Review for Star Trek - Deep Space Nine - Series 4 (Slimline Edition)

Introduction

I mentioned in my review of Season 3 that despite continually improving year on year, subsequent seasons of Deep Space Nine would commit significant missteps along the way, lacking the consistency of the third season. Season 4 of Deep Space Nine kicked off with a doozy, although this was one misstep that it did quite quickly salvage. The problem was The Next Generation, or rather its popularity. The networks wanted the various spin-offs to match the popularity of Star Trek: The Next Generation, the most popular Trek ever, and when ratings slid, they expected something to be done. That was always an impossible ask. The late eighties to early nineties saw the proliferation of multi-channel television, the explosion of genre TV, with everyone doing sci-fi, as opposed to the virtual monopoly The Next Generation had, so Voyager and Deep Space Nine were for five years competing against each other. When Voyager’s ratings slipped, they parachuted in a tall blonde in a catsuit. Enterprise started off with the tall shapely Vulcan in a catsuit, but that didn’t stop it from being cancelled.

Deep Space Nine’s ratings slump towards the end of season 3 came first, and the studio was a little more generous with the creators. They wanted it to be as popular as The Next Generation, the Next Generation was no longer on air, so they told the producers to add a Next Generation cast member to Deep Space Nine, which would fix the ratings or so they thought. The producers were free to choose, so they chose Worf, the Klingon security chief from the Enterprise. You can see their logic. Worf was an outcast, an outsider in the Federation where he grew up, and not quite comfortable in the Klingon Empire either. He would potentially fit right in with the crew of misfits that was shaping up on Deep Space Nine, where no one quite followed convention.


Also following the Dominion defeat of the Tal Shiar and the Obsidian Order, major setbacks to the Romulans and the Cardassians in season 3, the Founders stated that the only Alpha Quadrant powers they had to worry about were the Klingons and the Federation. Bringing in Worf meant bringing in the Klingon Empire and that should have been just peachy for the storyline. The problem was that at the end of season 3, the producers had already plotted the next arc of the Dominion storyline, and all of that had to be put on the back burner to accommodate Worf. At the time, I thought that bringing a TNG character onto a show that was very much doing its own thing was a mistake, and would divert attention from the existing, and very interesting characters. That didn’t happen in the end, but it still feels like you have to get through the Klingon stuff at the head of the season before getting back to the real storyline. Fortunately some of the Klingon stuff is really quite good.

At the edge of the final frontier there’s... politics. The planet Bajor has finally been returned to its population after decades of occupation, oppression, and exploitation by the Cardassian Empire. The wrecked world needs help getting back on its feet, and the provisional government has called in the Federation and Starfleet to administer the space station the Cardassians left behind, now dubbed Deep Space Nine, in the hope that it will become a hub for trade and commerce in the sector. To that end, and to move the Bajorans toward eventual Federation membership, Captain Benjamin Sisko has been assigned to DS9, while the Bajorans have assigned Major Kira Nerys of the Bajoran militia as his second in command. But the discovery of a stable wormhole in the nearby Denorius Belt, offering a shortcut to the Gamma Quadrant, turns a galactic backwater into the strategic centre of the galaxy. What starts off as a gateway to exploration turns a lot more sinister when they encounter the dominant power in the Gamma Quadrant, the Dominion led by the shapeshifting Founders, Changelings who can only see the Federation, and all other ‘solids’ as a threat.


At the end of the previous season, that threat became all the more apparent, when Changeling infiltrators manoeuvred the Romulan Tal Shiar and the Cardassian Obsidian Order into a suicidal attack on the Dominion that left both Empires significantly weakened. They then attempted to foment a war between the Federation and the Tzenkethi when a shapeshifter infiltrated the Starship Defiant and tried to provoke Sisko into a sneak attack. That attack was only thwarted when chief of station security Odo, a Changeling who was somewhat disillusioned when he finally found his people, committed the ultimate crime of killing another Changeling. But it was too late, as he learned that the Dominion had already infiltrated the Alpha Quadrant powers.

