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On Keiko
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ds9_rewatch rewatch of DS9 01x04, "A Man Alone." It's been a while since I saw this episode, and ultimately what it wound up dredging up are all of my Feelings about Keiko. [ironic icon is ironic]
Keiko frustrates me, a lot. I don't want to be frustrated by her, because there's so much that I love about her in the abstract--I love that O'Brien is a recurring character with a stable family life, and I love that she's got a very stable career and doesn't really depend on his. I also really like the degree to which it's clear that her Japanese heritage matters to her while not defining her. I remember adoring Keiko when I watched DS9 as a kid.
But for a lot of the first few seasons of DS9, a lot of the things I like about her just aren't true. Moving to DS9 throws a major wrench in her career, so she's struggling to find herself again. As a result, she shows up primarily to cause relationship drama for Miles. Even when she eventually goes back to being a working biologist, she really only comes back for episodes that need to have her in them, and the only episodes that need to have her in them are episodes where she and Miles are fighting. The show is asking an awful lot from its audience when it demands us to believe that a character we only ever see being irrationally angry and/or demanding in stereotypically feminine ways is strong and independent whenever she's offscreen or Miles isn't complaining about her. The show has characters talk all the time about the two of them as an ideal couple. But it never really shows them being a particularly happy, or indeed healthy couple.
(This gets particularly frustrating when the show decides that Miles/Julian bromance would be a great running joke and Keiko basically becomes a misogynist slash tropes bingo card.)
The second reason she frustrates me is a lot more fundamental to the show. Star Trek is very much a franchise about the Federation (aka the US) striding out into the galaxy imposing its will on everyone because their way of doing things is just that much better. Within that framework, Deep Space Nine won my heart by being instead a show about the fact that the Federation is often wrong. It's got a large number of regular characters who aren't part of the Federation and don't WANT to be, and it doesn't just reduce them to silly children who can't handle it or boilerplate villains the way other Treks sometimes do. Even the humans on the show wind up with a much more complex idea of galactic politics and how they fit into it than any crew member on any Enterprise.
And into this mix walks Keiko, who is basically the living, breathing embodiment of Federation Imperialism. She just wants to go out and explore the galaxy and look at cool plants. She is very open to meeting new people and learning about their cultures. She finds it fascinating, but they're never anything but Other to her, and the Federation way is always going to be the right way. Exploring strange new worlds and seeking out new life and new civilizations sounds like a great plan to her, while the rest of the characters on DS9 are sitting in one station and assimilating into Bajor.
"A Man Alone" is the episode where Keiko sets up her school. She's bored because there are no plants on DS9 and now that she's followed Miles here she has no job to do. She's worried about all the kids running around on the station with no structure. And, while she's not a trained educator, any adult with computers and a space to teach can totally teach an all-ages class of students from half a dozen different species, right?
It's supposed to be redemptive in this episode. But even in her first lesson you can see where it's going to go wrong. She's going to teach just, you know, your ordinary introductory lesson on the people and history of Bajor. To two Bajoran students, Nog (who has presumably grown up on the Station, and even if not, has definitely been living in Bajoran space for longer than she has), and Jake. At least Jake might get something out of her lecture.
Come the end of the season, Keiko's school will, of course, be the vector through which Vedek Winn gets introduced. And Winn, of course, is an evil religious extremist terrorist who wants to shut down Keiko's Noble Education System because she's teaching about the Wormhole Aliens and not calling them the Prophets. Keiko just wants a science-based curriculum, free of religious content, and it's a great way to set Winn up as the villain she'll be for the rest of the show.
Except for the minor fact that the ambiguity of the Prophets as aliens vs. deities is one of the driving narrative arcs of the show. To be fair, it makes complete sense for Keiko, and really any Federation characters in season one, to callously march into science-only land. This is years before Sisko embraces his role as Emissary. In fact, one of the things I adore about later season is the way guest characters from Starfleet continue to maintain the party line that the Prophets are just Wormhole Aliens.
