10 Greatest Star Trek Cave Episodes
3. The Siege Of AR-558
To this day, The Siege of AR-558 remains one of the most frank, intimate depictions of the senseless brutalities of war the franchise has ever offered. It is a haunting tale, and it all happens to the sombre, claustrophobic backdrop of the formerly Dominion-held caves on a planet that simply, and unceremoniously, has nothing more than an alphanumeric designation. As AR-558 script co-writer Hans Beimler told Cinefatastique (Vol 32, no 4-5),
The thing that Ira [Steven Behr] and I both wanted to do was to make war as gritty as possible. […] People pay prices in war. It can't be that clean. People you care about get hurt. We wanted to see that happen. We were determined to make that happen.
Other characters were considered according to Beimler, but it was eventually decided that Nog would pay the highest physical and emotional price from the battle — the ramifications of which, as we know, would be explored in a later episode.
The Siege of AR-558 also broke records at the time for the greatest number of phasers ever used in a Star Trek show, and filming involved a lot of practical pyrotechnics off-camera. CGI was used to create all of those nasty Houdini mines, meaning the cast was (cave-)acting to ping-pong balls or nothing at all.