I'm shutting this weblog down for a while, because everything I want to say here, I can say more effectively elsewhere. I may start posting here again sometime, but for now it is on hiatus.

Honoring today and always

My uncle Steve Hodge who served in the U.S. Army in the Korean War

And our American soldiers in Iraq and around the world

{ Barber, Adagio for Strings }

From TrekToday, Deep Space Nine's Ira Steven Behr looks back on DS9 and his brief involvement in Enterprise. DS9 wasn't everyone's favorite Trek series, but it's hard to argue with this statement:

"By the end of the show, whether you liked them or not, you really did know who Odo was, who Sisko was, who Nerys was, and I'm proud of that," he noted. "The other thing is that Martok, Brunt, Weyoun and other supporting players have more development than most of the lead characters in the other series."

The interesting thing to me about DS9 versus, say, Voyager or TNG, is that I actually preferred the more character-driven, less high-concept episodes, because I'd gotten to know and like these people and enjoyed following the course of their lives. Whereas on the other shows I liked the high-concept stories better, because they were more about interesting situations and ideas and how intelligent people in general responded to them, but not necessarily how specific characters responded to them.

If the Enterprise were caught in some kind of weird time-travel anomaly, the focus of my interest was how "the crew" would figure out how to resolve their situation. It could be anyone -- Picard, Riker, Troi -- in that situation, and my interest level would be the same. But on DS9, it was always about the characters. Even the high-concept plots were very specific to particular characters and their issues. Like, if you compare TNG's "The Inner Light" to DS9's "The Visitor," both are classic episodes of their respective series, with similar premises, but "The Inner Light" would arguably have worked whether you had Picard as the main character, or Worf, while "The Visitor" was at heart a story about Jake Sisko and his father, and wouldn't have worked if you'd replaced Sisko with, say, Bashir.

I really think this is why DS9 only got better and better as the series progressed, while the other shows sort of wound down once the flow of fresh ideas stopped. When you build a series on characters rather than situations, and focus on character development rather than high-concept ideas, you reach a point where you can practically just have the characters sitting around a table for an hour chatting and still have a riveting hour of television.

In other words, damn I miss DS9.

A ways past the midpoint of Dark Tower VII. Thoughts.

SPOILERS!!!!

I've made it close to halfway through Dark Tower VII. A couple of brief thoughts, which I will oh so thoughtfully relegate to the "extended entry" portion of this entry because it will contain spoilers for the first half of the book.

If you're reading the "full" version of this entry, then this is a SPOILER WARNING.