Disc 1
1 & 2. The Way of the Warrior
The Klingon flagship under the command of General Martok shows up, requesting that his soldiers take leave on the station. But it isn’t until Sisko gives permission that the rest of the Klingon fleet decloaks. The Klingons are there to ‘help’ their Federation allies against the Dominion threat, which in this case means throwing their weight around on the station, intimidating the locals, beating up Garak, and stopping and searching all ships for Changeling infiltrators. That isn’t exactly Federation policy, and tensions rise to a head when the Defiant has to fire a few warning shots to stop a Bird of Prey harassing Kasidy Yates’ freighter. Sisko remembers what Curzon Dax once told him, that the only person who can truly understand a Klingon is another Klingon, and he requests that Worf be reassigned to Deep Space Nine. Sure enough, there’s more than just a Changeling hunt going on. There’s been a coup on Cardassia, the military government has been overthrown by a civilian regime, and the Klingons are using the threat of Changelings as an excuse to return to the old ways of invasion and conquest. Sisko can either stand aside, letting Cardassia fall, or act and jeopardise the peace treaty between the Klingons and the Federation.


3. The Visitor
On a dark and stormy night, an old man gets an unexpected visitor. An aspiring writer has made the difficult trek through the Bayou in search of Jake Sisko. She’s a big fan of his work, but was desolated to learn that he had only published two books. At any other time, she wouldn’t have received an answer, but this night is the right night for Jake Sisko to tell his final story, why he in the end only wrote two books, a story which began when he was eighteen, and his father died.

4. Hippocratic Oath
Worf may be the new strategic operations officer on Deep Space Nine, but he’s having hard time moving on from his time as security officer, especially when confronted with the unconventional way that Odo conducts his investigations. Meanwhile, returning from the Gamma Quadrant, O’Brien and Bashir’s runabout crashes when they go to investigate a potential ship in distress, and they wind up captured by the Jem’Hadar. But these aren’t the ordinary Jem’Hadar. An unconventional leader is trying to wean his men off the drug Ketracel White, which the Dominion uses to control them. O’Brien believes that it’s their duty as Starfleet officers to escape, but Bashir’s oath as a doctor compels him to help the Jem’Hadar.


Disc 2
5. Indiscretion
When Kira receives a communication suggesting that the Cardassian ship Ravinok has been found, she’s eager to follow up the lead and locate the ship. After all, an old friend from the Bajoran resistance was on the ship when it vanished. What she doesn’t expect is that Gul Dukat wants to join her in finding the ship. This may be a new era of peace and reconciliation between Bajor and Cardassia, but this particular pairing doesn’t bode well. But Dukat has an even more personal reason to find the Ravinok.

6. Rejoined
Trills are a joined species, symbiont passing from host to host, to gain new experiences with each new life. It’s therefore a rule, a taboo even for associations of past hosts to be rekindled with new hosts. Torias Dax was married to Nilani Kahn, before he died in a shuttle accident. Now, a Trill scientific team is coming to the station to experiment with artificial wormholes, led by Lenara Kahn. Sisko offers Dax the opportunity to take some leave time, but Jadzia cites professionalism, that she’ll be able to work with Lenara without past feelings being rekindled. That’s a mistake.


7. Little Green Men
Nog’s about to be the first Ferengi at Starfleet Academy, which his uncle Quark still thinks is a bad idea. But he’s finally received the ship that his cousin Gaila owed him, and giving Nog a lift to Earth, with a hold full of contraband is a lucrative idea. But Gaila sabotaged the warp drive, which is why Quark, Rom and Nog wind up crashing in Roswell, New Mexico, in the year 1947...

8. Starship Down
Even trade missions to the Gamma Quadrant have to be conducted clandestinely now to avoid the Jem’Hadar. But a gas giant proves to be a less than ideal hiding place when a couple of Jem’Hadar ships attack the Defiant and the ship they’re meeting with. The Defiant is badly damaged, and knocked deep in the dangerously high pressured atmosphere of the gas giant. Captain Sisko is critically injured, and hull breaches mean that the crew are cut off from each other. The Jem’Hadar have followed the Defiant into the gas giant, and are even now hunting to finish her off.


