The Sovereign's Orb: Baseball as Metaphor in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine

The Sovereign's OrbBaseball as Metaphor in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Robert Gorman (bio) The year is 2369 and baseball as it once existed is no more. The major leagues are gone, taking with them the minors. In fact, there is no professional baseball of any kind back on Earth. The last World Series was played in 2042 with only 300 spectators in attendance. The London Kings emerged victorious due to a game-winning homerun blasted by baseball's last superstar, Harmon "Buck" Bokai. He, too, slipped into obscurity. Enter Benjamin Sisko (Avery Brooks), a Starfleet officer who is assigned command—against his wishes—of the Cardassian-built ore-mining space station Deep Space Nine (the station hereafter referred to as DS9) located in the farthest reaches of the Alpha Quadrant, lightyears from Earth. The Cardassians, a race of empire-building, reptilian-like humanoids, abandoned the station as part of a ceasefire agreement with Bajor, the nearby planet they occupied for six decades until Bajoran freedom fighters overthrew their conquerors. Sisko's task is to assist the Bajoran people as they rebuild their society with the eventual goal of Bajor becoming a member of the United Federation of Planets. The Bajorans are a deeply religious people who worship long-departed gods they refer to as the Prophets. Although there is a nonsectarian civilian government that runs the day-to-day operations of the planet, the real power lies in the hands of their religious leader, the Kai, who interprets the ancient religious texts that foretell the return of the Prophets and the restoration of Bajor's golden age. Soon after his arrival on the station, Sisko discovers a stable wormhole—the only one in the Alpha Quadrant of our galaxy—that leads directly to the adjacent Gamma Quadrant. It turns out, though, that noncorporeal beings reside in the wormhole and Sisko is the first to make contact with them. The Bajorans are convinced these entities are the Prophets they have long sought; the wormhole is their Celestial Temple, and Sisko, as the first to engage with them, is their Emissary, the individual who speaks to and for the Prophets. [End Page 48] Sisko, as a nonbeliever, initially resists that title and instead refers to the wraith-like beings as "wormhole aliens."1 While the wormhole becomes a major trading route between the quadrants, it also brings the Federation, along with the Klingons, the Vulcans, the Romulans, the Cardassians, and the other planetary systems in the Alpha Quadrant into conflict with a race known as Changelings—shape shifters who have established a far-reaching empire in the Gamma Quadrant they call the Dominion. Open warfare eventually breaks out between the quadrants, with the forces of the Dominion invading the Alpha Quadrant in an attempt to conquer it. Deep Space Nine is different from the other Star Trek series in a number of important ways. For one thing, it is much darker and edgier in tone than the others. Jonathan West, director of photography for the first two seasons of the series, refers to Deep Space Nine as "film noir in space." Gene Roddenberry, creator of the original Star Trek, had an "insanely optimistic view of the future. Someday, he and his show believed, human beings would learn to split the atom and solve the problem of need; our better natures would take over and we would fly around the galaxy spreading a vision of peace and tolerance to every sentient creature we found," one critic argues. With Roddenberry's demise, "pretty much everyone else that took turns raising the baby disagreed with that vision in some measure." That is especially true with Deep Space Nine where avarice, corruption, racism, murder, jealousy, violence, disease, sexual intrigue, and the lust for power are ever present among humans and aliens. Although now embraced as a critical success and a cult classic, this cynical, gritty, dystopian view of the future initially turned off many fans of the other Star Trek series and movies, as did the fact that there is little traveling from planet to planet.2 In Deep Space Nine, there is no Enterprise (except for passing references to it), no space...