Wertzone Classics: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine - Season 6

2374. The United Federation of Planets is, for the first time in a century, fighting a full-blown war. The Dominion, augmented by the addition of the Cardassian Union to their ranks, is pushing the Federation and their Klingon allies back on every front. When news arrives that the Dominion is preparing to bring down the minefield defending the wormhole and bringing in reinforcements from the Gamma Quadrant, Captain Sisko takes command of the largest fleet in Federation history to mount a daring mission to recapture Deep Space Nine. But this war is only just beginning.

With the fourth season of Deep Space Nine having taken the show off-track, the fifth season had gotten the show back to where the writers had wanted to go: pitching the Federation into conflict with the Dominion. By the end of the season that conflict had exploded into all-out war, leaving Star Trek with arguably its biggest cliffhanger since Jean-Luc Picard was turned into a Borg: the Dominion capture Deep Space Nine and drive most of the crew off the station.

The aftermath of that event drives the largest-to-date storyline ever attempted in the entire Star Trek franchise: a continuously building narrative that spans the first six episodes of the season. This mini-series-within-a-series was a bold move for Star Trek at the time, although some sceptics sourly noted possible inspiration from DS9's sometimes-rival show, Babylon 5, which had become more significantly serialised some time earlier. Despite the franchise not being really geared to it, the writers do an excellent job of making it work, giving us stories of life on the station under Dominion occupation and on the Defiant and on the Klingon Bird-of-Prey Rotarran as the war escalates. There's some excellent storytelling and character-building in these episodes, particularly the introduction of regular "inside the enemy camp" asides as Dukat, his aide Damar, Weyoun and the Female Changeling plot the downfall of the Federation. For the first time, ever, we have a regular cast of bad guys to balance the regular cast of good guys and it's great fun to see the story being explored from two different angles.

This arc culminates in Sacrifice of Angels, which gives us the biggest battle in Star Trek history (matched only by the battles at the end of Season 7, but those battles are too reliant on stock footage to be as impressive) thanks to Babylon 5's recently-ejected CGI team, Foundation Imaging. The result is a dramatic improvement in vfx quality. For the first time in Star Trek's history, we get immense, convincing fleet battles which remain superb more than twenty years later. The battle is balanced out by tremendous character work, such as Dukat lamenting the fact that the Bajorans (a people he brutally oppressed for years, killing more than five million of them) never erected a statue of them whilst Weyoun looks at him with the slowly dawning realisation that he's allied himself to an increasingly deluded lunatic.

After the initial arc we get an entertaining episode where Worf and Jadzia finally get married (prompting the bachelor party from hell) and then things calm down a bit, with a string of "standard Star Trek" episodes. This string of episodes remains entertaining though: Resurrection brings characters from the Mirror Universe to DS9 for a change (rather than vice versa), whilst Statistical Probabilities is highly influenced by Isaac Asimov's Foundation series, and asks what happens when a statistical science for analysing future trends reveals that the Federation's defeat in the war is inevitable. The Magnificent Ferengi is a mighty all-Ferengi show as Quark recruits a team of the brightest and best of his race to mount a commando raid to rescue his mother from the Dominion. The barminess of the premise is only enhanced by Iggy Pop guest starring as a Vorta.

Waltz is an angry episode, inspired by Ira Steven Behr visiting a DS9 message board and becoming annoyed by the number of Dukat apologists he saw trying to justify his evil. Waltz makes Dukat's self-delusion absolutely crystal clear and sets up his story arc for the rest of the series. Who Mourns for Morn? and One Little Ship are fun comedy episodes, the former focusing on DS9's resident enigmatic barfly but without revealing too much about him and the latter being an excuse to do a Fantastic Voyage homage (although they don't quite go that far).

Honor Among Thieves is a great character piece that has O'Brien become an undercover intelligence agent for Starfleet Intelligence, much to his own chagrin, whilst Change of Heart reveals one of the problems with the Dominion War putting Starfleet officers who are also family in combat situations alongside one another. Wrongs Darker Than Death or Night is another episode about the Cardassian occupation of the DS9 station and is based on a couple of shaky premises (that Dukat spent nine years in a relationship with Kira's mother, which you feel should have come up before, and that Kira would really risk time travel just to find out the truth) but is well-acted. Inquisition is an intriguing episode which sees Bashir apparently outed as a spy, only to discover the existence of Section 31, the Federation's clandestine black ops intelligence agency. Section 31 has gone on to be grossly overused in later Trek shows, but at this point is an intriguing addition to the Trek mythos.

His Way is a controversial episode, first for finally hooking up Odo and Kira (not a popular relationship among DS9 fans, although the actors do a reasonable job with it) and also introducing the holographic character of Vic Fontaine and his Las Vegas holosuite program. Fans were not enamoured of this at the time, but it's reasonably harmless and it's hard not to be charmed by Jimmy Darren's excellent performance. The Reckoning is a hugely significant episode for the Prophet/Pah-Wraith story arc, where the station becomes the battleground for an epic fantasy style duel to the death between two superpowered entities. The more overt fantasy elements border on the silly, but the episode is in reality more about faith, and there's a crushing moment of horror for Kai Winn (superbly played by Louise Fletcher) where she realises that Sisko - an alien - has greater faith than she does.