Disc 3
9. The Sword of Kahless
Dax’s Klingon friend Kor is back aboard the station, holding forth on his battle prowess in Quark’s. He’s really there for another reason though; he’s finally found a clue to the legendary Sword of Kahless, the weapon of the first Klingon Emperor, missing now for over a thousand years. He wants Dax’s help in retrieving it, from a distant world in the Gamma Quadrant, and Dax thinks to invite Worf along. The sozzled Klingon veteran soon bursts Worf’s hero worship bubble, but Kor’s loose lips are the least of their problems.

10. Our Man Bashir
Dr Bashir has a new holosuite plaything, in which he gets to take on the role of a British secret service agent in the sixties, kiss the girls, and save the world. It would be fun, until Garak decided to join in and deconstruct the genre. Only an emergency occurs on a runabout carrying Sisko, Dax, Kira, O’Brien and Worf, and the transporter malfunctions trying to beam them off. As a last ditch attempt to save them, their physical patterns are shunted to the holosuite, where they wind up taking the roles of the characters in Bashir’s program.


11. Homefront
12. Paradise Lost
A terrorist attack on a high level conference between the Federation and the Romulans has Sisko heading back to Earth, with Odo in tow. It’s the first such incident on Earth in over a hundred years, but it’s the evidence of Changeling involvement that requires Sisko’s presence. Admiral Leyton of Starfleet wants Sisko’s expertise and Odo’s knowledge to help smoke out Changeling infiltrators, to beef up security and prevent any more tragedies. He even goes as far as making Sisko acting head of Starfleet Security, and with Odo’s help Sisko goes about introducing stricter checks. A confrontation with his father Joseph suggests to Sisko that the added security is doing more than the Changeling threat to undermine the peace on Earth. But when the global power net fails, Leyton and Sisko have no choice but to persuade the Federation president to institute martial law.

Disc 4
13. Crossfire
The Bajoran First Minister (and Kira’s former resistance comrade in arms) Shakaar is coming aboard the station for some high level negotiations with the Federation. That naturally attracts threats on his life from certain quarters. It’s the kind of situation that Security Chief Odo would excel in, and he should have all the bases covered. Except Odo’s finally been distracted from his work by his romantic interest in Kira, an interest which she doesn’t even acknowledge, let alone return. And now that Shakaar is on the station, things only get worse.


14. Return to Grace
A Cardassian’s reputation is paramount. It certainly can’t stand up in public following the kind of indiscretion that results in a half Bajoran love-child. That’s why Dukat is now the captain of the freighter that arrives to pick up Kira to attend a security conference on a Cardassian world. It’s an uneventful if distasteful journey for Kira, but when they arrive to find that the outpost has been attacked, the conference delegates slaughtered by the Klingons, Kira has to teach Dukat how to be a resistance fighter to exact some measure of retribution from the Klingons.

15. Sons of Mogh
A Klingon cannot live with dishonour, at least that’s what they say. Worf can live with his decision to side against the Empire over the invasion of Cardassia, but his family has been removed from power in the Empire as a result, dishonoured. His brother Kurn shows up at DS9, asking Worf to remove this stain by killing him. The trouble is that the laws are different in Bajoran space. Speaking of Bajoran space, the Klingons are up to something sneaky on its borders. So much for honour...


16. Bar Association
Quark runs his bar according to Ferengi traditions and rules, the equivalent of zero hours contracts. So when his brother Rom keels over sick, he gets his pay docked. But it’s when everyone receives a pay cut because of a downturn in customers that Rom is pushed over the edge. Taking advice from Bashir and O’Brien, he starts a union to demand better conditions. But unions are illegal in Ferengi society, and the FCA sends liquidator Brunt with a couple of Nausicaans to remind them of the fact, painfully.

Disc 5
17. Accession
Sisko has always had an uneasy time reconciling his position in Starfleet, with the Bajoran perception of him as a religious figure, the Emissary to the Prophets. When a 200 year old lightship comes out of the wormhole, it offers Sisko an easy way out of his dilemma, for the ship contains the Bajoran poet Akoren Laan, who after 200 years in the Celestial Temple is of the firm belief that he is the Emissary. Sisko passes on the duties to him with gratitude, but seeing the post occupation Bajor, Akoren decides that the only way to heal Bajor is to return society to a strict caste system.


