SF&F Questions: Did Deep Space Nine rip off Babylon 5?

In our latest SF&F Question we address one of the biggest controversies in the history of science fiction television: did Star Trek: Deep Space Nine rip off its contemporary and "rival"space station show Babylon 5?

The Basics

Deep Space Nine was the second spin-off television series based on Star Trek. It ran for seven seasons and 178 episodes, debuting on 3 January 1993 and concluding on 2 June 1999.

Babylon 5 was an original science fiction television series which ran for five seasons and 110 episodes, along with an additional six TV movies and its own spin-off show which ran for half a season. It debuted on 22 February 1993 with a stand-alone pilot movie. Season 1 proper debuted on 26 January 1994 and the show concluded on 25 November 1998.

Both shows are set on enormous space stations, which the series is named after. Deep Space Nine is set on a space station near the planet Bajor, which is recovering from forty years of military occupation by the ruthless Cardassian Union. The United Federation of Planets and its space exploration wing, Starfleet, are called in to help run the station and advise the Bajorans on the rebuilding of their world.

Babylon 5's space station (which is considerably larger than DS9) is a sort-of United Nations in space, where representatives from five major governments and dozens of smaller ones meet to discuss important interstellar affairs. The impetus to build the station came from a devastating war between the Earth Alliance and Minbari Federation that cost the lives of hundreds of thousands and destabilised the galaxy.

The contention, made directly by Babylon 5's creator and executive producer J. Michael Straczynski at the time, was that Deep Space Nine had ripped off Babylon 5's concepts and ideas, from the broad idea of setting the show on a space station to some specific elements such as having a shapeshifting character (the Minbari assassin in B5's pilot was originally an actual shapeshifting alien) and the presence of an interstellar "gateway" near the station (the wormhole in DS9's case, the jump gate in B5's case).

Wait, Babylon 5 started after DS9. How can it have ripped it off?

It's true that DS9 aired its pilot episode, Emissary, six weeks before B5 aired its pilot, The Gathering, and took a lot longer to get its first season proper on air. In fact, DS9 was halfway through its second season before B5 could begin airing its first. However, this does not tell the full story of the two shows' development; Babylon 5 was created, conceived and outlined almost five years before DS9 was commissioned.

J. Michael Straczynski came up with the idea for Babylon 5 in 1986 or 1987; he seeded a mention of the name into Final Stand, one of his episodes for Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future, which aired on 4 October 1987. He developed the Babylon 5 series bible around this time and wrote a pilot script (an early but still-recognisable version of The Gathering), plus a full set of 22 episode outlines for a full season of the show. Concept artist Peter Ledger also provided paintings of the titular space station and its crew. This package was shopped around CBS, ABC and HBO in 1988 to no avail.

In early 1989 Straczynski and his prospective production partners, Douglas Netter and John Copeland, received a boost when they met Evan Thompson, the head of a group of local stations called Chris Craft. Syndication - where a show is sold direct to lots of local TV stations rather than one of the big national networks - was experiencing a renaissance thanks to the success of Paramount Television's Star Trek: The Next Generation (which had launched in September 1987) and Chris Craft was interested in lining up a new show for the syndication market. Babylon 5 fit the bill, they felt, and they hoped a new science fiction show would do similar numbers to Star Trek for them.
To this end Thompson took the Babylon 5 project directly to Paramount Television. He presented them with the pilot script, the 22 additional episode outlines, the outline of a serialised five-year story arc and the detailed production notes which suggested that the show could be made for less money than TNG. Paramount sat on the notes for about eight to nine months and the producers he spoke to were enthusiastic about the project, but Paramount's senior management felt that having a second science fiction/space opera show set in a completely different universe would be too confusing and would cannibalise the Star Trek audience. By the end of 1989 they had formally passed on the B5 project and Thompson was given back the notes, scripts and outlines.

