[Gates McFadden] Star Trek: The Next Generation
had successfully returned the franchise to television and flourished.
How true.
[Larry Nemecek] The syndicated model had worked so well for Next Generation.
Even on the business side of things,
Next Generation was this amazing paradigm shift.
Paramount knew that they had a cash cow in Star Trek.
[McFadden] So Paramount did what any studio does with its prized cow.
Indubitably.
-[cow moos] -[McFadden] Milk it for all it's worth.
We were a few seasons into Next Generation
when they said, "Let's get another show."
[McFadden] This is the story of how Deep Space Nine
attempted to take Star Trek somewhere it had never been.
A space station.
[McFadden] In other words...
It's not a starship boldly going.
[McFadden] So even though...
Some things are still the same.
[McFadden] Most things were very different.
So beam aboard and hold on tight
as we boldly go into the depths of Star Trek.
And you can see it all from here in The Center Seat.
With the death of Gene Roddenberry in 1991,
the next chapter of the Star Trek saga on TV would be untouched by its creator.
But Star Trek was now in the hands of Rick Berman,
someone Gene trusted more than anyone.
I felt it was my responsibility to keep Gene's optimism alive.
[McFadden] Which as the new series approached was easier said than done.
One of the biggest bugaboos driving writers crazy
with the idea of Gene's perfect humans,
how do you have conflict among characters and have it be Star Trek
and its perfect humans in the advanced 24th-century world?
[McFadden] There was another problem too.
We can't have two Star Trek ships out at the same time.
Do you want to confuse the audience with another ship show?
[McFadden] With The Next Generation still on the air,
the network was looking for something different.
They've got the well-oiled machine up and running.
Their problem was how to distinguish it to go where you hadn't gone before.
[McFadden] Meaning...
[Andrew Robinson] It can't be just about going from planet to planet
and solving problems, you know, with aliens in space.
[McFadden] So Rick Berman and showrunner Michael Piller
came up with something exactly opposite.
Let's do it on a space station. Let's not be locked onto an Enterprise.
[Andre Bormanis] The premise as Michael Piller used to explain it was,
"The action is gonna come to us."
It's like Dodge City, you know, in Gunsmoke.
And immediately now you're telling a story that is different to what has come before.
[McFadden] Well, different, that's what the network wanted.
This is where the adventure is.
[McFadden] No sooner had the adventure begun
than the worries set in.
Every new challenge to come up with an original Star Trek
is fraught with worry.
"Are we making it too different?"
You know, it was a little bit risky.
And is some of it just gonna be,
"We're gonna have a certain aspect of the audience
that's just gonna be so, you know, bullheaded
that they won't come in and accept something new"?
[McFadden] Although risky, the writers were more than ready
to explore this new style of Star Trek.
Let's push the boundaries and see what are the edges.
What are the limitations of what Star Trek can be?
[McFadden] Someone who was very interested in pushing the edges
with both his writing and his beard color
was Next Generation writer Ira Behr.
Man, he was just into it. [laughs] I don't know how else to say it.
[McFadden] And coming over to Deep Space Nine,
Ira brought some bold ideas.
Ira got very involved in wanting to do
long strings of continuing episodes.
[McFadden] Which is now bingeworthy TV.
But since the original series,
Star Trek had made its name as an episodic epic.
That follows a definite pattern.
The minute you have serialization, you have lots of arcs going.
You can't miss those things.
At this point in television, you know, almost everything was episodic.
Yeah, when will we learn?
There were very few serialized shows.
Dallas was a serialized show.
Dynasty is a serialized show, primetime soap operas.
[gasps]
[McFadden] The studio wanted a fresh approach,
but not that fresh.
The studio said no.
[McFadden] Paramount feared viewers would be adrift
in this new Star Trek universe.
These shows were gonna be syndicated.
They were not necessarily gonna be syndicated in order.
The independent stations, they don't want to have to be locked
into doing these in the order that we give it to them.
They wanna be able to show them in whatever order they want
that suits their market 'cause this is important for their ratings
and they just wanna mix them up.
And they wanted standalone episodes.
[McFadden] And even though...
Ira was very good at talking me into doing what he wanted to do.
[McFadden] He wasn't that good.
The studio absolutely said no.
[McFadden] Okay, well, that's the last we'll hear of that.
Most likely.
It may not have been ready for serialized plotlines,
but Star Trek was ready for something else far more groundbreaking.
Your hero's a Negro captain.
Avery being the first African American captain
of a Star Trek series like this,
but in that day and age was a big deal.
People won't accept it. It's not believable.
It just didn't happen.
It was exciting to know that we were gonna change history, really, with that.
This was before there was a Black president,
so this was really groundbreaking at the time.
[McFadden] Not only did Starfleet have its first commander of color,
but unlike the captains before him,
Benjamin Sisko was carrying a lot of baggage.
He was coming aboard with a very specific, complicated backstory.
And so we start with a captain losing his wife.
Damn it! We just can't leave her here!
Being left with his son.
I was just thinking how much you look like your mom.
[McFadden] Not only would Sisko be unlike any captain before him...
He believes Captain Picard is personally responsible for the death of his wife.
[screams]
And he now has to come to terms with all that.
Otherwise, he has no future at all.
One who does not wish to be among us.
In that sense, he's very much like Captain Pike in "The Cage."
I'm tired of being responsible for 203 lives.
By choosing all these elements,
Michael Piller set up the incredible possibilities for this character.
