Star Trek: Deep Space Nine had its detractors from the very beginning. Star Trek fans were used to seeing starships fighting battles in space, away teams beaming down to unexplored planets, and many first contacts. That's what they had with Star Trek: The Next Generation so when Deep Space Nine came along, and fans learned the series was going to be set on a space station, there wasn't a lot of excitement. And only two years after Deep Space Nine debuted, Star Trek: Voyager premiered.
Voyager was the Star Trek fare fans were used to with the added addition of a ship being stranded far away from home with no idea how to return. That made for good television. And that was why, at the beginning of season three of Deep Space Nine, Michael Piller, the series' showrunner, very bluntly told Ira Steven Behr that he had to accept that Voyager was going to be the flagship show of Star Trek, and Deep Space Nine wasn't going to be able to compete with it.
"At the start of season three, Michael came into my office and said,"Look, Ira. I want you to knowI love DS9, and I think you're doing a great job, but you just have to prepare yourself that Voyager is going to be the flagship show. It will always be overshadowed by Voyager because it's going to have a ship, it's going to be on a journey to get back home. It's just going to be way too in the pocket of the franchise for DS9 to compete."Ira Steven Behr
Behr admitted that those words were like waving a red flag in front of a bull and took them as a challenge which worked as the following seasons produced some of the absolute best Deep Space Nine (as well as Star Trek itself) episodes like In the Pale Moonlight, The Visitor, Far Beyond the Stars, Trials and Tribble-ations, The Way of the Warrior, Duet, and Call to Arms, just to name a few.
Deep Space Nine didn't have the starship in space all of the time, but it had deep drama coupled with the action which often created superior episodes. And sometimes, even those without the action excelled at being the best. But then, those types of episodes are what Trek does best. Even though the battle scenes and action work is edge-of-your-seat entertainment, the deep dives into the characters and how they interacted with one another often provided more intriguing stories.
Deep Space Nine might not have been the flagship show of Star Trek back in the nineties, but, in many ways, it overshadowed the other series with the complexity of the arcs, the stellar acting, and the undeniable chemistry between the characters. It achieved a well-deserved status as one of the best Star Trek series.