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I've been catching up on some Star Trek since I was a teen when a lot of these aired. And holy cannoli the first episode of DS9 has to be the heaviest ever.
Sisko is assigned to DS9 and is meeting with Picard about it. Sisko expresses this assignment isn't to his preference and Picard starts giving him the "Starfleet duty" lecture and Sisko erupts in his face saying to cut him some fucking slack, he is raising a kid by himself because his mother died on a ship that he helped the Borg destroy when he was Locutus. 🤯
Despite also popping Picard's bubble he makes it clear that he's not some career obsessed owned-Starfleet loser who uses it as an excuse to never start a family.
In addition to rebuking Picard, he's also a sensitive enough black man that he can cry on camera (while the wormhole entities ask him why he dwells on the memory of his wife's death) but he is still hard ass enough to blackmail a ferengi into keeping his shop open in exchange for not putting his nephew in prison.
A very different Trek.
First time watch, not rewatch?
In hindsight, DS9 doesn't start to get frequently great until the very end of season 2, despite having a relatively strong pilot for a Star Trek show, just to warn you. You might be tempted to just skip ahead a couple seasons, and indeed early DS9 mostly lets you get away with that (like most 90s-era TV shows, producers didn't dare risk losing an audience who missed one episode and hence they pushed for low levels of arc-plot and continuity), but definitely find some watch guide to consult if you do. There are some good early episodes that are worth watching because their character development makes later great episodes even better, there are a few great episodes ... and IMO there's one of the best episodes in all of Star Trek, just plopped into Season 1 because that's where they needed it for one character's arc.
I never saw the pilot episode. This clears up a lot of confusion. In the later episodes when the prophets are speaking to him I had no fucking idea what was going on, not realizing they're entirely in his head and using figures from his memory to speak to him.
The most vivid episode was the one where they try to trick that... Romulan senator into believing the Dominion plans to attack them. But then he discovers the Federation faked the evidence and he's enraged and then his ship just ... suspiciously ... explodes and they were all oddly okay with this?
I guess also that episode where it cold opens to Worf having rough dry humping sex with Dax?
Gene Roddenberry passing away early in TNG is probably the best thing to happen to the show. He never would have let the Federation get so dark, though he would've probably kept the rough Worf/Dax sex scene.
Unfortunately it's a double-edged sword. If you listen to the writers talk about TNG, it's clear that TNG was good in spite of him and not because of him. Some of the best stories (e.g. Picard's story in "Family" in S4) they did were shot down by Roddenberry because "people in the future wouldn't act that way", and the other producers had to fight with him to get the stories approved. But on the other hand, stuff in DS9 was already getting dark enough that the writers were seriously risking the setting not working as a positive vision of the future any more. And when you get to nu-Trek, that is completely gone, with the Federation being outright villains in Picard. So while Roddenberry could be unreasonable about his vision at times, it turns out that having someone like that at the helm was important to make sure that the writers didn't just completely disregard the fact that Star Trek is supposed to be an optimistic future, not just today's problems but 300 years from now.
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