I just read through Gedeon Maheux’s post on why Deep Space Nine is his favorite Star Trek series, and I couldn’t agree more — in fact, I’ve been thinking about the exact same thing. I’ve been catching some DS9 reruns on Spike lately (it’s right after the Ultimate Fighter, which I would never, ever watch on my own but which a friend has convinced me to follow), and for all the reasons Gedeon lists and more, it’s by far my favorite part of the Star Trek universe.

Truth be told, I’m a Star Wars man. I never was one for fleet captains and military designations and diplomacies, I’m much more a fan of the rough rider, rebel forces (and let’s be honest, racist) wild west in space kind of universe that Star Wars depicts. Of course, in the newer movies, it got deeper into the mythology and midichlorians and the Jedi Council, but let’s be honest, the real star of Star Wars is Han Solo. Sure, the Jedi and their Force are a big draw, but you can’t have an elegant weapon like the lightsaber without a universe full of clumsy blaster-wielding roughnecks on the run from Jabba the Hutt.

So yes, when it comes to sci-fi universes, Star Wars has my heart. But there’s no denying that Star Trek has some solid mythology, and for all of Star Wars’ sound and fury, it’s never been able to delve into the big questions like Star Trek has (and when Lucas has dared to try, he’s usually failed). I’d never wear a Starfleet uniform, even ironically (though I’ve owned toy Startroopers, a Darth Vader pez, and many, if not dozens of, lightsabers of various sizes and coolness), and I think the Vulcan ears are just cheesy (yes, even in the new movie’s trailer), but there’s no denying that the universe has some heft to it.

And never is it felt more than in the DS9 series. Gedeon’s post has lots of good points — Avery Brooks is extremely underrated as the main lead of a Star Trek series, as are all of the memorable (if not necessarily likeable) characters of the series, and the central theme of Star Trek as “man and his universe” has never been more apparent in every single scene as in DS9.

I once read (and I’m sorry that I don’t remember where) that there are two kinds of science fiction. One kind is like the original Star Trek series — the technologies dreamed of in the fiction are cutting-edge and used only by a select few. They’re experimental, and it’s the experimental fantasy that keeps us interested: movies like Alien, Back to the Future, and every other sci-fi movie where there’s a whole world of people who have no idea that these fantastic things are real. That kind of fiction is interesting, I guess: it’s a dream of the future, based on a premise of “so if we can do that now, will we be able to do this soon?”

But the second type is infinitely more fascinating to me. It’s where all of the technology dreamed about in the first kind is no longer experimental, it’s commonplace. Blade Runner, Fifth Element, and yes, Star Wars. Instead of a desperate spaceship captain activating an alien warp drive that might bend time, the alien warp drives are in every household coffeemaker, and instead our hero is a coffeemaker repairman. Instead of, say, an elite crew navigating the vast regions of space to boldly go, etc. etc., humanity lives and breathes out in space, and alien races that were once, ahem, alien to us, are instead working and living and fighting shoulder to shoulder with us.

Which also makes DS9 a series more relevant than ever these days, when our world is more “global” (whatever that means) than it has ever been, and we must learn either the hard way (or any way, really) that everyone we once as a culture thought alien, from homosexuals to terrorists, are really not that different from us at all. Star Trek’s other shows are about exploring outward, searching the stars, and going to new places. But DS9 is, in a much more interesting way, about searching inward, and figuring out just who we are and why we do the things we do.

Plus, Deep Space Nine and America are similar in another way now: we’ve both got a black guy in charge.