The Shocking Reason Why Worf Was Brought To Deep Space Nine

One of the ironies about Star Trek: Deep Space Nine is that it started out very rocky with season one, but it still had strong ratings which were buoyed by the ongoing success of the concurrently airing Star Trek: The Next Generation. The third season of DS9 was its strongest yet, but without the excitement and buzz generated by TNG (which had already wrapped its final season), ratings were going down. Accordingly, Paramount told the show’s producers to shake things up in some kind of dramatic way that would renew fan interest.

The first idea that the Deep Space Nine team came up with was having Vulcan leave the United Federation of Planets. It’s not clear exactly why these aliens would have done so, but it’s undeniable that having the long-running Federation pillar depart the UFP would have been a big deal. However, showrunner Ira Behr had a better idea, one that would connect to a very ambitious two-part story from the previous season.

Deep Space Nine episode “The Die Is Cast” had the Romulan Tal Shiar and the Cardassian Obsidian Order team up to make a pre-emptive strike at the Dominion. Their combined might and combined intelligence (the Tal Shiar and Obsidian Order were basically the CIA of their respective planets) would theoretically be enough to cripple the Dominion before these Gamma Quadrant baddies could invade the Alpha Quadrant. However, the entire thing was a trap, and the Dominion handily destroyed this combined fleet and almost everyone in it (conveniently, Garak and Odo managed to escape, and Enebran Tain was taken prisoner).

How does all of this tie into why Worf came to Deep Space Nine, though? Near the end of “The Die Is Cast,” one of the Founders says something quite chilling: “After today, the only threat remaining to us from the Alpha Quadrant are the Klingons and the Federation. And I doubt either of them will be a threat for much longer.”

When Deep Space Nine writer Ronald D. Moore wrote that line, it wasn’t necessarily intended to be foreshadowing for any specific stories. But given the Paramount mandate to shake things up, Behr ran a new idea by Moore: having the Klingons be the ones who ended up breaking diplomatic relations with the Federation. Behr was impressed and pitched a Klingon arc to producer Rick Berman, who had the simple suggestion that if the show was going to make the Klingons a major focus, it needed to have Worf as a main character.

When it came to making Klingons a major threat in Deep Space Nine, Ronald Moore was very excited about the idea because he thought Gene Roddenberry’s idea to make Klingons Federation allies had “defanged” some aliens that made “great villains.” He ultimately felt the Klingons deserved to be major antagonists and was disappointed when the only Klingon stories The Next Generation could explore involved Worf’s family and internal Imperial politics. Now, they could be an updated version of the foes that had so memorably threatened Captain Kirk.

As for Worf, he was a welcome addition to Deep Space Nine, and he played an integral role in “Apocalypse Rising,” an episode in which Sisko, Odo, and O’Brien dressed as Klingons and discovered that a Founder had been impersonating the Klingon General Martok. This retroactively added even more weight to the Founder’s ominous line from “The Die Is Cast,” implying that the Dominion had long been planning to put the Klingons and Starfleet against one another. Best of all, the combination of bringing Worf to DS9 and making the Klingons bad guys again boosted ratings.

That day, it seemed, was not a good day for the best Star Trek series to die.