10 Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Episodes That Were Almost Completely Different

9. Wrongs Darker Than Death Or Night (Season 6 Episode 17)

Of all of the relationships in DS9’s seven year run, few are as interesting as that of Kira Nerys and Gul Dukat. Frequently combative, occasionally understanding and always ambiguous, the former overlord and terrorist are at odds as often as they are allied.

Going through several shifts in its gestation period, season six’s ‘Wrongs Darker Than Death of Night’ would push this relationship to breaking point when Kira peers back in time after Dukat smugly reveals that he and her mother had been lovers.

Wildly different in its origins, the episode’s original impetus bizarrely concerned the ghosts of time displaced Bajoran children and a Cardassian analogue of the Nazi scientist Josef Mengele, before being almost completely thrown out save for the time displacement and refocusing on Kira and Dukat. The original script also had Kira forgiving her mother for the transgression, realising she was doing it to provide for her family, before being rewritten again to leave the moral position much more ambiguous.

Whilst not amongst DS9’s best, the episode served as another knife twist in Dukat’s inexorable link to Kira, and another opportunity for DS9 to explore the moral complexity of this post-colonial world.