https://twitter.com/NanaVisitor/status/629760570523152384

DS9 is great once it casts off its "TNG spinoff" shackles.

DS9 is just as inconsistent as any other Trek show, but boy are its peaks high indeed.

It's especially good when you start watching it from the beginning. You power through the mostly lame early seasons, then it starts getting good, and then BAM Worf is back! He shows up right around the turning point to things getting really good.

Bort's Guide to When DS9 Is Good And When It's Not:

The show is initially about the Federation trying to help a battered world (Bajor, until very recently under the heel of the Cardassians) recover and to eventually gain admittance to the Federation. The first couple seasons are a bit of a slog because Bajor is such a mess and it's simply not fun. ("Ugh, famine on Bajor, AGAIN?") But there are some excellent episodes in there too, you just need to tolerate the slog.

Bajor gets fixed by the middle of the third season, and the second half of the third season is pretty good but not very important.

In the fourth season we get Worf, the best episodes, and lots of good action too.

The first half of the fifth season, Odo no longer has his shape-changing abilities, and coincidentally that's where the show is at its weakest. Then he gets his powers back and coincidentally the show gets better. (I haven't ever investigated this, but I suspect there were executive shenanigans at work, which had a hand both in Odo's condition and the script quality.)

The last big change is season seven and the introduction of Ezri. I say Ezri rocks, and it's a shame she wasn't introduced earlier, because I would have liked more than a single season with her. She ends up saving the Alpha Quadrant with her counselor training; top that Deanna Troi.

Bort - how would you rate DS9 compared to Voyager? TNG? TOS? Enterprise?

I watched the first couple of seasons of DS9 on Netflix some time ago, and they seemed better-written than most Star Treks, but it was it was difficult to get into the series on account of Jadzia Dax being the only hot space babe. Where were all the T'Pol's and Deanna Trois?

DS9 is the best Trek series.

And I say that loving TNG and TOS (warts and all) and having seen the entirety of Voyager and most of Enterprise, and every movie except for Into Darkness (but none of the Animated series; it just never aired where I lived).

DS9 was the best Trek.

One thing I liked was, it traded on a concept that would never fly today: sometimes the terrorists are justified. Major Kira was a terrorist back during the Cardassian occupation, she killed lots of Cardassians and even Bajorans as was necessary. She has her regrets but she also sees what she did as necessary and justified.

The series also takes a stab at fundamentalism vs. less unhinged forms of religion, a little less successfully because the fundamentalists are never portrayed in a even slightly sympathetic light. Well, one scene one time, but that's it ... maybe twenty seconds of conveying that Wynn suffered tremendous loss too and is as wounded as everyone else on Bajor. But overall she's about as unsympathetic as you could hope for; she's played by Nurse Ratchet for Christ's sake.

The theme that comes up over and over in different ways in DS9 is exactly how fragile the Federation paradise is: a single well-placed terrorist attack could breed enough panic to make a military dictatorship look necessary, turns out there is a secret CIA-like agency (Section 31) that does the dirty work that allows the Federation to continue, even Sisko tries to make allies of the Romulans by supplying them with falsified documents. And yet, the show never abandons the sense that, if you're not willing to stick by your principles, you're not fighting for anything worthwhile. No spoilers, but the Federation basically survives at the end of the series because a couple nobodies on DS9 refused to let one of Section 31's operations go unchallenged; had they gone the easy, less-principled route, it likely would have meant the end of all the big players (Romulans and Klingons too).

DS9's final season consists entirely of some lounge singer taking them on lounge singer adventures in the holosuite.

I still think that DS9 easily had the darkest episodes ever involved in any of the Star Trek series.

In the Pale Moonlight is a prime example of this; the Captain involved in a secretive plot to frame their enemies to draw in a new ally to the war; a statement on how good men must sometimes do very evil things.

And the siege of AR-55somethingsomething. Really a gritty war story involving blown-off limbs (in the still PG sense) and a coming of age featuring the 1000 yard stare.

As much as I loved TNG, it was wholly sanctimonious and surreal in regard to how perfect it was. DS9 had everything fucking broken to start with and it was built up just to watch it get destroyed again. I don't think it should have ended on as much of a high note as it did but the majority of audience would have felt cheated if at least most of the things weren't set right by the end.

When Cardassians try to block, show them that you rock!

This is really bad advice, and I hope nobody takes their message seriously.

On the contrary; politely asking someone to leave you alone is a signal of strength.