18. Rules of Engagement
Worf is on trial for murder! It was supposed to be a convoy mission, escorting relief supplies to a Cardassian colony, but then the Klingons attacked. In the heat of battle, a civilian ship strayed into the line of fire, decloaking in front of the Defiant, and Worf responded by destroying it. At least that’s what the Klingon prosecutor alleges as he pursues an extradition hearing against Worf.

19. Hard Time
Worf may have been on trial, but O’Brien has been tried and found guilty of espionage on the planet Agratha. What’s more, before Major Kira can even lodge a protest, he’s served his 20 year sentence courtesy of Agrathi virtual reality and memory implant technology, 20 years for O’Brien, just a few hours in the real world. The O’Brien who returns to Deep Space Nine isn’t the same man, and despite his best intentions, he finds simply fitting back into his old job and returning to his family impossible.


20. Shattered Mirror
Jake’s mother is paying a visit, which is quite a trick given that she died in the Borg attack. Actually this Jennifer Sisko is not Jake’s mother; she’s from the mirror universe, and actually is there to kidnap Jake, take him back to her side, in the expectation that his father will follow. It turns out that the rebels may have taken Terok Nor, but the Alliance is sending a fleet under Regent Worf to take it back. Their one chance is the Defiant (‘Smiley’ O’Brien stole the plans last time he was on DS9), but they need Sisko’s help to get it operational. It’s sneaky and underhand as you might expect from the mirror universe, but Jennifer Sisko didn’t expect that she would bond with her ‘son’.

Disc 6
21. The Muse
Lwaxana Troi is back, and she’s pregnant. Since her last visit, she went and fell for the Tavnian Ambassador’s charms, got married, and got pregnant. This is when the world caved in, as she got pregnant with a boy, and Jeyal reverted to Tavnian tradition, which means that the men get to raise the boys, who don’t see any females, including their mothers till they are sixteen. Lwaxana’s hoping that her true love, Odo will be able to help her. Meanwhile, Jake Sisko has come to the attention of a passing alien female named Onaya, who spots the budding writer’s talent. She offers to teach him techniques to become a better writer, but Jake has no idea what she wants in return.


22. For The Cause
Sisko and Kasidy Yates could use more happy time, but her job as a freighter captain means she has schedules to keep, while Starfleet is always calling on Sisko. Most recently, there’re been a security briefing about some industrial scale replicators passing through DS9 as an aid package to Cardassia. Starfleet suspects that the Maquis will try and hijack the shipment. Sisko’s happiness certainly gets tainted when Constable Odo and Commander Eddington of Starfleet Security come to him with compelling evidence that Kasidy is a Maquis sympathiser. But she’s not the traitor that Sisko should be worrying about.

23. To The Death
When the Defiant returns from a Gamma Quadrant mission to find that Deep Space Nine has been attacked, and badly damaged by a Jem’Hadar raiding party, the trail is warm enough to invite immediate pursuit. The trail leads to a damaged Jem’Hadar warship, but not the raiders they are looking for. The ship’s survivors, six warriors and a Vorta named Weyoun are taken aboard the Defiant, where Weyoun proposes a temporary alliance to deal with their common foe, renegade Jem’Hadar that are trying to make an Iconian gateway operational.

NOTE: This episode has a mandatory 2 second edit from the BBFC to remove a neck-break. If you’re wondering at the run time of 23:10 being more than 2 seconds shorter than the usual episode runtime of 23:37, that’s because the episode was first edited by the US broadcast censors, who stated there were around 30 too many Jem’Hadar kills in the final act. So no one has seen the original version of To The Death.


24. The Quickening
A planetary survey mission is interrupted by a distress call, and Bashir, Dax and Kira respond. Only they’re about two hundred years too late. They find a plague world, an example of Dominion punishment for non-compliance, a world where people are born with a Blight, which at some point in their lives will Quicken, and then death will soon follow. Bashir with his Starfleet confidence thinks he’ll be able to find a cure in a matter of days, but the only one who takes hope from his confidence is a pregnant woman named Ekoria. There is a fine line between confidence and arrogance.