Eventually Babylon 5 found a home at Warner Brothers and their new Prime-Time Entertainment Network (PTEN), an alliance of syndicated stations. The show was formerly announced as being in development in the summer of `1991. Two months later, Paramount Television announced that they were developing a spin-off from Star Trek: The Next Generation, called Star Trek: Deep Space IX (later changed to Deep Space Nine after too many people wrote in asking what a "Deep Space Ix" was) that would be set on a large space station. Straczynski was not slow in calling foul and reminding people that Paramount had had the story notes for Babylon 5 for almost a year and could have cribbed whatever notes that'd wanted from them.

Okay, that sounds pretty plausible actually. So what is Paramount's side of the story?

Paramount's side of the story is pretty straightforward: they themselves didn't come up with the basic notion of DS9. Instead it came in with a new executive to the network who did not have prior access to any internal documents related to the 1989 Babylon 5 proposal.

Backtracking a little: despite risible critical notices, the first two seasons of Star Trek: The Next Generation had done gangbusters for Paramount in terms of ratings and therefore advertising profitability. With the third season of TNG, including its epic Borg cliffhanger episode, The Best of Both Worlds, improving the show's critical and commercial success, they wanted to exploit this by developing more shows in the same setting. However, executive producers Rick Berman and Michael Pillar weren't sure how to approach this and, with TNG being a time-consuming show, they put these ideas on the backburner.

The situation changed in 1991. Brandon Tartikoff, one of the most feted and respected television executives in Hollywood, had departed NBC after fourteen years. During his time at the network he had displayed a canny eye for gauging what would work and what wouldn't, making such far-reaching decisions as renewing Cheers and Seinfeld even after the first few seasons of each show brought in terrible ratings and being rewarded when they both became the biggest shows on television. He was also involved in the creation of The Cosby Show, Miami Vice and The Golden Girls, all of which became immense successes despite Hollywood wisdom being set against them.
Tartikoff was asked to join Paramount Television, which was in the doldrums and needed some firing up. Tartikoff accepted the job and arrived in the post of chairman with one firm idea already in place: a new Star Trek television series. One of his first actions was to summon Berman and Piller to his office (they were terrified that he was going to cancel TNG) and presented them with a concept he'd already developed: if the original Star Trek series and TNG were both "Wagon Train to the stars" - a reference to a 1957-65 Western TV show about pioneers exploring the American West - than he wanted the new show to be "The Rifleman in space", a reference to a 1958-63 TV series focusing on a widowed sheriff trying to keep the peace in a fractious frontier town whilst also raising his young son. The new Star Trek show would therefore not be set on a starship but a starbase, one of the planetary bases frequently visited in both Star Trek series, and the show would deal with the problems of being stationary in possibly hostile surroundings rather than being able to roar off at the end of each week's adventure.

Piller and Berman ran with the idea - possibly a bit more literally than Tartikoff had expected - by proposing that a Starfleet base had been set up on a planet recently under hostile alien occupation, with a newly-widowed Starfleet officer assigned to command the base with his son. The officer's wife had been killed by the Borg in the Battle of Wolf 359 and he was suffering issues related to that event. They decided the occupying aliens would be the Cardassians - introduced in the then-recently-aired TNG episode The Wounded - and created the planet Bajor and its spiritual inhabitants as the planet in question. They also mused on using a stable wormhole (an idea introduced in Star Trek: The Motion Picture in 1979 and further expanded on in the TNG episode The Price, which had aired in November 1989) as a way of revitalising Bajor's economy and introducing strife with the Cardassians, who'd abandoned the planet before the wormhole was discovered.

However, they ran into problems just a couple of weeks later when costing the show. One of the appeals of doing the project was having regular location filming to make the show feel less claustrophobic than TNG and give it a very different look. The problem is that regular location filming would have meant either almost doubling the budget beyond TNG (at that point already the most expensive TV show on the air) or spending many episodes indoors without going outside, which seemed pointless. They decided that moving the show onto a space station made more sense: starbases were established as also being space stations in the original show and having the show set in space would allow for the exploration and space battles that viewers had come to expect. It also allowed them to have outings to other planets (Bajor or new worlds in the Gamma Quadrant beyond the wormhole) or stay on the station as budgets required. Indeed, the show's first official announcement poster indicated they would be using the already-established Spacedock design from the movie Star Trek III for the space station, but they later decided that using a Cardassian station would be more interesting.

