Star Trek Deep Space Nine Feature Length Episodes: Ranked
9. Call To Arms - Sacrifice Of Angels
The second example of a multi-part story, this series of episodes chronicle the early days of the Dominion War. Beginning at the end of the fifth season, DS9 is lost to the Dominion forces and Sisko must operate now from the Defiant initially, before moving to Starbase 375.
Over the next few episodes, the crew take their recovered Jem'hadar fighter into enemy territory to destroy facilities, they do battle with soldiers on a lonely planet and Sisko must give up command to help organise the war effort. Worf discovers his son has signed up to fight in the Klingon Defense Forces, leading them to an awkward meeting. Finally, Starfleet launches a daring attempt to re-take DS9, aided at the eleventh hour by the Prophets, but not before the largest battle in Star Trek history to that point.
As an experiment, this story arc was mostly a success. The slower entries (namely Sons and Daughters and Behind The Lines) do drag it down a little but both Call to Arms and Sacrifice of Angels more than make up for this. It is thanks to the success of these entries that the show was able to push out the experiment to a 9 part finale in the seventh season.
This was all at a time when serialized storytelling on TV was relegated to soap operas, as it was difficult to introduce new fans when they had to go and try to find the previous episodes to catch up. But with a nail biting cliffhanger and a thrilling finale, this is a story that has stood the test.