Disc 7

25. Body Parts
Quark’s dying! He’s just come back from Ferenginar after his insurance physical with the bad news. If there’s one thing that’s incumbent on a Ferengi hoping to reach the divine treasury after his death, it’s to clear his debts before he dies. Quark has a lot of debts, and he isn’t sanguine about getting a lot of Latinum for selling his desiccated remains on the Futures Exchange. But then someone buys the lot for 500 bars. That someone is Brunt of the FCA, and he wants his pieces of Quark, even when it turns out that Quark was misdiagnosed. Meanwhile, Major Kira is having Chief O’Brien’s baby.


26. Broken Link
Now it’s Odo who is ill, collapsing with an unknown, life-threatening ailment. As he was for so long considered the only one of his kind, medical knowledge about his species is sparse. The only thing that Doctor Bashir can suggest is that he be treated by his own kind, the Founders of the Dominion. That’s a tricky mission indeed, but as it turns out, the Founders are not only expecting Odo, they’ve actually engineered his return with the disease. A year previously, Odo committed a crime that no other changeling had ever committed; he killed one of his own kind. Now it’s time for him to return to the Great Link to be judged. The punishment might be unusually cruel for one of his kind, but what he learns in the Great Link has far more ominous implications for the Alpha Quadrant.

Picture

Deep Space Nine gets a 4:3 regular transfer that is just about passable on an SD screen, and you have to be a little more forgiving to watch it on an HD panel. Just like for The Next Generation DVDs before it, the show may have been shot on film, but its special effects and final editing were completed on videotape. Even on 480 NTSC, the show will look soft, and it’s a tad softer on PAL DVD with its 576 line resolution. The clarity never approaches that which a DVD can offer, and detail levels are low, colour somewhat faded. Having said that, Season 4 actually improves on what has come before, offering a smidge more clarity and definition; you can certainly see more detail in Quark’s lavish costumes, and colours are a tad crisper too. Also, that rainbowing effect I mentioned in the first three seasons is greatly diminished here.

Sound

You have the choice between DD 5.1 English and German, DD 2.0 Surround, French, Italian and Spanish, with subtitles in these languages, Danish, Dutch, Norwegian, and Swedish. I opted for the English track quite naturally, and found that the dialogue was clear, the show’s music and effects came across well, and the surround soundstage was put to decent use in conveying the action sequences, establishing the show’s ambience. It’s a pretty decent surround presentation for a 90s TV show. Season 4 debuts a new arrangement of the theme tune, making Deep Space Nine sound like a bustling hub in the middle of the galaxy, as opposed to a solitary outpost at the edge of nowhere.

Extras

This slimline budget release of Deep Space Nine collects the seven discs of the clamshell box release, and repackages them into four thinpak cases, with one disc getting a case of its own, and the other six sharing three cases, held on opposing inner faces. They’re all held in a sturdy card slipcase, with the art not season specific.

The discs take their time in loading up, insisting on sending The Defiant through the wormhole before letting us see the main menu screens. The episode discs merely list the episodes, selecting one will allow you access to language options, scene select, play episode, and navigate back to the main menu.


All of the extras are on disc 7

Charting New Territory lasts 18:14 and focuses mostly on the (re)-introduction of Worf and the new Klingon storyline, as well as looking at some of the season’s notable episodes.

Michael Westmore’s Aliens is the by now regular segment that looks at some of the alien make-ups created for season 4, this lasts 11:01.

Crew Dossier: Lt Worf (I thought he was a Lt Cmdr?) lasts 14:10, and sees Michael Dorn interviewed about his role as Worf on DS9, with clips taken from 1995 to 2002.

Deep Space Nine Chronicles was a thing back in 1996 around about the time of the franchise’s 30th anniversary. For select episodes of the first four seasons, the actors gave introductions, adding interesting points of trivia about the production. You get the introductions here in a 41:47 Play All chunk. Of course you can select them individually too. There are 34 in total.