Paramount's defences to the charge of ripping off Babylon 5, therefore, are that 1) the person who came up with the basic idea of DS9 hadn't been working at Paramount previously and arrived with the concept already in place before he'd seen any documents; 2) the B5 documents were all returned to Evan Thompson before 1989 was over and no copies were made (and indeed, it would been legally dubious to do so); 3) the original concept was for a planetary base and was only moved to a space station for budgetary reasons; and 4) that many of the concepts used in DS9, including the wormhole and even the original space station design, predated B5's original genesis by years.

More common sense arguments can also be made: a space opera TV show is going to be either set on a spaceship, a space station or a planet, and with Star Trek already having a starship-set show on the air and with the planet option eliminated by budgetary requirements, a space station was the only setting left.

Right. So what about the shapeshifting alien?

Straczynski's original 1987 The Gathering draft had a shapeshifting alien trying to kill Ambassador Kosh and being defeated. Visual effects limitations would have required this alien to have shifted form with some kind of blurry effect or even off-screen. It should be noted that this alien was only ever intended to appear in the pilot episode.

Deep Space Nine, on the other hand, was pretty much ordered by Paramount to include a shapeshifting alien to cash in on the craze for "morphing". This CG technology had been pioneered by the 1988 movie The Abyss by James Cameron but had exploded in the public consciousness with Cameron's film Terminator 2: Judgement Day, released in July 1991. The T-1000 android's ability to shift shape was accomplished by cutting-edge computer technology and it led to an insane craze for both TV shows and films to use the same software (as well as music videos, such as Michael Jackson's "Black or White"). Paramount wanted a shapeshifting alien as a regular character on DS9 to cash in on this craze, not because an unused TV outline from two years earlier had such a character as a one-off villain.

Okay, that sounds pretty convincing from their perspective. So why is this explanation not more widely known?

J. Michael Straczynski was a pioneer in the use of the Internet for discussing his work and his TV shows: he was sitting on chat groups as early as 1990 talking about the series. Most people in the United States didn't even know what the Internet was until circa 1995 and the Star Trek team were slow to start using the Internet as a means of communicating with fans. As a result, the full story of the creation of Deep Space Nine and Brandon Tartikoff's involvement was not publicly known until the publication of The Deep Space Nine Companion in 2000. Tartikoff himself passed away in 1997 and Michael Piller in 2005, so neither are still with us to comment on the situation. On the other hand, Straczynski was discussing it loudly and publicly from 1991 onwards, so his version of events became dominant in the media.

It should be noted that, many years later, Straczynski also withdrew his suggestion that DS9 ripped off B5, saying that he did not believe Rick Berman nor Michael Piller (whom Straczynski knew) would knowingly rip off another writer's material. He left open the idea that a Paramount executive may have "steered" some discussion with material from his notes, but no evidence for this has ever been produced.

Okay, but did the shows have an impact on one another during production and transmission?

This is clearer. For example, the Cardassians were supposed to have a clandestine intelligence agency known as the "Grey Order", introduced in Season 2 of DS9. One of the production staff pointed out that Babylon 5 had a "Grey Council" (the rulers of the Minbari Federation) and the Cardassian name was changed to "Obsidian Order" to avoid any confusion.

Ron Thornton, the creator of Babylon 5's cutting-edge CGI, also claimed in 1996 that the introduction of the White Star (a warship the B5 crew could use to get around in) was directly inspired by the introduction of the USS Defiant on DS9 a full year earlier, a claim furiously denied by Straczynski who pointed out that the show simply needed a ship bigger than the standard fighters and shuttles to take the fight to the enemy. It should be noted that the relationship between B5's producers and its CGI team at Foundation Imaging was breaking down at this point, so it's unclear if Thornton's comment was meant seriously or in jest (and Ron Thornton passed away in 2016, making it difficult to clarify further).

