Deep Space Nine Companion (Star Trek Deep Space Nine) (Paperback)

by Terry J. Erdmann (Author), Paula M. Block (Author) "What are the most important elements required in the development of a television series?..." (more)
Key Phrases: holosuite program, grand nagus, wormhole aliens, Deep Space Nine, Ira Behr, Ron Moore (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description

"The challenge of putting together a television show for the first time was especially intimidating because of the traditions and the expectations for Star Trek®."

-- Michael Piller, co-creator, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine

It might be hard to believe, but there was a time when launching a new Star Trek series was considered a risky venture. Maybe it was just luck that Star Trek: The Next Generation® had succeeded. Could another show capture the imagination of the viewers?

The creators of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine® built a cast of characters totally different from the more comfortable, familiar ones that had been seen on previous incarnations of Star Trek. One of the writers observed, "You can see right away they're not perfectly engineered humans....They seem more real....They represent a different way to tell a story." The setting for the show was a space station, a dark, almost sinister, alien place -- the diametrical opposite of a bright reassuring starship. This new Star Trek series set every expectation on its head -- and it succeeded. Deep Space Nine created some of the most visionary, emotionally charged and critically acclaimed hours of television ever made, and at the end of seven years it could boast of ranking at the top of the syndicated ratings year after year.

The Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Companion is the official guide to all 176 spectacular episodes of this revolutionary series. Detailed synopses, behind-the-scenes information, and in-depth interviews with the cast and crew are provided for each show. Hundreds of photographs and illustrations -- many never before seen -- fill the pages of this book. For the casual reader or the fan who wants to know more, this is the definitive book on this groundbreaking series. From its explosive beginning to the heartrending conclusion, relive it all and see why TV Guide called it "the best acted, written, produced, and altogether finest...Star Trek series."

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter One: First Season Overview

Putting It All Together

What are the most important elements required in the development of a television series? A concept, certainly. A look. A tone. A personality, if you will. But in actuality, it's the people involved with the series, both on-screen and off, that form the skeleton upon which the entire production takes shape. And if the skeleton of the newborn television series Star Trek: Deep Space Nine were to resemble the space station itself, there is no doubt that Ops, the station's nerve center, could be represented in those first critical days only by co-creators Rick Berman and Michael Piller. It was late 1991 when Berman, executive producer of Star Trek: The Next Generation, received the clarion call from Brandon Tartikoff, then head of Paramount Pictures, to create a new science fiction television series for the studio.

"I was asked to create and develop a series that would serve as a companion piece to The Next Generation for about a year and a half, and then TNG would go off the air and this new show would continue," recalls Berman. "So I asked Michael Piller to get involved, and we put our heads together. I really never had the opportunity to discuss any ideas with Gene [Roddenberry]. This was very close to the end of Gene's life, and he was quite ill at the time. But he knew that we were working on something, and I definitely had his blessing to develop it."

Tartikoff had mentioned the possibility of the new show being a kind of Rifleman in space -- the concept being that if Star Trek was originally conceived of as a Wagon Train to the stars, then the new show would be The Rifleman, a man and his son living together in a frontier town. And the station itself, of course, would be a high-tech version of Fort Laramie, or Dodge City, or any of a variety of classic American Western towns located at the edge of the new frontier.

Sounds simple enough -- but remember, this wasn't to be just any science fiction series.

"The challenge of putting together a television show for the first time was especially intimidating because of the traditions and the expections for Star Trek," admits Piller. "And yet, coming with the wind at our backs [from The Next Generation, where Piller also held the title of executive producer], it really felt as if we had figured out what made Star Trek work, and that we could bring all of the vision that Gene Roddenberry had about space and the future to a different kind of franchise. We didn't want to do the same thing again. We didn't want to have another series of shows about space travel. We felt that there was an opportunity to really look deeper, more closely at the working of the Federation and the Star Trek universe by standing still. And by putting people on a space station where they would be forced to confront the kinds of issues that people in space ships are not forced to confront."

In a series that focuses on a starship like the Enterprise, Piller explains, you live week by week. "You never have to stay and deal with the issues that you've raised," he says. But by focusing on a space station, you create a show about commitment

"...about the Federation's commitment to Bajor and DS9," he notes. "About the commitment that people have to make when they go to live in a new environment, and have to coexist with other species who have different agendas than they have. It's like the difference between a one-night stand and a marriage. On Deep Space Nine, whatever you decide has consequences the following week. So it's about taking responsibility for your decisions, the consequences of your acts."

As they developed the bible for the show, Berman and Piller decided that the "town" -- or rather the space station -- would be a darker and grittier environment than fans of both the original series and The Next Generation were accustomed to seeing. And the inhabitants of the space station, while still reflecting all the best qualities of humanity, a factor that had been so important to Gene Roddenberry, would be...less than perfect.