Valiant is an effective war story, although let down by poor CGI (Foundation Imaging having moved on to Voyager and Paramount bringing a less capable company to work on DS9, which in retrospect was a mistake), whilst Time's Orphan is an effective story about fatherhood and loss. The Sound of Her Voice features one of the best vocal performances in all of Trek, as the crew make contact with a crashed Starfleet officer they can only speak to via subspace. Tears of the Prophets ends the season with a surprisingly brutal cliffhanger as the Federation and their allies go on the offensive against the Dominion and suffer an unexpected loss.

In the middle of this last run of episodes we have Profit and Lace, an episode which started from the idea of making it the "Some Like It Hot" of DS9 with Quark having to pose as a woman. This escalated to Quark having to be surgically altered to become female, with hilarity resulting from his hormonal and personality changes. To say this episode is terrible is a massive understatement: it is simply the worst-ever episode of Deep Space Nine, bar none, and probably one of the twenty worst Star Trek episodes ever made. It's wince-inducing, bordering on the unwatchable.

Profit and Lace is remarkable though, in that it is the sole weak link of the entire season. It is so bad that it was in danger of bringing down the score of the entire season by itself, but fortunately the season more than counterbalances this by deploying arguably the two single finest episodes of Deep Space Nine, and easily two of the best episodes of the entire Star Trek franchise since its inception. If you even had a list of the best episodes of Star Trek and put these two at the very top, I don't think people would argue with you too hard.

The ever-so-slightly lesser of the two episodes is In the Pale Moonlight, an episode of wartime paranoia and deception as Sisko finds himself reluctantly working with Garak on a scheme to convince a high-ranking Romulan senator that the Romulans should enter the war against the Dominion. At every step of the way, Sisko makes what seems like reasonable, logical choices even as they corrupt him further and draw him deeper into the mire, with Garak acting as a siren, luring him on to more dubious decisions. The ending of the episode, with a horrified Sisko trying to morally justify the murder and mayhem he's inadvertently sanctioned and the millions of deaths that will now stem from his actions, ranks as one of the most powerful in all of Star Trek.

The other powerhouse is Far Among the Stars, where Sisko finds himself as a struggling novelist and short story writer in 1950s New York City, with his friends recast in new roles. This episode repeats the trick from (the homeless-centric episode) Past Tense in Season 3, of taking a social issue and directly tackling it head head-on rather than through traditional Star Trek allegories and metaphors. In this case the subject is racism and how arbitrary prejudice (subconscious or outright) limits ideas and progress. The episode is centred on Avery Brooks' stunning performance and also on his outstanding direction, but all of the actors put in tremendous work in what is one of Star Trek's most powerful hours.

The sixth season of Deep Space Nine (*****) is its strongest year, narrowly beating out the almost-as-accomplished fourth season. Thanks to Far Among the Stars and In the Pale Moonlight, not to mention the outstanding opening six-part arc, it shows the series and the franchise at its very best. The season 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 sixth season as part of a wider review of the final two seasons twelve years ago. That review can be read here.

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine - Season 5

2373. The Federation is facing its greatest crisis for centuries. Its alliance with the Klingon Empire is in tatters following the Klingons' invasion of Cardassia and open hostilities have erupted along their border. The Dominion is orchestrating events from behind the scenes. The Founders have stripped Odo's powers of transformation, leaving him a helpless "solid." With the Dominion preparing to strike, it falls again to the crew of Deep Space Nine to try to save the Federation and the entire Alpha Quadrant.

The fifth season of Deep Space Nine is effectively about getting back on track. The DS9 production team's intent for the prior year had been to put the Federation and the Dominion on a collision course to test how the Federation's ideals would hold up against a determined, equal opponent. The studio's desire to "shake things up" had rattled that premise and seen them bring in the Klingons in force, which had taken them away from where the story was meant to go. But in the fifth season Ira Steven Behr and his team decided to "make it a virtue," by using the Klingon/Federation conflict as a way of getting back to the Dominion.

The result is a run of episodes that almost rivals that of the exceptional fourth season. There isn't anything here quite as strong as The Visitor, but at times it comes damn close. Trials and Tribble-ations is the comedy highlight of the show - and possibly the entire franchise - with the DS9 crew travelling back to the events of the original series episodes The Trouble with Tribbles and interacting with Kirk, Spock and company via vintage clips (and the technology used to combine them, Forrest Gump-style, has held up very well over the past twenty-five years). It's brilliantly funny and constantly inventive. It is rivalled in these stakes by In the Cards, one of Star Trek's greatest comedic tour-de-forces and possibly the single most underrated episode in the entire Star Trek canon, as Jake and Nog attempt to procure a vintage baseball card for Sisko which results into them blundering into high-stakes political negotiations for the future of the quadrant.

Elsewhere the season has a plethora of very strong episodes. Season opener Apocalypse Rising starts to undo the damage of the Klingon arc, whilst The Ship is a great "under siege" story. Looking for par'Mach in All the Wrong Places is Cyrano de Bergerac in space and is terrific fun, whilst Nor the Battle to the Strong is the first time that Deep Space Nine plays its "war is hell" card, trying to undo the antiseptic attitude to war and conflict that had built up over the course of The Next Generation. The Assignment is a phenomenal episode where Keiko is taken over by a Pah-Wraith (the enemies of the Bajoran Prophets) and forces O'Brien to sabotage the station. It's a great episode that shows how criminally underused Rosalind Chao was as a performer over the course of the series.

