Earlier this week, James Darren—the actor and singer best known for his roles in the Gidget films, and, to sci-fi fans, his turn as the kooky lounge singer hologram Vic Fontaine on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine—passed away at the age of 88. A late arrival to the Star Trek galaxy, Darren’s inescapably wry charm and smooth takes on classic jazz were an unlikely fit for a series that was staring down the barrel of some its grandest, most challenging storytelling. But his enduring popularity reflects that really, a character like Vic Fontaine was always just as important to Deep Space Nine‘s story of war and compromise in utopia.
A late arrival in an established ongoing show is always a challenging position to be in for an actor. Star Trek was no stranger to this throughout its half-century-plus of existence, and is filled with as many success stories (Jeri Ryan’s arrival as Seven of Nine in Voyager‘s fourth season) as it is controversial ones—Deep Space Nine itself faced this with the addition of Nicole de Boer’s Ezri Dax, the next host of the Dax symbiont to replace Terri Farrell’s Jadzia after her exit. But Vic Fontaine, introduced late into the sixth season of the show, faced a particularly daunting entry. Star Trek had plenty of recurring holodeck bits before that played with anachronistic and tonal clashes: TNG had things like Picard’s love of ’40s noir and his detective persona Dixon Hill, or its infrequent brushes with a maniacal Dr. Moriarty. Voyager, running concurrently with DS9 at this point, went through a whole bunch, from Sandrine’s, to the Paxau Resort, to Fair Haven.
But Vic Fontaine wasn’t just another avenue and genre for a show that regularly played with genre to waltz down: he was a lovable, all-singing, all-dancing smoothie, a sendup of ’60s mobster flicks, being shoved into the heart of a show at its bloodiest and darkest, as Deep Space Nine reckoned with the cost of total war in Star Trek‘s idealized future.
It was an incredibly risky move, but one that paid off enormously. A lot of this was due to Darren’s charisma: as tonally alien to DS9 as Fontaine was, Darren suffused the hologram with an affable charm and humor that made the audience and Deep Space Nine‘s war-weary heroes alike quickly fall into his orbit and feel at ease. But it’s also for what Fontaine and his lounge came to represent as the Dominion War raged across the series: a slice of culture and comfort that united our myriad heroes, a slice of home that was not specifically any singular being’s home. Vic Fontaine came to represent to Deep Space Nine this romanticized ideal almost as lofty as the ideals the Dominion War was being fought for, this creative imaging of one society’s past that could be shared and made accessible to the many, and unity to be found in that cultural exchange.
This becomes explicit from almost the moment Vic is introduced to the series. In “His Way,” he is the catalyst that brings together the climax of Kira and Odo’s on-again, off-again romantic arc, providing a touchstone even as their own baggage as a Bajoran and as one of the Changelings began to complicate their place in the war more and more. It’s Vic that provides a place for Nog’s story about wartime trauma after he loses his leg in one of DS9‘s most brutal war episodes, a place for these characters to escape to and be in touch with a universal sense of personhood. Vic and his lounge aren’t just a home away from the war, but a canvas for Deep Space Nine‘s personal stories about love, personhood, and grief to intermingle and be given space. It’s a vital mirror to the show’s grand story, and a constant reminder that when he shows up, while you might be getting a break from the sorrows and action of the Dominion War, so are DS9‘s characters, if only for a little while.
It’s why climaxing Vic’s arc in the wonderfully silly “Badda-Bing Badda-Bang”—the season seven episode where Vic’s holoprogram comes under threat of a total reset when part of its storyline sees Vic ousted from his residence by the mafia—clicks even right as DS9‘s wider wartime story is reaching its climax. Vic represented a place where everyone on DS9 was welcome—an idea even Sisko came to admire, after his initial distancing from the lounge over its idealized view of a past that would’ve looked down on him. By threatening it, and by having that threat unanimously pull the whole main cast together to prevent it (via, of course, the medium of a classic heist tale), DS9 was telling us that this was the home these disparate characters had found together, this safe haven away from the darkness encroaching further and further in on them, and they were going to do their damndest to save it.
It’s fitting then, that one of the last scenes in all of DS9 rightfully takes us back to Vic’s. After the war is over and the treaty with the Dominion is signed, the crew comes together to hear Vic one last time, before they all begin to go their separate ways. Darren gives a stunning rendition of “The Way You Look Tonight”—a song about appreciating the little things people who love each other notice in one other. It’s romantic, but it’s also a song about this snapshot of these people together, friends, lovers, survivors, before the circumstances that steeled them and brought them together in the first place begin to fade from memory. It’s a reminder that this is one they fought for—for one final time, that chance to be together, to connect, to feel something in this shared place. In the shadow of war, Vic Fontaine was the bright light that Deep Space Nine needed.
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