Star Trek: 10 Things You Didn't Know About Odo

In 1964, Gene Roddenberry famously pitched "STAR TREK" as "a 'Wagon Train' concept — built around characters who travel to worlds 'similar' to our own […]". The American frontier of the Old or Wild West was transposed into the final frontier of space. Star Trek: Deep Space Nine would switch out the Enterprise as train for the Station as frontier town.

As Robert Hewitt Wolfe commented in the aptly named DVD extra New Frontiers — The Story of Deep Space Nine, the station had its "country doctor," its "barkeeper," and, of course, its very own kind of lawman. In the beginning, René Auberjonois noted in Crew Dossier — Odo, "Constable Odo was sort of envisioned […] as a kind of young, John Wayne Sheriff-in-town".

In fact, Wayne himself had a brief (somewhat secretive) cameo in Wagon Train. As we know, Auberjonois had been another kind of West — Colonel West — in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country. Cut from the theatrical release, his scenes were reinserted, 'de-inserted,' and reinserted on physical media.

From West to East…wood, "I was told six months before the series began that Odo was going to be a Clint Eastwood type," executive producer Ira Steven Behr noted in Crew Dossier — Odo. When Auberjonois was cast, however, that character description no longer made sense ("does not compute," in Behr's words), but the writers were already working Eastwood. Behr called them up to apologise for the change in direction, adding that, with Auberjonois, "it [was] better than we even imagined".