The dangling Maquis plot threads are tied off in a fine duology of episodes, For the Uniform and Blaze of Glory, where Sisko and former Starfleet officer turned traitor Eddington go head-to-head in a Les Misérables-inspired story of obsession. This would be a bit more believable if Sisko had mentioned Eddington once in the dozens of episodes since his last appearance, but the actors sell it well.

Odo gets some good material in Things Past (which tries to challenge the idea of him getting out of the Cardassian occupation with his hands clean, which always seemed a stretch), The Ascent and A Simple Investigation, although the latter is undercut by Odo's first romance happening after he becomes a changeling again, rather than whilst still a solid. Ties of Blood and Water tests the limits of Quark's morality and he is horrified to find how his exposure to the Federation's ideals has limited his ruthless business edge. Soldiers of the Empire is a Klingon-centric, fun action romp, although it's let down a bit by the characters not quite gelling as well as they might (and you never really doubt that Martok is going to come through, which removes some of the tension). Doctor Bashir, I Presume is a great comedic piece, but also important for re-setting Dr. Bashir's character and explaining some nagging issues with his character over the years.

The season is let down a little by some subpar episodes. The Darkness and the Light tries to be a tense story of cat and mouse with an old enemy tracking down and eliminating Kira's resistance cell, but it sizzles out with no sense of tension. Let Her Who is Without Sin is one of DS9's vanishingly few outright awful episodes, with Worf inadvertently joining forces with some crazed (but also very beige) terrorists for reasons that are unconvincing at best. Empok Nor, which sees Garak turned into a serial killer by some kind of gas, is fairly boring. Garak is a powerful and fantastic character when allowed to play his shades of grey, turning him into a one-note villain is pointless. The Begotten is okay, but a little underwhelming (and it relies a bit too much on Rene Auberjonois acting emotionally against a piece of goo, which to be fair he just about sells). Children of Time has a very solid SF premise, but the morality of the ending is never really addressed in the series.

Where the fifth season shines, though, is the move to greater serialisation and the bringing in of bigger set-piece episodes. In Purgatory's Shadow and By Inferno's Light is as fine a two-parter as Star Trek has ever made, a huge, epic story operating on many different levels and nailing each of them superbly (with Andrew Robinson's outstanding performance as Garak a highlight). Grand politics, terrific action set pieces, characters confronting and overcoming their demons and Worf's tendency to punch things being made into a powerful storyline on its own. This is DS9 firing on all cylinders. The same can be said of the season finale, Call to Arms, which finally unleashes the dogs of war in a story featuring a huge space battle, tremendous character work and the biggest cliffhanger the franchise has ever done bar only The Best of Both Worlds.

The fifth season of Deep Space Nine (****½) is firing on all thrusters, and is only let down a little by a few more iffy episodes than the fourth year. The season 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 fifth season as part of a wider review of the third through fifth seasons twelve years ago. That review can be read here.

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine - Season 4

2372. The threat of the Dominion has created an atmosphere of paranoia and distrust across the Alpha Quadrant. The Cardassians have sealed their borders, the Federation is increasing security on Earth and the Klingons, after a century of peace, have gone on the offensive to strengthen their empire's borders. With the Federation-Klingon Alliance in jeopardy, the fate of the quadrant will be decided at Deep Space Nine.

The fourth season of Deep Space Nine marks a notable shift in the tone of the show. Prior to this season it had been well-regarded, but perhaps a little underrated by viewers. Star Trek: Voyager, which started halfway through DS9's third season, had attracted a huge amount of attention for the launch of a new starship heading into genuinely unexplored territory, whilst there was a perception that DS9 was a little stale, especially with another space station show, Babylon 5, picking up greater contemporary critical acclaim and awards. This perception, which was not really fair, had been addressed by DS9 upping the ante in its third season, introducing a new starship to help defend the station and telling more serialised stories about the rising threat of the Dominion.

Still, Paramount wanted to shake up the show and bring in some new storytelling opportunities. The DS9 writers hit on the idea of bringing in Lt. Commander Worf (Michael Dorn) from The Next Generation and making the always-popular Klingons a recurring feature of DS9. With these changes on the way, the team were asked to make Season 4 something of a "reboot" for the series, a jumping-on point for new viewers.

This explains why Season 4's movie-length opener, The Way of the Warrior, is a little bit bizarrely expository in telling us things we already know: Odo's background and capabilities as a shapeshifter are once again explained and there are lengthy recaps of the Bajoran Occupation, the threat posed by the Cardassians, Garak's background as a spy, Dukat's haphazard career trajectory, Quark's semi-criminal background, Dax's nature as a Trill and so on. This leads to quite a few scenes feeling completely redundant: this show has already aired 72 episodes (one less than the entire run of Game of Thrones and rather more than the complete runs of shows like Breaking Bad, The Wire and Orphan Black) and reintroducing the characters and concepts as if it's the first time feels a bit weird.