Again, I really love the concept of having a Federation character bungling around getting their Federation prejudice in everyone's face. I just... really wish it wasn't Keiko, because in combination with the relationship problems she and Miles have, she is almost entirely an unsympathetic character, in a way that the show's writers clearly didn't intend her to be.
ds9_rewatch rewatch of DS9 01x04, "A Man Alone." It's been a while since I saw this episode, and ultimately what it wound up dredging up are all of my Feelings about Keiko. [ironic icon is ironic]Keiko frustrates me, a lot. I don't want to be frustrated by her, because there's so much that I love about her in the abstract--I love that O'Brien is a recurring character with a stable family life, and I love that she's got a very stable career and doesn't really depend on his. I also really like the degree to which it's clear that her Japanese heritage matters to her while not defining her. I remember adoring Keiko when I watched DS9 as a kid.
But for a lot of the first few seasons of DS9, a lot of the things I like about her just aren't true. Moving to DS9 throws a major wrench in her career, so she's struggling to find herself again. As a result, she shows up primarily to cause relationship drama for Miles. Even when she eventually goes back to being a working biologist, she really only comes back for episodes that need to have her in them, and the only episodes that need to have her in them are episodes where she and Miles are fighting. The show is asking an awful lot from its audience when it demands us to believe that a character we only ever see being irrationally angry and/or demanding in stereotypically feminine ways is strong and independent whenever she's offscreen or Miles isn't complaining about her. The show has characters talk all the time about the two of them as an ideal couple. But it never really shows them being a particularly happy, or indeed healthy couple.
(This gets particularly frustrating when the show decides that Miles/Julian bromance would be a great running joke and Keiko basically becomes a misogynist slash tropes bingo card.)
The second reason she frustrates me is a lot more fundamental to the show. Star Trek is very much a franchise about the Federation (aka the US) striding out into the galaxy imposing its will on everyone because their way of doing things is just that much better. Within that framework, Deep Space Nine won my heart by being instead a show about the fact that the Federation is often wrong. It's got a large number of regular characters who aren't part of the Federation and don't WANT to be, and it doesn't just reduce them to silly children who can't handle it or boilerplate villains the way other Treks sometimes do. Even the humans on the show wind up with a much more complex idea of galactic politics and how they fit into it than any crew member on any Enterprise.
And into this mix walks Keiko, who is basically the living, breathing embodiment of Federation Imperialism. She just wants to go out and explore the galaxy and look at cool plants. She is very open to meeting new people and learning about their cultures. She finds it fascinating, but they're never anything but Other to her, and the Federation way is always going to be the right way. Exploring strange new worlds and seeking out new life and new civilizations sounds like a great plan to her, while the rest of the characters on DS9 are sitting in one station and assimilating into Bajor.
"A Man Alone" is the episode where Keiko sets up her school. She's bored because there are no plants on DS9 and now that she's followed Miles here she has no job to do. She's worried about all the kids running around on the station with no structure. And, while she's not a trained educator, any adult with computers and a space to teach can totally teach an all-ages class of students from half a dozen different species, right?
It's supposed to be redemptive in this episode. But even in her first lesson you can see where it's going to go wrong. She's going to teach just, you know, your ordinary introductory lesson on the people and history of Bajor. To two Bajoran students, Nog (who has presumably grown up on the Station, and even if not, has definitely been living in Bajoran space for longer than she has), and Jake. At least Jake might get something out of her lecture.
Come the end of the season, Keiko's school will, of course, be the vector through which Vedek Winn gets introduced. And Winn, of course, is an evil religious extremist terrorist who wants to shut down Keiko's Noble Education System because she's teaching about the Wormhole Aliens and not calling them the Prophets. Keiko just wants a science-based curriculum, free of religious content, and it's a great way to set Winn up as the villain she'll be for the rest of the show.
Except for the minor fact that the ambiguity of the Prophets as aliens vs. deities is one of the driving narrative arcs of the show. To be fair, it makes complete sense for Keiko, and really any Federation characters in season one, to callously march into science-only land. This is years before Sisko embraces his role as Emissary. In fact, one of the things I adore about later season is the way guest characters from Starfleet continue to maintain the party line that the Prophets are just Wormhole Aliens.
Again, I really love the concept of having a Federation character bungling around getting their Federation prejudice in everyone's face. I just... really wish it wasn't Keiko, because in combination with the relationship problems she and Miles have, she is almost entirely an unsympathetic character, in a way that the show's writers clearly didn't intend her to be.
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But more seriously, oh, yeah, great points. You've simultaneously managed to articulate why DS9 will always be my favorite, and why it's also so problematic at the same time.