Commander Benjamin Sisko and his son Jake, both survivors of the Wolf 359 Borg massacre, arrive at the planet Bajor as part of a Starfleet team taking over the abandoned Cardassian space station Deep Space 9. The station, which was inentionally damaged by the Cardassians before they left it behind, is being pieced together by newly-transferred Operations Chief O'Brien from the Enterprise. Sisko also meets Major Kira, his Bajoran first officer, Odo, a mysterious shapeshifter in charge of station security, and Quark, the suspicious Ferengi kingpin who's eager to get out of town before the regulatory hand of the Federation clamps down on his shady "business" affairs. Sisko himself, however, is considering resigning from Starfleet to raise his son in a better environment. Soon, the station's new doctor, Julian Bashir, and science officer Jadzia Dax, a very old friend of Sisko, arrive.
Sisko travels to Bajor and visits Bajoran spiritual leader Kai Opaka, who tells Sisko that he is to be the emissary of the people to the temple of their gods. Opaka reveals an Orb, a mystic object of a type which has appeared throughout Bajoran history. The Orb envelops Sisko in a brief recollection of his first meeting with his wife, and then releases him. Opaka gives him the Orb, and the news that Sisko - whether he likes it or not, whether he even knows it or not - will find the temple.
Seizoen 1
Dax and Sisko set out for the Denorios belt in a runabout and stumble across a wormhole that shoots them 70,000 light years across the galaxy. Trying to return to the station, their ship is halted. Dax is taken back to the station by an Orb, while Sisko is kept and studied by noncorporeal beings who built the wormhole. These beings have no conception of linear time, existing simultaneously in the past, present and future, and they ask Sisko questions about the ephemeral nature of humans, which they do not comprehend. Dax, back on Deep Space 9, fills the crew in on details of the wormhole. Major Kira orders O'Brien to shift the station's position so that it stands in front of the wormhole. A Cardassian ship, however, enters the wormhole, but is damaged by the wormhole life forms. When another Cardassian flotilla arrives and finds no sign of the missing ship, they threaten to open fire on Deep Space 9 unless Kira agrees to surrender the station.
Shortly after Dr. Bashir excitedly reports to Sisko a meeting with a merchant who happens to be the only remaining Cardassian on the station, a Bajoran ship is detected with hostile Cardassians hot in pursuit. The single occupant of the damaged Bajoran vessel is beamed aboard and is discovered to be a member of a group of violent Bajoran extremists who have not yet ceased their terrorism against the Cardassians. Requesting asylum, all Tahna does is invite Sisko's suspicion. Sisko is further put in a tenuous situation when the Cardassian ship's commander demands that Tahna be turned over for his crimes against the Cardassians. Kira, herself a former member of Tahna's underground, tries to convince Tahna to give up his violent tactics, but he refuses, and it turns out that his visit to Deep Space 9 is all part of another of his inevitably bloody gambits for revenge. This time, however, Tahna plans action not only against the Cardassians, but the Federation as well - and he expects Kira to help him.
During routine banter with Quark on the Promenade, Odo spots Ibundan, a Bajoran man he jailed months ago for murder, and the old enemies get into a fight almost immediately. Not long afterward, Ibundan is found dead in one of the Promenade's holosuites, and evidence has been carefully placed to lead a trail to Odo, a suspicion which spreads among the station's populace along with rumors of Odo being a Cardassian agent and a growing paranoia. Bashir and Dax begin putting together pieces of a puzzle which include DNA traces from Ibundan's ship, but in the meantime, the station's residents grow restless and demand that Odo be handed over to be punished for a crime they believe he committed. While Sisko and his crew are working full-time on finding the solution to the crime, the denizens of Deep Space 9 seem to have no intention of allowing Odo to survive long enough to stand trial.
Business as usual is keeping O'Brien the busiest man on DS9, as systems continuously break down almost at random, mainly food replicators. In the course of his repairs, O'Brien accidentally activates a concealed Bajoran device designed to release an adaptive virus into the food generated by that replicator. He is immediately stricken with the disease, which scrambles his brain's ability to connect language, stimuli and responses. Quark, impatient to get service back on schedule at his bar, unwittingly spreads the virus to all of his patrons, and a stationwide epidemic ensues. Bashir, before falling victim to the virus himself, discovers that the plague was created by the Bajora in an attempt to prevent the construction of the station years ago, and it is eventually fatal. Most of the population is rendered useless, with a few exceptions, among them Odo, Major Kira and Quark. They must find an antidote to the virus and try to ensure the station's safety until a cure can be found.
The first ship from the Gamma Quadrant emerges through the wormhole and arrives at DS9. Its single occupant is convinced to dock at the station to allow the crew to repair his battle-damaged vessel. O'Brien tries to get acquainted with the alien, who identifies itself only as Tosk. As soon as no one is watching, however, Tosk begins trying to determine how to fight and hide on the station. Odo discovers Tosk tampering with a security junction and Tosk winds up in the brig. A second ship arrives from the wormhole. Sisko gives the new visitors every chance to make friendly contact, but they instead disrupt the station's shields and beam into the Promenade without permission. Armed, they begin searching for Tosk and hold the crew at bay. It turns out that they are game hunters searching for Tosk, and advise the crew of DS9 to stay out of their way. O'Brien decides to take the rules of the hunt into his own hands to prevent Tosk from having to be bagged in captivity and disgrace.
