Did you enjoy DS9 the first time you watched?

[apollo1984]

No I did not enjoy it first time around, I just did not really "understand" the premise of the show, now I do understand it and it is the most well rounded of all the treks in my opinion.

Many characters that had depth (and a few flaws for good measure) not just focusing on a few (ie voyager), good action episodes (a lot of the dominion arc), good emotional episodes (duet and the Visitor) and good comedy episodes (I don't usually like holodeck episodes but I did enjoy Bada, bing and our man bashir).

 

[at Quark's]

Depends a bit upon what you mean, exactly.

If you mean did I like DS9 the very first episode I saw? Don't remember, though I did have to get used to DS9, and characters like Odo and such.

If you mean, did I like DS9 the first time I watched a significant part of the series? Certainly!

 

[Kor]

To be honest, I got kind of bored during the original run and stopped watching regularly, but I ended up missing some great episodes because of that. I came to appreciate it much more later on.

Kor

 

[Lance]

I appreciated it's maturity from the outset, and loved the 'clash of two worlds' feel of squeaky clean Starfleet types being dropped in the aftermath of a war zone and being asked to sink or swim. But it took me a while before I 'got' all the characters. I did like Kira from the start, but found Julian and Jadzia both a little annoying. Jadzia I never really warmed to. I did like that Sisko had baggage with the death of his wife. Most of the characters felt more 'real' to me than the toy soldiers we'd seen populating starships in the other shows.

That having been said, I did follow Voyager more than DS9 at the time. My first complete run through of the entire DS9 was really when the DVDs came out.

 

[cgervasi]

Question 2: Was there an episode that got you hooked?

Personal: I tried to watch the first few shows in 93 and just hated it. The music (then) sucked, no real starship, and it was weird. The whole inside the wormhole aliens and Sisko flashing to baseball....blah and meh, but that was back then.

I watched it on the first night. But I was confused b/c I had heard it would be like TNG but grittier, like focused on the rough poor neighborhood of space. I was 16 y/o and confused about what this religious stuff was doing in the show.

I watched the episodes occassionally, and I thought they were alright.

Then I watched them again on the DVDs around 2003-2004, not long after the invasion and occupation of Iraq. Suddenly the show actually made sense to me. This was the positive outcome that people supported the invasion wanted. Here's this unsable country with civil war that had math and science while the rest of the gallaxy was in a "dark ages" of sorts. They're deeply religious. They invite in the most powerful country in the quadrant, a secular country, to help them partly because they have a resource (the wormhole) that the rest of the gallaxy wants to exploit.

I know there were many differences, and I don't mean to bring up the real-world politics of it. I'm just saying it sort of showed me the dream (which didn't come true) that proponents of occupying Iraq had.

 

[tomalak301]

DS9 premiered during treks golden era and I was 8 years old. I was a TNG fan and was hooked after Past Prolouge. I actually found Emissary a little boring at first.

 

[Peach Wookiee]

I remember being mad at then-Commander Sisko for being mean to Captain Picard. But I liked the show. I can't honestly say it was my absolute favorite when I was younger, but after September 11, it became my favorite. It made much more sense after that.

 

[mendelin]

When I first saw DS9, I was a huge fan of TNG and I was very sad after "All good things" - the series finale of TNG.
Well, The Emissary was for me like "oh, the best story is over, here is something else, but not your favorite TNG". I hated it.
I was waiting for appearance of my favorite characters: Miles O'Brien, Q, Vash, Mrs Troi. Honestly to say, Season 1 wasn't a good story: Babel, If Wishes Were Horses were weak episodes.
After The Search DS9 became interesting series to me.
But the show became my favorite one completely after Heart of Stone. Yep, I'm a huge fan of Odo and I love all Odo-centric episodes.

 

[IronMaiden]

What is wrong with Babel? it is one of my favorite episodes from S1.

I really wanted more virus episodes

 

[keith2282]

I actually loved the series from beginning to end. The only topics I got tired of in the show was the Bajoran's religion and extension of that, the "Prophets". It, to me, was just ran into the ground. Still love the series overall though.