[McFadden] But creating a complex, conflicted captain
would prove to be a double-edged sword.
That was a difficult fit for Star Trek.
Like, that's not how a Starfleet captain should be.
[McFadden] Avery Brooks' audition,
though he didn't know it at the time,
turned out to be a previous production that showcased his emotional range.
I had done a movie of the week for Showtime.
It was a version of Uncle Tom's Cabin.
Nobody can buy my soul.
Avery came off as an incredibly powerful man
with hurt, with damage, which works perfectly for Sisko.
[McFadden] But Paramount was on a different page.
The studio wanted Sisko to be somebody else.
They didn't think Avery was charismatic enough.
They wanted Kirk and they wanted Picard,
and I think they didn't realize that no one was writing Kirk or Picard.
They were writing Sisko.
[McFadden] This was going to require an intervention.
So I went to Junie Lowry, the casting director,
and I said, "Avery Brooks," and she said,
"Yeah, we talked about Avery, but he's down in the Caribbean.
He's on vacation."
I said, "So what?
Send him the script.
We're talking about a man who could have a job for seven years.
You don't think he'd want to read this script on vacation?"
She says, "Okay, I'll send him the script."
[McFadden] And in the end...
I was ready to die with her.
[McFadden] Avery's talent could not be ignored.
We settled on Avery Brooks because he was the best.
He was the best captain.
[McFadden] And this captain's leadership
would be tested as much off the bridge as on it,
by a 15-year-old.
I was instructed to not be like Wil Wheaton and Wesley Crusher.
He was too much of a problem-solver/know-it-all,
and they wanted my character to be more human and fallible,
just like a regular kid.
[McFadden] And Cirroc did have one advantage.
[Cirroc Lofton] I think I avoided the trap of being another Wesley Crusher
by not knowing about Wesley Crusher.
So you can't imitate something that you have no idea of.
Wanna go for a swim?
[McFadden] Like The Next Generation before it,
Deep Space Nine imagined real-life family struggles in the 24th century.
Is this the food replicator?
[McFadden] And this dose of 20th-century reality
was more alien to American television than even the weirdest aliens.
How often did you see a single father raising a child
in those days of television?
Not very often.
[McFadden] So Paramount would be getting just what they wanted:
a very different Star Trek with a very different captain,
captaining a very different starship.
It's not a starship, it's a station.
Space station?
[McFadden] Indeed.
The days of the Enterprise were over,
and Captain Sisko would need a station to captain.
Very difficult to come by that station's design.
There was a huge evolution to it all.
[Herman Zimmerman] And it's a whole different approach.
We were going about the station as being a kind of Tower of Babel place
that was built over a long period of time by several cultures.
So we started doing sketching of things
that look like an alien platform with different levels
and different hardware hanging off and places for ships to dock.
So we had these crazy designs.
[McFadden] In the end, producers decided the solution to this space station dilemma
was a simple matter of keeping up with the Cardassians.
I'm allowed to do whatever I want.
[McFadden] Oh, no, no, no, the Cardassians.
You can't understand that we are skeptical.
[Nemecek] When it was finally decided it would be a Cardassian station,
that was still a blank slate.
What did that look like?
We have to start thinking like Cardassians.
[McFadden] Who knows how Cardassians think?
But Rick Berman knew one thing about Cardassian architecture.
Rick Berman rightly said, "You know, this should be a shape
that any kid watching the show could draw in a few strokes."
[Pabst] All right, I haven't got a title for this one yet.
Anybody got any ideas?
And they eventually came around to maybe the station could be a kind of a wheel.
The circular station with a hub, you know, with a core
made a lot of sense.
At the end of the process, the station looked very alien.
The model for Deep Space Nine was six feet around,
and it was the most beautiful model.
[McFadden] The designers had reinvented the wheel for space.
There were, like, cogs in a wheel.
They actually had cogs and rolled in the cogged floor.
Herman built, up until that point,
the largest standing interior set ever made for Star Trek,
actually, on the promenade.
You walked on and you were enveloped.
You came on the set and it was hard not to think that you were on a space station
and that everything was fully functional.
It was beautiful.
[McFadden] Beautiful, unusual,
it was like nothing Star Trek had seen before.
Unfortunately...
Deep Space Nine and Babylon 5,
they came out at right about the same time.
[McFadden] Babylon 5, like Star Trek, was set on a space station.
Excuse me, but I'm in the middle of 15 things, all of them annoying.
[Doug Drexler] I think that there were a lot of people
who thought that one stole from the other,
that Star Trek was ripping off Babylon 5.
[McFadden] And it certainly didn't help
that Babylon 5 had already been pitched to Paramount.
J. Michael Straczynski had come in and pitched what we all now know as Babylon 5.
Not every dream I've heard lately ends well for you.
[McFadden] Paramount turned it down.
[Drexler] Straczynski, I believe he thought
that Star Trek was ripping him off.
Was Deep Space Nine ripping off Babylon 5? I sincerely doubt it. I really do.
The idea of a space station is not an original idea.
It's an obvious thing to do.
I just think that those are ironic similarities.
[McFadden] Similarities that ended there because Deep Space Nine was forging ahead,
boldly going into the future.
[McFadden] With a big cast, big set, and big expectations,
shooting on the pilot began in August of 1992,
with The Next Generation alumnus David Carson in the director's chair.
It wasn't the first pilot that I'd done, but it was certainly the biggest.