Once you get past that, the episode is pretty good. Shaking up the Federation-Klingon Alliance, which had gotten a little too cosy over seven seasons of The Next Generation, is a good move and bringing Worf over to DS9 makes sense. Worf's angst-ridden, constantly-conflicted backstory and nature were sometimes an awkward fit on the comfortable Enterprise-D but are much more at home on the station. The absolutely massive space battle at the end of the episode is one of DS9's most impressive action set-pieces (even as you can feel the technology of motion-controlled models creakily hitting its limitations) and the episode features several outstanding character and humour pieces among all its explosions, such as Garak and Quark's morbid realisation they are not fans of the Federation but are reliant on it for survival, whilst Quark's determination to defend his bar with a non-existent disruptor is one of the show's funniest moments.

The season goes on much as it started (mercifully with less recapping of well-established plot points). The second episode of the season, the Hugo-nominated The Visitor, holds a strong claim to being Deep Space Nine's best episode and one of the best episodes of Star Trek ever made, an exploration of family, parental relationships and obsession spanning decades and lifetimes with an outstanding performance by guest star Tony Todd.

The season seems to enjoy setting up paired episodes which explore ongoing ideas. The Jem'Hadar get more exploration in Hippocratic Oath, in which Bashir tries to free them from their addiction to the ketracel-white as a way of robbing the Dominion's power over them (despite the risk it may also turn them into uncontrollable, all-conquering monsters), to O'Brien's extreme disquiet. Later in the season, To the Death explores more of the Jem'Hadar's nature and reveals that, although they do have a very extreme, odd code of honour, they are still extremely dangerous adversaries. This episode also marks the outstanding debut of the Vorta Weyoun, one of Star Trek's best-ever villains, played with charisma, skill and charm by Jeffrey Combs.

Meanwhile, Dukat gets a lot of character development in Indiscretion, in which he and Kira form an effective working relationship and we learn that Dukat has a (somewhat) nobler side to his character, which is then developed in Return to Grace. These episodes also introduce a new recurring character in the form of Dukat's half-Bajoran daughter, Ziyal, whose very existence provides a huge amount of emotional angst for the character (as well as helping Kira's developing sense that some Cardassians can be redeemed and become allies...just never Dukat).

We also learn more of Bashir, with his lighter and more frivolous side coming to the fore in Our Man Bashir (a James Bond parody that landed the production team in hot water with Paramount's legal department, who received threatening letters from MGM) and his more obsessive, arrogant side come out in The Quickening (as well as Hippocratic Oath). Meanwhile, the Rom/Quark relationship gets a lot of development in Little Green Men, Bar Association and Body Parts (the latter two also seeing the return of "Brunt, FCA," also courtesy of the magnificent Jeffrey Combs), which go a long way to fleshing out the Ferengi as a serious (ish) people with their own culture and beliefs.

New (to DS9) character Worf also gets a lot of development though episodes like The Sword of Kahless, Rules of Engagement and Sons of Mogh, which all do well to flesh out Worf and also give him more stuff to do other than just getting beaten up by the alien guest star of the week to show how tough they are.

Elements which had been much more key to DS9's identity in previous season are reduced to almost token appearances here. Accession is the season's sole contribution to the Bajoran spirituality/Emissary storyline, where Sisko gratefully relinquishes the title of Emissary to a Bajoran who's been trapped in the wormhole for three centuries, only to discovery the new Emissary is a hardline religious conservative who wants Bajor to return to outdated cultural practices from centuries ago. Sisko ends up having to fight for the very title he's wanted to get rid of for three years. Similarly, the Maquis get a sole episode about them in For the Cause, where the Maquis cleverly try to use the beating the Cardassians are receiving at the hands of the Klingons as a way of securing their political goals. There's also only one "let's torture O'Brien" episode, with the superb Hard Time. Shattered Mirror is the season's signature Mirror Universe episode and is a fun piece with an excellent space battle. The season also has only one episode focusing on Odo's unrequited love for Kira, Crossfire, but it's an outstanding piece of character drama with magnificent performances from Rene Auberjonois and Armin Shimerman, and one of the best low-key episodes in all of Star Trek's history.

Even the Dominion get a low-key season. Starship Down sees a badly-crippled Defiant playing cat-and-mouse with two Dominion warships in the atmosphere of a gas giant, in a tense submarine-style movie. It's tremendous fun, with a great guest performance by James Cromwell (just ahead of him going off to shoot the movie First Contact). The two-parter Homefront and Paradise Lost at first glance looks like a Dominion show, but it's actually a story about paranoia and how the Federation allows distrust and fear to get loose on Earth, with almost catastrophic results without the Dominion even having to lift a finger. The finale, Broken Link, is a great character piece which explores more about the Founders.

The most notable thing is that virtually all of these episodes are great. There are some small flaws along the way - Little Green Men is a bit too comedic, Rules of Engagement loses its main character in Worf for long stretches of the episode - but the season only has one mediocre episode, The Muse, about an alien who gets its power by...watching Jake Sisko write? It's a weird concept that never really works, although a subplot about Odo having to rescue Lwaxana Troi with a dramatic declaration of romantic intent is surprisingly more enjoyable.