The acrimony between the two shows resulted in furious flame wars between their respective fandoms on the Internet, becoming notable enough that Straczynski dialled down his criticisms of DS9. This thawing of tensions may have also been down to the fact that Straczynski was good friends with Jeri Taylor, executive producer on Star Trek: Voyager, and wanted to cool things down. To this end he also convinced Majel Barrett-Roddenberry (Number One, Nurse Chapel, Lwaxana Troi and various Federation computer voices on multiple Star Trek shows) to guest star on Babylon 5 during its third season.

Answer: Deep Space Nine did not rip off Babylon 5, despite the fortuitous timing and some very superficial surface similarities which do not withstand detailed scrutiny. A spin-off from the very successful Next Generation was a natural progression for the franchise and a space station setting was a logical extrapolation once a planetary setting was ruled out. There is also no evidence Paramount made (highly unethical, if not illegal) copies of the B5 notes or passed these onto the DS9 producers, and the charge was later withdrawn by B5's executive producer.

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Happy 25th Birthday to STAR TREK: DEEP SPACE NINE

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine turns 25 years old today.

Deep Space Nine hit screens on 3 January 1993 with its feature-length pilot episode Emissary. The first spin-off from Star Trek: The Next Generation, the series was the first (and, to date, only) instalment of the Star Trek franchise not to be set on a starship. Instead, the show was focused on one location, the enormous Cardassian-built space station Deep Space Nine.

Inspired by the then-ongoing crisis in the Balkans and the collapse of the Soviet Union, DS9 did a number of things differently to the Star Trek shows that had come before. The premise was that the Cardassian Union had withdrawn from the Bajoran homeworld, which they had brutally occupied for forty years. Starfleet was invited to take charge of the abandoned Cardassian space station in orbit and advise on the rebuilding of Bajor. The series balanced a number of tensions against one another, particularly with those on Bajor who were fearful that they had swapped the militaristic yoke of the Cardassians for the much friendlier but still imperialistic fist of the Federation. These tensions were exacerbated in the opening episode when a stable wormhole between the Bajoran system and the distant Gamma Quadrant of the galaxy was found, leading to Bajor's economic boom and constant threats from the Cardassians to reclaim the system.

Early seasons revolved around Bajoran religious and political tensions, the rebuilding of the DS9 station and the attempts by Commander Benjamin Sisko (Avery Brooks) to hold his crew together whilst he's been proclaimed a religious figure by the Bajorans. At the end of the second season a new threat was introduced: a powerful alien empire in the Gamma Quadrant known as the Dominion. Fed up with interlopers from the Alpha Quadrant, the Dominion infiltrated the Alpha Quadrant over the course of several years, using shapeshifting agents to ferment war between the Klingons and Federation and to destablise the Federation, Cardassian and Romulan governments. Eventually this led to the outbreak of full-scale war, with the Cardassians siding with the Dominion in a major conflict that lasted over two years.

What made Deep Space Nine work wasn't the space battles, explosion or (relative) cynicism compared to other Star Trek shows, but its consistency, its thematic coherence, its serialisation and, most of all, its characters. No other Star Trek show had such an eclectic crew of dysfunctional individuals, or so many non-Federation characters in the regular cast. Most successful amongst these were greedy Ferengi barkeep Quark (Armin Shimerman), order-obsessed shapeshifting sheriff Odo (Rene Auberjonois), and the grumpy-but-loyal engineer O'Brien (Colm Meaney), a transfer from The Next Generation. Later seasons also saw the arrival of Lt. Commander Worf (Michael Dorn) from TNG, who immediately found a new level of character development on the (somewhat) darker and more adult show. Deep Space Nine also accumulated a massive cast of recurring and returning characters played by outstanding actors, such as Dukat (Marc Alaimo), Winn (Actual Oscar Winner Louise Fletcher) and the incomparable Garak (Andrew Robinson) and Weyoun (Jeffrey Combs), probably the greatest assortment of villains and antiheroes in the history of Star Trek.

