A while back, I wrote about how I started watching Star Trek: Lower Decks and how it made me fall back in love with the franchise as a whole. This simply met, while I was eagerly awaiting the next season and episode of Lower Decks, I also wanted to go see another older Star Trek program. I wanted to check on the Trek that I missed out for one reason or another.

Thankfully, Netflix in my region has a whole slew of older Star Trek available. Now, I have watched the entire Next Generation and Voyager series already. This left Deep Space Nine, which, from what I understand, is the least popular among the trio of “next generation” Star Trek programs. Well, as I wanted more Star Trek in my life, I decided to watch the entire series and judge it for myself.

Well, I did just watch all seven seasons of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and, honestly, I’m quite torn about the show. That’s because of the Dominion and, in turn, Dominion War, the overarching storyline that made Deep Space Nine super interesting but, at the same time, kind of made it a mess at the same time.

To get an idea of why I say this, we do have to go to the start of Deep Space Nine and what I can only imagine was the original premise. The show starts with Commander Benjamin Sisko being assigned to the Bajor sector, wherein the Bajorians had just liberated themselves from Cardassian rule. He was assigned there to try to convince the Bajorians to join the United Federation of Planets as a new ally.

During his first day, Sisko discovers a wormhole close to Deep Space Nine, a former Cardassian space station retrofitted as his new base of operations. He is also anointed as The Emissary of the Prophets by the Bajorian people as, during the discovery of the wormhole, he encounters The Prophets, who were gods to the Bajorians. As the wormhole leads directly to the Gamma Quadrant, Deep Space Nine becomes both a hub for explorers who want a direct route to the Gamma Quadrant as well as a strategic outpost for the Federation.

Based on this, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine was supposed to take exploration of strange new worlds and civilizations and turn it on its head. Instead of the crew travelling around the galaxy, the galaxy would be going to them. They had a whole new region of unexplored races either waiting to be found in the Gamma Quadrant or they would be coming from the Gamma Quadrant and visit Deep Space Nine. You also have the additional story of Sisko having to be both a Starfleet Officer as well as some kind of messianic figure to the Bajorian people. There’s also the added wrinkle of having diplomatic ties with the Cardassians, who would want to re-take control of Deep Space Nine because of it strategic location next to the wormhole.

Too bad the writers couldn’t really make it interesting!

That’s one of the biggest problems I had with the first season of Deep Space Nine: the situations the crew of Deep Space Nine were getting into didn’t grab my attention. Honestly, the only thing that did was Quark, the Ferengi who owns and operates the bar on Deep Space Nine. We did get some morally ambiguous characters like Major Kira, a former Bajoran freedom fighter turned liaison officer to the Federation, as she had trouble adjusting to the bureaucracy and diplomacy needed to talk to the their former oppressors, the Cardassians, most especially Dukat, who was the leader of the Bajoran occupancy. However, Quark was different as the Ferengi was obsessed with making money, leading to some really strange bits of wisdom to come out from him. Even so, the initial season and two of Deep Space Nine just was boring as nothing interesting was going on.

This is why the writers probably developed the Dominion and created the Dominion War, which would go on to occupy the rest of Deep Space Nine’s remaining seasons. So, it turns out the Gamma Quadrant is ruled by the Dominion. Led by the Founders, their goal is to conquer the entire galaxy. While they had pretty much taken over the entire Gamma Quadrant, they have now set their sights on the Alpha Quadrant, thanks to the wormhole.

This led to the Dominion War and, at the start, it was a great storyline as it involved a lot of the other races found throughout Star Trek, from the Klingons to the Romulans. Alliances were formed and broken throughout the Dominion War thanks to the Founders’ race ability to shapeshift and sow seeds of distrust among the Alpha Quadrant races. This also meant that Odo, Deep Space Nine’s security chief and who just had found out he was a Founder himself, has his loyalties called into trust by the other races.

Politicking becomes more important as the Dominion, although they are trying to conquer the entire Alpha Quadrant, are forging alliances with races such as the aforementioned Cardassians, who would want to assert themselves as the great new power in the area. While this didn’t feel like “classic” Star Trek, I can appreciate the writers trying to do something different with the property and taking a rather alien tone to the usually positivity of other Star Trek shows. Suffice to say, this held my interest for quite a while.

The problem is how the Dominion War just dominated the entirety of Deep Space Nine and it just became a huge problem as some of the plot points hinted at during the first two seasons were either dropped or shoved aside.

Remember how Sisko became The Emmisary and revered by the Bajorian people? Well, while they would have that pop up from time to time and it did play a major factor in the first part of the last season, it didn’t gel well with the Dominion War storyline. They actually had to introduce the Pah-Wraiths, essentially the evil Bajorian gods and the counterparts to the Prophets. All of a sudden, there was this evil sect of the Bajorian religion they just conveniently forgot to mention all this time? Seems very shoehorned in to me!

There’s also the tragic issue of one of the better characters of Deep Space Nine: Dukat. I already mentioned he was the former head of the Cardassian occupation of Bajor but he was more than just that. He was kind of the central antagonist before the Dominion War. With the addition of the Dominion, he became more of a side character and much less of a threat. It also seems like the writers didn’t really know what to do with him. They tried to give him a redemption arc when he rescued his daughter, Ziyal, from a slave labor camp. As she was born from an affair with a Bajorian, Dukat was stripped of his rank and became some kind of a freedom fighter when the Klingons started attacking Cardassian outposts.

That didn’t last long because it turns out Dukat has been secretly negotiating with the Dominion, leading to the Cardassians siding with the invading forces. He along with the Dominion secured Deep Space Nine for quite a while in a storyline I actually enjoyed but this didn’t last long as Sisko and the Federation and Klingons eventually took back Deep Space Nine and Dukat was captured… only to escape and then become sort of the Emissary of the Pah-Wraiths!

You can see why I would say the writers were trying to find something for Dukat to do after the Dominion became the major focus as he would just bounce around from position to position, leading to a lack of focus on what he was initially created to be: the big bad guy! The problem was, as the Dominion were now the big bad to fight, Dukat wasn’t needed anymore. Heck, the way he was taken care of in the very last episode was one of the most anti-climactic conclusions to a big bad guy I’ve ever seen! Falling down a cliff into a fiery pit is so cliche!

So, while I will say the Dominion and the Dominion War was good for Deep Space Nine as a whole, I just didn’t like how it took over the entire series. While it added a lot of intrigue to the show, it also took away a lot of what Deep Space Nine was supposed to be. It’s this fact which makes me confused if I actually did enjoy Deep Space Nine or not.

I can’t really say if the show would’ve been better off if it stayed the course and just go with their original premise of a space station being a hub to a different part of the galaxy because that didn’t happen in my timeline. But I will say I don’t think fans will remember Deep Space Nine as fondly as they do because the Dominion War is precisely why people remember it. The Dominion War made the Star Trek universe more uncomfortable and, well, more mature as nothing was black or white there. Sometimes, you had to do bad things in the name of good and, while that might not feel like Star Trek back then, it’s what most people feel about real life in general. I think they can identify with that more and that’s why Deep Space Nine is remembered fondly. Personally, I can see why they like it… but a big part of me wishes it wasn’t there because of the problems it inadvertently created.

What did you think of Deep Space Nine’s overarching Dominion War storyline? Let me know in the comments section below!