You get three featurettes looking at the work of designers on the show, Deep Space Nine Sketchbook: John Eaves (10:02), Jim Martin Sketchbook (7:36), and Bob Blackman’s Designs of the Future (6.40). There’s also a photo gallery with a few dozen images to click through.

Finally there are the Easter Eggs, the Section 31 files hidden around the menus. There are 10 in total, with the actors appearing to talk about notable episodes or their characters for a few minutes, or the creators chatting about certain episodes or effects shots. There’s around 34 minutes of footage in all.

Conclusion

Missteps indeed... The end of season 2 introduced the Dominion in the form of the Jem’Hadar in an explosive way, a game-changing moment, and then the start of season 3 ramped up the stakes when it was revealed that the bosses of the Dominion, were Odo’s people, other shapeshifters. Through the season, things got all the more tense as we learnt more about the implacable Dominion, peaking in a two parter that saw a Cardassian Romulan Alliance try to launch a decisive first strike on the Dominion, only to be suckered into a trap by changeling infiltrators. The chilling final analysis was that thereafter, the only threat to the Dominion would be the Federation and the Klingons. The end of the third season saw the Dominion try and embroil the Federation in a war, giving Sisko and the Defiant false orders to confront the Tzenkethi. It was an attempt that was only averted at the last minute, but the final message was chilling. It was too late, changelings were everywhere.


You probably would have expected to see this play out at the start of Season 4, only we got Klingons instead, loads and loads of Klingons, topped off with a helping of Worf. It seemed at first that the Dominion threat was forgotten, or at least misplaced, while the Klingon threat took centre stage, the militant Empire going back to the old ways of conquest, merely using the Dominion threat as an excuse to invade Cardassia, who had recently shucked off military rule in favour of a civilian government. It would take around ten episodes of awkwardness, trying to sort out the orbital mechanics of this ensemble cast now that a new planetary body had entered the system. How would Worf relate to the existing characters, what would be the dynamics between them, and so forth? While the Dominion did crop up here and there in the opening episodes, it wasn’t until episode eleven that we did finally get back to that pointed statement from the dying Changeling at the end of Season 3, addressed in the Homefront/Paradise Lost two parter.

But in this one instance, the apparent misstep of a ratings chasing Klingon addition to the cast turned out to be a blessing in disguise. That statement at the end of the Season 3 two-parter, that the Klingons and the Federation were all that the Dominion had to worry about, actually made this a logical development for the show. The Dominion threat was big enough that the politics of Bajor, Cardassia, and the Maquis would have to be subsumed into Alpha Quadrant politics at large, and the arrival of Worf also made one thing clear to the creators of Deep Space Nine. With The Next Generation off the air, and with Voyager lost in the Delta Quadrant, all of the Alpha, Beta, and Gamma Quadrants were theirs to play with, the whole of the Star Trek legacy, from the original series all the way through to the Next Generation was their sandpit. They could do anything they wanted, and things would get larger in scale, much more epic as the rest of the series unfolded.


But first Season 4. Despite the Klingon diversion, and the period of apparent aimlessness as the series sought to re-establish its identity, the episodes from the start are really quite strong. The overriding arc, even in this Klingon heavy series, is still the encroaching Dominion threat, with several episodes spent increasing the tension, getting some idea of just how ruthless this foe will be, with more and more encounters with the Jem’Hadar and the Changelings. The Klingon arc gets better as the series progresses, and it also becomes part of the Dominion storyline, most notably in the final episode of the season. There are a couple of interesting character arcs too, most notably Dukat, who undergoes a partial redemption following the Klingon invasion, as he switches allegiances to the civilian government, and learns what it is to be a conquered people under the yoke of the Klingons, after so long being the conquerors of Bajor. If it doesn’t engender much sympathy, it does at least get some degree of recognition from Kira. It becomes an interesting relationship when the two have to work together to find a missing ship, and Kira learns that Dukat is looking for his Bajoran mistress, and their illegitimate daughter. It takes a bit of convincing but Dukat chooses to accept his daughter Ziyal in exchange for losing all status in Cardassian society. Genocidal dictator of Bajor aside, you might get to thinking that Dukat is a nice guy, although he never loses that pragmatic ruthless edge.

