30 Years Ago Deep Space Nine Season 3 Changed the Game for Star Trek

If you subscribed to the magazine Star Trek: The Official Fan Club in 1994, you already knew some spoilers about how Deep Space Nine’s third season debut was going to change everything. While 1994 is generally remembered as the moment when The Next Generation ended its TV run in May, and then launched a film franchise in November, what some fans might forget is that in between those events was the utter reinvention of Deep Space Nine. Before the internet, hardcore Trekkies had access to this information: the Starfleet insignia was changing, Odo’s uniform would look different, and—gasp—the space station-based Star Trek show was getting a new starship!

In fact, the launch of the USS Defiant in the third season two-part debut, “The Search,” utterly changed the direction of Deep Space Nine forever. And, in doing so, this episode also knocked forward more than a few dominoes that Star Trek canon is still grappling with today.

Consider this: There are only 30 episodes of the recent Trek series Star Trek: Picard, and those episodes represent wildly different tones and stories, with staggering revelations and events in each season. Deep Space Nine had already aired 46 episodes before getting the Defiant and solving the mystery of Odo’s elusive origin. TV was of course very different back then, but what’s relevant here is that for some fans the introduction of the Defiant and the revelation that the Founders of the Dominion are shapeshifters is where the show truly begins. Just like with The Next Generation (and arguably, some other Trek shows too), most fans tend to agree that DS9 hit its stride in season 3, and that this was the moment where the show started on the path toward its true destiny.

But, what’s interesting, is that in rewatching “The Search,” the brilliance of the two-part story isn’t that it comes out swinging, but instead, it only fires its new, big guns, once. The rest is all character work. 

The Defiant Decloaks 

The episode opens with Kira (Nana Visitor) basically telling the station crew what the audience already knows: There’s no way DS9 could survive a direct attack from the Jem’Hadar, the soldiers of a bigger entity called the Dominion, a new threat introduced at the end of season 2. For two seasons, DS9 was protected by a bunch of souped-up shuttle crafts known as runabouts. Even when taking on the terrorist cell of The Maquis in season 2, Sisko (Avery Brooks) and the crew were still using runabouts.

But the emergence of the Jem’Hadar and the Dominion required something new: A Federation warship that was a leaner and meaner version of the Enterprise. Right at the start of the episode, Sisko decloaks the Defiant and tells Kira that “I’ve brought back a little surprise for the Dominion.” We quickly learn that this was a test warship, created to fight the Borg, but that the Defiant was mostly a prototype and isn’t exactly the most well-rounded ship. Sisko says, “It’s overgunned and overpowered for a ship its size.”

This was something Star Trek had never done before. DS9 was basically looking at the camera and saying, “This really isn’t your parents’ Star Trek anymore. This ship is hardcore!” But, interestingly, by having the Defiant be utterly unstable, DS9 was bringing Trek back to its roots. In The Original Series, you always got the sense that the Enterprise was about to fall apart if Kirk pushed Scotty too far. In “The Search,” O’Brien (Colm Meaney) becomes a full-on Scotty, now saddled with a ship somewhere between the classic Enterprise and the rickety Millennium Falcon.

And yet, smartly, “The Search” pulls its punches with the introduction of the Defiant. After heading into the Gamma Quadrant to find the Founders, the Defiant is jumped by some Jem’Hadar warships and loses. In fact, Dax and O’Brien have been stranded at this point, so the person who first fires the pew-pew-pew new main phasers of the Defiant is Dr. Bashir (Alexander Siddig). The rest of the first episode, and all of the second part, aren’t really about the Defiant at all. Instead, Odo and Kira are with the mysterious Changelings, while the rest of the crew think they’ve escaped in shuttlecraft, but are really stuck in a simulation for all of the second episode.

Basically, if anyone thought the Defiant was going to boldly go, “The Search” makes it clear that very bad things can happen to this ship. Sisko told you this thing was experimental and could break right away, and then, sure enough, it does. While the Defiant would go on to havemany amazing and heroic moments, the idea that it failed its maiden voyage is significant. With this defeat, DS9 was reminding us that unexpected things could happen in this Star Trek series; people could die and cool new starships could lose. Badly.

The Mystery of the Dominion

Unlike previous Trek baddies, de facto showrunner Ira Steven Behr wanted the Dominion to feel bigger, but also more intricate and realistic than previous Trek villains. The Federation was composed of various species, but its enemies tended to be one-race governments—the Romulans, the Cardassians, the Klingons. With the Dominion, Behr challenged writers Robert Hewitt Wolfe, James Crocker, and Peter Allan Fields (and others) to come up with a new kind of enemy in the Gamma Quadrant. Part of the influence was Isaac Asimov’s Foundation books, and Wolfe specifically referred to the Dominion as an “Anti-Federation.”

But one of the biggest mysteries about the Dominion was something DS9 decided to deal with right away at the start of season 3. Instead of having more misdirects and drawing out the identity of who the Founders were, “The Search” made it clear: The Changelings, who Odo (René Auberjonois) has just realized are his people, are the villains behind everything. This means that the massive stakes of interstellar war were suddenly made personal. Deep Space Nine was setting up a massive space war that would engulf various seasons of the show, but what the revelations about the Founders did was make the stakes seem real, and especially devastating for Odo.

The first part of “The Search” makes you think the story is all about Sisko taking the Defiant on a desperate mission to find the Founders and avoid all out war. But the twist with the Founders flips the story and makes the overall arc an Odo-centric story, one which will impact the future of the galaxy forever. From one-liners in Lower Decks (“The Dominion War didn’t happen, Changelings, aren’t real!”) to the entire plot and background of Picard season 3, and even crucial aspects of Discovery season 5, the repercussions of the Dominion are nearly immeasurable in the bigger Trek timeline. 

But like all great Star Trek stories, what makes it work isn’t the space politics or even the (briefly) fired phasers. The crew of the space station Deep Space Nine had an entire way of life to protect, but suddenly, their enemy could be anyone at any time. DS9 was always the gritty Trek, right from the start in 1993. But after the third season in 1994, the show was poised to take the story to even darker and more interesting places, where Star Trek had never gone before.

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine is streaming now on Paramount+.