A Runabout barely returns from the Gamma Quadrant after experiencing a power loss on its way back to DS9. The crew must be rescued by Sisko, Kira and O'Brien on arrival, and they have brought a passenger back from the other side: Vash, Captain Picard's old flame from a vacation on Risa, last seen going off to explore the universe with Q. Vash has apparently been wandering through the Gamma Quadrant on her own for two years, and once she gets settled in on the station, begins making plans to sell several artifacts from the Gamma Quadrant.
In the meantime, power failures begin occurring on DS9, coinciding with the arrival of Q, who is pestering Vash to continue her travels with him. Q also introduces himself to Sisko and the station crew and delights in irritating them as much as he has always enjoyed badgering the Enterprise crew. In the meantime, Vash meets Quark and they begin planning an auction of her Gamma Quadrant loot - off of which they both expect to make a fortune. Power failures and Q continue to plague the station, climaxing with a gravitational force sucking DS9 straight toward the wormhole. Sisko is unsure whether an unknown natural phenomenon is dragging the station to its doom, or if Q is simply playing another of his infamous pranks.
While on the way to her quarters, Dax is attacked and kidnapped. Bashir attempted to help, but was knocked out. When he came round moments later, he informed Sisko and they managed to stop the ship from getting away. These men were ordered to arrest Dax for treason and murder. Sisko managed to use the fact that the station was Bajoran to allow an extradition hearing. In that hearing, the person who attempted to kidnap Dax had to prove that Jadzia Dax was responsible for Curzon Dax. The situation is made mute when Odo uncovers the evidence that it was not Dax who murdered the man because Curzon Dax was in that man's wife's bed at the time.
Bashir and Kira respond to a distress signal from a security ship. They find the security person and a prisoner, but the prisoner died. The prisoner was captured while he was on the way to DS9 to hijack a shipment but as the station prepared for the shipment, evidence did seem to suggest that the prisoner was still alive and still trying to hijack the shipment. They discovered that he had stored his conciouness in a generator and had transferred it into another person's brain. Although the security guard was initally expected it was discovered that it was Julian's brain he had transferred it into. The freighter arrived and was hijacked, but Dax mamanged to send a pulse along the tractor beam which allowed Julian to take control again.
A group of Gamma Quadrant aliens led by Falow makes first contact with the station, an event which Sisko intends to treat with the utmost seriousness and ceremony. Sisko is surprised, however, when Falow and his fellow travelers seem to be interested only in games. After Sisko leaves the proceedings out of boredom and mild disappointment, Quark cheats Falow in his casino, and Falow means to get even by introducing Quark to a game from the Gamma Quadrant. At the same time, Sisko, Dax, Major Kira and Dr. Bashir vanish from the station without a trace, finding themselves in a surreal maze occupied by images of Falow and others. As they try to work out the puzzle and help each other survive, Quark continues to play the game, only gradually becoming aware of who his pawns are.
In the TNG episode "The First Duty", Picard emphasized to Wesley that the first duty of a Starfleet officer was to the truth. Yet, in this episode, Sisko says that the first duty of a Starfleet officer was first contact.
Quark receives a surprise - and something of a dubious honor - when Grand Nagus Zek, a Ferengi business mogul, arrives at DS9. After some customary patronizing at Quark's, Zek insists on holding a conference of Ferengi profiteers there, while Quark fears that Zek plans on buying out his bar on the station. To everyone's surprise, especially Quark's, Zek announces his retirement and declares that Quark will succeed him to the coveted position of Grand Nagus. Many of the visiting Ferengi are jealous, as would be expected of them. But Quark discovers - after a close call - that someone among the Ferengi is jealous enough to try gaining the position of Nagus by killing him.
A pair of twinned Miradorn arrive at the station to sell an artefact. A visitor from the Gamma Quadrant attempts to steal the artefact but Odo catches them all. Sisko and Dax go to his homeworld and the Gamma Quadrant visitor starts talking to Odo about the "Changelings" in the Gamma Quadrant and even shows him a "Shape shifting" pendant. Odo took the visitor back to his homeworld in the Gamma Quadrant but they are intercepted by the Miradorn, seeking revenge for his dead brother. They are forced to enter a vortex which the visitor claims is the home of the shape shifters. He gets onto the planet but it turns out that it is not the changeling homeworld but the place where he hid his daughter. Odo lets them go out of sympathy.
On a routine day at the station, Kai Opaka, the Bajoran spiritual leader who helped lead Sisko to discover the wormhole when he first arrived at DS9, pays a surprise visit. Sisko, Kira and Bashir take Opaka on her first trip through the wormhole. Before they can return to the station, a signal is detected from a series of satellites orbiting a moon in the Gamma Quadrant. When Sisko's Runabout investigates, it is fired on by one of the satellites, forcing the ship to crash-land on the moon. Opaka dies on impact, but before Kira has long to grieve, warriors appear and take the crash survivors back to their camp. It is discovered that two groups of combatants have been stranded there for centuries, fighting a war in which no one ever dies - not even newcomers who find themselves in the line of fire.