Deep Space Nine dealt seriously with topics including religion, politics, racism, refugee rights and warfare. It also developed alien species such as the Ferengi, Bajorans, Trill, Romulans and Klingons in far greater depth than on The Next Generation, and it also introduced its own great roster of villains and new races, most notably the three species that make up the Dominion: the Jem'Hadar, Vorta and Changelings. So successful was the Dominion that Star Trek: Enterprise tried to repeat the idea with the Xindi, although this was less successful. DS9 was also confident enough not to lean on the Borg, which ended up being over-used on Star Trek: Voyager to the point that they lose all of their original, formidable menace.

DS9 was also, easily, the funniest Star Trek show, with several outright comedy episodes that were very successful (most notably In the Cards, bus also several James Bond pastiches and 1950s pulp SF homage Little Green Men) and a great line in knowing humour. It even allowed Worf to lighten up and deliver some serious masterclasses in deadpan delivery. DS9 even took the mickey out of Star Trek itself, noting that its utopian society, although laudable, was perhaps both a little bland and at times a unfocused.

Jake: "I'm human! I don't have any money!"
Nog: "It's not my fault your species decided to abandon currency-based economics in favour of some philosophy of self-enhancement."
Sisko: "Hey, watch it! There's nothing wrong with out philosophy. We work to better ourselves and the rest of humanity."
Nog: "What does that mean, exactly?"
Jake: "It means...we don't need money."
Nog: "Well, if you don't need money you certainly don't need mine."

Most importantly, Deep Space Nine was very consistent in quality. The first season could be a little bland but it didn't have any outright-terrible episodes and had at least one stone-cold classic in Duet. By the end of the second season, DS9 was firing on all cylinders and somehow kept getting better. This contrasts with The Next Generation and Enterprise (Discovery is too new to see which way it's going to go yet), which both took at least three seasons to really find their feet, and Voyager, which never really settled down at all. Its worst episodes were nowhere near as awful as those of the other Star Trek shows and it's finest hours - Far Beyond the Stars, In the Pale Moonlight, The Visitor, Duet, Trials and Tribble-ations - are right up there with the very best the franchise has to offer. Recent years have seen a re-appraisal of DS9 that has moved it up from being the ugly stepchild of the Star Trek franchise to frequently voted its finest incarnation. It also has the best finale episode of any Trek show (despite stiff competition from TNG's All Good Things).

DS9 also gave us another classic TV show that followed in its wake: four years after DS9 ended, producer-writer Ronald D. Moore regrouped with writers David Weddle, Bradley Thompson, Michael Taylor, Jane Espenson and others to create the revamped Battlestar Galactica, which delivered an even bleaker take on war, spirituality and technology.

To celebrate the 25th anniversary, a new DS9 documentary is in the works. What You Leave Behind will feature interviews with the creative team behind the show, the actors and many fans and appreciators. The documentary will be released later in 2018 and will also feature the first sequences from the show remastered in full HD, with the hope the rest of the series may follow.

Happy birthday, Deep Space Nine. Maybe one day we'll see a Star Trek series being as bold and innovative once again.

DEEP SPACE NINE fans crowdfund a new documentary

Fans of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine have crowdfunded a major new documentary about the series.

Ira Steven Behr, the executive producer, showrunner and lead writer on the show from its third season through to its end, has created a new documentary called What We Leave Behind (named after the DS9 series finale). The film will delve deeply into the show's origins, writing and creation and will feature contributions from all of the major players on the creative team and all of the actors, bar Avery Brooks (possibly for availability reasons).

One of the most interesting things about the film is a related, separate roundtable with the DS9 writing team, including Behr and Ron Moore, where they brainstorm a theoretical eighth season of the show.

Behr and his team asked for $150,000 to help finish and edit the film. They've now raised £215,000 and added extra stretch goals, including a live musical score and the possibility of adding extra interviews (hopefully including Brooks).

