By Chris Snellgrove
| Published
One of the weirder takes that sometimes runs around the internet is that Star Trek shouldn’t be political, with haters claiming that shows like Discovery focusing on a strong Black woman are some kind of major deviation from franchise norms. In reality, Star Trek has been political from the beginning, and even the stars often read connections to real-world events in the otherworldly stories they bring to life. Case in point: for the Deep Space Nine episode “Dramatis Personae,” Quark actor Armin Shimerman saw the Los Angeles riots reflected in the tension between Sisko and Kira.
Armin Shimerman & Bajorans
To bring you up to speed, “Dramatis Personae” is an episode where the inhabitants of DS9 fall under the telepathic influence of orbs from an alien race that died out long ago. They died out due to a power struggle, and the telepathic nature of the orbs led to, among other things, a similar power struggle between Sisko and Kira. It made for some fascinating TV, and in the eyes of Armin Shimerman, used Kira’s Bajoran race to explore the otherwise touchy subjects of the Los Angeles riots.
The actor said that he “loved this episode” and “that revolution broke out” symbolically via “the conflict between Sisko and Kira, a person who is a national and who only thinks of her world first.” According to Armin Shimerman, such nationalism was regularly on display in Los Angeles at the time: “We had our riots because neighborhoods felt that they weren’t getting a fair share of the wealth of Los Angeles, and there’s the Bajorans who are fighting because they’re not getting a fair share of what they think they deserve.” Here, he refers not just to Kira’s personal struggle but the Bajorans rebuilding after their brutal Cardassian occupation.
Especially in the early days of Deep Space Nine, we see how Bajor was often caught between a rock and a hard place. Starfleet is in orbit to help the planet rebuild, but Sisko doesn’t always do things the way that Kira or other Bajorans would prefer. In “Dramatic Personae,” for example, the conflict kicks off when Kira wants to detain a ship she suspects of smuggling weapons to the Cardassians and Sisko refuses, on both legality and principle, to detain a vessel without evidence.
Interestingly, Armin Shimerman sees this conflict between Starfleet and the Bajorans as symbolic of the conflict between local law enforcement and rioters. Those rioters, like Kira, put their world–or at least, their people and their neighborhood–above all other concerns, including the laws and law enforcers who may very well have been stifling them. The Quark actor says that this tension is “very intrinsic to the life we live in Los Angeles, so when it’s represented on television, I feel for that”.
It seems that Shimerman had the same emotional breakthrough that many of us experience when watching a good episode of Star Trek. A well-written episode can be downright therapeutic, helping us achieve insight into our fellow man that we once thought impossible. Perhaps those empathetic breakthroughs are why Star Trek: The Motion Picture had such a bold tagline: “the human adventure is just beginning.”
While we always love to hear the insights of Star Trek’s great actors, Armin Shimerman’s linking of Bajoran nationalists and Los Angeles rioters is truly fascinating (as Spock might say). Certainly, many have considered Kira’s people as metaphors for others in the real world, including Palestinians. The DS9 actor may very well be one of the only ones to associate these aliens with his rioting LA neighbors, proving once and for all that there’s always something new to learn from episodes of the best Trek show ever made.
