A science project turns into a war.
This episode develops in a very careful sequence. For the first 10 minutes it looks like its going to be an annoying comedy episode, with Quark and Sisko trapped on a camping trip. Then it looks like it’s going to slightly advance the ‘Dominion’ plot with a simple ‘captured and then released’ story. But it just keeps developing and expanding into what promises to be quite a transformation of the DS9 universe.
The main weak spot is the Jake & Nog scenes, which work quite well overall, they just don’t fit the tone of the episode by that point.
Without question the Dominion scores the prize for ‘most threatening introduction of a villain species’. Not even the Klingons were this worrying after their first episode on screen.
332 down, 405 to go.