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By GustavoLeao / 05:17, 9 September 2010 / General Star Trek
Star Trek Magazine has a new interview with Star Trek Deep Space Nine actor Alexander Siddig in their issue 27, The Genius Issue, and here are few excerpts.
Siddig seems genuinely proud to have been part of the way DS9 pushed the boundaries of Star Trek. "I think it still remains an individual show, in the whole Star Trek genre," he suggests. "It's the only one like it. It's very different. It has the stamp of Ron Moore on it, and Ira Behr."
"It wasn't really until the fourth or fifth season that the executive producer opened up to me and said, ‘Listen, the first two years of this show, every single time we had a big executive meeting with the studio bosses, they were trying to fire you!'" Siddig remembers. "They look at your numbers, and see you're easily the most unpopular character in the show. But we'd made a deal, the producer Rick Berman and myself, that the guy would start off hopeless, and evolve. We had the luxury of time. We knew we were going to do at least six seasons."
DS9 also broke new ground by featuring so many interpersonal relationships. Bashir particularly bonded (if slightly antagonistically) with Miles O'Brien (Colm Meaney) and Garak (Andrew J. Robinson). "They classically exploited the British/Irish thing," says Siddig, of the Bashir/O'Brien friendship. "We were going to be this pair who bickered at every opportunity.
"And it actually continued off-stage - Colm and I had furious fights about England and Ireland, and I had no idea politically about any of the stuff. I suspect now, looking back, that he didn't have any idea either, but he spoke so passionately and vehemently about it that I believed every word he said! But he would take me to Irish bars, especially to ridicule me in front of the Irish clientele! It was good fun in the end. We loved to hate each other. And we chose to go out with each other, even if it was to argue all night, so there must have been some bond there, beyond the ordinary. I really enjoyed my time with Colm, and I really enjoyed the relationship that developed as a result of that. In a shoe ostensibly about freedom, rebellion, terrorism, and religious oppression, this was a relationship that came out of dislike, but blossomed into a real love, which was really great."
After DS9‘s run ended in 1999, its style of serialized storytelling wasn't attempted again in Star Trek until the penultimate year of Star Trek: Enterprise, in 2003. "They lost their courage," Siddig believes. "They thought that DS9 was a mistake for several years, and so they hurried to get another show on that more accurately repeated the success of TNG. Hence along came Star Trek: Voyager, which is pretty much an exact copy of TNG. Voyager was a decent show, but was not original. Nobody can tell me that was an original concept. Enterprise was kind of a comedy of errors in the same sense. They should have looked to the left or right and seen what Battlestar Galactica was doing, or even Bablyon 5, and gone ‘Well, there is a market for the DS9 style'."
The full interview can be found on issue 23 of the Star Trek Magazine, on sale in the US.
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