Deep Space Nine was the first Star Trek series that parked its crew on a space station and didn’t let them explore much.
It started a little slowly, but once it figured out where it fit in, it became – and remains – one of the most popular entries in the science fiction franchise.
However, that doesn’t mean it didn’t confuse the heck out of us along the way. When you’re dealing with countless alien species, intergalactic conflict, and inscrutable aliens that somehow live inside a wormhole, things can get a little murky.
While Deep Space Nine is still one of the most interesting and challenging Star Trek series, it’s hard to do seven years of any weird space series without introducing some straight-up nonsense.
Fans have voiced their confusion with the show they love via the internet’s native language: the meme.
However, despite knowing that all this odd stuff exists, we still enjoy the series. It’s just important to acknowledge the wackiness.
With that said, here are the 18 Star Trek Memes That Show Deep Space Nine Makes No Sense.
Why did they keep him there?
“Simple tailor” Elim Garak runs a clothing shop on the station. He was there during the Cardassian occupation of Bajor when the place was still called Terok Nor.
Nobody really trusts him, since his species are basically Space Nazis, and that’s probably unfair.
However, he was an active member of the shadowy intelligence agency the Obsidian Order, and he had tortured a lot of people in that role. So the hatred wasn’t really unfounded, after all.
Rumors said that he was still active in the Order, and that’s possibly because his profession is a direct reference to author John le Carré’s espionage novel Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. However, we don’t really expect 24th-century aliens to get that.
Regardless, it’s odd that Starfleet just let him keep making pants and hanging out with their senior officers. That is, unless he was also working for them.
But look at that little face
It was hard to believe at the time that a largely background character with no lines would be one of the most endearing on the show.
However, it’s a little easier now. Everyone loves Groot in Guardians of the Galaxy, and he just repeats the same three words. Nobody says much of anything (out loud) in A Quiet Place, and it’s doing just fine.
Morn has a lot going for him, though. He’s a big, cuddly looking character with tiny, bear-like ears, and his name is an anagram for beloved Cheers character Norm, who also spends all his time sitting at a bar.
The running in-universe joke is that Morn talks too much, but we never hear it. If we did, it would probably just ruin the character.
Go ahead and stop them, then
In its later seasons, Deep Space Nine became about two conflicts. One was the overt, galaxy-spanning Dominion War, and the other was less conventional.
That’s the one between the two non-corporeal species. On one side are the Prophets, the cryptic aliens who live in the station-adjacent wormhole and dispense weird advice every time Captain Sisko goes in there.
They’re up against the Pah-wraiths, who are equally body-less but evil.
In the episode “The Reckoning”, the two sides possess the bodies of Major Kira and Jake Sisko to fight it out with massive energy blasts that come out of their chests.
We’re not sure how Benjamin was supposed to stop that business from happening, but it is the opposite of order.
We don’t get it, either
One of the central relationships in Deep Space Nine is the series-long bromance between Chief O’Brien and Dr. Bashir.
They go on holosuite adventures together, play darts, and have a lot of drinks. It never really made much sense.
We were happy to get more O’Brien after his too-few appearances on Star Trek: The Next Generation. He’s a likable guy.
We relate to him because he’d rather be in a Jeffries Tube rerouting power couplings than traipsing around in space looking for trouble.
Then we have Julian, who has a genetically modified super-intellect and uncanny medical abilities but never really picked up on social cues.
He’s mostly annoying, and his friendship with O’Brien seems more like a case of the engineer giving up than the doctor winning him over.
Gul Dukat’s perfect disguise
Gul Dukat was the administrator at Terok Nor when it was still a Cardassian mining base during their occupation of Bajor.
That means it was his job to manage the “prisoners with jobs,” hit production quotas, and be generally unpleasant.
That’s not how he saw it, though. Despite all the bad stuff that happened under his watch, he convinced himself that he was a benevolent leader.
He admitted that he was harsh, but his argument is that he could have been a lot worse.
This makes Dukat a complicated, gray character in the middle of an already ambiguous series, and he makes for a fascinating villain.
Later on, he starts to follow the Pah-wraiths and finds the perfect disguise to do so: a Bajoran farmer.
This gets him all the way to the series finale even though he doesn’t change his distinctive voice at all. However, nobody notices.
Multiple leadership methods
Omnipotent villain Q made his debut in the series premiere of Next Generation, and he bothered the crew of the Enterprise-D throughout its seven seasons.
It was a given that he’d appear on Deep Space Nine. And he did in the sixth episode, “Q-Less”.
