While Star Trek: Deep Space Nine has been off the air for over 20 years, the Star Trek series continues to find new audiences and receive positive critical appraisal despite not initially being appreciated by its studio.
DS9 star Alexander Siddig is returning to hard sci-fi for the first time since the series ended in his new film Skylines and has enjoyed revisiting the fan-favorite genre. Recalling that the idea of a serialized Star Trek series wasn't embraced by the television studio at the time but has since been received more favorably by younger audiences introduced to the series through platforms like CBS All Access.
"We knew at the time that there was something different about that show because it wasn't liked by the studio. [Laughs] The studio likes their cookie-cutters and it was something they found really difficult to digest. They didn't understand the serialization thing, it was bizarre and uneconomical -- it didn't script well, I think was the technical term -- and so we were kind of called the middle child," Siddig reflected. "It's been really fascinating to go a couple of decades later and see that the show really sort of stands up and a lot of people -- and I talk to a lot of fans, especially during this COVID time keeping a sort of social club just keeping an eye on each other -- it's a lot of youth and youngsters who weren't born when the show came on. It's really resonating with them and they don't have any understanding of what the TV landscape was like in the '90s. They see it as a perfectly normal show so I'm quite chuffed that it hasn't dated horribly...I don't dare look at it in case I think it has. [Laughs]"
Running for seven seasons from 1993 to 1999, Deep Space Nine star Siddig portrayed the space station's chief medical officer Doctor Julian Bashir. Pleased that the series has stood the test of time, Siddig noted that its decision to move to a serialized storytelling format may have helped influence the new generation of Star Trek series starting with Star Trek: Discovery.
"There's always cultural paradigm shifts but, at the heart of it, I think it's a really decent, dark Star Trek and it may have paved the way for [Discovery] to go 'Okay, we already set that mold' and I can't see [Discovery] because I don't have CBS All Access but I think they've picked up a bit of Deep Space Nine and they've run with it, it's been really interesting to see how that's evolved," Siddig observed.
Written, directed and produced by Liam O'Donnell, Skylines stars Lindsey Morgan, Jonathan Howard, Daniel Bernhardt, Rhona Mitra, James Cosmo and Alexander Siddig. The film will be released in select theaters, on demand and digital Dec. 18.