Star Trek: Deep Space Nine

I moved to Texas in December of 1992, and that point, Star Trek: The Next Generation was still going on.  However, in my prep to move to Texas I knew of a fourth Star Trek TV series to launch.  That’s of course Deep Space Nine.  I like most fans at the time thought “Star Trek? On a space station?”  When the show conceptually was announced, I wondered how it would work.  No Enterprise?  No Kirk? No Picard?  That’s a base level format change.   Then I started reading about what they thought – which was that the only real difference is that instead of them going TO the stories, the stories came to THEM.  That turned out to be a non issue for me.  We saw corridors, offices, sickbay, etc that we’d see on an Enterprise.  The space station vs ship kerfuffle turned out to be no big deal.  As time progressed, they did get a ship that allowed them to leave the station, but the vast bulk of the show was set on the station, or the planet it orbited (Bajor).

However the main reason that Deep Space Nine remains my favorite Star Trek series to this day is that it has the biggest/deepest – yet most developed secondary and tertiary character group of any series.  Oh sure, other series have background characters, some quite good.  But DS9 has the largest group.  But it’s not JUST the numbers that are important.  They’re not all just faceless people – they are characters you have learned about, built up, and ones you CARE about.  You can have a buttload of background characters, but they end up being nothing you care about – the proverbial redshirts.  However, that’s not what happened here.  Rom, Leeta, Vic Fontaine, Garak, Damar, Weyoun, Martok, Kasidy Yates, Admiral Ross..  These are all characters you know something about, not just say the random Admiral that’s thrown in.  And that’s just a couple of them.  There’s a crap ton more.  It’s a VERY deep (no pun intended) and very rich set of characters to work with.

That doesn’t even talk about the primary cast.  The series had intended on bringing two secondary characters over from TNG to be part of the main DS9 cast.  However, one of them (Michelle Forbes) didn’t want to be tied down to the long term contract, and declined.  As she was going to be the major Bajoran character, they had to invent someone new – Major Kira Nerys (Nana Visitor), and a legend was born.  They were lead by Avery Brooks as Ben Sisko, who at the time was known best for Spencer For Hire.   Armin Shimerman played the Ferengi Quark.  Shimerman was one of the OG Ferengi in their first Season 1 TNG appearance (which was awful), but on DS9, Quark redefined the Ferengi and made them an interesting race.   I will get into the full cast as we go along, but I adore this group.

The series ran for seven seasons and over that time, a few cast changes happened.  In the fourth season, they brought Michael Dorn on to play Worf, who was added as a permanent series regular (something my wife was very much in favor of).  After Season 6, Terry Farrell left the series, and as such, her character of Jadzia was killed.  But due to the nature of the Trill race, her essence survived in a new Dax host – Ezri, played by Nicole DeBoer for the seventh and final season.  So the show evolved over time, developed new things, and then of course there was the Dominion War which dominated the last four years of the show.

It’s an overall master class in my opinion of good story telling, while having a heart and a sense of humor.  It also tackled serious things like religion, racial tensions, sexual orientation.. They produced not just some of the best episodes of Star Trek, but some of the best television I’ve seen.  There was some silliness too (“Death to the Opposition!” comes to mind).  It was a well balanced TV series, and one that I was VERY much looking forward to revisiting when I realized I’d be doing *ALL* of Star Trek in this marathon series of mine on my blog.

The series has never really made a return – not in any meaningful way.  There were no theatrical movies (like there were with the original series and Next Generation), and no major cast reunions.  Events got mentioned from time to time in other Star Trek incarnations, but full on sequels as such didn’t happen.  Off the top of my head, the only real times we revisited DS9 in canon was in the animated series “Star Trek: Lower Decks” which brought back Nana Visitor to voice Kira again, and the penultimate episode Lower Decks also had Andrew Robinson & Alexander Siddig reprise their roles as Garak & Bashir respectively.  But that’s the only real times DS9 has returned.  I’m kind of torn with that.  The series ended in a way that sets up some sort of sequel to Sisko’s story, but to date that’s never been touched on.  In some ways I’d like to see more of it, yet in other ways I’m glad it’s closed off like that.

It also had the best series finale – brought everything to a close, and in the last 5 mins there was enough tacked on to give you an idea what the characters that survived at the end would be doing in the future.  Seven seasons and 176 episodes.  Some years after the series ended, a look back at the series was produced, called “What We Left Behind – Looking back at Star Trek Deep Space Nine“.  It was funded by Indiegogo (of which I backed).  It’s a killer two hour look at the series production.  In 2025, it’s available free on Youtube, so if you’ve never checked that out, I urge you to do so.

One last thing… During this show’s run I got married.  I’m still married to the same woman nearly 30 years later, and she started watching DS9 with me after we got married.  That carried over into Voyager, Enterprise, etc..  So that was a a fun spice for my Star Trek viewing.

Season 1

Like most Star Trek series, Season 1 had some rocky moments.  There were some absolute gems in Season 1 , but what made DS9 the show I adored, wasn’t here in Season 1.  At least not in full force.

• Babel (5/14/2025) - (25 Jan 1993) – Season 1 Episode 5 (Serial 405)
• A Man Alone (5/13/2025) - (18 Jan 1993) – Season 1 Episode 4 (Serial 403)
• Past Prologue (5/12/2025) - (11 Jan 1993) – Season 1 Episode 3 (Serial 404)
• Emissary (5/11/2025) - (4 Jan 1993) – Season 1 Episodes 1-2 (Serial 401-402)