It's also been pointed out that the level of interest in the project this crowdfunding exercise raises could be used to bolster the case for remastering Deep Space Nine in high definition. CBS has so far remastered The Original Series, The Animated Series, all of The Next Generation and several movies (Enterprise was made in HD in the first place), but has held fire on DS9, citing disappointing sales of the TNG remasters. However, if the documentary raises a very large sum of money, that might convince CBS to take a look and may test-remaster a few select episodes (like they did ahead of TNG).

Star Trek at 50: Tearing Up the Rulebook

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine's two-hour pilot episode, Emissary, premiered on 3 January 1993 to high ratings and a solid critical reception. The creators did everything they could to ensure people would tune in, with some impressive trailers, a guest spot from Patrick Stewart as Captain Picard and a much-hyped actual look at the Battle of Wolf 359 from TNG's The Best of Both Worlds. The new show got off to a great start.

 Deep Space Nine opened to strong reviews and critical acclaim, but the first season was later criticised for being a little too dull. Episodes like Duet and, in the second season, the introduction of the Dominion swiftly remedied such complaints.

Over its first two seasons, DS9 concerned itself primarily with the political-religious situation on Bajor, the antagonistic relationship with the Klingons and, with decreasing frequency, dropping in TNG characters like Q, Vash, Lwaxana Troi and the Duras sisters. Although this was often successful - such as Sisko punching out Q, leaving Q feeling that Sisko was less interesting than Picard and never visiting the station again - it occasionally left the writers feeling like an adjunct to TNG. They spent more time moving away from the TNG template by doing things Star Trek had not done previously, like revisiting previous storylines more frequently, developing a large cast of secondary characters and, at the start of Season 2, creating Star Trek's first-ever three-part episode (later on they would also create Star Trek's first - and only - six and nine-part episodes as well).

Paramount were initially very happy with DS9's performance, but also responded to fan complaints that the new show was a little too stationary by ordering a second spin-off from Rick Berman's team, to their surprise (they'd assumed DS9 would be their primary focus once TNG ended in May 1994). Rick Berman and Michael Piller were soon distracted creating the new series, Star Trek: Voyager, and they needed a new team to step up and take command of Deep Space Nine.

In the second season DS9 began downplaying the Bajoran-Cardassian storyline, noting that some fans were not keen on it, and started developing its own set of villains. They didn't want another monstrous foe like the Borg or yet another race obsessed with honour. After casting around for ideas they hit on the notion of an "Anti-Federation", a coalition of disparate races in the Gamma Quadrant who had joined together under the leadership of the persecuted shapeshifters to defend themselves and, over time, had became the despotic, tyrannical power they had originally set out to avoid. The Dominion, as they became known, were slowly teased and unveiled over the course of the second season before making a full impact in the enormously popular second season finale, The Jem'Hadar, where they destroy the Galaxy-class USS Odyssey as a show of might.

The introduction of the USS Defiant, the Federation's first warship, was mildly controversial.

For the third season fresh creative blood came on board, most notably experienced TNG writer Ronald D. Moore. Moore had just got off the boat (metaphorically) from finishing up TNG and co-writing Star Trek: Generations. His first assignment was to give DS9 a powerful new warship that would help defend it from the Dominion, the USS Defiant (aka "the tough little ship"). However, the biggest change as the season progressed was Michael Piller moving over to Star Trek: Voyager and Ira Steven Behr stepping up as showrunner.

Behr was a much more character-focused writer than his Star Trek forebears. When he took over, a series of informal rules were put in place: no holodeck malfunction episodes and as little technobabble as possible. He wanted stories rooted in the characters that weren't afraid to be a bit more morally murky and questionable than Star Trek had been in the past. His team delivered in spades and the cast responded enthusiastically to being given more challenging material, particularly Avery Brooks who was proud that the show was prepared to tackle issues such as racism, discrimination, homelessness and religion.

Lt. Commander Worf (Michael Dorn) arguably got more character development in four seasons on DS9 than he did in seven seasons of TNG.

