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

The road was rocky and timey-wimey along the byway of the romance between Odo and Kira. For the longest while, the love seemed one-directional. Odo only ever admitted his true feelings amidst Founder fakery, and as his temporally displaced duplicate. After all that, they both just needed a nudge from a particularly bright light bulb, and it was sealed with a kiss.

The Odo/Kira relationship wasn't something the writers had planned from the beginning either. Instead, as René Auberjonois told TrekNews in 2011, the first hints of a possible romance between the two emerged somewhat organically during the filming of the final scene of the second season episode Necessary Evil:

I don't know what it was that I did or if it was how it was shot, but the next day, when they were looking at the dailies, the writers said, 'Oh my God, look, Odo loves Kira.'

"Nana and I always had thought that it would remain an unrequited love," Auberjonois added in the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Companion. In fact, according to Auberjonois, neither really knew that Odo and Kira would become a couple until they got the script for His Way.

Nana Visitor herself also admitted that she wasn't "much of a fan of Kira and Odo being together," even going to the writers in an attempt to "discourage" it. "But they found a way to make it all make sense," she concluded in the Deep Space Nine Companion. Just thank everything holy and the wormhole aliens that it was Odo and not Gul Dukat!