Star Trek: Deep Space Nine - Season 2

2370. The Federation's attempts to help the planet Bajor recover from Cardassian occupation are strained when civil war threatens the planet and religious turmoil surrounds the election of a new spiritual leader. Whilst Commander Sisko and his crew attempt to navigate through tricky waters, a new Federation-Cardassian treaty has left colony worlds of each power in earth other's space, resulting in the rise of new tensions and a freedom fighting group, the Maquis. Meanwhile, the exploration of the Gamma Quadrant beyond the wormhole proceeds apace and the Ferengi become the first power to forge trading alliances with worlds there...only to learn of the existence of something called "the Dominion," which is not happy about the influx of new traffic into their space.

The first season of Deep Space Nine was reasonably entertaining, if not the most exciting collection of episodes in the franchise's history. The writers didn't seem entirely sure on the new show's tone and direction to start with and relied a little too heavily on bringing in Next Generation characters and ideas. Towards the end of the season, however, they decided to focus more on their own characters and premise, resulting in several excellent episodes (especially Duet).

Season 2 opens with the same confidence in their own skills on full display. For the first time ever in Star Trek's history, the season launches with a three-part story that delves deep into Bajoran politics and conflicts. It's a great story that uses the show's recurring cast - Dukat, Winn, Bareil - to best effect, but it's also a solid worldbuilding exercise for Bajor and has some great action beats (even if an atmospheric dogfight between Bajoran fighters is a little too ambitious for the effects technology at this point). It also has a very impressive main guest star in Frank Langella (Frost/Nixon), who makes for a formidable antagonist.

The season has more than a few great episodes: Cardassians, The Wire, The Collaborator and Tribunal feature solid stories about the Occupation and its aftermath, providing great acting opportunities for the regular and recurring cast. Particularly, Andrew Robinson's Garak goes to incredible strengths and becomes arguably the best actor on the show, although he's given a run for his money by the likes of Marc Alaimo, Louise Fletcher, Nana Visitor and Rene Auberjonois.

Also outstanding is Sanctuary, where the Bajorans have to grapple with ethics and morality when they are asked to help a race which has suffered as much as they have. Whispers is an excellent character piece, focused entirely on O'Brien as the world around him goes strange and he has no idea what's going on. Armageddon Game is a great show about politics and perception, furthering the Bashir/O'Brien bromance in the process. Profit and Loss is a great Quark show, depicting more sides to the character than previously seen (as well as Garak). Blood Oath is an exceptional episode bringing back three key Klingon characters and actors from the original series in an action piece that also demonstrates Dax's involvement with the Klingon Empire (foreshadowing the later arrival of Worf). The Maquis is a great two-parter about how signing a peace of paper doesn't magically solve problems on the ground. Crossover begins the show's long-running flirtation with the Mirror Universe, featuring some great alternate roles for the actors to inhabit (Nana Visitor in particular).

The outstanding, best episode of the season is Necessary Evil, a lengthy flashback episode to the station's days under Cardassian occupation, where rejected scientific curiosity Odo is forced against his will by Gul Dukat to conduct a murder investigation. It's a moody, terrifically-written piece which sees the station's sets adjusted in a manner that makes them hellish and sees amazing performances by everyone involved. It also explains why Odo was allowed to retain his job on the station and why more than a few Bajorans (particularly Kira) are prepared to stand up for him despite him being, on the surface, a collaborator or at least an enabler of the Cardassian regime.

Rules of Acquisition is a solid Ferengi episode and marks the beginning of Deep Space Nine's long-running project to redeem the species. The "lol, misogyny" aspect of their Next Generation appearances starts its long road to being discarded here, and it's amusing to note in retrospect that it's one of Star Trek's most underrated races which first becomes aware of the Dominion, who will come to dominate almost the rest of the show's run. 