The result is that 24 out of the 25 episodes this season are good to excellent, incorporating one of the greatest Star Trek episodes of all time in The Visitor and multiple other compelling pieces. These all give the fourth season of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (*****) a good claim to being its strongest year. The season 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 third season as part of a wider review of the third through fifth seasons twelve years ago. That review can be read here.

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine - Season 3

2371. The Federation is facing its greatest threat since the Borg: the Dominion, a powerful empire in the Gamma Quadrant which is no longer willing to tolerate violations of their territory. The fear of shapeshifters infiltrating the Alpha Quadrant will lead to desperate measures being taken to head off the threat, and the assignment of the Federation's most powerful combat vessel to the front line at Deep Space Nine.

There is a strong belief that Star Trek shows - at least those since the original series - only start getting good with their third season. Star Trek: The Next Generation's first two seasons were highly variable and only started producing reliably good episodes in its third year, whilst Enterprise only really got going when it embraced a serialised storyline in its third season. The third season of Discovery has also (so far) been a big improvement over the first two, patchy years.

This wasn't quite as true of Deep Space Nine, which started reasonably well with one of the franchises's best debut seasons and levelled up impressively in its second outing. Instead, the third season represented a continuation of the smooth improvement in quality the show experienced over its first four seasons.

The season has several recurring storylines. The show isn't really serialised in the same as quasi-rival Babylon 5 (at least at this stage), but it did make greater use of continuity and references than previously. This is apparent in the first, two-part story The Search, which picks up on the cliffhanger ending to the second season which established the Dominion as a major threat. In The Search, which marks the writing debut for DS9 of TNG writer (and future BSG and Outlander showrunner) Ronald D. Moore, the show gets a new asset in the form of the USS Defiant, an experimental warship to help defend against the threat and also provide the crew with a better way of getting around than the tiny runabouts. In a notable plot development, Odo also discovers where he came from and more about his people, including some very unpleasant truths. It's a solid action story, although some elements in the second part prove disappointing.

The season goes onto have a long streak of pretty good episodes. The House of Quark is a culture-clash comedy between the Ferengi and Klingons but which also gives Quark the chance to be heroic (as well as introducing Next Generation fan-favourite Gowron to DS9). Second Skin sees Kira discovering she's an undercover Cardassian spy with false-implanted Bajoran memories. The episode doesn't waste time trying to really convince the viewer this might be true, but the reasoning for the deception is intriguing. Civil Defense is a superbly entertaining disaster movie episode where the station's old anti-uprising security system is accidentally reactivated and goes haywire. Defiant is another great action story, using a visiting Thomas Riker to set off a desperate battle with the Cardassians with Sisko reluctantly joining forces with Gul Dukat to shoot down one of his own ships (in a manner similar to the 1964 film Fail Safe). Shakaar sees Kira forced to resume her life as a freedom fighter when Kai Winn cracks down on a group of farmers who defy her, resulting in a terrific Western-style action show. Through the Looking Glass returns to the Mirror Universe and achieves some nice character reflection by uniting Sisko with the mirror counterpart of his deceased wife (although the fact the Sisko sleeps with both the mirror Dax and mirror Kira in this episode is kind of brushed over).

The Past Tense two-parter starts a trend for DS9 episodes for directly engaging with difficult social issues rather than using some kind of standard Star Trek metaphor for them. The episode directly transports Sisko, Dax and Bashir to 2024 San Francisco, which is riven by immense wealth inequality and homelessness, and having to deal with the problems they encounter before returning home. It's an extremely strong two-parter with great performances. Later on the season blows up the Dominion threat even further with Improbable Cause and The Die is Cast, a far-reaching two-parter which sees the Romulans and Cardassians join forces for a secret strike on the Founders' homeworld, with Odo and Garak reluctantly dragged along for the wide.

Heart of Stone and Destiny are very solid character pieces, reflecting on Odo's growing realisation he is in love with Major Kira and on Sisko's position as the Emissary causing conflict with his position as a Starfleet officer. Visionary is the season's regular "let's torture O'Brien" episode and has him shifting randomly in time as part of shenanigans with the Romulans. Explorers sees DS9 engaging with real, solid piece of hard SF, the idea of using "light sails" to cross interstellar space, and makes a very good fist of it. Family Business introduces Quark's mother, the Ferengi homeworld and the character of "Brunt, FCA," played with an outright genius performance by Jeffrey Combs. As a piece of worldbuilding for the Ferengi, it is terrific. The season finale, The Adversary, is low-key but a solid bit of tension as a changeling infiltrator plays cat and mouse with the crew on The Defiant.

Other episodes have good notions but mixed execution. The Abandoned is a simple rewrite of TNG's I, Borg, with a Jem'Hadar in place of a Borg, but falters due to a lack of focus: it's an Odo episode where it takes more than a third of the episode to get Odo involved in the story, with a somewhat weak resolution. Meridian has a great central premise - a planet that only appears for a few days every few decades, and Dax falls in love with one of the inhabitants - but doesn't do much with it. Life Support sees Vedek Bareil taking part in urgent peace negotiations with the Cardassians despite being heavily injured and the treatments he seeks to keep going threatens his life. TNG had similar ideas in both Too Short a Season and Loud as a Whisper and Life Support offers no new insights on the premise.

