In Star Trek: Deep Space Nine’s fifth season the long awaited war with the Dominion begins. After Sisko and his crew expose a plot against the Klingon Empire peace talks begin, but the Dominion uses the opportunity to insert themselves into the conflict between the Klingon’s, Cardassians, and Federation. Additionally, Odo adjusts to living as a solid, Quark finds a way to get his Ferengi commerce license back, Kiera has the O’Bien's baby, and Worf and Dax start dating. And, as part of the Star Trek 30th Anniversary celebration, the show does a terrific homage to the original series with the time-travel episode “Trials and Tribble-ations.” Jeffery Combs becomes a recurring guest star as the fan favorite character Weyoun, and Aron Eisenberg is back as Cadet Nog doing his field training. The writers do a good job at balancing the ongoing story arcs with standalone episodes, and at giving each of the main cast subplots and character development. Also, the space battles are surprising good (for a television budget) and exciting. The most ambitious season of the series so far, Season 5 of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine is full of thrills.
Review by Alexander von LimbergBlockedParent2023-09-08T08:25:31Z— updated 2023-09-09T11:59:30Z
It's slightly worse than previous season.
Overall, it's another strong season of DS9 as the exciting overarching story progresses. Things become more tense in the sector and some thrilling action episodes underline this fact. This season's Trials and Tribble-ations is one of the greatest, funniest, most entertaining episodes of the franchise and certainly a paradigm of how fan service is supposed to be. This season ends with one of the most exciting cliffhangers of the franchise.
Not every episode is great though. The number of mediocre episodes is larger than in the previous season. Let he who is without Sin is shockingly bad. But that's not the only episode I'd call worse than "mediocre". Thus, quality is inconsistent. Often a mediocre episode follows a great episode. This season also lacks an intellectual showcase episode with a serious philosophical question, ethical dilemma, political message, a mind-blowing physics concept or very dark undertones. The premise of Children of Time was promising but ultimately fell flat. Even the overall mediocre episode For the Uniform showcased ethics that I'm very uneasy with but which the show never dared to discuss. In this case, the show's usual "action have consequences" rule was blatantly ignored. And both stories that showed the grim realities of battle (The Ship and especially Nor the Battle to the Strong) ultimately failed (for different reasons) to be anything more than solid episodes. This season also features the end of two mini overarching storylines: the Marquis story and the "Odo, the Solid", story. Both plot lines aren't really good. Too early, even before Odo experienced the pleasure of a solid state existence (what a joy would that have been to watch), Odo returned to his gelatinous state. The Marquis storyline had a lot of potential but was never a favorite of mine. Ultimately, it was ill prepared and executed on a tight budget. We hardly knew Eddington. We never saw the colonies. We never saw their bloody fight. How are we supposed to bond with them and be emotionally invested (negatively or positively) in those rebels / freedom fighters as much as Sisko (inexplicably) seems to be? Ultimately they are a nuisance. Their actions never had wider geopolitical implications for the conflict between the superpowers in the sectors that eventually escalates to open warfare in the season's finale.