Other episodes have strong central ideas but don't really take off: Invasive Procedures wants to be a deep-rooted Trill drama about stealing Dax's symbiont, but can't really do the idea justice. Melora wants to say something about disability, but because the main character's disability is self-chosen and temporary, it doesn't really track. Second Sight wants to be a love story for Sisko, but goes off in a very weird "Star Trek hallucination...or is it?" direction that becomes a bit tedious. The Alternate starts off as a welcome piece of backstory exploration for Odo, as we meet the Bajoran scientist who raised him, but the episode refuses to make him really culpable for the pain he inflicted on Odo in his experiments and then goes off on a completely wild monster hunt tangent that feels incongruous at best. Paradise is a very interesting "back to basics" story about a Federation colony that has reverted to a hunter-gatherer level, but what seems to be an idyllic existence is rapidly exposed as a tyranny. This feels like DS9's first brush with dealing with oppression and bigotry (especially the scene of forcing Sisko into a punishment box), but it never really gets to grips with what it wants to say, especially compared to later episodes like Far Beyond the Stars.

There are a few more episodes that fit into the "okay" category: Rivals has promising ideas about a rival to Quark from the same species as TNG's Guinan who uses his powers for personal gain, but gets mixed up with alien devices that alter the laws of probability (possibly inspired by The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy). The episode is entertaining, but doesn't make the most of either possibility. Shadowplay is a nice mystery story about a village whose people are disappearing one-by-one. The resolution is quite good and there a nice subplot about Odo bonding with a young child, but it's not the most dynamic of episodes. Playing God has the DS9 crew confront one of the most serious threats in the entire history of Star Trek and resolving it in one of the most bafflingly off-hand ways possible.

The season ends on a very strong note. The Jem'Hadar properly introduces the Dominion and two of its three main powers, the Vorta and Jem'Hadar. It also has an outstanding space battle as DS9's runabouts and the Galaxy-class USS Odyssey join forces to take on a Jem'Hadar attack fleet, with decidedly mixed results. Amongst the explosions, the episode is also terrific for Quark taking Sisko and his stereotypical view of the Ferengi to task (the moment that Sisko realises is right and he has developed almost racist views of the Ferengi is quite impressive, well-handled by Avery Brooks and Armin Shimerman). The only downside to the episode is that the Dominion's position - they don't want people pouring into their space and colonising planets without their permission - seems quite reasonable and the Federation's response, that they're going to keep exploring the Gamma Quadrant regardless, feels off.

The second season of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (****) shows significant improvement over the first season. The show is still not operating at the height of its potential but it's making solid progress to getting there. The series is available on DVD in the USA and UK, as well as on CBS All Access in the States and Netflix in the UK.

Note: I previously reviewed DS9's second season as part of a wider review of the first two seasons twelve years ago. That review can be read here.

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine - Season 1

2369. The Cardassian Union has withdrawn from its forty-year occupation of the planet Bajor, leaving behind a world with shattered infrastructure and riven with factions and religious strife. The United Federation of Planets offers to help in the reconstruction, taking over orbital station Terok Nor (now renamed Deep Space Nine) and installing a Starfleet administration staff. When a stable wormhole is discovered linking the Bajoran system to the distant Gamma Quadrant of the galaxy, Bajor's future is secured...if they can stop the Cardassians retaking the planet. Deep Space Nine is moved to the mouth of the phenomenon and Commander Benjamin Sisko and his crew have to work to secure the alliance between the Federation and Bajor whilst dealing with the mysteries that lie beyond the wormhole.

It is common - after the original - for Star Trek shows to have decidedly ropey first seasons. The Next Generation's first season was pretty weak, with badly-written episodes relying on racist and sexist stereotypes abounding, with only hints of the greatness that the show would later achieve. Voyager's first season was almost somnambulant, Enterprise's was full of potential that it never came close to realising and modern shows Picard and Discovery both had shaky opening seasons, with excellent casts struggling with wildly inconsistent writing.

Deep Space Nine emerges, almost by default, as having the best opening season of any Star Trek show since the original and also the best pilot. That doesn't mean that either are flawlessly great, but they are batting above average for this franchise.