Prophet Motive is a very promising Ferengi episode and Wallace Shawn is always great as the Grand Nagus, but it feels the episode doesn't quite deliver on its premise of fleshing out the Ferengi ideology of capitalist greed, though it is quite amusing that Quark of all people becomes the second person to successfully communicate with the Prophets. Equilibrium and Facets are great for fleshing out Dax's backstory (the prior in a manner similar to what Doctor Who has since done, twice) but neither episode quite catches fire.

There's very few outright weak links in the season. Fascination - where a visiting Betazoid gets sick and telepathically "infects" the regular characters with romantic feelings for random people - is tedious. Distant Voices may be one of DS9's absolute nadirs, a poorly-conceived dream episode about Bashir's fear of aging which doesn't really accomplish much.

With weak episodes few and far between and a growing sense of menace and danger building across the season as the threat from the Dominion escalates, complete with the first major fleet battles in Star Trek's history, Deep Space Nine's third season (****½) is an accomplished, strong piece of work. The season 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 third season as part of a wider review of the third through fifth seasons twelve years ago. That review can be read here.

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.

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Seasons 6-7

By the end of Season 5, Deep Space Nine had long established an identity that set it apart from its progenitor, The Next Generation, and its struggling younger sibling, Voyager. With its darker tone and greater focus on long-running storylines, conflicted characters and the difficult subjects of religion, politics and war, DS9 seemed to challenge the very foundations that Star Trek was based on. Whilst this made the show arguably the most popular Trek series with those who normally didn't like the universe of the Federation and Klingons, it divided Trek fans between those who welcomed its different approach and those who felt it strayed too far from the ideals laid down by Gene Roddenberry. The events at the end of Season 5, with the Federation abandoning Bajor and the DS9 station, allying with the Klingons and launching a pre-emptive attack on the Dominion, seemed to showcase this.

Season 6 of DS9 kicked off with something Trek had never before attempted: a tightly-plotted six-episode serial. Three months have passed since the end of Season 5. Deep Space Nine is in the hands of the Dominion and its Cardassian allies, who are now using the station as their forward command post for prosecuting a full-scale war against the Federation and Klingons. Although a minefield across the mouth of the wormhole prevents them from bringing in reinforcements from the Gamma Quadrant, the Dominion is achieving great victories on every front due to their superior technology and the ability to breed fresh Jem'Hadar warriors to replace those lost on the front lines much faster than the Federation and Klingons can train new soldiers. The series splits into several parallel narratives, as we follow the adventures of Worf and General Martok on a Klingon warship, Sisko and the Starfleet crew on the USS Defiant, and Odo, Quark, Kira and Jake living on the station under Dominion occupation. This is Trek at its most epic, featuring the biggest single space battle ever seen on any Trek series before or since (Operation Return, involving over 2,000 starships) and some of the most startling character developments in DS9's history. As well as the visual spectacle of the CGI fireworks (still very impressive ten years on), there is a fascinating psychological storyline as Kira and the Female Changeling fight a battle for Odo's soul, and Gul Dukat becomes obsessed with defeating Sisko to the exclusion of all else.

Predictably, the Federation soon gains the upper hand and the station falls back into their hands, although the war continues. The remainder of Season 6 is spent following the reverses and successes of the war and features some superb storytelling. In one memorable story the Federation recruits a pool of genetically-engineered geniuses (including Dr. Bashir) to help with war strategy, and their analyses of the Dominion's apparently inevitable victory is a tip of the head to Isaac Asimov's science of psychohistory, as shown in the Foundation novels. Elsewhere, we learn that a much greater and more mythical conflict is taking place between the Prophets and the Pah-Wraiths, of which the Dominion War is but a reflection, and the Prophets' manipulation and use of Sisko and his Bajoran religious nemesis, Kai Winn, in that war makes for fascinating viewing. This season also features what is often called the darkest-ever episode of Trek, when Sisko and Garak scheme, conspire, manipulate and even carry out murder in order to trick the Romulans into attacking the Dominion. The episode in question, In the Pale Moonlight, is one of the most gripping in all of Trek's history. There is also Far Beyond the Stars, in which Trek pays homage to its 1950s SF roots and addresses racism in an honest and surprisingly (for Trek) non-preachy manner. Events culminate in a shocking cliffhanger as a regular character is killed, Sisko abandons his post and the Pah-Wraiths seem to gain the upper hand.

Season 7 is slightly less successful. The opening story arc restores the status quo, of sorts, but a string of stand-alone episodes feel suddenly out of place as the war continues to rage off-camera. Some fans also objected to the inclusion of the recurring holosuite character of Vic Fontaine, a Las Vegas singer and bar-owner who gives the crew advice on their personal problems. However, James Darren (a real-life 1960s Vegas vet who had also acted in The Time Tunnel and TJ Hooker) gives a charming and often funny performance, and he appears in significantly fewer episodes than you might think. Many of these earlier episodes also focus on the new character of Ezri, played by Nicole de Boer, to the slight exclusion of more familiar characters.

