From the various interviews I've read/seen over the years, I've gotten the impression they were making things up as they went along, only settling into stories and arcs at the start of each season.
No, because otherwise they wouldn't have had to come up with something for it during Season 2 if there was already a plan in place. They would have just used that plan. The Dominion was a response to the Gamma Quadrant just being more space and since Voyager was being setup and the Delta Quadrant was going to also be more space.
Yes, I know. And in fact I already said that they didn’t have any specific plan earlier in this thread.
This is why I used the words “vague” and “inkling” in this. I didn’t mean to say that I thought there were any concrete plans necessarily committed to paper, laying out some original plan. I just wonder if Piller and Berman, when they wrote the idea of the wormhole into the pilot script or series bible, had any thoughts about where they would try to take that concept. Nothing like an arc or long-term plan, but something that might have been inherent in the original idea without them necessarily following up on it.
To illustrate what I had in mind, here’s a look at how the wormhole, for example, is described within
series bible …
THE BAJORAN WORMHOLE
Wormholes, simply put, are shortcuts through space. You go in one end and come out the other in seconds … but find yourself billions of kilometers away. All known wormholes previously encountered in the Star Trek universe have been unstable. Their ends can whip randomly around the universe … they last for brief periods of time before collapsing. But, in our pilot episode, the first stable wormhole is discovered near the Denorios asteroid field, close to the planet Bajor. Like other wormholes, it is only visible when an object enters or exits through it.
A brief journey through the Bajoran Wormhole will take a starship to the Gamma Quadrant … normally a sixty year journey at warp nine. The ride is a spectacular light show, with brilliant colors surrounding the ship … while inside, strange visual distortions affect perceptions as passengers tear through the space-time continuum. (There will be different optical effecs going the opposite direction through the wormhole.)
This wormhole is a new passageway to hundreds of unexplored sector of space. And it will turn Bajor into the leading center of commerce and scientific exploration in the sector … attracting travelers from all over the galaxy.
iIn the first episode, we learn that the wormhole has been artificially created by a species of aliens that do not live in the same space-time continuum as we do. Thus, we encounter them unexpectedly within the wormhole itself. They have been sending out orb-like probes from the wormhole, one orb every century for a thousand years, seeking contact with other lifeforms.
(
Bolded parts by me.) As you can see, there are some vague ideas that are not necessarily how they ended up portraying it on the show. They paid some lip-service to the station becoming a “leading center of commerce and scientific exploration in the sector … attracting travelers from all over the galaxy”, but rarely did they really manage to make it feel that way. I also don’t remember making it clear that the wormhole aliens where sending out the orbs specifically to contact other lifeforms.
There’s also this interesting tidbit …
On a given day, there might be anywhere from ten to three hundred visitors to DS9 as ships come through … explorers, scientists, merchants, spies … most of the visitors stay on their ships but there are special quarters for some guests. All of their ships need to stop at DS9 to be outfitted and tuned with special impulse energy buffers to travel safely through the wormhole. (In the first episode, we learn that ships’ power sources are destructive to the ionic field that is home to the aliens who created the wormhole, and live within it on a differen time plane. During that experience, we are told how to travel through without harming them.)
Which is something that was hinted at in the pilot but never really followed up with any sort of story. So that might be something like what I was thinking of: The possibility that Piller and Berman saw this as a potential jumping off point for a story down the line.
Concerning the early thinking about who Odo’s people might be, there’s this in the bible …
When the wormhole is discovered very close to where he was originally found, Odo realizes that the answers to a lot of questions in his life could be on the other side. Someday, he hopes, someone will come through the wormhole, perhaps even looking for him, and tell him who he is.
Which makes it seem like their original idea was not that they would journey into the Gamma Quadrant all that much and that whoever his people were, they would eventually come to
them.
There’s also some interesting stuff about Jadzia’s original conception …
The result of this joining is an [sic] serene character who brings a calm, centered voice to any discussion … patient, confident and wise … you might think of Dax as an ancient zen master in the body of a twenty-eight year old woman. There is a subtle conflict within her … a generation gap if you will. The older symbiont suppresses the youthful insistence of the host. And so, sometimes she will seem ‘controlled’ when a part of her really would like to let go. For example, the 300 year old worm has no use for sex or passion, except as it serves procreation, but occasionally the youthful instincts of the host overcomes that resistance.)
Kira, who forms a very close relationship with Dax, often tells her to loosen up. Dax admires Kira for her youthful energy, her purpose and her drive and becomes something of a mentor to her.
Dax and Ben Sisko have worked together before. The only trouble is that, back then, Dax was still in the host body of an elderly man … and was something of a mentor to Sisko. Her sexually appealing new form will create a certain tension between her and Sisko, which they will both resist. After all, he’s still having a hard time getting used to the fact that she’s a three hundred year old worm. But he does not hide the respect and affection he has for her.
That they envisioned Jadzia as a character dominated by a 300 year old worm that “has no use for sex or passion, except as it serves procreation” might be the original reason why they resisted pairing her up with Bashir, because she just didn’t have any desire for romance. They even say that Dax has motherly feelings for Bashir and is protective of him.
Kira telling Dax to loosen up (and not the other way around) is also a bit funny and probably illustrates very well how a character’s portrayal changes in the course of a show’s run and is influenced by how the actress plays her. And I also never really noticed that they wrote Sisko as someone resisting his attraction to Dax. There was maybe one line in the pilot about it and then in the Mirror Universe they let them spend a night together. But other than that they seemed to have dropped that idea.
What’s also notable is the absence of any mention of the wormhole aliens being seen as prophets by the “Bajora”, the wormhole being called the Celestial Temple and Sisko as the emissary. So those seem to be later additions to the concept.
