I had originally started DS9 at season 4 and the only time the Morn registered for me in that viewing was in the episode Who Mourns for Morn? which was a really enjoyable episode. I just started watching it from the start and in the episode where Quarks is shut so Quark and can play a game with Dax, Morn is moved on from sleeping on one of the promenades benches by ODO only for him to helplessly bang on the door then walking on dejected was both funny and moving. I have to admit it is these moments where small scenes like this in the early seasons that establishes characters, even minor ones like Morn is what I had missed by skipping seasons. Without giving away spoilers, is there other moments like this in the first 3 seasons that does the same for other minor characters?
I'm in the middle of a rewatch (Season Four), and I'd never noticed the pair of Pakleds that show up almost as much as Morn Granted, first time I watched DS9, i hadn't seen the entirety of Next Generation, so I wasn't even aware who the Pakleds were.
I can hear it now... PAKLED (to Quark): "Our glass is empty. Can you make it full?" QUARK: "Yeah, whatever. One slip of latinum." PAKLED: "He will make our glass full. We are smart."
I had a soft spot for the Klingon Chef played by the late actor/singer Ron Taylor. I recall the episodes he was in "Melora" and "Playing God", Klingons were still around but wouldn't be front and center to the tales to come. THAT discipline didn't last long.
I had watched Melora at the weekend as even though the Klingon Chef was just in a the episode for a couple of minutes, he did make an impression with the time he had!!! Just going a bit off topic, I was impressed with the SFX of the low gravity simulation between Melora and Bashir. I assume it was done with wire harness and CGI but it was a great effect as it complemented the scene and story rather than just put in for the wow factor as CGI seems to be used for nowadays.
Some other characters that show up throughout the seasons. I think there's this elderly Bajoran religious dude at the Promenade's Temple that you see every so often. O'Brien has an assistant named Neela There are persistent Ferengi waiters and repeat dabo girls. One, named M'pella, gets a few lines The Pakleds do show up, a LOT. In the Gamma Quadrant sourcebook for the Star Trek Adventures RPG I wrote that it was the Pakleds who actually smuggled the Founders into the Alpha Quadrant. Ended up dovetailing nicely with some plot developments from a later show... In Star Trek you'll see a lot of the same crew members over and over again. This is because those actors are the doubles for the main characters. There are different types of doubles, too, such as stand--ins for rear shots, stunt doubles for scenes with fighting or peril, and body doubles for long shots. So if you happen to see a large black man in a red Starfleet uniform, he very likely was one of Avery Brooks' doubles. M'Pella, the dabo girl, is a tall white woman with pale skin and dark hair. Her actor happened to play Jadzia Dax from behind, and in all of the outdoor shots (Terry Farrell has a skin condition and cannot be in direct sunlight). So that's where a lot of the recurring characters come from.
Thanks for the information JRoss, much appreciated. There was a few other episodes in the first 3 seasons that I enjoyed and focused more on minor characters that only appeared in one episode. The ones that stayed on my mind was Melora and Shadowplay. I liked them because they focused on the notion of identity. Melora had the chance to be like everybody else by being able to function properly in normal gravity but didn't because it would mean giving up who she was as an Elaysian. In Shadowplay, it was touching that Rurigan accepted that he had accepted and cared for the holograms he had created even though he knew they weren't real people. Another one which touched on identity although based on one of the main characters was Whispers where we asked ourselves whether a clone of O'Brien was the same as the real one.
Pretty interesting stuff when DS9 was actually good IMO; seems engaging into the conditions of human disabilities and making it a positive was another gold cluster for Star Trek. It gave hope for individuals who had a condition could think they can achieve whatever they wanted. The producers did an excellent job making that episode.