Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Season 7 (1999)
Review by Doc Ezra
Film:
DVD:

Series created by Rick Berman and Michael Piller, based on original concepts by Gene Roddenberry
Starring Avery Brooks, Rene Auberjonois, Michael Dorn, Colm Meaney, Siddig El Fadil, Nichole deBoer, and Nana Visitor

Features:

• All twenty-six seventh season episodes
  
• "Ending an Era" retrospective featurette
  
• Crew Dossier: Benjamin Sisko
  
• Crew Dossier: Jake Sisko
  
• "The Last Goodbyes" series wrap-up featurette
  
• Section 31 hidden files
  

Released by Paramount
Region: 1
Rating: NR, suitable for audiences 12+
Anamorphic: N/A; appears in original 1.33:1 TV aspect

My Advice: Fans of the series will want it for completeness' sake, others can probably just give it a miss entirely.

While Deep Space Nine never received the level of fan acclaim that accompanies either the original series or Next Generation properties, it remained throughout its seven-year run a solid, watchable series. While the storytelling shifted from episodic to serial to episodic and back to serial again at a dizzying pace, the individual performances of its cast and the writing on any given episode was on par with what people had come to expect from anything bearing the Star Trek label. In Season 7, however, we get to see what happens when one jumps into the idea of serial storytelling without a clear enough direction. The result is a series conclusion that leaves as many questions unanswered as it actually manages to resolve, and a Trek franchise that has to fall back on licensed fiction books in order to take care of the mess left over after the show had closed.

The dominating feature of this season is the massive ten-part arc that handles the war with the Dominion. Given that the creators have invested a significant portion of their plot in this over the past several years, it only makes sense that this occupy such a huge chunk of the final season. Of all the long-term plotlines being tied up over the course of the season, this is probably the only one that really feels "finished." The entire Sisko/Emissary pseudoreligious destiny bit comes off pretty flat by comparison. When you've built up this entire weird mythology surrounding the wormhole, it's pretty damned lame to tie it up neatly when someone realizes that there are a few words from the holy book that have never been translated correctly. There's also a good bit of Sisko's fate pushed off into licensed novels, which is so impossibly stupid that I can't do its bone-headedness justice in mere print...I'd need CGI and a decent effects team just to illustrate the heavy suck factor.

The cast is, as always, excellent, though Nichole deBoer is a little lost in the shuffle. In a season full of sentimental goodbyes and wrap-ups, the new kid on the block doesn't really mesh. Add to this that Ezri Dax was a vastly irritating character, especially early in the season, and you start to feel sort of bad for the actress brought in to stand around and look out of place while the show wraps up. They'd have been better off just dropping the Dax character entirely. The scripts are pretty solid, though there's a little too much sentimental goodbye-waving in a few episodes, and a couple of others are just clunkers. I wanted someone to delete Vic Fontaine entirely, but that's been true for a while now. The holodeck went from being a really neat idea early in TNG to being a crutch for any time they couldn't cook up a decent plot and needed a "filler" episode, and nowhere is that more egregious than here. Baseball with the Klingons? Please.

The bonus features are what we've come to expect from the entire Star Trek franchise released on DVD to this point. There are a couple of crew profiles, a couple of production featurettes (featuring more tearful goodbyes), and a few hidden files here and there containing additional info. As always, though, you have to be careful about watching the features before you've screened all the episodes, as there are some major plot spoilers hiding amongst the seemingly innocuous video snippets. And still, alas, no commentaries anywhere. Video and audio are both outstanding, and the packaging is sturdy and easy to use, giving quick access to any disc you desire. I'd love to be able to buy some empty cases of this design for my Next Generation DVDs.

Die-hard trekkes and trekkies already own this, so I suppose it would be redundant to tell them to pick it up. For the rest of you, the seventh season makes a poor entry point, as the linear storytelling dictates that the vast majority of the episodes here have their origins in previous seasons. If you've been following the show, or caught a good bit on TV and want to see how it ends without having to get lucky and see it in syndication, this is a great set, well-produced and well worth the money. Just don't expect to see all the loose ends tied up neatly when the series concludes.