DS9 was launched as the somewhat "darker," "grittier", and "edgier" spin-off of The Next Generation. Incoming head of Paramount television Brandon Tartikoff had mandated a spin-off show be made and, when the Next Generation team were struggling for ideas, suggested that they base the spin-off on 1950s Western The Rifleman, just as the original series and TNG had been based on the Western Wagon Train. The Rifleman was about a veteran, widowed soldier and his young son making a home for themselves in a dangerous town on the very frontier of the American West. Michael Piller and Rick Berman developed the spin-off with this idea perhaps a bit too literally in mind: hence Ben Sisko (Avery Brooks), a widowed veteran of the war against the Borg that ended The Next Generation's third season, relocating to the dangerous frontier station of DS9 with his young son Jake (Cirroc Lofton). Originally the inspiration would have been even more directly obvious, with the series being set on a starbase on the surface of Bajor, but budgetary considerations (location shooting for every episode would have been ruinous) and plot limitations (the setting would have made Bajor too much the focus of the show) encouraged the producers to move the story to a space station setting, with the wormhole introduced as a means of allowing the show to still explore unknown space.

The most unusual feature of the show - still - is that it blends Starfleet crewmembers with non-Starfleet personnel, with Sisko and his team having to work alongside alien shapeshifter Odo (Rene Auberjonois), Bajoran first officer Kira Nerys (Nana Visitor) and Ferengi barkeeper Quark (Armin Shimerman). This means that not all the characters in the show are under Sisko's authority and there is much butting of heads between different cultures and ways of doing things. This generated conflict, and thus drama and stories, circumventing Gene Roddenberry's The Next Generation proscription against drama and conflict between Starfleet characters (something he himself had violated lots of times with various "dodgy admiral" stories, but still). It also added texture to the setting. Previous shows had focused on Starfleet and the Federation perspective near-exclusively, but The Next Generation had modified its focus over time to use Worf to explore the Klingon culture and Deanna Troi the Betazeds. DS9 makes use of its alien characters to explore those cultures in tremendous depth and use them as a way to reflect back on the Federation.

This tremendous depth is impressive, but in the first season, still fairly nascent. Odo's history is a total blank page and only vague hints of his origins are provided this early on. Quark is a petty criminal but also one that doesn't take too many risks and also isn't too keen on mayhem and murder. He has a line he won't step over, not believing in risking his own skin. It's Kira who emerges as the most fleshed-out character in the first season, starting off as a staunch Bajoran nationalist who doesn't believe the Federation should be involved in Bajor's reconstruction, but later becoming more of a believer in cooperation and the need for the Federation to be involved to stop the Cardassians returning. This development gives the first season a reasonably strong character arc, something rather unusual at the time in episodic television, let alone Star Trek.

This early nod towards serialisation is still fairly underdeveloped. There are secondary and tertiary characters introduced this season who only show up once but have much bigger roles in later seasons: rival Bajoran vedeks Winn (Louise Fletcher) and Bareil (Philip Anglim), and "simple tailor" Garak (Andrew Robinson) all make the most of their solitary appearances this season but set themselves up well for later developments. Gul Dukat (Marc Alaimo) appears a few more times and is set up tremendously well at this point as a foil and opponent for Sisko.

The cast is superb, with Brooks being a more idiosyncratic figure than William Shatner or Patrick Stewart but also a commanding, military figure with a nice line in confrontational diplomacy (and a temper, the sort of weakness Roddenberry would have blanched at). Visitor is outstanding as Kira, Auberjonois is flawlessly gruff as Odo but with an excellent line in subtlety and Shimerman is clearly having tremendous fun as Quark. Terry Farrell as Lt. Jadzia Dax is a bit more lost in the mix in the first season and often doesn't have much to do, but is great when she does, playing the mixture of a young Starfleet officer and world-weary Trill symbiont with 300 years of experience in her head very well. Colm Meaney's Chief O'Brien transfers over from The Next Generation with a much bigger role as the station's chief engineer and nails it perfectly, becoming the most human and relatable character in the cast. An unfortunate weak link at this stage is Siddig El Fadil (later re-credited as Alexander Siddig) as Dr. Julian Bashir: the original plan had been to cast a young hothead as the doctor and the writers weren't able to adjust their scripting to Siddig's strengths until the second season. This leaves him as an underwritten character in the first season with little characterisation outside his arrogance and somewhat tedious pursuit of Lt. Dax. Given his extraordinary later performances, it's a shame to see Siddig being ill-served by the material at this stage.

