Something occurred to me last night. I was unpacking a box of books, and one of the book was a collection of Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s poetry, which, oddly enough, comprises fully half of the poetry I own. (The other book of poetry I have is O Holy Cow: The Selected Verse of Phil Rizzuto, a fact that confounds an English teacher of my acquaintance to no end.) What can I say, I’m not a poetic sort. 😉
Anyway, back to Tennyson. As I’m sure everyone realizes by now, the Mission: Gamma books have been using Tennyson’s poem “Ulysses” as a lead-in. Well, with Tennyson in hand, I read through “Ulysses” in full, and it made sense. In many ways, the poem could be speaking about Vaughn, a man of war who turns to exploration and discovery.
The tangential thought I had after was this: thus far in the relaunch, we haven’t really seen Vaughn function as Kira’s second-in-command. He wasn’t such in Avatar. Abyss didn’t have much of anything to do with the station. Demons had Kira and Vaughn follow different routes in dealing with the Gateways and the Europani, but Vaughn wasn’t taking Kira’s lead. And Mission: Gamma has Kira in command of the station and Vaughn in command of the Defiant, quadrants apart. It really seems that we have two lead characters in the post-series Deep Space Nine.