Star Trek: 10 Secrets Of The USS Defiant You Need To Know
1. Defiant Legacy
The USS Defiant appeared in 68 episodes of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine before it was destroyed and replaced with an identical ship of the same class and the same name (but terrible purple carpet) in an additional two episodes of the series.
The replacement Defiant, actually the USS Sao Paulo, survived the war with the Dominion and the end of the Deep Space Nine and hasn't appeared in any other canon Star Trek media since "What You Leave Behind".
However, for the retrospective documentary "What We Left Behind – Looking Back at Star Trek: Deep Space Nine", members of the show's original writing staff reconvened to sketch out an additional episode of the series and settled the fate of the Defiant. In the hypothetical season eight imagined by Ira Steven Behr, Ronald D. Moore, Robert Hewitt Wolfe, René Echevarria, and Hans Beimler, the Defiant would be commanded by Captain Nog in the year 2395 until its destruction at the hands of Section 31.
That grim fate aside, the Defiant does live on in Pocket Books' excellent Star Trek: Deep Space Nine relaunch novels and is playable in the Star Trek Online MMO.
According to Ira Seven Behr, the Defiant was "on a five-year mission to kick ass", but it's probably still got some fight left in it for another round in Star Trek: Lower Decks or Star Trek: Picard...