Bar Association
(Season 4)
In
Bar Association, we have an A and B plot which are pretty fundamentally linked. In the A plot, the staff at Quark's bar look to unionize for better wages and benefits, until the Ferengi Commerce Authority shows up and beats the crap out of Quark to force a settlement; in the B plot, Worf is cheesed off at living on Deep Space 9 and decides to move his quarters to the
Defiant.
In both the A and the B plot we deal with the difficulties of living on essentially a civilian freeport, like Deep Space 9. This is one - but not the first or last - episode in which the producers seem to be trying to present to us an image of Deep Space Nine as ultimately a civilian locale. They have repeatedly said, in fact, that DS9 was based on a 'western town' in space. Odo is the sheriff, the Federation are the federals, the Bajorans are the locals, Quark is the innkeeper, and so on. The community is small and intimate and people passing through are the main source of drama.
One of the ongoing ways in which the producers encourage this perspective is with the 'clash' of authorities. We have the Bajoran government (Kira) bickering with the Federation (Sisko) over how to run the station. Civilians come with their own codes of ethics and legal systems - Ferengi, Tosk, eventually Klingon. There is a scene, for example, in which Sisko is encouraging Quark to settle the A-plot labor dispute. Quark says that it's a tricky situation because of Ferengi cultural mores against unions; Sisko says that as far as
he is concerned, the Federation is Quark's landlord, and doesn't charge him rent, power, or maintenance but can if he causes trouble.
It's a good idea... in
theory. But this episode is a pretty good example of the challenges the producers faced in actually displaying it on screen.
There are two scenes in particular that highlight the issue, in my mind.
First is when Ferengi Commerce Authority Liquidiator Brunt shows up, complaining that the way Quark is handling his labour dispute is unacceptable. His lackeys intimidate Quark, and then ultimately beat him nearly to death Quark refuses to press charges, because the FCA would just 'send somebody worse'; second is when Worf goes to Odo to report some thefts in his quarters. Odo acknowledges that he will prosecute the offender, but that this is just life living in a freeport, where people can come and go as they please.
Both scenes are pretty unsatisfying, however.
The producers seem to go back and forth on who, precisely, is responsible for enforcing the law on DS9 - and what precisely that law
is. Some of the time Odo seems to make up his own rules - as when he says early in the series that he doesn't permit weapons on the promenade "and that includes phasers" as in
Emissary; some of them time it seems to be Sisko and the Federation, as when Sisko refuses to turn over a Cardassian to the Bajoran government without evidence of his complicity in crimes in
Duet; and some of the time it seems to be the Bajoran government, as when Dax is to be extradited for Curzon's crimes and a
Bajoran arbitrator hears the extradition case, in
Dax.
So on whose authority is FCA Liquidiator Brunt running around assaulting Quark on the promenade? It certainly seems that neither Bajoran nor Federation law generally permits people to run around committing gross bodily harm. I suppose it's
possible the Federation might have some treaty with the Ferengi to allow them to enforce their own law in Federation territory - this was after all a plot point in
Dax, no matter how nonsensical it was - but equally, we saw that the Bajoran government was the one who called the shots in such cases. So even if Quark is refusing to press charges, it seems hard to believe that Sisko, or Odo would just let Brunt walk away. But even if they
did, it seems equally hard to imagine that they'd let someone else back on the station knowing their intent is just to assault Quark again.
Second - and related - is Odo's response to Worf's security complaints. Of course Odo has a list of security issues on the
Enterprise to bring up as counterpoints, but really the core of Odo's response seems to be, "hey, this is a western frontier town, you've got to expect that things will happen". But there are some definite differences between a space station and a frontier town. It's hard to sneak into a space station, for one thing; it's surrounded by space. They have weapons scanners at the airlock entrances, too, and biofilters and all kinds of other responses to some of the most basic challenges.
More broadly, though, is that Deep Space Nine is presented in a very polarized fashion. We have a very small core crew - Worf, Dax, Kira, Sisko, Odo, O'Brien - and a collection of named civilians. This, combined with the physical
size of the promenade - it's very small - and the only a handful of shops that we see present that western idea of a very small town, with one main street, one saloon, and one sheriff. In this very episode, though, we see Quark's bar staff - and there must be twenty of them! There are unlimited extras for security, maintenance, and operations. We see crowds of passengers moving in and out and through the station and sometimes hear about double-digit number of ships per day. All of
that indicates a much larger station, almost like you might imagine a free port in the West Indies with its crew of redcoats and civil administration.
I don't even know that it was a question of budget, at the end of the day. After Season One, the largest expenditures on sets were for the
Defiant (and the wardroom, eventually). I find it hard to believe that if they wanted to, they couldn't have built an engineering set, or a docking port set, or a bigger set for Odo's office that give the
impression - like you see in the Expanse - of a bigger administration.
The problem is that the producers have wanted to have it both ways. For budget reasons - and also, I think, to stick with their 'frontier western town' vision of DS9 - they build small. The bar's small. The promenade's small. The crew's small. But they wanted to tell bigger stories: shows where Quark's staff form a
union, for example. Or later shows during the Dominion War, where DS9 is supposed to be a major military staging point. Shows which rely on a
bigger town. And the two are occasionally in conflict. It's hard to understand why if Quark has 20 staff, Odo (or for that matter, O'Brien!) doesn't seem to.
It's one of the most frustrating thematic issues with DS9, for me. Obviously a television show is about telling stories, but sometimes it feels like the producers wanted everything at the same time; they weren't concerned about telling a specific
set of stories. This changed toward the end of the show's run, as the Dominion War took an ever-increasing role and more and more of the stories began to fit into that thematic mould, but even then it's like your telling World War II stories out of a Western town, and that has its own issues.