When the Yangtzee-Kiang goes down, Bashir says the hull temperature is 1500 degrees Celcius. But just after the crash the crew touch it. Ouch!
As the leaders of two Bajoran factions arrive on the station where Sisko hopes to diplomatically steer them away from solving their differences in combat, O'Brien and Dr. Bashir depart to Bajor in response to a distress call which vaguely stated that an entire community is jeopardized. Bashir is puzzled to find all of the villagers except one - the elderly Sirah - in perfect health, yet the locals still insist that they are in mortal danger. They discover, when the Sirah makes his appearance at a yearly festival (against Bashir's recommendation), that the threat comes from the legendary Dal'Rok, a mythical creature which descends upon the village for five nights of each year in an attempt to destroy it. But every year in the past several generations, the village Sirah told a Story, somehow halting the Dal'Rok's onslaught. This year, the Sirah will not complete his Story...
Bajor is about to begin tapping the core of one its moons so it can generate power. However, they find on the moon one stubbon Bajoran and his workers who are unwilling to leave. During an attempt to remove them by force, the man is injured. Kira remains behind to care for him, feeling sorry for him. She realises that he has to leave so when he tells her that as long as his house stands, he remains, she burns his house down and they beam up.
The strange behavior of space near the wormhole and the sudden appearance in Chief O'Brien's quarters of a character from a bedtime story read to Molly signal the beginning of an alien study of the station's crew from the vantage point of manifestations of their imaginations, ranging from a favorite baseball player of Sisko's to a pair of ravishing beauties (appearing, naturally, on Quark's arms) to the girl of Bashir's dreams - Dax, but with a far different personality. At first the apparitions seem harmless, but it then seems that they are capable of posing danger to the crew.
A handful of Federation ambassadors boards Deep Space 9 on a fact-finding mission - one which is failing to get off the ground since the delegates seem unable to cope with the fact that the station isn't exactly a proper Federation starbase. Among the delegates is Lwaxana Troi, who becomes enamoured of Odo after he retrieves a stolen item of hers from a thief at Quark's bar. As she begins scheming to snare the constable, a small probe emerges from the wormhole, and to O'Brien's surprise, the station computer actually works well enough for once to download information from the probe. The probe's effect on the station computer is inexplicable, including stranding Odo in a stuck turbolift with Lwaxana Troi...
Odo and Lwaxana are stuck in Turbolift 7. Later in the episode Sisko's station log says that they are stuck in Turbolift 4.
A Klingon ship makes an unexpected return from a scientific mission in the Gamma Quadrant and self-destructs. A single member of the ship's crew beams himself into Ops, dying shortly after cryptically announcing victory. As Dax and O'Brien start trying to piece together the mystery of the Klingon ship, divisions take place between members of DS9's crew. Kira, still unsatisfied after losing an argument with Sisko about security arrangements for a shipload of possible allies of the Cardassians, begins to plot against the commander, quietly gathering loyal followers among the crew and threatening those who don't sympathize with her cause. Sisko, in the meantime, goes into hiding supposedly for security reasons, as he and Chief O'Brien prepare for Kira's imminent mutiny. Odo remains the only officer who hasn't taken up arms with either side yet, since he has his own motive.
- The two other Bajorans mutinying with Kira. First, both are wearing grey uniforms. In the next shot, one is still wearing grey but the other is wearing a *tan* uniform like Odo's.
- When Sisko and O'Brien got to Airlock 4, they were without their comm badges, which they had discarded earlier. After Odo told everyone to grab on to something and opened the airlock, Sisko had his comm badge on. Then in the next scene cut back to him, he was again without his badge.
- When Odo opened the cargo bay airlock the air was blowing into his face even though he was facing the airlock. Seems like everyone else had the air blowing at their face regardless of which way they were facing. Air should have been rushing *out*.
A Federation freighter arrives and delivers a passenger who needs medical attention. At the mention of the passenger's disease, Kira realizes that whoever it is, they were at a forced labor camp operated on Bajor by the Cardassians which Kira helped to liberate years ago. But the patient turns out to be a Cardassian. Kira places him under arrest and, against Sisko's advice, interrogates him. Under questioning, the Cardassian suddenly proclaims himself to be Gul Darhe'el, who commanded the labor camps and authorized genocidal killings of Bajorans. Kira, along with the Bajoran provisional government, takes a more vested interest in proving him guilty of past atrocities...even if he isn't who he says he is.
Vedek Winn, a Bajoran spiritual leader who is a prime contender for the position of Kai, appears in Keiko's classroom and declares that Keiko's scientific teachings about the wormhole are in conflict with Bajoran beliefs. Winn's announcement divides the Federation officers and Bajorans on the station who follow Winn. Sisko attempts to enlist the aid of Vedek Bareil, the quiet leader in the race to become Kai, but initially meets with no cooperation. When terrorist acts begin, it becomes apparent that Bajoran political interests may also be deeply involved - and the Federation crew of Deep Space 9 may have outstayed their welcome.