Star Trek: Deep Space Nine/Fridge

Fridge Brilliance

• In an early episode, Garak is criticizing Shakespeare's Julius Caesar for being entirely too predictable and unrealistic, much to the annoyance of Bashir:

Garak: "I knew Brutus was going to kill Caesar in the first act! But Caesar didn't figure it out until the knife was in his back."
Bashir: "But that's what makes it a tragedy. Caesar couldn't conceive that his best friend would plot to kill him."
Garak: "Tragedy is not the word I'd use. "Farce" would be more appropriate. Supposedly, this man is supposed to be a leader of a great empire, a brilliant military tactician and yet he can't see what's going on under his own nose!"

• • Then, many episodes later, Gul Dukat's daughter, Ziyal, helps free La Résistance, who then disable the station's weapons array which allows Sisko to retake the station. Her betrayal of her father had been a long time coming and Dukat had been warned repeatedly in the episodes before then, but he refused to believe it until it was far too late and the damage had already been done. It should be noted that Garak and Dukat are sworn enemies.
    • Before that in the very next episode Garak's old mentor Enabrin Tain had no idea that his Dragon Colonel Lovok was a Changeling spy until it was much too late.
• The Founders appear to be callous and uncaring towards the Vorta, uncaring if they die and kill them for failures but considering what we hear from the Weyoun that defects to Odo and some comments by the female Founder and I realized that the Founders view assuming a new form to grant them new insight so by killing a Vorta they're actually helping that Vorta gain a new perspective that may aid it where the previous version failed. After all, why continue to clone servants you have no personal investment in who keep failing you unless you really do care and don't view death as that big a deal?
  • The only evidence we have about their attitude toward the Vorta in the first place is the Female Changeling's comments when either Weyoun was disrespecting Odo or the war was going very badly. That and their attitude toward solids in general, in which comments they never make it a point to exclude Vorta and Jem'Hadar, except that the Female Changeling interestingly referred to Weyoun specifically as the only solid she's ever trusted. But of course, trust is not the same as respect or caring. But in any case, their habit of cloning the Vorta, and giving the new ones the memories of the old, could be due to any combination of concern for their development and for their services to the Dominion.

Fridge Horror

• When Odo meets another one of the 200 he has already infected his people with the disease, he melds with this new changeling who then goes on his merry way and is never heard from again...
  • That's because it died in that very same episode.
  • Well, it never existed. The timeline was collapsed. That's... different from dying, right?
  • The changeling referenced in the first line is Laas from Season 7. The above two lines are referring to two different Season 5 episodes. Laas and the disease are a loose end on the show itself, though the Star Trek Deep Space Nine Relaunch establishes that Laas made his way into the Great Link and got cured.

