Yes, it's the award show you never asked for but didn't know how badly you needed. In this DS9 Season 1 retrospective, Lily and Cole bestow awards for acting, costumes, makeup, props, and more -- including best and worst episode (but spoiler: neither goes to Move Along Home). It's the glitziest night in the quadrant, and you don't want to miss it. 

🥂 Drink pairing: Roku gin and Schweppes soda 

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Jumja sticks! Sexy Vedeks! The Sydney Opera House as fashion accessory! It’s the explosive season finale of DS9, and Lily and Cole are as fired up as a schoolhouse on fire. Showrunner Michael Piller intended “In the Hands of the Prophets” to serve as a bookend to the pilot, “Emissary,” revisiting Sisko’s relationships with Bajor, the Prophets, and his devoutly religious first officer, Major Kira. In turn, we use this super-sized podcast episode to revisit some of the recurring themes of Deep Space Wine’s inaugural season, including: Lily and Cole’s will-they-won’t-they dynamic; lamenting the sorry state of Miles and Keiko’s marriage; and endlessly debating which characters are smashable. (Lily’s taken by a certain cherry-red kimono.)

🍷 Wine pairing: Champagne from Ruinart
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Intended as a low-budget ‘bottle show’ to save money before the season finale, ‘Duet’ devotes most of its runtime to two characters steeped in conversation with each other. But this dense story and its tug-of-war between justice and vengeance have come to be regarded as one of the finest hours of Star Trek. The episode’s writers drew inspiration from the play ‘The Man in the Glass Booth,’ which in turn was inspired by the kidnapping and trial of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann by the Israeli Supreme Court in 1961. That same court case would compel Hannah Arendt, a philosopher, political theorist and Holocaust survivor, to coin the term “the banality of evil” to grapple with the wide-scale complicity of the German people in the Holocaust atrocities. 

Cole and Lily delve into the post-WWII historical context that inspired Duet, including the Nuremberg Trials and the establishment of the state of Israel. Following the timeline through to contemporary crises of occupation and oppression, the episode also considers Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel’s writings on inherited violence and “cycles of rage.” But there is room for hope, too: we end with Hannah Arendt’s playbook for tackling hatred and fascism--which, as it turns out, hinges on more people simply talking to each other. 

🍷 Wine pairing: 'Serpico' Cabernet Sauvignon from Mitolo
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Is this unhinged tale of intrigue, betrayal and horology giving more Shakespeare or soap opera? We say both, and all the better for it. And though there's plenty of camp silliness on the surface, naturally Lily and Cole dive deep. Cole sees the 'play within the play' setup as a revealing metaphor for television acting, using it to interpret what each DS9 cast member brings to his or her respective character. Meanwhile, Lily teaches Cole that the sci-fi conceit driving the episode's plot actually isn’t so far-fetched, connecting it to the concept of social contagion and mass psychogenic illness, mass hysteria, and groupthink. Oh, and not to be outdone by the drama onscreen, Lily also gifts us with a Shakespeare reading. Fasten your seatbelts, once more unto the breach -- it's going to be a bumpy night. 

Get your Kleenex ready - it’s time for the episode that makes all of us melt into a puddle. And if you haven’t got your pail nearby, thank the drag gods that Lwaxana Troi is here to scoop you back up. Lily and Cole deep-dive into Lwaxana’s drag queen energy, what her fabulousness brings to the comparatively sterile world of Star Trek, and particularly what her arrival means for queer-coded self-acceptance on DS9. We also pay tribute to actress Majel Barrett, First Lady of Star Trek.

🪕 Intro music: Lily on ukulele and vocals, "I Am a Rock" by Simon & Garfunkel 

🍷 Wine pairing: Beaujolais 'Les 3 Roches' from Pierre-Marie Chermette

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Thought this episode was nothing but Rumpelstiltskin and rabid emus? Think again! Lily plumbs the depths of the station residents’ imaginations to psychoanalyze their deepest desires and greatest fears, uncovering some surprising insights along the way. Meanwhile Cole revisits The Secret, the runaway 2006 self-help bestseller all about "turning thoughts into things," to evaluate just how powerful the human imagination really is. 

What’s one stubborn farmer standing in the way of progress for an entire planet? Everything or nothing, depending on how you measure value. Nog and Jake spend the episode measuring it in wrappages of yamok sauce, bars of latinum, and gross of self-sealing stem bolts. Meanwhile, Major Kira is forced to reassess her values in a postcolonial Bajor where the black and white of wartime have blurred into an uneasy gray. For our discussion, we draw from A Short History of Progress by Robert Wright, Catch-22 by Joseph Heller, and the history of the Three Gorges Dam project in China. 

In the second half of our conversation with Star Trek director and producer David Livingston, we turn a spotlight on his directorial credits 'The Nagus' and 'The Storyteller.'  Along the way he shares behind-the-scenes casting insights, reveals his favorite character relationships, and argues what, in his opinion, makes Deep Space Nine the most enduring and addicting Star Trek show. 

If you watched any Star Trek in the 80s, 90s, or 2000s, you've seen David Livingston's name countless times on the bottom of your TV screen. Working behind the scenes from the very first episode of The Next Generation, he quickly graduated to the role of producer for all seven seasons of The Next Generation and began directing in that series' fourth season, starting with The Mind's Eye.

He would go on to become the most prolific director in Star Trek history, with 62 episodes to his name across The Next Generation, DS9, Voyager, and Enterprise. The list of episodes he has directed reads like a rundown of some of Star Trek's greatest moments: we're talking Voyager's Scorpion, Equinox,  Future's End, and Deadlock; Deep Space Nine's The Visitor, The Die Is Cast, and You Are Cordially Invited; Enterprise's Regeneration...the list goes on.

We ostensibly invited David to the show to discuss two of the episodes he directed in Season 1 (The Nagus and The Storyteller), but it turned into a freewheeling conversation on everything from classic cinema (from westerns to film noir to dystopian sci-fi), to the all-time favorite scenes David directed, to the quiet rebellion he led as a producer on The Next Generation to try to make the show less perfect and more interesting.

We had the pleasure of speaking with him for two hours, and we can't bring ourselves to cut any of it. So we're posting the first half of our discussion now, and we'll be posting the second half next week. Enjoy!

🍷 Wine pairing: "NON5 Lemon Marmalade & Hibiscus" Non-alcoholic wine
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🧙‍♂️ A good story can be a powerful thing—it can rally us around a shared cause, give us hope, or even vanquish our fears. But of course, a story is nothing if it’s not told well. In this tale of monsters and myth-making, the medium is the message. “The Storyteller” serves up two charming stories, which both play like Bajoran folktales: while Bashir and O’Brien unwittingly reenact Rudyard Kipling’s “The Man Who Would Be King” in an isolated village, Jake and Nog go…beyond the pail to impress a visiting diplomat. We draw on “monster theory” to decode the metaphors at play, taking detours along the way to appreciate great robe game and, yes, ponder Lord of the Rings copyright infringement.

🍷 Wine pairing: 2021 Syrah from Swinney

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