For those who watched DS9 during its first airings, did it seem odd to you that Vic Fontaine/James Darren sang entire songs in the later seasons of DS9?
I only finished watching DS9 recently and just found it really odd. It seems out of place in the regular TNG/DS9 format, didn’t drove the plotline forward, and sometimes felt just like a filler.
(I don’t mean to be disrespectful, I like the character and the actor can sing well, I am just curious why the producers made that decision).
The holosuite episodes were an interlude and a break from the overarching dominion war arc allowing the crew to do something out of the box and wacky. Even then they often covered relevant topics such as Nog’s PTSD. The heist episode is one of my favourite episodes in all of Trek.
If you like that one and you’ve never seen the original Rat Pack Ocean’s Eleven movie, do yourself a favor and watch it. It’s not deep, it’s not fantastic cinema, but it’s entertaining as heck.
This broad ain’t playin’ with a full deck!
Not everything has to “drive the plot forward”.
That’s a very modern attitude to TV that stems from series only having ten odd hours to tell a full serialised story. When you’re telling twenty plus episodic stories in the year, you have time to kick back and show stuff that isn’t crucial to the story.
Yeah, having watched in release order (ish) and just recently finished Discovery & Picard, I feel this sentiment in my bones! For sure, I don’t want the actors and writers to have to be worked to the bone churning out 26-episode seasons each year.
But it’s also really frustrating how they insist that every 10 episode season, their characters must save the entire galaxy. There’s no actual space to get to know the characters who aren’t the main ones.
The Dominion war brewed for 3 seasons and then played out over 2 more. I think. That’s a time scale that allows for amazing character development.
That’s why I love Strange New Worlds and Lower Decks at the moment. They’ve brought back the episodic take that made Trek work for five series.
Lower Decks is the most impressive. The fact that they manage to tell a full TNG era type story, with no characters feeling left out including the support cast, in half an hour a time is masterful.
I just started SNW (like I said, release order ish, I was trying to save best for last). It’s such a breath of fresh air! It’s quite funny that they kept the “previously on” narration, but at least so far, it’s mainly just doing character intros and not explaining the entirety of the season leading up to that point 😂
Fully agreed on Lower Decks!
Man can you imagine Nog and/or Rom getting half the character development that they got in DS9 in a contemporary show format?
Not saying it’s all bad or all good one way or another, but your comment made me think back and totally appreciate those two fleshed out minor characters
It felt totally natural to me watching it first time round. It’s part of DS9’s thing to be about a group of people who stay in one place and have lives and relationships. And it’s part of DS9’s thing to throw in stuff and let it grow if it works.
It balances against the harsh darkness of the main storyline, and in a 26 episode series you can’t just bash out war after war after war episode - everyone needs a break.
Probably also helps that it’s likely cheaper than other stuff to produce and means they can save some budget for a space battle in another episode.
It also fit, IMO, with the reality that they were on the frontier and in a war. Which from memory was made explicit when the program was introduced.
Whether you liked it or not, I think it made plenty of sense in universe.
Even in a real war civilian life continues even if you’re close to the war zone and soldiers are cycled on and off the front lines. Therefore it’s perfectly believable for the DS9 crew to be off duty and having a pint at Vic’s between missions.
It balances against the harsh darkness of the main storyline, and in a 26 episode series you can’t just bash out war after war after war episode - everyone needs a break.
The almost entirely relentless grimness of Picard season 1 is exactly why I detested it. Except Riker’s pizza episode, the rest was just characters acting unconvincingly traumatised and chugging alcohol.
I feel like they tried to learn from BSG without bringing in Ronald D Moore for insight, and just said, hmm, yes, the things that make BSG work so well are depression and alcoholism.
All his episodes felt like the showrunners were pulling a “Sandler” and just hooking up their out of work friend that used to have a hell of a lounge act.
He is a good actor and singer, but using him so much was just freaking weird. 100% filler in my opinion, even though they did some charector development in his episodes.
For some reason “filler” sounds negative to me, but I thought it was excellent filler. Stuffing is my favorite part of Thanksgiving dinner though 😁
What we used to call a “bottle episode” younger people now call “filler” as they’ve grown up in a world where shows are designed to be binged as a whole in a few days, not slowly eased out over 24 weeks of the year.
I don’t think anyone has a problem with bottle episodes. It’s the bottle episodes specifically starring Vic Fontaine which stretches the premise thin to incredulity that I think people–or at least I–have an issue with. Do another Ferengi or Klingon thing if need be. But attaching such sentiment to a character that the show really really wants you to like doesn’t work for me. Again, he’s a love him or hate him character. At least Ezri’s episodes, while shoehorned, made sense for why they needed to be there if they had to have her as a replacement at all. Vic was just an insert the writers specficially wanted for no good reason.
