STAR TREK: DEEP SPACE NINE

   US tv series (1993-). Paramount. Series creators/executive prods: Rick Berman and Michael Piller. Exec prod Ira Steven Behr. Based upon STAR TREK created by Gene RODDENBERRY.Writers have included Piller, Behr,James Crocker, Paul Robert Coyle, Bill Dial, Jill Sherman Donner, Peter AllanFields, D.C. FONTANA, Morgan Gendel, Michael McGreevey \& Naren Shankar, Joe Menosky, Kathryn Powers, Frederick Rappaport, Sam Rolfe, Alexander Singer, Jim Trombetta, Robert Hewitt Wolfe. Directors have included Corey Allen, Cliff Bole, Avery Brooks, David Carson, James L. Conway, Kim Friedman, Winrich Kolbe, Les Landau, Rob Legato, David Livingston, Paul Lynch, Robert Scheerer, Robert Wiemer. The two-hour pilot was aired in Jan 1993. Since then, 18 one-hour episodes in the first season, and a further 26 in the second.

   Two seasons to 1994. A third season is current in 1995.In an unusual departure for the STAR TREK franchise (the first live-action tv spin-off was STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION and this was the second) ST:DSN is set on a space station (newly occupied by the Federation) orbiting a planet, not a starship. The effect of this moreenclosed and stationary world is slightly to emphasize characterisation and personal conflict among the occupants of the station, many of whom do not belong to Starfleet, and to reduce the number of episodes featuring exploration and the discovery of strange alien races and artifacts. However, the station is dramatically situated: it is close to a stableWORMHOLE leading to an unexplored area at the other side of the galaxy, the GammaQuadrant; the planet below is inhabited by the spiritual-natured Bajorans first encountered in a fifth season episode of Star Trek: TheNext Generation: "Ensign Ro"; the station itself has just been vacated bythe militaristic Cardassians, persecutors of the Bajorans who are still in the vicinity, and as an alien construct lacks the comforts of Federation starbases. The series is set towards the end of the time periodcovered by Star Trek: The Next Generation.The regular cast are the station commander, Benjamin Sisko, played by black actor Avery Brooks; his non-Starfleet second in command, a Bajoran, Major Kira Nerys, played by Nana Visitor; science officer Jadzia Dax, a Trill (humanoid and internalslug acting in symbiosis, currently female but the previous humanoid partner in the symbiosis was an old man), played by Terry Farrell; the young medical officer Julian Bashir, sometimes aggressive,sometimes naive, usually a womaniser, played by Siddig El Fadil; the non-Starfleet Security Chief, Odo, a shape- shifting alien of unknown origin, played by ReneAuberjonois; Chief of Operations Miles O'Brien, ahuman, played by Colm Meaney; Quark, the opportunistic and greedy Ferengi proprietor of the station's bar and gambling casino, one of an alien race of merchants and entrepreneurs introduced in ST:TNG, played by Armin Shimerman; Jake Sisko, the 14-yr-old son of the commander, played by Cirroc Lofton.As an ensemble the cast is efficient, with Odo and Dax both being very interesting characters, and some good "morphing" effects when Odo changes shape. The "Q"character from ST:TNG makes several appearances. Various sinisterbeings appear through the wormhole from the Gamma Quadrant, and the last episode of the second season introduced a new alien race, the Jem'Hadar, who live in the quadrant. But the response from STfans to the series has been a little luke warm, and it has not come closeto rivalling the high ratings of its immediate predecessor, in part perhaps because of competition from the other new space-station program, the harder-edged BABYLON-5 (1993-). Spin-off novels had reached, by early 1995, Star Trek:Deep Space Nine\#11: Devil in the Sky (1995) by Greg Cox and John BETANCOURT. There are also young adult book spin-offs.

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