[McFadden] Also big were the stakes.
I had this meeting with production people at Paramount
who said to me, "This is the first time we're doing a Star Trek series
without Gene Roddenberry."
[McFadden] Paramount feared that if Deep Space Nine ventured too far
from Star Trek 's traditions, the fans might desert them.
There is that risk.
[McFadden] So the studio instructions were crystal clear.
[David Carson] "This pilot and this series is very important to Paramount,
so we want you to know that it's very important that we get it right."
[John Tenuto] And of course, a director on a pilot
isn't just coming in for the week, getting an episode together and helping.
A director on a pilot really sets the tone.
Cut.
[McFadden] David had his work cut out for him
with a complicated pilot script called "Emissary."
The "Emissary" was such a difficult story to tell.
[McFadden] And David needed to get it right from the very first frame.
The first scene that I shot of Deep Space Nine
was the scene on the bridge,
and there was a lot of movement in the scene,
so I thought this is a great way for us all to get to know this bridge.
So I followed them around on a crane.
It was problematic, and it caused Livingston to come and tell me
what am I doing.
"You're still doing this shot at lunchtime?"
[laughs]
'Cause I had to represent the production end,
and I had to come at him and tell him, "David, you gotta move on."
He didn't want to, and a lot of times he didn't.
Damn it! What's the problem?
[McFadden] The problem was to do with some awkward introductions.
It had a lot of characters to introduce.
Who the hell are you?
And they were all not cookie-cutter type of people.
[laughs]
There were all kinds of people that we had really never seen before.
[McFadden] Some weren't really people at all.
The Trill is implanted. It's ancient.
You've got trying to figure out that relationship.
[McFadden] A symbiotic relationship between basically an ancient asexual slug
and an alien race called the Trill,
played by Terry Farrell.
Deep Space Nine was not just about man.
It was about a whole bunch of different races and species.
[McFadden] And for the actors who played these races and species,
well, even some of them were a little lost.
"I think there's been a mistake. This is a man's role.
It's not... It's not written for a woman."
And that was my conditioning.
[McFadden] Nana Visitor was invited to read
for the character of a Bajoran revolutionary.
She found the way it was written revolutionary.
[Kay Eaton] Science fiction needs more strong women characters.
I'm always saying that, aren't I, Jules?
[Nana Visitor] She wasn't smoothed out. She wasn't reasonable all the time.
She wasn't controllable.
She didn't care about how she was perceived.
She cared about how she lived her life more
and what goals she had and how she met those.
And too bad if people didn't like her.
[McFadden] Nana took that exact attitude into her audition as Kira.
[Carson] There was a long table with Rick Berman and me
and a few other people sitting around behind it,
and she stormed into the room, really, and started reading.
I think it was the first scene with Commander Sisko.
I don't believe the Federation has any business being here.
I was pretty pissed off in that scene.
And she got hold of these chairs and started to throw them around the room.
And it was extraordinary.
And we sat there going,
"Wow, this really is a revolutionary who wants to be doing stuff."
I remember terrifying someone in the room.
And then she did her last line, banged her hands on the tabletop
and glared at us as if to chance say, "Okay, I got it, right?"
And turned and walked out of the room.
And she was right. She got it. That was it.
[McFadden] Despite a spirited audition,
Nana was conflicted.
[Visitor] I was so excited to get it. I wanted to do it so badly.
And my manager said, "It's science fiction.
Don't take this one. It's gonna ruin your career."
I thought long and hard about it,
and I refused the job at first.
I got a call from one of the producers,
and he talked about the level and who else was cast,
and that did it for me.
I'll find a way to make it happen.
[McFadden] The aggressive audition technique
that had worked for Nana was all the rage.
[Carson] Rene Auberjonois came in, stalked into the room,
shut the door firmly behind him.
[McFadden] With some cast members virtually demanding their roles.
He didn't say hello to anybody.
Just when he finished, he finished his last line,
turned his back, walked through the door, slammed it behind him.
He came in with the body posture and the attitude
and everything that was Odo.
It was wild.
He was as rude as he could possibly be to all of us,
and that was Odo. [laughs]
You're gonna get sloppy without me to keep an eye on you.
I don't think so.
[McFadden] Armin Shimerman reprised his Ferengi act from The Next Generation,
but this time as Quark,
and was now an occasionally affable bartender.
I'd like to discuss arranging a line of credit. [laughs]
[McFadden] The Cardassians had come over from The Next Generation too,
but the inscrutable Garak, played by Andrew Robinson,
was derived in part from an unlikely inspiration.
I played Liberace once on a TV movie.
I have a wonderful song.
[Andrew Robinson] There was something about Garak
that always was reminding me...
He became kind of Liberace's cousin.
I do appreciate making new friends whenever I can.
[McFadden] But the main influence for Garak, a Cardassian spy,
drew on contemporary literature.
The conception of Garak was a character out of a Le Carré novel.
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy was a common reference point in the writers' room,
that Garak was created with that in mind.
If you can't beat it, spy on it.
[McFadden] Which may explain Garak's other peculiarity.
I have a clothing shop nearby.
For Garak to end up on Deep Space Nine,
and as a tailor,
it's one of the most bizarre dramatic situations.
It's Dr. Bashir, isn't it?
[McFadden] Alexander Siddig provided Star Trek with, hmm,
arguably its first truly dashing doctor
as its chief medical officer, Julian Bashir.
Dr. Bashir is this wide-eyed, idealistic Starfleet officer.