Behr also knew how to play politics. Despite his - by Star Trek standards - radical ideas he maintained the trust and support of Berman and Piller, who eventually left DS9 unmolested to do its thing whilst they focused on Voyager. In fact, Voyager got the lion's share of publicity and marketing as Paramount used it to launch their new TV network, UPN (which later merged with The WB to become The CW), but Deep Space Nine soon developed a knack of stealing its thunder. The arrival of Michael Dorn (Lt. Commander Worf) on DS9 and the development of a season-long arc about renewed hostilities between the Federation and Klingons led to a boost in ratings and critical acclaim. Voyager had a nice, small-scaled 30th Anniversary episode featuring flashbacks starring George Takei as Captain Sulu, but DS9 had a massive, Forrest Gump-style extravaganza that actually inserted DS9 characters into classic scenes from the original series and was absolutely brilliant.

The outbreak of full-scale war between the Federation and Dominion dominated the last two-and-a-half seasons of Deep Space Nine and allowed the show to challenge the ideals of the Federation and the conventions of warfare. Some of this material was controversial with Trek fans but enormously popular with critics and the general audience. Ultimately, DS9 reaffirmed Gene Roddenberry's ideal future for humanity as a worthwhile endeavour, but also stated that maintaining those ideals was going to be incredibly hard. This part of the series also saw Star Trek doing something it never had previously by developing a recurring cast of bad guys - Kai Winn, Gul Dukat, Glinn Damar, Weyoun of the Vorta and the leader of the changelings - and checking in with them as well as the heroes, giving greater depth than is normal to the "enemy".

Deep Space Nine ended in the spring of 1999 with a massive arc spanning nine episodes and wrapping up the storylines of dozens of characters established over seven years. DS9 bears the distinction of being the only Star Trek series to end on such a unanimously-applauded high and leaving the audience wanting more (in comparison, TNG's finale, All Good Things, is excellent but most of its final season was poor). However, there was a feeling that the show had snuck under the radar a little bit too much and its achievements and quality had not been fully appreciated in its own lifetime, not helped by the perceived (but largely illusory) rivalry with Babylon 5, which attracted far more press attention for pretty much just not being Star Trek. Paramount also showed little interest in a DS9 movie after it finished, to the disappointment of fans and the production team.

The cast of DS9 in its final season.

In the seventeen years since DS9 finished, the show has undergone a cultural reappraisal. TV Guide later said that DS9 "is the best acted, written, produced and altogether finest" Star Trek series and it is hard to argue with that. Ronald D. Moore, who worked on three different Star Trek shows, named it his favourite and took many of the writers over from DS9 to work on the rebooted and critically-lauded Battlestar Galactica (2003-09), which was both his development of the ideas from DS9 and his rebuke to the limited vision and ambition of the perenially underachieving Star Trek: Voyager.

Voyager had launchd in January 1995 in a blaze of publicity and ended seven seasons later in 2001, but it is far to say that compared to DS9, it's critical reception was altogether more variable.

Starz moving forwards with adaptation of OUTLANDER

Last year, Starz optioned the screen rights to Diana Gabaldon's mega-selling Outlander book series, in which a WWII nurse time-travels back to 18th Century Scotland and finds her life divided between the two time periods. Seven novels have been published in the series so far, along with a four-volume spin-off series. An eighth novel in the main series is forthcoming.

Starz are now moving ahead with the adaptation. Ronald D. Moore (showrunner on Battlestar Galactica and a senior writer and producer on both Star Trek: The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine) will be running the show and heading a writer's room consisting of Toni Graphia (Battlestar Galactica), Matt Roberts (Deep Space Nine) and Anne Kenney (LA Law). Also joining the team is Ira Steven Behr, Moore's former boss at Deep Space Nine and also the showrunner on The 4400 and Alphas.

Whilst the show still hasn't been formally greenlit, the hiring of additional writers suggests that Starz envisages going straight to series on the project in the near future.