The season starts out strong with arguably Star Trek's best pilot, Emissary, which introduces the fairly complicated set-up and plot but manages to get through it quite well. It's still a fairly inelegant pilot, rooted in exposition, but it does its job of introducing the characters and setting up the premise. The first season goes on to have a run of quite strong episodes: Captive Pursuit sees O'Brien introduce the first alien visitor from the Gamma Quadrant; Dax is a thorny, class Trek ethical conundrum as Lt. Dax is accused of a crime carried out by a previous host; The Nagus has a great guest turn by Wallace Shawn (The Princess Bride) as the Ferengi Grand Nagus, Zek; Battle Lines is an unusually violent episode about a culture trapped in a perpetual war (with a great turn by Breaking Bad's Jonathan Banks as the main guest star); and Progress is a great early Kira episode.

Inbetween you have episodes with great elements but which are let down by some writing decisions: Past Prologue is a fascinating look at Bajor's mixed attitudes to the Federation and the wormhole, but is undermined by a pointless cameo by The Next Generation villains Lursa and B'Etor; Q-Less is terrific fun with John de Lancie on fine form as Q in his sole appearance on DS9, but it does feel more like a TNG episode than a DS9 one; Vortex is a promising Odo episode undermined by a weak guest star; If Wishes Were Horses is a typical "weird things happen on the station; strange aliens involved" Star Trek cliché that was getting old in the original show; and Babel is an "alien virus infects the crew but the doctor saves the day in under fifty minutes" piece, although the solution is a little more creative than normal.

In terms of real howlers, the season is remarkable in only having one: The Passenger, in which Dr. Bashir gets taken over by a murderous psychopath. Even by Star Trek's elastic standards, the science is laughably unconvincing and Siddig El Fadil's attempts to depict the possessed Bashir by making him speak...reallly....slowly are just painful.

Other episodes have weak premises but are livened up by the execution: The Storyteller doesn't make much sense (everyone seems really chill with this one Bajoran village being constantly terrorised by a random cloud monster) but wonderfully sets up the Bashir/O'Brien bromance that will extend across the series; Dramatis Personae has a potentially tedious "the crew acting out of character due to alien influence" storyline but by exaggerating pre-existing tensions rather than creating them out of thin air, it forces the characters to confront genuine issues; and the controversial Move Along Home is so deranged that fans think it's either one of the worst episodes of Star Trek ever made or an unsung work of genius (especially the fantastic ending, which subverts the typical Star Trek ending in a hilarious manner).

The season also has two stand-out classics. Duet is simply one of the best Star Trek episodes ever made, a powerful two-hander between Nana Visitor and guest star Harris Yulin (a perennial great of American television and film who's never quite gotten the profile he deserved, who should have gotten an Emmy for his performance here) that dives deep into the Cardassian/Bajoran relationship, war crimes and survivor guilt. The ending, where Kira discovers that even her hatred for the Cardassians has limits, is one of Star Trek's all-time best moments of characterisation.

The season finale, In the Hands of the Prophets isn't quite in that league, but it is a wonderful piece of drama and worldbuilding, putting Starfleet's morality and ethics squarely in the firing line. The Federation believes in respecting other cultures and their religion without indulging or propagating their beliefs, but on a station the Federation doesn't own this becomes extremely difficult, with Keiko O'Brien's school in the firing line when she starts teaching the scientific truth of the wormhole rather than the Bajoran religious belief that it is the Celestial Temple of their religion, the home of their gods (and not mere "wormhole aliens"). This set up a decidedly timely debate on science versus religion and how respectful teachers should be of beliefs that are not supported, if not flatly contradicted, by science (evolution versus creationism was becoming a big issue at the time in American schools). As well a reasonably strong season finale, it also sets up the rest of the series and acts as a prologue to the three-part arc that opens the second season.

The first season of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (***½) is the weakest of the show's seven seasons, but still lands quite well, certainly much better than the first season of almost any other Trek show (bar the original and maybe Lower Decks, depending on your sense of humour). It establishes a number of interesting characters, and by Star Trek standards has a low number of forgettable or poor episodes and, for a rookie outing, a nicely large number of good to excellent episodes. Whilst it could be stronger, it sets up the show well. The series is available on DVD in the USA and UK, as well as on CBS All Access in the States and Netflix in the UK.

Note: I previously reviewed DS9's first season as part of a wider review of the first two seasons twelve years ago. That review can be read here.

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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