This is where the adventure is.
Siddig, he was just terrific.
I think we all agreed on him as soon as he arrived.
[McFadden] Along with Irish actor Colm Meaney.
Another neutrino disruption.
[McFadden] Who played Chief Engineer Miles O'Brien.
[David Livingston] He represented every man,
you know, the working guy, the guy who got his hands dirty.
Even though it was all this computerized stuff,
you knew that he'd look good with a wrench in his hand.
[McFadden] There were a lot of characters in the first episode,
something that posed quite a challenge for the director.
What the hell is happening out there?
Very often, directors on television are trying to come in on budget.
They got a lot of pressure,
and they are going to try to move you through as fast as possible.
"That's good enough."
[McFadden] Well, they didn't come in on budget
nor on schedule.
Don't ask my opinion next time!
[McFadden] So much so, David fell behind with the feature-length,
special effects-laden premiere.
"Emissary" went over budget. We went over schedule.
This is outrageous!
[McFadden] Paramount was soon breathing down the young director's neck.
He did get a lot of crap from the studio about falling behind schedule
and about going over budget.
[McFadden] But in David's defense...
It's the hardest pilot I've ever done.
And unfortunately, the director has to take the wrath.
It's show business.
[McFadden] Exactly. So what would the audience think?
[Locutus] You will disarm your weapons.
[McFadden] The pilot for Deep Space Nine
premiered on January 3rd, 1993.
And the music comes on.
[theme music playing]
It started very strongly.
And all I could think of was, "That's what we made?"
And I was impressed. I was like, "Wow."
I found it beautiful. I found it powerful.
[McFadden] Critics lauded its ambition.
And I think when we made it, it was the most expensive pilot on record.
A lot of money.
[McFadden] Twelve million dollars to be precise.
[Mark A. Altman] They spent so much money on the pilot
that they didn't have a lot of money after that.
So they did a bunch of bottle shows on the space station.
[McFadden] Bottle shows are shot primarily in one location to save money.
And it fed into this mythology
that this was a show that boldly goes nowhere.
[McFadden] While shooting in one location reduced costs,
the makeup budget was going in the opposite direction.
Oh.
[McFadden] Even by Star Trek standards,
there were more alien races than you could shake a phaser at.
[Nemecek] Klingons and Cardassians and Romulans,
much less the Ferengi, much less the aliens of the week.
We grew in the writers' room to really love the world-building of those cultures.
Every episode gave you another opportunity
to discover something new, discover something richer.
So we really got in and built their worlds out
in much bigger ways than Next Gen or the original series.
[McFadden] But the more alien stories the writers dreamed up,
the more makeup, which was becoming...
In a way, off-the-wall and kind of wacky,
and it had so many challenges that were so great.
[McFadden] And so expensive.
Keeping up with the Cardassians was proving costly.
Well, the Cardassians were part of Star Trek: The Next Generation.
It was improved upon greatly.
[McFadden] Improved upon by master makeup magician Michael Westmore,
who now had his hands very full as head of makeup
for The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine.
[Michael Westmore] We had a thing called the Westmore Alien.
The Westmore Alien was boxes of noses and heads
and ears from previous aliens.
That is good enough for me.
[McFadden] But for the non-randomly put together aliens...
The Jem'Hadar are often one step ahead of the Vorta.
I always had something in Earth that the people could associate with,
but they didn't know.
It's like the Jem'Hadar was a little bit of dinosaur and rhinoceros.
And you can see it's like, "Where do you put the horn?"
The horn was their hair in the back of their head.
[McFadden] For Michael, Deep Space Nine 's aliens were his canvas.
Did you tell him about that slug inside of you?
Yes, Benjamin, he knows I'm a Trill.
[Westmore] With Terry Farrell, I spotted them by hand.
Take me 20 minutes.
[McFadden] But most procedures took quite a bit longer than that.
That mother... outfit, my makeup took over four hours.
It was like being entombed.
"Get me outta here."
[McFadden] For some, the rigorous makeup routine
was just a way to get into character.
[Visitor] They'd have us come in early, get our makeup on,
and wait for our scenes.
So I would walk around Paramount,
and it was one of the best ways to prepare for being a Bajoran
who's looked at with prejudice
because no one was really aware there was a new Star Trek filming.
And I'd get double takes and I'd get people looking at my nose.
And after a while, it would piss me off.
It would be like, "What?"
-[record scratches] -[laughs]
And that attitude I definitely brought to Kira.
Commander, let's not be confused here. My loyalties are to Bajor.
[McFadden] Well, no one would question that.
But when it came to what Nana was wearing, well, that was a little on the nose.
Bob Blackman gave it such a look
and such a texture to the whole show.
[Robert Blackman] Well, Nana, she needed to appeal
to the 18 to 43-year-old group more,
and so we put her into a spandex-like fabric
that was formfitting, and she had a great figure.
It's not necessarily comfortable. I didn't love being in orange latex.
Oh, I love a woman in uniform.
[McFadden] But it wasn't just Nana's uniform that was stretched thin.
As season one turned into season two,
the writers were feeling stretched as well.
We're still trying to repair all the damage your forces did before they left.
[Ronald D. Moore] Because the station didn't go anywhere,
stories that you did last week we're still kind of with you this week
'cause those people were still here.
[McFadden] And despite the clear instructions
from the studio regarding serialized plotlines...
The studio absolutely said no.