These problems are swiftly addressed by the season's halfway point, when the war is brought back into sharp focus and the final nine episodes build to a huge finale. The Federation-Romulan-Klingon alliance is tested when the Dominion aligns itself with another powerful race, the Breen. However, this also tests the Dominion's own relationship with the Cardassians, who are increasingly resentful of their downtrodden position. The evolution of the character of Damar is deftly handled in this arc by actor Casey Biggs as he convincingly goes from stooge to Spartacus in the space of a few episodes. At the same time, the writers' alignment of Dukat and Winn as servants of the Pah-Wraiths is an extremely clever, if horribly inevitable move. The final episode answers most of the series' outstanding questions, resolves most of the characters' storylines fairly convincingly, but also leaves some ambiguities and loose ends for the future. Despite a weak opening, the final season of DS9 achieves something that none of the other Trek series were able to do with their finales: it leaves you wanting more.

Deep Space Nine Season 6 (*****) continues the extremely high quality of the preceding two seasons and gives us more of the successful blend of space battles, comedy, drama and social commentary that has made DS9 worth watching. It is available on DVD in the UK and US.

Deep Space Nine Season 7 (****½) picks up after a slow start to deliver a satisfying conclusion to the series. It is available on DVD in the UK and US.

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Seasons 3-5

There's a tradition in Star Trek that it takes three seasons for each series to really find its feet. Whilst Deep Space Nine's first two seasons had been entertaining, it still lacked a really notable sparkle to set it apart from both TNG and other SF series that were starting to appear at the same time, most notably Babylon 5. At the end of Season 2 DS9 was finally given the kick up the backside to really push it to become something more than the sum of its parts.

There's a dangerous new force in the Galaxy: the Dominion, an alliance of alien races unified under the rule of the Founders, shapeshifters who hold all other 'solid' races in mistrust after millennia of persecution by them. The wormhole in the Bajoran system directly links the Federation and the Dominion territories together, and Season 3 opens with a cold war between the two getting underway. A Federation attempt at peaceful negotiation is rebuffed, and Deep Space Nine is soon being reinforced with new weapons and a new defender in the shape of the first-ever Federation warship, the USS Defiant. However, whilst the threat is lurking in the background there is curiously little activity between the two sides, and after a while the series falls back into its traditional episodic structure. Luckily, the show delivers a series of solid stand-alone episodes here, ranging from the comedic to the dramatic. There's also the first appearance by Robert O'Reilly in DS9 as Klingon Chancellor Gowron, prefiguring his later, more prominent role in the series.

Whilst there's little action in the early season on the arc front, there's lots of background detail which comes together nicely later on, such as the growing momentum behind the Cardassian dissident movement and Garak's continuing yearning to go home to his people, whilst vague rumours of a Cardassian military build-up that even Dukat has no knowledge of hints of something cataclysmic to come. We finally get to that point in the epic Improbable Cause/The Die is Cast two-parter, which ends in the biggest space battle in Star Trek history to that point and the chilling line, "The only threats to us in the Alpha Quadrant now are the Federation and the Klingons, and neither are going to be a problem for much longer."

That line leads us into the magnificent Season 4. With the destruction of the Cardassian Obsidian Order, a full-scale revolution gets underway on the planet, triggering Klingon fears that the Dominion are masterminding events as a prelude to invasion. On that flimsy pretext, the Klingons invade Cardassian space, sparking a period of renewed tension with the Federation and even an abortive attack on Deep Space Nine itself. To deal with the Federation's belligerent former allies, Sisko recruits Lt. Commander Worf to join the station command crew. This shakes things up nicely, as Worf fits much better into the darker and more conflict-driven DS9 universe than he ever did on TNG. With the Federation and the Klingons at each other's throats, the Dominion has a free hand to get up to what they want to in the background and several key episodes address this. Season 4 is also the point that recurring actor Jeffrey Coombs hits his stride with the introduction of his two best characters, the Ferengi liquidator, "Brunt, FCA" and the Vorta Weyoun.

Season 4 is DS9 firing on all cylinders, delivering brilliant moments of drama, action and even comedy, something Trek has a mixed record on. Possibly the show's creative high point, although there is a the feeling that the introduction of the Klingon threat has taken the show away from where it was supposed to be heading.

That point is addressed at the start of Season 5 with the discovery that the Dominion have infiltrated the highest echelons of the Klingon Empire and masterminded the conflict with the Cardassians and the Federation for their own purposes. Having weakened the Alpha Quadrant sufficiently, the Dominion form an alliance with the Cardassians and start flooding Cardassian space with their warships. The parallel to pre-WWII Europe works extremely well. Whilst the episodes dealing with the main arc (most notably the In Purgatory's Shadow/By Inferno's Light two-parter) are magnificent, there are still many brilliant individual episodes here, such as the hilariously inventive Trials and Tribbelations and the extremely disturbing The Assignment. There are a couple of creative misfires, such as Odo's temporary transformation into a human that doesn't work quite as well as it should, but overall Season 5 maintains the quality of the season that preceded it. It ends on a high point, with the comical episode In the Cards (featuring some of the biggest laughs in Star Trek's history, such as the inherent ludicrousness of the Federation abandoning money in favour of 'a philosophy of self-enlightenment' and Ronald D. Moore's hilarious pisstake of technobabble with Dr. Giger's immortality device) preceding the monumental cliffhanger of Call to Arms, where the Federation and the Klingons feel compelled to launch a pre-emptive assault against the Dominion, with some jaw-dropping final moments as the Dominion capture DS9 and the Federation is forced to retreat.

