What You Leave Behind

This Story: Season 7 Episodes 25 & 26 (production codes 575 & 576)
DS9 Overall: Episodes 175 & 176
Trek Overall: Story 432, Episode 456
Airdate: 31 May 1999
Writer: Ira Steven Behr & Hans Beimler
Director: Allan Kroeker

Notes

• The final episode of Deep Space Nine.  The final scene  shot was with Armin Shimerman & James Darren playing “Go Fish”.
• The ninth and tenth of a ten episode arc that closes out the Dominion War and Deep Space Nine as a series. As far as I know it’s not intended to be a single story with ten parts to it, but it is very tightly wound together (ala Babylon 5), so watching these out of order would be near impossible.  On original broadcast, they were advertised as “The Final Chapter“.
• As originally broadcast, this was a single double length episode, but in syndication it’s split into two pieces.
• Avery Brooks is the only actor to have appeared in every single episode of Deep Space Nine.
• This episode was directed by Allen Kroeker, who also directed the finales of Star Trek Voyager & Star Trek Enterprise.
• The episode was novelized by Diane Carey, and while long out of print, is still available as a Kindle book.
• There was also an official series of novels (from 2001 through 2017) which continued the DS9 storyline beyond the end of the series.  There is a list of them available here.
• Additionally, in the DS9 (restrospective/making of) movie “What We Let Behind: Looking Back at Star Trek: Deep Space Nine”, the Season 7 writer’s room got back together and pitched what a fictional “Season 8” of Deep Space Nine would be if they had one. It’s quite an interesting exercise.  The entire film is available for free on Youtube (in full – legally) as of Nov 2025, so you can check it all out here.
• The bridge of the Defiant was not struck and was used in the future for various ship bridge shots on Voyager & Enterprise.
• There was talk of the final scene of the series being Benny Russell with a script for “Deep Space Nine” which would then make all of DS9 (and perhaps all of Trek) a dream.  I was QUITE glad they decided not to do that.
• During a fight scene between Avery Brooks & Marc Alaimo, Brooks actually clocked Alaimo for real, causing him to have to take a few days off – it threw filming into a tizzy.
• The fire caves scene used the same sets used for Star Trek: Insurrection making them look better than they would have using just the TV budget.
• The Pah-Wraith flames use the same fire effect created for the Badlands in the episode “For the Cause“.
• The shot of Odo returning to his people was the first time there was any scene n the Gamma Quadrant since the penultimate episode (plus one) of Season 5.
• This episode was nominated for an Emmy Award for Outstanding Special Visual Effects for a Series.
• The final episode of Star Trek that aired before the death of DeForest Kelley (11 Jun 1999).
• There’s a Back to the Future reference here when O’Brien references a “Flux Capacitor”.
• In real world time, the next episode of Star Trek to air would be Voyager’s “Equinox Part II” (22 Sep 1999, 144 days later). This episode of DS9 is the final time there would be two concurrent (in universe) series going at the same time.  That is unless you count Star Trek Discovery and Lower Decks, but they take place in radically different parts of the overall timeline.  DS9 & Voyager are supposed to be concurrent in universe (just in different locations).
• This is just the tip of the iceberg insofar as background stuff for this episode.  The Memory Alpha link below contains a metric ton of other info worth reading about this episode (and every other in this series too).

Links