That story has the prankster appearing on the station to put Dr. Bashir to sleep for most of it and bid on an energy-draining crystal that turns out to be an alien egg. That’s not even the weirdest thing that happens.
At one point, Q transports himself and Sisko into a Victorian-era, bare-knuckle boxing match and gives himself a top-tier mustache. The Commander almost immediately lays him out.
The fact that the petty superbeing doesn’t take this personally and spend the next seven seasons getting even is, frankly, surprising.
However, he still had some appearances to make on Voyager.
Well, how many do you use?
One of the long-standing Star Trek jokes is how much real technology the franchise has either predicted or directly inspired.
This means automatic doors, flip phones, and the mp3 audio file format.
Still another is the tablet computer. Apple released its first Newton in 1993, the same year that Deep Space Nine premiered.
However, we’d already seen versions of “PADDs” (Personal Access Display Devices) since the original series. And the real-world concepts just kept getting better.
That’s especially apparent in scenes like the one above, in which DS9’s chief of security, Odo, demonstrates how much he has to keep track of by showing off how many PADDs he needs to contain it all.
The Star Trek universe apparently never thought of features like Slide Over or Split View. They’re really convenient, Odo. You’d love them.
Welcome to the Deep Space Fill & Grill
Deep Space Nine got way more interesting as it went on. But that’s only after it introduced characters like the Founders and the Jem’Hadar.
We weren’t entirely sure what the creators were going for when it started.
Sure, Sisko and crew had that whole new quadrant of the galaxy to explore. And of course they had some local sociopolitical situations to sort out.
However, when they weren’t doing those things, they were on the station. You know, being stationary.
This meme captures the spirit of that issue with a hilariously reductive description of what Deep Space Nine is when it’s not under attack.
We know it’s a step up from a forced-labor ore refinery like it was under the Cardassians. However, it still doesn’t really sound like a happening place when you put it this way.
Deep Space Nine was pretty preachy
All Star Trek series feature some kind of religious or spiritual beliefs. But Deep Space Nine packs them in like Tribbles in a grain-storage compartment.
The Bajorans worship the Prophets, Gul Dukat worships the Pah-wraiths, and both the Vorta and Jem’Hadar of the Dominion pledge a fanatical allegiance to the shapeshifting Founders. It’s a whole lot of tribute going on.
Sisko starts out calling the Prophets “the wormhole aliens,” which totally annoys Bajor’s religious leaders. However, even he comes to believe in their plans and prophecies eventually.
A lot of the series is about different perspectives on these kinds of spiritual relationships. Many of the senior crew’s interactions and disagreements come down to how they interpret the weird stuff going on in and around that wormhole.
It’s easy to believe that advanced science and galactic awareness will challenge spirituality, but Deep Space Nine just runs with it.
Time travel complicates everything
Both Deep Space Nine and Voyager had special episodes to commemorate the original series’ 30th anniversary in 1996.
The latter series included a flashback to Tuvok’s time on the U.S.S. Excelsior under Captain Sulu, and DS9’s was… different.
“Trials and Tribble-ations” uses the technology that director Robert Zemeckis used in Forrest Gump to insert the station crew into the classic series episode “The Trouble with Tribbles”.
This was the story that finally acknowledged the visual differences between Klingons in the two eras. However, mostly it was just kind of awkward.
It’s a fun episode, to be fair, but the rest of the series is so serious that it was weird having an hour of just straight-up goofiness show up in the middle.
What does ‘Prime’ mean, anyway
This is more a criticism of the whole franchise, but Deep Space Nine does include a couple episodes in which Sisko has to contend with the Federation’s policy of non-interference.
The main one is “Captive Pursuit”, which involves a group called the Hunters stalking a specially bred being called a Tosk as a cultural ceremony.
The two groups end up on the station, and Chief O’Brien wants to help the prey escape. Sisko sympathizes, but he reiterates that the Federation can’t step in.
That’s his official line, anyway. he actually helps O’Brien add the creature by asking Odo not to rush in stopping him.
In previous series, the Federation will make an exception if endangered planets or species specifically ask for help. Or, in Kirk’s case, if he feels like it.
But he’s so handsome
This meme probably came out before the show’s seventh season, in which Dr. Bashir finally lands a (non-holographic) girlfriend when he pairs up with Ezri Dax. He had a pretty long six years other than that, though.
He met Garak early on, and the two of them decided to have weekly lunches. Bashir also befriended Chief O’Brien, which we’ve already discussed and is weird.
The young doctor developed an infatuation with the series’ original Dax host, Jadzia, but she just didn’t think of him that way.
She ended up marrying Worf and then passing away. That was sad, but it did give Julian another chance with the symbiont.