[McFadden] There was really no way to avoid it.
[Moore] As a result, you had ongoing relationships
and ongoing stories that you had to pay attention to.
[McFadden] And despite Ira clearly starting to get his way,
the audience wasn't so sure.
There were a lot of people who didn't like the way it was going,
the fact that it was serialized.
[McFadden] A defiant slap in the face to the studio,
which promptly slapped the show right back
because as they initially said...
These shows were not necessarily gonna be syndicated in order,
and they wanted standalone episodes.
[McFadden] Which meant for viewers...
Who knows when you're gonna be able to see it,
much less when you can record it.
A lot of the audience gave up.
[McFadden] Poor ratings confirmed Paramount's worst fears.
[Moore] The studio was concerned about the ratings.
They wanted something that was equaling
and then ideally surpassing Next Generation.
[McFadden] Well, as it happens,
The Next Generation was ending its seven-year run,
leaving Deep Space Nine adrift and all by its lonesome.
Now I know we're doomed.
[Nemecek] For all the fans at the time who loved to say,
"Oh, yeah, DS9, it's the show that doesn't go anywhere."
Because there wasn't a starship,
it had a little trouble finding its place as a Star Trek show.
[McFadden] Paramount wanted more from its most valuable property.
They wanted some change. They wanted to see a spike in the ratings.
They want to see bigger popularity for the series.
[McFadden] They wanted to match the success of Next Generation.
And short of importing key personnel over from The Next Generation,
Deep Space Nine...
Actually, maybe they should bring some people over from The Next Generation.
Like senior writer Ron Moore.
When I came on in the third season, I was really a little burned out at TNG
by the time the show ended, and I was happy and grateful
to start doing something new,
and it was a very different challenge, you know,
and I was really energized by it.
[McFadden] Perhaps even a little defiant,
an issue that Rick Berman, the keeper of Gene's vision,
was more than aware of.
You know, he knew we'd been straining at the leash for quite a while,
and now Gene's gone, and I think he just sensed that,
"Okay, these guys are wild people, they'll just, like, destroy this thing,"
if he didn't hold the reins really tight.
[McFadden] And in Ron Moore's first defiant act...
They created the Defiant so they could go away from the station.
Release docking clamps. Aft thrusters at one quarter.
Port and starboard at station keeping.
[McFadden] So Star Trek pimped its own ride
with a brand-new battleship and a revised mission.
"Let's give Sisko a ship. Let's see him getting out there."
The Defiant was a prototype,
the first ship in what would have been a new Federation battlefleet.
[McFadden] The ship was new, but in launching it,
Star Trek was actually returning to its roots.
Standby weapons and shields.
"Oh, look, it's the Star Trek crew getting off on a ship and doing stuff."
Well, that's the DNA of Star Trek all along.
Thank you for finally figuring that out.
[McFadden] And just to make sure no one missed
that Star Trek was back on track,
producers threw in a little shock and awe.
Fire!
"It's got Gatling gun phasers. Oh, my God."
[McFadden] They may have gained some Gatling guns,
but in season three, the big gun,
Michael Piller, the showrunner, would depart,
leaving Deep Space Nine 's future uncertain.
[McFadden] With a new injection of talent
from the wildly popular Star Trek: The Next Generation...
Wild. [laughs] We would go crazy.
[McFadden] Showrunner Michael Piller had left to work on
other upcoming Star Trek projects.
That was good news for Ira Behr,
who would finally have his chance to take the reins as showrunner.
We gave more and more input to Ira Behr, who was one of our top writers.
So that took a lot of the load off of us.
Ira, the blue-beard genius bear.
He is phenomenal.
You never know what color his beard is going to be from day to day. [laughs]
He was beyond energized. He was just on fire.
[McFadden] And despite his bright beard...
As the series went on, they certainly went to darker places.
They had a lot more shades of grey.
[Visitor] Not everything was black and white on our show.
Not everything is black and white in life.
And I found it very true.
[McFadden] But Ira was shooting for more than truth.
Ira wanted more warfare, more violence.
[groans]
My feeling was, it strayed a little bit far
from Gene's ideals
and his hopes of what the future was going to be,
and as a result, Ira and I had a number of disagreements.
[McFadden] But the darker hues of the rejuvenated Deep Space Nine
seemed to leave its audience in a dark place too.
[Nemecek] "We've added the Defiant in the mix. Whoo, action."
And yet the viewer numbers, the ratings,
aren't going up.
[McFadden] And so for season four,
they just brought in more people from The Next Generation.
Michael Dorn was brought over to try and bring over some of that flavor.
It must be an exciting prospect.
[Moore] They wanted to juice the show in some capacity.
So you know, bring over a TNG character.
I appreciate.
[McFadden] Unfortunately, Klingons are not known
for blending easily into their environments.
[Lofton] It took a little while for him to warm up to us.
You know, 'cause he was almost like his character.
Like, "I will not talk to you unless it's necessary."
What more is there to say?
My only fear was that they were going to replace me with Michael Dorn.
I really, really worried about that, and that did not happen.
[McFadden] For the writers, Worf was just as unwelcome.
I do apologize again for the inconvenience.
I felt the hand of the studio forcing us to do something
that wasn't organic to the show.
"But if they feel this strongly, let's try to make 'em happy
so that we can do the things we really wanna do."
"Okay, let's find something interesting and new to do with Worf
that we haven't done, you know, up until now."
It will be a glorious adventure.
