Star Trek Deep Space Nine was the 3rd series in the Star Trek Franchise. It ran from January 1991 until June 1999. It was different to all previous Trek in that instead of exploring the galaxy the crew were based aboard a space station and whilst a certain amount of exploring went on most stories were based on Deep Space Nine itself so the galaxy came to them.

The static location meant that the storylines that were developed were able to run as a thread through several episodes and it was much easier to revisit the events of a previous episode. So whilst there was still a new main story each week there was much more of a feeling of continuity than there had ever been before.

Deep Space Nine pushed the boundaries compared to any Trek that had gone before, the edges became a little blurred and issues were no longer as black and white as they had always been. These were characters that made mistakes. Where before we had Kirk's complete disregard for the Prime Directive and Picards almost slave like adherence to it, here we have a group of people for who the choices are not so easy, they live on the edge of a wormhole to a new quadrant and in that quadrant there is a race that would like nothing more than to enslave the entire Alpha Quadrant, suddenly the Prime Directive doesn't seem quite so important. It does get broken but never without good reason and / or deliberation.