Regardless, his friendship with the pathologically lying Garak was still somehow the healthiest relationship he had. Also, some creative, nontraditional corners of the internet have done a lot with that premise.
Don’t worry; I’ll fight you later
“Trials and Tribble-ations” wasn’t the only silly episode of Deep Space Nine. The fifth-season episode “In the Cards” happens solidly during the build-up to the Dominion War, but it’s still mostly a romp.
Jake notices that his father is looking pretty morose and stressed out, so he sets out to score the baseball fan a centuries-old Willie Mays rookie card.
Unfortunately, he loses the auction to a wacky inventor, who demands some equipment in exchange for the item.
He’s building a device to fight aging by “keeping the body’s cells entertained,” and he has quite a shopping list.
All of this leads to a confrontation with Dominion representative Weyoun, who has shown up to negotiate with the Bajorans and spread around actor Jeffrey Combs’ special brand of likable menace.
Eventually, Weyoun just gives Jake the card because this episode is just super goofy.
Ben Sisko’s complicated parentage
As the Emissary of the Prophets, Commander/Captain Sisko is deeply entrenched in Bajoran culture and regional politics.
He’s reluctant to take on this role, but he’s a professional and does his job to the best of his ability.
He learns later, however, that the Prophets named him Emissary for a reason, and it’s not just because he happened to discover their home in the wormhole.
They’d actually orchestrated his very birth to fulfill their own prophecies. And we’re not experts here, but that kind of feels like cheating at prophesying. That’s more like a plan.
The Prophets possessed a woman who conceived Sisko with his father to produce the person that they needed to achieve their goals.
It’s hard to say if this makes the guy half-wormhole alien, but that’s kind of the least of our concerns with this reveal.
The limits of medical science
Chief O’Brien’s chronically dislocated shoulder is a running joke throughout the series. The thing pops out when he’s kayaking in the holosuite, during space battles, or when he needs to get out of especially tense games of darts.
It happens all the time. That’s despite the fact that Federation medical science has reached a point where doctors can inject substances without needles, install fully functioning mechanical hearts, and get vitals and internal readings just by passing a blinking light over the patient.
However, they somehow still can’t get Miles’ shoulder to stay in the joint.
He got a temporary and miraculous fix during his time on the Enterprise-D from a mysterious alien with healing powers.
However, apparently it didn’t take because his shoulder injury comes up throughout Deep Space Nine.
Nobody’s prefect
This is more of a silly flub than anything weird about the show itself, but we’re going to notice it every time we watch this episode now.
In the opening credits for first-season episode “A Man Alone”, actor Aron Eisenberg’s name appears as “Aron Eisenerg”.
He plays Quark’s nephew Nog on the show. And his name is already pretty tricky with that less common version of “Aaron,” but we were surprised to see that this is where the typists messed up.
In a show that includes such oddly spelled, alien words and terms as “Jem’Hadar” and “Terok Nor,” and technobabble like “self-sealing stem bolt,” we’re not surprised to see something slip through.
It’s a talkie, so the actors don’t necessarily have to be able to spell that stuff to say it.
Fun with future fashions
Most of our concerns about fashions on Star Trek come down to the mandatory miniskirts for women on the original series, the Federation’s stirrup pants, and characters’ casual wear, which looks like everyone’s clothes are pajamas made of bus seat upholstery.
However, this meme presents a whole other level. Kai Winn’s hat looks like half of the Sydney Opera House, and we kind of love it.
It definitely isn’t anything someone would ever wear to bed, so it’s already well ahead of just about everything the senior staff wears during their off hours.
This is a formal hat. It is a scary hat, and it sends a message. That message is, “I am wearing something on my head that looks like three sharks swimming away from me, and I chose it on purpose.”
It’s a total power move.
Deep Space ‘Why?’
If you ask a Deep Space Nine fan what their least favorite episode is, you’ll get a few different answers. “Move Along Home” is a solid contender.
It’s about an alien who turns most of the senior crew into pieces in a board game they make Quark play. It’s really dumb.
However, we have to give it to “Profit and Lace”, in which Quark undergoes surgery to become a lady Ferengi so that he can take his mother’s place at an important meeting.
The point is to have a business-savvy woman convince the deeply misogynist Ferengi leaders that letting female members of society pursue profit and participate in society was actually a good idea.
This episode is somehow even more awkward than Voyager’s “Threshold”, in which Tom Paris travels so fastthat he evolves into a giant salamander.
What do you think? Are there any other memes that prove Star Trek: Deep Space Nine makes no sense? Sound off in the comments!
