Episode Details

“Capitalism could appropriate even the most radical ideas and return them safely in the form of harmless ideologies.”

Guy Debord

Let me take you back to January 3rd 1993 and the first Star Trek spin-off show

Star Trek was a show about a starship with a 5 year mission, and Next Generation was a reboot of that same narrative format.

Even the first animated series stuck to the formula.

But now Star Trek was about to re-write the episodic format of a strange new world per episode.

And focus on just one world. Or more precisely just one space station.

Welcome to Deep Space 9.

Watch the full video essay on YouTube

Star Trek has always been a show about exploration. But now that Trek was settling down in one place it could think about the dark side of humanity’s history of exploration.

Colonisation.

And so Deep Space 9 made the genuinely brave decision to make Star Trek a show about

Postcolonialism 

Settler colonialism

and Decolonisation

Bajor is a world of peace loving spiritual seekers who follow a religion very similar to Vedic Hinduism … it’s basically the Indian sub-continent in space.

That has recently freed itself from colonisation by the Cardassians. An empire of stiff necked, emotionally repressed Imperialists who are really polite and make great witty gay space spies.

So that’s basically the English then.

And Deep Space Nine is basically postcolonialism studies in space. 

Based on a scifi metaphor for the