Odo’s arc is pretty interesting too. He was ever a man alone, but that was made abundantly clear when he found his people, learned that they were the Dominion, and chose to walk away. That decision was underlined at the end of season 3, when to protect his crewmates, he killed another changeling; something that had never happened before. Now he has no way to return, his solitude is complete, only he’s nursing an unrequited love for Kira, which compounds his solitude, made worse when he considers being honest about his feelings, only to see Kira fall in love with her former resistance cell leader, Shakaar.


If there is one thing that is noticeable about Season 4 of Deep Space Nine, it’s just how far it has shifted away from its original premise, that of Benjamin Sisko’s mission to prepare Bajor for Federation membership, and falling into the role of religious icon, the Emissary almost by accident. The first three seasons had these story arcs in abundance, the tensions between Bajor and Cardassia, between Bajor and the Federation, and then later thrown into the mix, the Maquis, and the Demilitarized Zone between the Federation and Cardassia. In Season 4, we really only get two episodes, and the reasonable villainy of Kai Winn is noticeable by its absence. Accession actually seems contrived to remind us of Sisko’s role as Emissary to the Prophets, and to make him confront that once and for all. But For the Cause is a far more engaging and worthwhile episode, which reminds us of the Maquis’s existence in a dramatic way, one which knocks Sisko for a loop.

There are a whole lot of episodic highlights for this fourth season, and even fewer low points than before. The opening two parter is a strong, action packed event story, one which does the job of re-introducing the Klingons en masse into this universe. It’s followed by the other best ever episode of Deep Space Nine. The first was season one’s Duet, but the Visitor comes from the Field of Dreams school of storytelling, an episode that anyone emotionally invested in father son relationships will appreciate. Starship Down is a great disaster episode, with the Defiant in dire straits, and the crew having to work separately to save their lives. The Dominion comes back into the frame in a big way in the Home Front two parter, which shows that their insidious reach stretches as far as Earth, which many would have considered an inviolable paradise, and Return to Grace is the second round of Kira vs. Dukat, which sees Dukat having to learn from Kira how to be a terrorist. I’ve already mentioned the Maquis episode, For the Cause, but then it’s immediately followed by To The Death, which sees Sisko having to work with the Jem’Hadar to put down a rogue faction. Even with the censorship it’s an action packed episode.


As for episodes that I disliked, Rejoined is another attempt at Trek trying to portray same sex relationships, but doing it through the allegory of a Trill taboo. It was behind the times in 1996, and Rejoined once again pulls back at the critical point, letting the taboo win, the status quo be preserved. Rules of Engagement was an interestingly conceived story, that of Worf on trial for a war crime, but it was poorly executed. Hard Time was another torture O’Brien episode, but it was episodic television when DS9 was becoming a serial format. None of what O’Brien went through, none of the ramifications of his ordeal exist outside the confines of this episode, and it really should have carried over through the season.

I still love the Ferengi episodes, there’s a whole lot of sharp humour and observational wit to them. Little Green Men setting them up as the Roswell aliens was genius, while Bar Association is a great show to relate to. Body Parts is just fun, allowing Jeffrey Combs as Brunt to just shine. He also made a memorable appearance as yet another alien, the Vorta Weyoun, only to die at the end of the episode. He was so good in that role, that it turned out that Vorta are cloned! I even liked the Mirror Universe episode in this season, whereas I’d originally thought that one was enough.


Season 4 is another strong season of Deep Space Nine, and following the diversion of the Klingon heavy opening arc, and the need to fit Worf into the storyline, it quickly found its feet, and delivered a season of strong, entertaining episodes. This budget collection merely collects the original discs in standardised packaging as opposed to the more expensive clamshell boxes, and it’s a far more affordable way to collect Star Trek. The content is still good, and for this fourth season, the picture quality improves to the point that it’s tolerable when scaled up to a larger screen. It’s a crying shame that this won’t get the HD treatment that The Next Generation got.