Deep Space Nine Season 3 (****) is where the show finds its feet. It is available on DVD in the UK and USA.

Deep Space Nine Season 4 (*****) is where the show hits its creative highpoint, and is likewise available in the UK and USA.

Deep Space Nine Season 5 (*****) maintains the high quality of the fourth season and pushes the story arc forward and sets things up for an apocalyptic final two seasons, and is also available in the UK and USA.

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Seasons 1 & 2

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine debuted in January 1993 and ran for seven seasons and 176 episodes. In time, Deep Space Nine became the 'least Star Trek-like' of the six series, more interested in long story arcs about war and political intrigue than boldly exploring new worlds. However, these early episodes saw the series initially hamstrung by a more traditional approach and episodic structure.

Deep Space Nine opens in 2369. The Cardassian Union has withdrawn its occupation forces from the planet Bajor, leaving its infrastructure shattered and its populace in need of help. The United Federation of Planets assists with the planet's reconstruction efforts as a prelude to Bajor joining its membership, and Starfleet takes command of the former Cardassian orbital facility, Terok Nor, now renamed as Deep Space Nine. Initially it appears that the Federation's role, although important, is somewhat unexciting. However, a stable wormhole is discovered linking the Bajoran system to the Gamma Quadrant, located seventy thousand light-years away on the far side of the Galaxy. As dozens of races clamour for the opportunity to explore this new frontier, Bajor becomes enriched by the wormhole's presence and the Cardassians begin scheming to retake the station and Bajor, with only the thin red line of Starfleet's small presence to stand against them.

As the series evolved this initial premise gradually shifted and eventually was discarded altogether. But these early episodes are driven by this backstory. Bajor's politics and religious strife becomes a dominant force in the early series, to the bemusement of the audience. Although Bajor is a very well-developed culture and world (arguably the most well-developed planet ever created in Star Trek's history), the Bajorans are not one of the more colourful races in the Trek canon. Unfortunately, when not dealing with Bajor and its problems the series tends instead to recycle old Trek ideas, plots and characters. It's not long before characters such as Q, Vash, Lursa and B'Etor from The Next Generation are making cameo appearances which are vaguely amusing but don't really seem to help the show establish its own identity. The series is also not helped by a somewhat stiff performance from Avery Brooks as Commander Sisko, although he gradually relaxes into the role as the series progresses.

However, the first season of each incarnation of Star Trek is traditionally a pretty rough time as actors and writers find their feet. Compared to the first seasons of both The Next Generation and Voyager, Deep Space Nine's first year is actually pretty good. The pilot sets things up reasonably well (kicking off with a spectacular flashback to the Battle of Wolf 359 between the Borg and forty Federation starships) and subsequent episodes explore each of the main characters and the setting in turn. There's some ropey acting and a few of the effects have not aged well, but otherwise everything stands up. In fact, considering DS9's story arc was made up as the writers went along rather than being pre-planned in advance it's surprising how cohesive the series is and how many elements are set up in the first few episodes that reach fruition at the end of the seventh year. And, naturally, DS9 at its worst is still more than a match for Voyager at its best. The stand-out episodes from the first season are probably the last two: Duet, a powerful two-hander which pitches Nana Visitor's Major Kira against guest star Harris Yulin as a Cardassian war criminal accused of murder and complicity in genoicde; and In the Hands of the Prophets, which sees a destabilised Bajor descending into political and religious strife which endangers the station.

Season 2 sees the writers and producers taking a different tack. Existing Trek elements are downplayed, TNG cameos and recurring characters are dramatically reduced and the show starts building its own mythology. New characters and factions are introduced. The characters of Bareil and Winn, who represent the two different ideologies battling for control of Bajor, are developed, whilst 'simple tailor' Garak evolves into the most multi-layered character in Star Trek's history. The Maquis - a terrorist group made up of disaffected Federation citizens who turn to violence to protect themselves after their planets are given to the Cardassians as part of a treaty - muddy the waters of our heroes' allegiances quite a lot. Early in the season we hear a whisper about something called 'the Dominion', which controls some of the Gamma Quadrant and as the season progresses we start to see some of their handiwork in the form of planets devastated by their actions and entire races displaced because they had nothing to give the Dominion. This latter plotline culminates in the impressively foreboding finale, The Jem'Hadar, in which the Federation is faced with a powerful new enemy and suffers a hefty defeat which leaves things on an ominous note going into Season 3.

Deep Space Nine Season 1 (***) is a bit rough around the edges and at times clings a bit too readily to existing Star Trek cliches, but there's a huge amount of potential on display here and most episodes have something interesting to offer. The series is available on DVD in the USA and UK.

Deep Space Nine Season 2 (***½) is stronger, introducing new concepts, ideas and characters which give the series much more of its own distinctive identity, complete with the introduction of Trek's most fascinating enemy since the Borg. The series is available on DVD in the USA and UK.