Star Trek DS9 Scariest Villains Foreshadowed By Forgotten Character
In Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, the scariest villains were the Jem’Hadar, genetically engineered warriors who served as the alien enforcers of the shapeshifting Founders. These guys are the backbone of the Dominion, and they weren’t properly introduced onscreen until the second-season finale episode appropriately titled “The Jem’Hadar.” However, what most fans don’t know is that this race was effectively foreshadowed early on in Deep Space Nine by the alien Tosk, someone who shares their characteristics and that a writer later confirmed was bred by the Founders.
Tosk
For this crazy Jem’Hadar story to make sense, you’re going to need to know a bit more about the alien Tosk introduced in the DS9 episode “Captive Pursuits.”
Like the Jem’Hadar, Tosk was genetically engineered, but he was never meant to be a fearsome warrior. Instead, he was bred to be prey, and he had a special self-cloaking ability designed to help him evade relentless alien hunters.
The Same Cloak
At this point, you might think there are only surface-level similarities between Tosk and the Jem’Hadar. Sure, they’re both genetically engineered and they both have the ability to cloak themselves in combat, but that’s probably a coincidence…right?
But the plot thickens: the actual script for the episode “The Jem’Hadar” specifies that the titular baddies are using the same kind of cloak that Tosk uses in “Captive Pursuits.”
The Vorta Make The Tosks
The real smoking gun linking Tosk to the Jem’Hadar has been provided by series writer Robert Hewitt Wolfe. In the Deep Space Nine Companion, Wolfe revealed that the Vorta who genetically engineer the Jem’Hadar for their own purposes also lend their services to others in the Gamma Quadrant. As he said, “You want some Tosks you can hunt, the Vorta will provide them for you.”
The Carrot And The Stick
In case you’re wondering, the Dominion didn’t provide these services to other races out of the goodness of their hearts, nor did they do it to make a profit. Instead, the Vorta (the negotiators of the Founders) would serve as a friendly face to new races, and they would offer a variety of “carrots” as an enticement to do business with the Dominion.
The Vorta would offer whatever these races wanted, including weapons such as phaser rifles, with the understanding that the grateful races would then owe the Dominion a debt that would be collected at a later time.
The carrot analogy regarding the Dominion also helps us to understand how Tosk relates to the Jem’Hadar. He is an example of a carrot used by this mighty alien empire, but the Jem’Hadar are correspondingly described as part of the Dominion’s “stick.”
In other words, when they want to do business with a new race or new organization, the Dominion will first offer to bribe them in exchange for future loyalty, and if that fails, they have a genetically engineered warrior race to help cow others into submission.
The Jem’Hadar Were Around Longer Than We Realized
Neither Wolfe nor the script for “The Jem’Hadar” elaborates on this, but we can’t help but wonder if Tosk was essentially the Vorta’s rough draft for the Jem’Hadar. It’s easy to imagine, for example, that the Vorta gave a harmless alien bred to be prey his own cloaking device as a test run for the cloak they would give their warriors.
Similarly, breeding Tosks might have helped the Vorta work out any potential genetic engineering flaws that could have otherwise plagued the Jem’Hadar.
That last part is just speculation on our part, of course. But it’s quiet canon among the Deep Space Nine writers that Tosk was bred by the Vorta, forever linking him to the Jem’Hadar.
In this way, the sixth episode of DS9 serves as a foreshadowing of the villains who would be fighting Sisko and the rest of our heroes from the end of season 2 all the way through to the series finale.
