Twenty Years of Deep Space Nine

On January 3, 1993, Star Trek took a turn into a darker, grittier place with the premiere episode of Deep Space Nine. The pilot episode, “The Emissary,” introduced us to a Commander who hated Picard and was looking to retire early, an ex-terrorist turned first officer, a 700 year old Science Officer, a shapeshifting security officer, a morally challenged barkeep, and a slew of others that, frankly, did not get along.

What emerged was a show that was the first Star Trek not created by Gene Roddenberry. In fact, before his death, he was pretty pessimistic about it. Gone was the doe-eyed optimism of his original vision of the future and replaced with the harsh realities of war, occupation, and…well…life.

So, twenty years later, what’s your take on DS9?

14 replies on “Twenty Years of Deep Space Nine”

      • I had my fears/doubts about it along the way (I didn’t care much for the whole dominion war bit…) but ultimately I enjoyed it. I think what hurt it most in my area was the syndication time slot. I’m certain I missed a few episodes here and there. One of these days I should really watch it again, but I have many other things already on that list.

  1. Certainly, it had the most interesting character and character interactions of any Trek. Like NextGen, it had a weak first season and its share of dubious episodes, but I enjoyed the series overall.

    NSFW, live:

  2. Wow, weird coincidence. I just started rewatching the series from the beginning last night.

  3. I decided to celebrate with “The Trouble With Tribbles” from TOS and “Trials and Tribble-ations” from DS9. You can see some of the joins, but it is impressive…

  4. I liked the abiguity of Quark and the ongoing presence of the Cardassians in the Trek universe. Each character had a flaw which was a remarkable change from the pristine TNG character set. The station was also always breaking down and flawed. From memory there was Federation “Section 31” which I would have liked to see them explore further.

    In hindsight this started really lacklustre. As Babylon 5 started however all of a sudden the quality of both the writing and story started to take off. The introduction of a “war ship” (Defiant) and an ongoing enemy that wasn’t solved in a 44 minute episode kept people interested.

    • Enterprise made Section 31 canon. I think at one point DS9 had an episode which waffled on how official or long-standing Section 31 actually was, and how much of it was a renegade group within Starfleet, or some such.

      And then there is System32, which is probably causing all those problems. Just delete it and you’ll be fine.

  5. I liked, and still do like, Sisko. To me he’s the only realistic boss EVER in the Star Trek universe. When someone screwed up he’d give ’em hell, and he never accepted any of the crap Picard (for example) did.

    For example, if Geordi ever said he doesn’t know what’s causing some malfunction, Picard would just tell him to keep looking. Of O’Brien did that to Sisko, Sisko would threaten to drop-kick him the hell out of DS9 and have Starfleet send a COMPETENT engineer.

  6. Ahh, the 90’s, when we were blessed with not one but TWO great sic-fi shows about space stations….

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