[McFadden] When Worf failed to bring
The Next Generation -level ratings to Deep Space Nine...
It continues to struggle in the ratings.
[McFadden] Not even Captain Sisko's season-four makeover
could bring in viewers.
Avery was trying to find the character at the same time,
and part of it was his look.
I couldn't agree more.
[McFadden] But the studio couldn't agree at all.
[Moore] You know, Avery wanting to shave his head and have the goatee,
the studio, they didn't wanna do that.
Rick didn't wanna do that either.
But it's Starfleet now on DS9 ,
and he's gotta have the clean-cut Starfleet look
and have the, you know, the pointed sideburns and the whole thing.
It's like, "Come on." [laughs] "Come on."
[Moore] Ira fought really hard to let him shave his head
and let him have the goatee because Ira felt
it makes Avery comfortable in his skin.
[McFadden] After all, the more heroic the lead,
the greater the chance of hero-worthy ratings.
Avery Brooks' biggest claim to fame before DS9
was playing Hawk on Spenser: For Hire.
The name is Hawk.
He was a hero in my community.
Yeah.
I prefer the bald Avery Brooks
because there is power in that baldness.
And it gave him authority.
There's no question, bald with the goatee is the best Sisko.
-[laughs] -[McFadden] Well, he would say that.
There's no guarantee of that!
[McFadden] Deep Space Nine
had weathered four years of disappointment.
And neither Worf's whimsical ways, Captain Sisko's shiny head,
nor Ira's blue beard were enough to stop Star Trek trying one last thing.
Unfortunately, it had nothing to do with Deep Space Nine.
They got busy with the next show.
[McFadden] Paramount had already begun developing Star Trek: Voyager,
putting DS9 further in the shade.
Well, we were never the shiny, new thing, so the idea of Voyager coming along
was like, "Yeah, they're gonna try again 'cause they didn't get it with us."
[Lofton] And because they were network, they got more money,
bigger budget, better trailers, the whole gambit.
Their craft service was amazing.
I mean, everything that could be better was better for Voyager.
And we were sitting there like, "Wait, wait a minute.
We've been here for, you know, all this time.
How come we didn't get the brand-new trailers?"
[McFadden] Not everything was better,
but let's not get ahead of ourselves.
Producer Ira Behr felt his show had been abandoned by Paramount brass
and left to fend for itself in the war of ratings.
He just felt like Voyager was getting all the attention for being a network show
and no one, he felt like no one was paying attention to little DS9.
[McFadden] Oh, no one is paying attention you say?
With Paramount no longer breathing down its neck,
DS9 had a unique opportunity to spread his wings.
[Moore] At some point, Paramount just threw up their hands.
Paramount left us alone.
"The show's still dark. The ratings are okay.
They're never gonna pick up the ratings.
Ah, whatever. Let 'em do whatever they want."
And they just started leaving us alone.
DS9 got to do pretty much what it wanted to do.
[McFadden] With a free hand creatively, DS9 was able to ask questions of itself,
of Star Trek, and ultimately of its audience.
For example, in the episode "Far Beyond the Stars,"
they asked a lot of questions.
-[tires screech] -[groans]
That was one of the most special episodes.
Take a look at these readings.
[boy] Hey, you gonna buy that or not?
It was a period piece. We're talking about police brutality.
-[grunting] -Stop it! Stop it!
[Lofton] This was a special subject matter
that you wanted to make sure you were getting right.
[sobbing] I am a human being, damn it.
In case you haven't been paying attention to the headlines,
but it hasn't gone away.
Star Trek is the future.
And that means that these people who are writing these,
they are hopeful in heart that the future,
people will eventually see the world the way the world truly is.
Things are going to change. They have to.
[McFadden] This was the original Star Trek ethos
of infinite diversity, warts and all.
[Penny Johnson Jerald] The world full of people
who have red skin, brown skin, black skin, and white skin,
and if any skin I left out, that's in that too.
[McFadden] But don't worry, Ira, Ron, and the writers were not done yet.
[Moore] "Let's push further than anyone thinks we can.
Let's challenge what Star Trek is.
How good is the Federation? Don't they have their own problems?
What happens when they face this kind of crisis? What about this?"
[McFadden] Well, Ron was about to get the chance to find out.
[McFadden] With Ira Behr in the driver's seat...
That's when we really started to feel like we were a sailing ship
and Ira was at the wheel.
[McFadden] A wheel that Ira had been spinning in the background
for quite awhile.
Because if you remember...
Ira got very involved
in wanting to do long strings of continuing episodes.
The studio absolutely said no.
[McFadden] But with the studio's attention elsewhere,
Ira really only had Rick to convince.
That wouldn't be too much of a problem.
Ira was really good at pulling the wool over your eyes.
He would say, "We're not gonna have a continual long series of episodes
that aren't standalone," and all of a sudden,
they would occur.
[McFadden] Ira had planted the seed of one such arc way back in season two.
Right here.
Let's just say, if you want to do business in the Gamma Quadrant,
you have to do business with the Dominion.
Uh, the Dominion? What's that?
[McFadden] With this tiny mention of the Dominion,
Ira would spawn one of Deep Space Nine 's biggest arcing plotlines.
You belong to the Dominion, don't you?
[McFadden] Which would not only fly in the face of the network's wishes...
May it keep you strong.
[McFadden] ...but possibly Gene Roddenberry's as well.
[Moore] The Dominion War, Rick said so at the time,
he said Gene would absolutely have killed this story.