Cause he was cool as hell. Him working with Nog was some of the best television ever. Only dumb thing was him being a person in the mirror universe. But that is minor. The singing after Jadzia died was gut retching.
that is legitimately my favorite thing about vic fontaine
Most people here are ignoring the main reason: the writers were just a bunch of baseball loving rat pack fans who took their love of those things maybe a little too far. In the case of baseball, we only had Take Me Out to Holosuite to deal with (which is a great episode–provided you like baseball, I suppose). In the case of the rat pack, we inexplicably got Vic Fontaine who you either love or hate. I wouldn’t hate Vic Fontaine so much myself if they didn’t force him to basically take up the space that Quark’s Bar was supposed to be, and for him to be an integral part of the show so late in the series. And yes, the musical numbers take up too much time, if you ask me.
As much as I absolutely love DS9, I did not like the Vic Fontaine character. But, in general, I’m prejudiced against holodeck stuff, most of the time, because I felt Trek spent way too much time in the damn holodecks instead of exploring space.
At first, I didn’t really mind this character that much. But then they really started giving him more screen time as the show went on, and that just made me resent the character. I did not want to spend time in the holodeck when they could have spent that time on the Dominion war storyline or on more interesting characters (Sisko, Dukat, Kira, Kai Winn, etc).
DS9 is still one of the few Trek series that, overall, I truly enjoyed, but I skip the Fontaine scenes whenever I go back and watch episodes now.
I actually loved Fontaine, but he was the exception for me, otherwise I totally agree with the sentiment. TNG and Voyager really overused them spectacularly, at least for me. At least Enterprise had the sense to take place before holodecks were invented (by the federation at least…)
I’m just going to add that James Darren was actually a professional singer with gold records and multiple top ten hits before he started acting. It was nice to see that that wasn’t entirely forgotten.
I think Vic Fontaine is one of the weirdest things in Star Trek, and that’s saying something. I couldn’t believe he had such a big part in DS9. I enjoyed some of it and I always crack jokes about him so it was definitely entertaining but just so very weird.
I think I get what he was supposed to be, it’s kind of like when they send comedians and singers onto military bases to boost morale of the troops. It was just such a weird choice to have that style of music. It felt totally out of place to me, and I’m sure it was seriously uncool at the time it was on TV.
Imagine being 15 or something and trying to persuade one of your friends that DS9 is amazing and really cool (which it was and is), so they come round to watch an episode with you and it’s Vic Fontaine.
I mean. I prefered DS9s use of swing and lounge to TNGs obsession with poetry, classical and opera music. Glad we’ve moved past that now and we’re getting stuff like Klingon punk in lower decks
In fairness, though, Patrick Stewart did Shakespeare before he did Picard. Have you seen him as a young man playing Oberon? https://www.google.com/search?q=patrick+stewart+oberon&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjStue03pOAAxU6XUEAHb4ZDLUQ0pQJegQICxAB&biw=1685&bih=803&dpr=1.14#imgrc=6p-8DlObJa4hpM
Swing and lounge had a bit of a resurgence in the '90s. It was probably a ‘blink and you’ll miss it’ fad, but it was a whole thing for a certain demographic.
I say this as a genuinely uncool person who had listened to very old music from a very young age. (see username) It was unnerving to have other young people suddenly expressing positive interest in my record collection, but it was also nice that companies were reissuing some better content on CD.
That being said, Vic Fontaine was cartoonish and I hated those episodes. If it was meant to be a homage, it was a poor one.
Cool is an elastic thing. Sometimes it means popular. Sometimes it means wonderfully quirky. (I’m thinking of 11th Doctor’s descriptions of his unusual sartorial choices.)
Kids like to fit in with their peers, so cool to them probably means what everyone else is into. I didn’t like lounge music when I was a kid because it was of my parents’ generation. I didn’t like opera when I was a kid because I had little exposure to it, so it was weird. Happily, my tastes have broadened. I regret it didn’t happen sooner.
Star Trek has become classic (except, maybe, Enterprise) for good reason. That’s enough. They snagged James Darren at the end of DS9. Great. Some kids didn’t get Vic Fontaine at first blush? Too bad. Try again. The best art requires a little effort.
Also, when you love something, your enthusiasm pulls in others. If they reject it because it’s not popular, fuck 'em. Wonderfully quirky people are so much more interesting than people who fit in.
So that Sisko could do a song with him as a little icing on the DS9 cake
I felt the same way. I wonder if it hit different on TV at the time.