"Everybody in the original series was heroic, but they weren't pure in the way that Gene Roddenberry decided to make the characters in The Next Generation," explains Writer Joe Menosky, who served on staff for TNG and freelanced several scripts for DS9. "It's a mystery to me as to how that worked on TNG, but it worked great. On paper you would think that these people have had every shred of human pathology that makes humanity interesting bled out of them, everything that makes one feel compassionate towards people, their weaknesses that make them human. And yet it worked."

But of the characters on DS9, notes Menosky, "You can see right away they're not the perfectly engineered humans of TNG. They seem more real. I don't know if that makes them as attractive to viewers or not. But they are really different, and they represent a different way to tell a story. And it was definitely a conscious choice to create that potential for conflict."

"Gene's major rule was to avoid conflict among his twenty-fourth-century human characters," says Berman. "But we needed this conflict for decent drama, and we didn't want to have to always bring the conflict into the stories from the outside. So the idea we came up with was, what if we create a cast of characters that have amongst them non-Starfleet people? There can be conflict amongst the non-Starfleet people, and there can be conflict between

the Starfleet people and the non-Starfleet people. And then, what if we put it on a Cardassian space station that's very inhospitable, to say the least. So by having characters like Quark and Kira and Odo in this inhospitable setting, we were able to create a conflict with the environment, so to speak."

"We really set out to create conflict on every level of this show," says Piller, "conflict between the Federation and Bajor; conflict between Starfleet and the environment in the space station that was not particularly comfortable for humans; conflict with the religious aspects of the Bajoran people; conflict with the Cardassians and the beings our characters would encounter on the other side of the wormhole; conflict between us and the humanist values of Gene Roddenberry's futuristic humans. All of these things were to make life on this space station challenging."

The irony, of course, was that this concerted effort would create conflict with some of the most hardcore Star Trek fans, who didn't take kindly to the attempt to tinker with the magic formula.

"People talked about the show being 'edgier,' a word I hate," says Berman. "People talked about the show being 'darker,' which it really was never intended to be. But I think it's all because they didn't see that group of loving family members that existed on the first two Star Trek shows. You had a much more contemporary group of characters that had been plopped down in this space station. And I think that after a year or two, a lot of fans who appreciated what Star Trek was about saw that this series was Star Trek at its core, although it was also very unique."

It was Piller, primarily, who guided the writers in developing the facets of the characters' personalities at the initial stages. "Michael had a very clear voice for each of them," recalls Robert Hewitt Wolfe, who came aboard the series as story editor and departed (at the end of Season 5) as a producer. "He had a pretty good vision of what he wanted and then eventually the actors started to bring their own stuff in."

But unlike Athena, that vision did not emerge full-grown from Piller's mind. "When I got there, Michael was working on the pilot," says Peter Allan Fields, a veteran of the Next Generation writing staff who was brought in as co-producer during the preproduction period. "And I began trying to think up stories on this or that, and line up other writers, explaining to them what I thought we would want. But Michael would keep changing this character or fixing that detail, altering this and picking up the hem and changing the inseam. So I'd have to call up the same writers and say, 'Forget what I told you.' My first couple of months were unproductive because there wasn't that much for me to do until Michael had a firm grasp on what he wanted out of the show. He'd had a pretty good idea when I got there, but for Michael it wasn't good enough. He's got a wonderful knack of taking something and giving it just enough twist, something that we can still relate to but that's far and away alien. Or something that we haven't seen but have felt. Human emotion and character are...well, galaxy wide."

Like Fields, Ira Steven Behr was a TNG veteran, albeit a shell-shocked one. "I did not enjoy writing TNG," he admits. "I did not like the lack of conflict, the kind of stodginess, the tech solutions to a lot of problems." Behr's relationship with the TNG staff, particularly Piller and Berman, remained good, and when work began on their new "baby," he yielded to their requests that he return to the fold. "Mike said to me that 'the new show is going to have more humor, more conflict, it's going to be a little more bizarre.'"

Behr came on board as supervising producer. And like Fields, he found working with the outside writers during the preproduction period to be a difficult task, primarily because the thumbnail characterizations of the crew kept evolving. "I'm sending writers off, telling them to think Clint Eastwood for Odo. Then they cast Rene Auberjonois, and it's not quite the same thing." Still, the final mix turned out to be even better than imagined. "Any time you cast a show, the actors bring in something different," Behr comments. "For example, Sisko was supposed to be a cross between Kirk and Picard. And Avery Brooks brought to it a much sterner air of authority. He's much more a military leader."

The friendship between Bashir and O'Brien was something that occurre...