Fridge Logic

• The Defiant came into play because the producers realized that after introducing The Dominion in season two, it made no sense that the only defense Deep Space Nine would have was itself and three Runabout shuttlecraft, even before the first open conflict at the ending of season two.
  • This was also the point when Starfleet began to quietly upgrade DS9 into a station that could fend off a Klingon fleet of more than fifty ships in Way of the Warrior. This from a station that was overwhelmed by just three Cardassian warships in the pilot.
• Another example: Worf was reassigned to the station after the destruction of the Enterprise-D in Star Trek Generations. This meant that the writers needed to come up with a reason -- any reason -- to have Worf present on the Enterprise-E for his subsequent appearances in the Next Gen movie franchise. Star Trek: First Contact gives a reasonable explanation. Star Trek: Insurrection blatantly Hand Waves his presence at the beginning of the movie: he begins to explain what he's doing there before Riker starts talking over him. Finally, in Star Trek: Nemesis -- which is set after the Deep Space Nine finale, in which Worf resigns from Starfleet and becomes the Federation Ambassador to the Klingon Empire -- Worf is on the Enterprise-E, in Starfleet, as a member of its crew, with no explanation at all^[1].
  • Perhaps Insurrection takes place between episodes of Deep Space Nine during Worf's brief vacation from the station in an attempt to be very far away from Keiko O'Brien during her pregnancy (Which didn't last long anyway, but Worf wouldn't know that until he got back).
    • The pregnancy was two years past by that point - Insurrection occurred in Season 7, Kirayoshi O'Brien was born in Season 5.
    • Dialogue also establishes that the movie took place after the end of the Dominion War; which ended in the final episode of DS9.
• There was also the obligatory trial episode, where a crew member had to represent Dax because they had no lawyers. At all. To reiterate the scenario, this is a government that's being operated according to Bajoran law, but is enforced by Starfleet personnel, and is dealing with fallout from what was done under the Cardassian government. Why. The. Hell. do they not have any legal experts? They should need an entire team of them!
  • There's a difference between solicitors dealing with trials and those used for the disputes between nations. Actually having trained trial defence solicitors wasn't a high priority since DS9 doesn't seem to have been equipped for that in mind.
    • The primary mission of Deep Space Nine--at least in the earliest seasons--was to prepare war-torn Bajor for acceptance into The United Federation of Planets. This would presumably present a pretty significant legal and diplomatic challenges. There should be a number Federation lawyers and diplomats either based on DS9 or Bajor itself; we just never see them.
• They constantly test for changelings with a blood test. They keep doing it and believing the results even after they find out the man who came up with the test was a Changeling infiltrator, and even Sisko's father figured out how a changeling could get around it.
  • That's par for the course in some modern militaries: If it doesn't work, keep doing it until it does. Maybe humans haven't changed as much as they claim.
• Where was the Defiant when the Klingon fleet attacked in "The Way of the Warrior"? Really, the ship was probably staying under the cover of the station's shields so that they didn't get caught in a 50-on-1 curb-stomp, but it was like they were never there ...
  • The Defiant had been severely damaged rescuing the Cardassians minutes earlier. It is reasonable to assume that Sisko kept it docked to prevent its destruction.
• Why didn't the Cardassians blow up Terok Nor before withdrawing from Bajor?
  • Try reading the Millennium trilogy. Not exactly canon, but a) it's excellent and b) explains a lot.
  • At the time it was in orbit of Bajor, if it exploded pieces of it might have hit the planet caused damage or killed people. The last thing Cardassia needed was more reason for the Federation to be pissed at them.
  • Given the usual reliability of Cardassian technology, I always assumed they tried and the self destruct failed. They do have a scrapped fusion reactor or two, perhaps they were supposed to explode instead of just shut down improperly..
  • They also left in a rush. One of the plot-points they depended on in early seasons is that the Cardassians didn't even have a chance to completely wipe the computers-- O'Brien manages to retrieve all the engineering records from it, he tells Bashir that he could pull the medical records if he let a program run for a couple of weeks, and in one episode he pulls enough image data from a communication recording to identify the man making the recording. (The image they pulled was just a blurry mess, but it was good enough to match with a database of known faces.)
  • Of course this also brings up another problem-- why didn't the Federation ever replace the computer system? The Cardassians are known to be magnificent bastards, and early in the series they find the replicators were sabotaged by Bajorans... who knows what kind of backdoors or boobytraps are in the thing?
    • That actually came up in the episode Civil Defence, where O'Brien and Sisko accidentally trip an anti-insergency program that was buried in the computer. In their defense, they were trying to wipe Cardassian files out of the computer at the time...it just didn't work out too well.
    • And we actually find out that the head of Starfleet security on the station was busy installing his own backdoors and booby traps into the computer.
  • Given how quickly and how often the Cardassians tried to reoccupy the station, they seemed to view their departure as a temporary one. Before the wormhole was discovered, Bajor had nothing to offer anyone. The Cardassians likely assumed that Bajor would descend into civil war, the Federation would leave after realizing nothing could be done to stop the fighting, and the Cardassians would come back to 'restore order.'

1. ↑ There actually was an explanation given, but it was cut from the final film.