I found it weird when it aired. My recollection of watching it on TV as a teenager was that Vic became a big presence in the show very suddenly (I may be misremembering and it’s been a while since I rewatched DS9) and the amount of screen time they devoted to him in late s6 and s7 felt odd.
Yea I wonder that too. At times the character worked rather well, but overall, IMO, it stands out as weird.
But, like you, I wonder if a Sinatra homage was just a much more natural and emotionally impactful thing for the mature fans (ie Boomers) watching in the 90s. I’d bet that it was at least less weird. Like at most they thought, “huh, writers are Sinatra fans … ok” … ?
Sinatra and ‘lounge music’ made a big comeback in the nineties with younger people then in their early twenties, that would Gen X, not the boomers.
Gen X thought the late 50s and early 60s were interesting 30 years later.
The Bond revival was also in full swing with that age group too, which is why we got Bashir’s Bond hijinks combined with lounge culture.
James Darren was the real deal as a lounge singer. His career was trending upwards again during the show because of the lounge culture trend.
I’m also going to make a pitch for holodeck/holosuite episodes. I would absolutely argue that in the 90s they weren’t filler at all.
They aren’t as interesting now because they are too close to technology that we use everyday. That’s likely why we aren’t seeing Holodeck episodes in the same way in the new era.
While virtual reality, and shared role playing games are deeply established now through massively multiplayer games and discord, Star Trek in the 90s was actually doing its s job as a science fiction show imagining what people could do with VR and what could go wrong.
Taking it back to TOS, a shore leave planet that turned out to have interactive holographic characters and an operating system gone wrong wasn’t a trope, it was an entirely new concept. More, it built on the psychological thriller concept of imaginary things becoming real and dangerous that was at the core of The Cage and the MGM movie Forbidden Planet that inspired Roddenberry.
In both the Berman era and in TOS, virtual reality shows were a key way to explore character development, relationships and team development within the ensemble of characters.
DS9 ‘Only a Paper Moon’ is a deep dive into withdrawal from reality due to trauma. I would say it may not be as successful now because it’s too on the nose and less allegorical given the way gaming and VR are used by many with trauma and anxiety as coping mechanisms.
Great post. Thanks!
(Please can we stop stereotyping people by age. I saw DS9 the first time around and I’m not a Boomer. )
Star Trek has always had light moments in episodes. So this was nothing new. It was the case until the early 00s that many shows had an occasional musical interlude or even an entire musical episode. Sometimes celebrities would appear and do a whole song or their act.
That’s starting to happen again even in Sci-Fi. eg The Orville has had a few musical numbers. Also, keep watching SNW 😉
I’m sorry … really didn’t mean to offend or even stereotype too much, and I didn’t mean to invoke “boomer” in any negative sense here and could have just referred to the simple fact I was point out … which was that a 30 year old in the 90s would have been more familiar with Sinatra and the vibe of that scene than a 30 year old in 2020.
Only if that thirty year old in the 2020s had a poor cultural upbringing. I was seven when DS9 started, fourteen by the time it ended and only thirty-seven now. I’m well aware of Sinatra and the Rat-Pack and the Vegas scene.
poor cultural upbringing
That’s a bit judgmental, anrbitrary and even culturally hegemonic don’t you think? I was slightly older than you at the same time and couldn’t have given a fuck about the rat pack at the time (or now TBH) but was happily listening to Bach and blues and engaged with other things. Are you from the USA by any chance? (I’m not).
No, I’m British.
And yet you continue with stereotypes based on age.
Well I implied “more likely to be familiar”, on which I could have been more clear.
Otherwise, as far as my presumptions go, I’m theorising on a population level here, and am presuming generations have cultural differences. Stereotyping, IMO, can be done accurately enough if done from a statistical perspective which basically guarantees a degree of centrality as well, and this is the important bit many fail to recognise, a degree of variation.
I’m not trying to tell anyone who or what they are based on one particular trait. Just speculating as to a statistical factor that may exist at the aggregate level.
A 30 year old in 1995 would be a Gen Xer.
My recollection is that it was the younger adults in their 20s who were into the lounge culture revival in the 90s.
Older boomers would have been in their teens the first time round for this music. It wasn’t so much for them.
Oh, I forgot about these. These songs are so lovely to catch up on
I don’t know about you, but I cried during some of the songs. DS9 just started feeling like home, like these characters were my genuine friends. I loved just seeing them thrive and immersing myself in this world. For all that matters, I’d watch nine seasons of DS9: Operating Normally if it existed.
It might not have driven some kind of plot, but I am here because this universe is my happy place. I don’t care about some suspenseful plot.
