I’ve been bingeing Star Trek: Deep Space Nine on Netflix lately. I watched it 20+ years ago (dear god) when I was a geeky little 15-year-old with a massive crush on Dr. Bashir (Alexander Siddig has only gotten hotter with age; my crush remains unabated, although now I’m old enough to find Bashir a little bit annoying, especially in the first few seasons). I’m one of those people who doesn’t feel the need to choose between Star Wars and Star Trek; I get a lot out of both and think they both bring a lot to the table with regards to entertainment value, social commentary and escapism.

As I apparently ramble a lot about this, more below the cut. Oh, and spoilers for a 25-year-old show, I guess.

Two things, though.

One, which holds standard to pretty much any drama I’ve binged: Watching a bunch of episodes back-to-back makes you realize just how much friggin’ trauma the characters go through. Like, just using my space-BF Bashir as an example, the man is constantly threatened with torture or death, is frequently assaulted (often as a result of one of Quark’s plans falling through), is forced to kill people he knows (or at least Mirror Universe versions of people he knows), is made to perform dangerous/invasive/unethical procedures (on people he cares about, no less, but given his professionalism and high moral standards that’s only slightly relevant), is kidnapped or held captive on multiple occasions (including spending, like, a month in an internment camp where he spends time in solitary – and don’t even get me fucking started on how his friends respond to him when he returns and they realize they’d been interacting with his Changeling doppelganger the whole time he was missing!), and then has his worst secret revealed, which threatens his military career, his medical license and his personal autonomy. One or two of these things, alone, would be traumatic enough, but throughout the seven seasons of the show he undergoes enough horrific misadventures that he should, by all rights, have gone completely insane. (And people say I’m mean to my characters. I mean, I am, but still, now I know where I get it from!) This is just one character.

Two, taken from my currently viewing the Mirror Universe episode of “Through the Looking Glass”: we get to meet Mirror!Bashir, who is one of the leaders (or hotheads, it’s hard to tell at this point) of the Terran Rebellion. But … um … why? How? If, in this universe, humans are slaves and have been for … kind of a while … (like, since shortly after Kirk visited in the universe in the original series), how would Bashir’s parents have had the wherewithal to have their son genetically enhanced? Shouldn’t he be – by Julian’s own account in “Doctor Bashir, I Presume?” – severely developmentally, physically and intellectually delayed, with the approximate development of a 6-year-old? (And therefore most likely dead, since this universe doesn’t exactly seem like a supportive environment.) Or was Mirror!Bashir born without these disadvantages? Or did his parents somehow, magically, have the means to have their son enhanced? I know that the decision to have Bashir genetically enhanced (yes, like Khan) was a last-minute one (literally: Siddig got the script, with the big reveal, about two days before they were about to film; he had known nothing about this character “development” the entire time [this was a fifth-season episode, by the way!] he’d been playing Dr. Bashir), but man, does this ever highlight that.

Okay, another thing: the first-season episode “The Forsaken” was cringe-worthy. Watching Commander Benjamin Sisko – an amazingly well-written, compassionate and brilliant man – write off Constable Odo’s concerns regarding Ambassador Lwaxana Troi’s sexual harassment as a joke was horrifying. “Haha, Odo, maybe you should just let yourself be caught, you might like it. Don’t cause any troubles, Odo, she’s an ambassador, we don’t want to have to deal with it. So sorry her rampant sexual interest in you makes you uncomfortable, Odo, but I can’t and won’t help you.” The fact that Troi and Odo do eventually get along quite well (and that she proves to be a supportive friend) doesn’t make up for how awful it was to see Odo’s very obvious discomfort and unhappiness dismissed, and it was made worse (for me) because it was Sisko, a character I deeply respect, who did the dismissing.

I’m honestly tempted to do a thorough analysis of all the trauma Bashir experiences throughout the seven seasons. (I could do it for all the characters, but damn, that’s a lot of work.) And I know other shows, movies, novels, comics, etc. put their characters through an equal amount of hell and it’s just made obvious for me right now because I’m watching a bunch of episodes back-to-back, but damn.

And, uh, I didn’t really have a point to this except that I’m enjoying re-watching a series I loved as a teenager. The acting was phenomenal (not just Siddig and Brooks, who are fucking treasures, but everyone; there is no one on this show where I don’t have a moment of “Fuck, that was amazing” at least once or twice). The morality was complicated and complex. The heroes didn’t always win, the bad guys didn’t always lose, and sometimes people did the wrong thing for the right reasons and it still didn’t work out in the end. Fuck, I loved this show.