But we were able to get it done and we did talk him into it.
And so, you know, even though he would draw these lines,
he was willing to kind of move the lines and move the goal posts
with us every once in a while to kind of...
'cause he could recognize that this was a really good story.
[McFadden] Ron Moore and Ira Behr were waging a war on Star Trek tradition.
They would push the series' boundaries into new territory
with a season-six Dominion War episode
that was unlike anything Star Trek had done before.
I can see where it all went wrong.
"In the Pale Moonlight," it's a controversial episode.
Michael Taylor wrote the first draft.
[McFadden] That's freelance writer Michael Taylor,
who would later join the writing staff.
We were having trouble making it work and it got handed to me,
and I came up with the wraparound structure
and Sisko talking to the camera.
Captain's personal log.
Recording a captain's log and that that was gonna be the frame.
Maybe if I just lay it all out in my log, it'll finally make sense.
[McFadden] Ron Moore thought the title of the episode made sense too
because everybody knows about the pale moonlight, right?
When I wrote that title,
I was under the impression that that was just a saying.
You ever dance with the devil in the pale moonlight?
And everybody kept coming up to me and saying,
"Oh, so it's a Batman reference?"
And I said, "No. I mean, no, it's not about Batman .
It's just about the phrase, about the saying,
'Dance with the devil in the pale moonlight.'"
And then later came to find that, well, it's not really a phrase.
It's really just something that was said in Batman .
I just like the sound of it.
[McFadden] Whatever Ron thought it meant,
the episode was a radical departure,
with Star Trek 's heroes taking a devilish turn.
[Sisko] I was going to bring the Romulan's into the war.
[McFadden] The Dominion War.
With the Federation losing,
Captain Sisko conspires with Garak in a dance of disinformation.
It was willing to push characters into darker,
more ambiguous territory than the other Star Treks did.
You have Sisko and Garak both engaged in this really untoward tale of darkness.
And it may be a very messy, very bloody business.
When Sisko asks him for help,
he has a pretty good idea of the lengths to which Garak is going to go.
Sometimes, fairness doesn't win the day
and there are dirty tricks that have to be used.
You knew I could do those things that you weren't capable of doing.
[McFadden] So perhaps for the first time in Star Trek's history,
the dirty tricks weren't being played by the villains,
and the consequences were deadly.
[McFadden] "In the Pale Moonlight" was a Star Trek episode unlike any other.
[Moore] And it is about a disinformation campaign.
It's about fake news that the good guys use
in order to start a war, you know,
or a different part of the war with the Romulans.
[McFadden] Five years before the second war in Iraq,
Star Trek actually foreshadowed the rise of manufactured truths.
It's a fake!
"It's a fake!"
We're dealing with fake news and the use of fake news.
How, you know, news and information could be used by governments
and people in power to get what they wanted,
and you don't usually see the good guys do that on television.
And if I had to do it all over again...
I would.
[McFadden] Freed from the traditional scruples,
"In the Pale Moonlight" took fans into the darkest territory of them all.
Garak kills the forger.
I mean, he murders him.
And I deliberately played it off camera
because the episode as a whole is already pretty dark.
I'll be along shortly to say hello.
And I just sort of had an intuitive sense
that if I have one of our semi-regulars who we love, in cold blood,
murder another character on camera, it was gonna be a whole thing.
So I just buried it in the story and it happens off camera.
And I just knew that that would make it easier to slip by.
The joy of playing Garak was derived so much
from his lack of what we think as being moral or ethical.
Well, I suppose that depends on how you look at it.
[McFadden] And the captain too was suddenly Machiavellian,
light years from Star Trek 's original hero.
[Moore] Sisko does things in that show that you can't imagine Kirk doing
or any of the other Starship captains.
We took that character pretty far and engaged in deception
and murder and, you know, criminality and all kinds of things,
in service of a higher goal,
and I think that's an interesting place to take a character.
[groans]
[McFadden] And when Sisko's dance with the devil...
Get up!
[McFadden] ...spins out of control...
You killed him!
[McFadden] ...he faces a reckoning.
Sisko might have even expected it to have been a worse price.
Like, Cisco might have had a deeper, darker fear in the back of his head that,
"Once I go to Garak, who knows what the price is gonna be?"
You may have just saved the entire Alpha Quadrant,
and all it cost was the life of one Romulan senator,
one criminal...
...and the self-respect of one Starfleet officer.
[McFadden] And so we see a Starfleet captain
forced to make peace with himself before his enemies.
So I will learn to live with it.
At the end, when he says, "And I can live with it,"
he can live with the fact that he made those choices.
That's the moral to the story.
And he embraces it,
and he hates himself for it at the same time.
I can live with it.
Someone breaks the fourth wall and speaks directly into the camera,
that's the deepest you can go.
What makes Sisko such a great leader is that he deliberates
and he tries to do the right thing
even when it means that he has to do the wrong thing.
It's a great morality tale of "how far is too far?"
[Moore] I think you go with them on the ride.
You feel the pressure, you understand the stakes
of this galactic war that's happening.
Step by step, you understand why they keep doing what they're doing,
even as part of you is repelled by them.
The truth is, you can live with it too,
and that says something about you and that says...
and that's a fantastic, interesting interaction
between show and audience.
When it deals with complex issues and dives into things that are meaningful,
that's when Star Trek really works.
[Moore] Only Deep Space Nine could do that,
and I think it is one of the very best Deep Space Nine episodes.
