Star Trek: Deep Space Nine pilot episode (1993) (some spoilers)

I'm an avid fan of Star Trek TNG, and while it's a great series, it's far from perfect, often preachy and pandering but with a perfect send-off in all good things, a time jumping episode in which Picard is forced to give himself up and conform to a truth in order so that humanity and all that he loves does not cease to ever have existed, the ultimate sacrifice, leaving Star Trek Deep Space Nine to take the franchise and the ideas of the series so far further into the realm of the metaphysical, and Deep Space Nine is a marvel with great characters and ideas that explores ideas of faith, time, conflict and power on a galactic scale but all aboard one station under the command of Benjamin Sisko, the Emissary of the Prophets, a race of god-like being who exist beyond humanoid perception of time and space.

The whole pilot episode is about time and timelessness and the contradictory nature of time-continuing existence existing within timelessness and destiny, and the tightrope of faith.  Whereas the Enterprise is a perfectly oiled machine and the whole crew is pretty much perfect and know how to overcome all obstacles in a rigid, literary surface sense, Deep Space Nine is a broken space station abandoned and left in pieces by a totalitarian race of control freaks who oppressed the people of Bajor and committed atrocities against them for an era.  When they leave and Bajor is "free" under a provisional government, Starfleet steps in to help out and Benjamin Sisko reluctantly takes command of the station having lost his wife at the battle of Wolf 359 seen in TNG in which Picard was assimilated by the Borg and forced to assist them in an assault on Earth.  Therefore Sisko starts out with a resentment and hatred of his predecessor in the Trek story.  The way the pilot works as a continuation of the ideas explored in the best episodes of TNG, the final episode as well as the brilliant two parter in which Picard is assimilated, is poetic in the way it comes together and adds up as a profound demonstration.

As Sisko reluctantly arrives on the station struggling to deal with loss and carrying the baggage of hatred and resentment for the previous Captain incarnation of Picard, he unwittingly sets the stage for what is to come and puts the pieces in place.  As the episode begins it is far more of a slow burner, more mysterious and mystical than the fantastical and adventurous pilot of TNG, for this is a very different show and no one is eager or agreeable, every first encounter an argument or confrontation rather than a reunion or instant friendship, at least not on the surface, for these characters thrive on conflict, uncertainty and doubt, instead of the outward goodness and purity of the Enterprise crew, although that worked for a show that had only a partially continuing story but was for the most part an adventure of the week kind of thing.  Rather by having a continuing story the show unfolds and suprises you and tries the faith of its characters whose struggle is compelling and difficult but fits in place in a larger picture.  In this way the show combines religion and science as its foundation and achieves a grander scope than its predecessors.

In TNG's brilliant two-parter "The Best of Both Worlds," aptly titled as it explores the illusory conflict between the surface reality of culture, personality and freedom and the underlying cybernetic control structure which assimilates Picard in servitude to them as humanity is forced to fight in order to save their freedom.  In the beginning of Deep Space Nine Sisko is aboard one of the ships assaulting the Borg cube.  The ship is catches fire and begins to break up and in in the chaos Sisko loses his wife but saves his child.  This loss leaves him hardened but better for it, and three years later he is assigned to oversee the station as Bajor recovers from the occupation of a controlling occupying force similar to the Borg but less absolute and more reptilian and sadistic, a kind of lingering disruptive presence throughout the series, powerful but also deluded and arrogant,their rigid control and domination their downfall as with the Dominion allies later in the series.  Deep Space Nine is very much about power play both real and illusory.  As I've mentioned before there are races of varying levels of technological advancement and power in the Star Trek universe.  The systems at the higher end of the spectrum like the Dominion and moreso the Borg tend to be more rigidly controlling, systematic, invasive and powerful, or seem so, assimilating other cultures and civilisations or assimilating them so the Federation and Bajorans have to take leaps of faith and accept and overcome their flaws in the face of the ultimate power, the beings the Bajorans worship as gods, the prophets, which speak to Sisko after giving him his test in the pilot.

At some point Sisko and Dax get in a runabout to investigate anomalous readings in an attempt to find out more about mysterious orbs that have appeared in the skies above Bajor for millenia.  Suddenly in the same way a Bajoran pilot once described the heavens open up and swallow them, and they are sucked into a wormhole a folding of time and space, the celestial temple of the prophets in which they reside beyond time forever.  It is here that Sisko's time continuing existence is tested, and as he explains how he goes from one moment to the next in life as a human being, is is thrust into different meaningful events in his life, back and forth between meeting his wife, the death of his wife at Wolf 359 and playing baseball.  The prophets speak to him through figures from his life, from Picard, who in one shot appropriately as a borg stands alongside Sisko as the prophets deconstruct from within the mechanics that get Sisko from one point in time to the next, Sisko struggling to explain that he moves forward in time while he is repeatedly thrust back into the moment his wife died with the ultimatum from the prophets "but you also exist here."  They are learning one another in order for Sisko to become the emissary.  His being is deemed intrusive to them for trying to explain how he moves and how things are lost and his mortality, but as the prophets learn this Sisko also learns of timeless existence, of destiny, and so they are bonded forever by this and Sisko returns from his experience renewed as the emissary.  

At the same time the demonstration is taking place in the temple it is also happening on Deep Space Nine as the crew races against time to stop the Cardassians from staking a claim to the wormhole.  The tension lies in the fact that the station is barely functional and could tear apart at any moment, and the crew has to rely on blind faith to get them from point A to B.  At one point O'Brien tries desperately to get a computer console working before literally kicking it into action.  Everything seems to just happen instead of being controlled completely by the crew and as Sisko returns triumphant Deep Space Nine begins.  My favourite Trek series, fascinating.  

Die Hard (1990)

Die Hard is not only one of the best action films ever made, it's also a brilliant film of ideas, the skyscraper the setting for a climactic confrontation, the psyche of one out-of-place, everyday man who against the odds must reconcile with his estranged wife and defeat the evil Hans Gruber, a pretentious, materialistic thief and control freak.  When he invades the Nakatomi skyscraper it's time for John McClane to clean house, which he struggles to do but does so effortlessly in the fashion of the old action films which were less shallow and aesthetic, vulnerability and danger part of the equation rather than dispatching enemies with precision, dodging bullets and being a literal god-man.  There is no room for any of that in this film, John McClane is not a pretentious, insecure show-off like his nemesis Gruber who has to make big speeches and surround himself with a band of strongmen to get by, all that nonsense does is force him to rely on instinct and do what is absolutely necessary even if it means bombing out the building with C4.  He has no time, Gruber believes he has all the time in the world, and this is why Gruber, with his fancy suit and fancy watch, fails.  After rescuing the hostages and killing the terrorists he is forced into confrontation with Gruber who is  holding his wife hostage.  The final confrontation is brilliant, as Gruber is blown back out a window.  McClane's wife tries to save him, and is frantically holding onto the fancy watch, while McClane unbuckles it because Gruber must die.  Finally Gruber, out of time, his watch unfastened, falls, defeated all along by his own sense of himself as an autonomous, all-powerful mastermind with time in his hands, which he never was, and McClane and his wife, the male and female counterparts are reunited as the snow falls and Merry Christmas.  That is why it is not only a great action film, but a great Christmas film, and a great ideas film, and the same can be said for number 2 and Die Hard with a Vengeance.  Like many great films it's just another trip into the depths, into the infrastructure.  Blue Thunder is another film that comes to mind that does something similar.