Defiant Squash

I finished watching season two of Deep Space Nine and couldn't resist starting the next. That was always an effective finale to premiere transition. The season two finale, "The Jem'Hadar", has Sisko and the rest of the crew encountering the Dominion's military force and finding they're technologically superior. This is hammered home when a mission to rescue Sisko is lead by a Galaxy class ship, the same class as the Enterprise at that time, and it's unexpectedly destroyed by Jem'Hadar ships while the DS9 crew barely escape with their lives due to the fact that they were in runabouts, the especially large shuttlecrafts used in the series.

The episode successfully makes the viewer want to see the protagonists get back at the Dominion and the season three premiere, from September 1994, introduces the Defiant, a warship assigned to the station. It was widely seen at the time as part of an effort to make DS9 more like other Star Trek series because DS9, in its second season, was not drawing viewers in the same numbers as The Next Generation. Whatever the case, the Defiant is an interesting idea and I still like the way it's introduced as a barely functional, overpowered prototype.

The premiere, though, is a two-parter and it screws itself over with the second part, which abruptly changes the plot from one of a dangerous voyage into the Gamma Quadrant to confront the Dominion into one about the captured crew being caught in a simulation and Odo meeting other members of his species for the first time.

It's very obvious that most of the crew are in a simulation from the beginning when Starfleet decides to completely roll over for the Dominion. So there's very little tension created after the rising tension of the battle scene in the previous episode has been completely negated by the sudden new premise. Odo's meeting with his people, the Changelings, is a little more interesting. I like a bit of dialogue between Odo and the Changeling representative in which he protests against the Dominion's tyranny by saying that he's been an advocate of justice throughout his life. The Changeling replies that the Dominion means to impose order on the galaxy, effectively a twisted variant of Odo's love of justice. So this plot does tie more into Odo's occupation as a security chief than I remembered. It's also interesting that a species of liquid based shapeshifters would be obsessed with order. I'm not sure that contradiction ever comes to anything more than an intriguing premise but it's something that sets them apart from the Borg.

Oddly, after all the buildup, the Defiant is entirely absent from the second part.

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine is available on Netflix.