How Star Trek: Voyager Accidentally Saved Deep Space Nine

By Chris Snellgrove
| Published 19 seconds ago

Normally, Star Trek fans think of Deep Space Nine and Voyager as entirely different kinds of shows. After all, DS9 bucked franchise tradition by setting everything on a space station rather than a starship, effectively paving the way for longer-form, serialized storytelling. Voyager, by comparison, was more in the vein of The Original Series and The Next Generation, featuring a crew boldly going where no one had gone before. On Voyager, they were almost always going where no human had gone before because of the show’s premise. The crew is stranded on the other side of the galaxy in the Delta Quadrant, where it will take them decades to get back home.

While the shows are very different, Voyager had a surprising amount of influence on Deep Space Nine, a show that came out years earlier. Once Star Trek’s producers knew that Voyager would be exploring the Delta Quadrant each week, they realized that DS9 would have to explore more of what’s on the other side of the Bajoran wormhole: namely, the Gamma Quadrant. This led directly to the creation of the Dominion, which gave the show a newfound focus and some of its most beloved episodes. In this way, it’s fair to say that Voyager did more than influence its sister show; it also helped to accidentally save Deep Space Nine!

The Changing Face Of Evil

This story goes back to 1993, which is when the Deep Space Nine episode “Rules of Acquisition” made Star Trek history by first mentioning the Dominion, which would become the collective Big Bad of the entire series. On the DS9 Season 3 DVD special features, writer Robert Hewitt Wolfe revealed why the Dominion was created: “Voyager was going to be wandering through the Delta Quadrant from place to place, meeting new people every week, and we wanted to make the Gamma Quadrant distinctly different from that, by creating the Dominion, a sort of unifying anti-Federation in a way, just to give it a completely different character.”

Up to this point, the Gamma Quadrant hadn’t been explored in much detail, which is kind of shocking. In-universe, the thing that made Deep Space Nine so special is that it was stationed near the Bajoran wormhole. Most wormholes in Star Trek are unstable, meaning that you can’t safely travel through them without ending up in random places. This wormhole was stable, meaning that those in the Alpha Quadrant could easily visit the largely unexplored Gamma Quadrant (and vice versa). While we met some aliens from the Gamma Quadrant in Season 1, we didn’t really get an idea of who the movers and shakers in this area really were.

Crouching Comedy, Hidden Drama

“Rules of Acquisition” set out to fix this problem. It was a goofy Ferengi comedy episode played for laughs, one in which Grand Nagus Zek becomes obsessed with doing business in the Gamma Quadrant. Along the way, he and Quark learn about the existence of the Dominion, a mysterious but dominant force in that region of space. By creating the Dominion, the Deep Space Nine writers gave the show a kind of evil Federation as its biggest bad guy. This helped to differentiate DS9 from the upcoming spinoff Voyager, but the inclusion of these villains also supercharged the show, helping Deep Space Nine carve out its own unique identity in Star Trek history.

The introduction of the Dominion, an organization run by shapeshifters, paved the way to some of the show’s most exciting stories. For example, the writers had the shapeshifting Founders create a war between Klingons and the Federation, a story that gave the show a big ratings boost because it brought Worf back as a main character. Ongoing tension between Starfleet and the Dominion led to excellent standalone episodes, including “Call to Arms” and “In the Pale Moonlight.” The latter was part of the years-long Dominion War arc that effectively transformed this sci-fi series into a wartime show, boldly going where no Trek had gone before.

Some fans thought the war arc violated the very spirit of Star Trek. However, most agreed that this made for one of the most thrilling arcs in franchise history, one that helped DS9 maintain a relentless momentum that led to an absolutely jaw-dropping final episode. None of this would have been possible without the Dominion, who effectively saved the show. In turn, they would never have been introduced to Deep Space Nine without Voyager, a rival Trek show that forced producers to finally answer fans’ most burning question: what the hell is on the other side of that wormhole?