Star Trek: Deep Space Nine

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (DS9) is an American science-fiction TV series, created by Rick Berman and Michael Piller. It is the third live-action series in the Star Trek franchise.

Why It Rocks

 * 1) The setting of the titular space station is one that's so far unique in the Star Trek franchise, allowing for much more long-term storytelling than was typically done in a show from this era.
 * 2) Not only does the show boast a great main cast (including bringing across recurring TNG character Miles O'Brien, and then TNG main character Worf after that show ended), it features probably the largest and most interesting secondary cast of any Star Trek series.
 * 3) It takes several races and organizations that had been introduced over on TNG (including the Bajorans, the Cardassians, and the Maquis) and really fleshes them out and makes them much more interesting.
 * 4) * It also redeems the Ferengi by fleshing them out and establishing them as being a greedy, cut-throat, and more comedic race of extreme capitalists, instead of their previous portrayal as a serious threat among the line of pirates.
 * 5) Introduces one of the coolest starships from the Star Trek franchise, the USS Defiant.
 * 6) The show's main villains, the Dominion, manage to be extremely dangerous and intimidating without being so powerful that the show can't feasibly make use of them because they'd defeat the heroes too easily (the main reason why the Borg only had four appearances in TNG, despite their popularity).
 * 7) While things can get pretty dark when the eventual Dominion War storyline kicks in, the writers managed to prevent the show from getting so overwhelmingly dark that audiences stopped caring about what happened.
 * 8) * They also managed to resist initial suggestions to make the Dominion War just a two-parter made up of the Season 5 finale and Season 6 premiere episode, which would have been a sorely underwhelming pay-off for several years' worth of build-up.
 * 9) Season 5 features an awesome 30th anniversary tribute episode, "Trials and Tribble-ations", which inserts this show's cast into the TOS episode "The Trouble with Tribbles", and even allows for some limited interaction between the TOS and DS9 casts.
 * 10) The latter seasons feature some epic space battle sequences between the Federation/Klingon (and later Romulan) alliance and the Dominion, with nothing in the Star Trek franchise having really come close to matching their scope in the years since.
 * 11) As with TNG, it created a lot of early internet memes, including anything related to Captain Sisko's badass nature, and the "It's a FAAAKE!" scene from the episode "In The Pale Moonlight".
 * 12) It was the first Star Trek show to have any real discussion of LGBT issues (not counting TNG's infamously poor attempt to do this with the episode "The Outcast"), the first one to feature an LGBT main character (Jadzia Dax, and implicitly also Ezri Dax), and manages to do it without feeling overly preachy.

Bad Qualities

 * 1) The show's tone is very different than The Next Generation and Voyager, being much darker, more morally ambiguous, and more militaristic, especially in the later seasons. This might be off-putting to fans who prefer the optimism and strong moral messages of TNG and Voyager.
 * 2) Like the other Star Trek shows from this era, the first two seasons aren't as strong as season 3 onwards, mostly because the show hadn't found its identity and just tried to be "TNG on a space station".
 * 3) Despite its generally strong cast of characters, a few of them don't work out so well, at least to begin with:
 * 4) * Dr. Julian Bashir starts out as an annoying, overly enthusiastic dork, whose repeated efforts to hit on Jadzia are just cringe-worthy. The writers eventually had to resort to revealing that Bashir was actually a genetically engineered genius, and was deliberately acting like an idiot in the early seasons so that no-one would suspect his true identity.
 * 5) * Ezri Dax, who replaced Jadzia Dax for the final season after Jadzia's actress, Terry Farrell quit over a contract dispute, is a pretty poor replacement, combining all the worst aspects of Counsellor Troi and Lt. Barclay from over on TNG. She does improve a little as the season goes on, however, helping Nog through a life-changing injury, and talking Worf into assassinating the Klingon chancellor when it becomes clear that he's leading the Empire towards disaster.
 * 6) Some of the early CGI effects, especially the ones used for Odo's morphing, haven't aged well.
 * 7) Parts of the show and its storylines have been accused of ripping off Babylon 5, including by that show's creator, J. Michael Straczynski.