I'm very proud of that.
[McFadden] But no matter how proud or how good,
ratings remained uneven
as one of Star Trek 's most creatively ambitious chapters
neared its end.
We sort of knew that it probably was only gonna go one more year.
TNG got seven years.
Stood to reason that we probably weren't gonna get more than seven years
'cause we weren't ratings-wise as successful as they were.
[McFadden] With the end in sight, they began tying up all the loose ends.
You're trying to give these actors a satisfying end.
There was a melancholy sadness to it.
"Next year's your senior year and that's gonna be it."
[McFadden] All the pieces were in place for Deep Space Nine 's
seventh and last season to go out with a bang.
Unfortunately, before they could even start, there was a bombshell.
Heading into its final season,
Deep Space Nine was dealing with the loss of a key cast member.
Dax would not see a seventh season.
You go into a seventh season, you know it's gonna be your last season,
so the network isn't gonna start throwing more money at you because this is it.
So she got squeezed.
[McFadden] Unimpressed with her offer,
actress Terry Farrell checked out.
DS9 's writers had a problem they never saw coming.
We made no accommodation for what it would mean
to pull Dax as a character completely out of the structure of the show,
and I don't think any of us were really ready to do that.
[McFadden] Terry Farrell walked out.
But if you can't change the character, you can always change the actress.
And Nicole de Boer wormed her way in, so to speak, as the same character
but of course in a different body.
There was something of a scramble.
And it became, "Oh, my God. Okay, wait a minute, how does this work?
How are we gonna go about this?"
And there was a certain like, "Oh, my God."
[McFadden] Basically, an alien slug named Dax
found a new alien host, and Nicole was that host.
It's me.
Dax.
[McFadden] But she had some questions.
"What kind of alien is it?" [laughs]
Because I had done some prosthetic work before
on an episode of Outer Limits.
[McFadden] Which had proved to be at the outer limits
of Nicole's tolerance for makeup.
I would not probably be able to do that on a daily basis,
so he said, "Don't worry, it's very minimal makeup,"
and I said, "Okay, I'd love that."
[McFadden] It's a relatively complicated symbiotic relationship.
I was told to look at it as a new character,
although I would have the memories of Jadzia
as well as all these other people before with the symbiont.
[McFadden] So Nicole had a lot on her mind.
And the whole thing is that she wasn't trained to be joined,
so that is going to be complicated for her.
People need time to get over losing Jadzia.
[McFadden] But an even more complicated relationship for Worf.
Now, of course, Worf wasn't too excited about me.
I was your wife.
You are not Jadzia.
[McFadden] A fact that allowed the writers to explore new territory.
"Oh, there's an opportunity to do different Dax stories,
change relationships.
Now she has a different host."
We just kind of embraced it as an opportunity to expand
instead of contract.
[McFadden] Now in its final season,
the production raced to complete its 26 episodes.
They're getting kind of tired.
It's, like, the seventh season, and the hours were grueling.
For at least 16 hours a day and longer,
it was insane.
There were people there that didn't see their children grow up.
[McFadden] And it all came together for the very last episode.
You always said I looked good in a tuxedo.
They just went where they felt the story took them
and then finally landed this sucker at the end with an amazing finale.
[McFadden] In arguably the biggest story arc of them all,
teased from the very first episode,
Captain Sisko finally takes his place among the Bajoran Prophets.
Your time of trial has ended.
[McFadden] The Dominion War comes to an end,
and the crew live it up for one last night.
To the best crew any captain ever had.
People like myself, other members of the support staff,
got to be in the episode.
So all of us were the extras for those scenes,
and Ira planned it perfectly to be shot the very last day of shooting.
It was just an amazing day.
This one's from the heart.
[McFadden] The final episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
went out on June 2nd, 1999, leaving the audience wanting more.
Which now, thanks to streaming, they can have.
DS9 has definitely stood up over time, more so than the other shows,
which is ironic because, at the time, it was thought of as the lesser show.
[McFadden] And as it happens, that controversial serialized format
turned out to be ahead of its time,
and the vast story arc gave the show a long life.
Today, the definition of the word "streaming"
shows that people watch these shows
because they are continuing arcs, continuing storylines.
I think the fact that the way people view shows is different,
and binge-watching a show is the way DS9 needed to be seen.
And Deep Space Nine is bigger than ever now.
It's found a whole new following.
[McFadden] Routinely landing at the top of the best Star Trek series lists,
thanks largely to its wide-ranging and eclectic storylines.
And now I get a lot of transgender people coming up to me
and saying, you know, "Do you know how important
this character has been for me?
It was someone I could turn to that was like me."
Out of the entire franchise, I think Deep Space Nine was the best
because it dealt with issues that a whole bunch of people were facing,
especially people of color.
[McFadden] With Captain Benjamin Sisko,
Avery Brooks had made Star Trek history.
Avery, he just put his heart and soul into it.
It was really stunning to watch.
[Lofton] He taught me a lot.
The advice that he gave me along the way
were life lessons that just make you a better man.
He, by example, led in so many ways that I believe without it,
I would have been on a different path.
[McFadden] As deep Space Nine completed its mission,
a new Star Trek show was already on air,
with its own first to boast of.
I was the first female captain. It was an established fact.
You're serious.
Very.
[McFadden] But like all firsts, this one wouldn't come easy.
This was an unprecedented moment in the history of television.
[theme music playing]