 

[BruntFCA]

When I first got in to Trek as a kid I was a big fan of TNG, VOY and TOS through re-runs and the movies on VHS but DS9 wasn't airing on any of the local channels and I didn't have cable so while I was aware of it I couldn't actually watch it. Some time later my mom bought me a copy of "Emissary" on VHS and I loved it. At that age I didn't really view it as an episode of Star trek but as a Star Trek movie and I probably watched it dozens of times. Years later when I was finally able to watch the series it was pretty amazing, imagine that you have a favorite movie growing up and all of a sudden you now have access to 7 seasons of it. So yeah I liked it from the start.

 

[Queen Mab]

I remember being mad at then-Commander Sisko for being mean to Captain Picard. But I liked the show. I can't honestly say it was my absolute favorite when I was younger, but after September 11, it became my favorite. It made much more sense after that.

Out of interest, can you explain that a bit? Obviously 11/09/2001 was a watershed moment, but what changed in your outlook?

 

[apollo1984]

I remember being mad at then-Commander Sisko for being mean to Captain Picard. But I liked the show. I can't honestly say it was my absolute favorite when I was younger, but after September 11, it became my favorite. It made much more sense after that.

Out of interest, can you explain that a bit? Obviously 11/09/2001 was a watershed moment, but what changed in your outlook?

He probably saw similarities between Wolf 359 and 9/11, Wolf 359 was a huge battle where many died and families torn apart (all be it fictional).

Sept 11 it was a real incident where many people died and families torn apart, after that he probably found it easier to "relate" to why Commander Sisko was so confrontational with Picard as the guy who took his wife away.

Whether the poster actually lost someone in 9/11 I don't know but I suspect that even those who did not it put certain things in perspective.

 

[Isolinear]

The first time I watched DS9 was on the BBC in the mid-90s. I don't remember my opinion of it other than thinking Bashir was a really boring character and Odo a really interesting one. I guess I enjoyed it, but I do know I preferred TNG.
​

 

[Binary]

I loved the first episode. I found the wormhole aliens interesting and Sisko's bitterness toward Picard was perfectly handled. Plus the battle scenes at Wolf 359 were great. That was an awful lot of people who were killed and this put a more personal slant on the event... After the premiere though, it was a long time before I warmed to the show. Most of the first and second seasons didn't grab me as much. I wasn't until the third season that I really started to enjoy it.

 

[JirinPanthosa]

Babel wasn't terrible like Passenger but it was pretty mediocre. It had some cool moments like Quark's amusement at Odo needing his help at ops and Kira's forcing the guy to help him by infecting him.

 

[Paradise City]

Sisko's animosity was a bit strange. If he thinks Picard is the guy who killed his wife and the thousands of Federation citizens and was some sort of active collaborator with the Borg - then he should be refusing to converse and take orders from Picard at all.

Not to say the writers couldn't use Wolf 359 as a source of tension between the two men where Sisko is struggling to keep his composure - but the kind of gruff anger Sisko displays here struck me as being a bit out of place.

 

[DonIago]

The whole point was that, even as Sisko realizes that Picard isn't directly responsible for the death of his wife, seeing the Borg-Formerly-Known-As-Locutus standing within touching distance of him, knowing what he did, is more than he can bear.

It's called trauma.

 

[Peach Wookiee]

I remember being mad at then-Commander Sisko for being mean to Captain Picard. But I liked the show. I can't honestly say it was my absolute favorite when I was younger, but after September 11, it became my favorite. It made much more sense after that.

Out of interest, can you explain that a bit? Obviously 11/09/2001 was a watershed moment, but what changed in your outlook?

He probably saw similarities between Wolf 359 and 9/11, Wolf 359 was a huge battle where many died and families torn apart (all be it fictional).

Sept 11 it was a real incident where many people died and families torn apart, after that he probably found it easier to "relate" to why Commander Sisko was so confrontational with Picard as the guy who took his wife away.

Whether the poster actually lost someone in 9/11 I don't know but I suspect that even those who did not it put certain things in perspective.

I'm a she.
And what got me about DS9 in post-9/11 viewing was the issues they dealt with. Religious extremism, terrorism, what a society does while at war and can our ideals survive? Post-9/11, we had to deal with those issues.
ETA: What I ended up loving was that Sisko was more human in some ways. And as a person of faith, I love that DS9 celebrated the faith of a culture. And that was before 9/11.

 

[JirinPanthosa]

Sisko knew that Picard wasn't responsible for killing his wife but somewhere inside from his place of rage he felt like it. It's hard to intellectually repress that level of primal hatred.