The Defiant Decloaks
The episode opens with Kira (Nana Visitor) basically telling the station crew what the audience already knows: There’s no way DS9 could survive a direct attack from the Jem’Hadar, the soldiers of a bigger entity called the Dominion, a new threat introduced at the end of season 2. For two seasons, DS9 was protected by a bunch of souped-up shuttle crafts known as runabouts. Even when taking on the terrorist cell of The Maquis in season 2, Sisko (Avery Brooks) and the crew were still using runabouts.
But the emergence of the Jem’Hadar and the Dominion required something new: A Federation warship that was a leaner and meaner version of the Enterprise. Right at the start of the episode, Sisko decloaks the Defiant and tells Kira that “I’ve brought back a little surprise for the Dominion.” We quickly learn that this was a test warship, created to fight the Borg, but that the Defiant was mostly a prototype and isn’t exactly the most well-rounded ship. Sisko says, “It’s overgunned and overpowered for a ship its size.”
This was something Star Trek had never done before. DS9 was basically looking at the camera and saying, “This really isn’t your parents’ Star Trek anymore. This ship is hardcore!” But, interestingly, by having the Defiant be utterly unstable, DS9 was bringing Trek back to its roots. In The Original Series, you always got the sense that the Enterprise was about to fall apart if Kirk pushed Scotty too far. In “The Search,” O’Brien (Colm Meaney) becomes a full-on Scotty, now saddled with a ship somewhere between the classic Enterprise and the rickety Millennium Falcon.
And yet, smartly, “The Search” pulls its punches with the introduction of the Defiant. After heading into the Gamma Quadrant to find the Founders, the Defiant is jumped by some Jem’Hadar warships and loses. In fact, Dax and O’Brien have been stranded at this point, so the person who first fires the pew-pew-pew new main phasers of the Defiant is Dr. Bashir (Alexander Siddig). The rest of the first episode, and all of the second part, aren’t really about the Defiant at all. Instead, Odo and Kira are with the mysterious Changelings, while the rest of the crew think they’ve escaped in shuttlecraft, but are really stuck in a simulation for all of the second episode.
Basically, if anyone thought the Defiant was going to boldly go, “The Search” makes it clear that very bad things can happen to this ship. Sisko told you this thing was experimental and could break right away, and then, sure enough, it does. While the Defiant would go on to havemany amazing and heroic moments, the idea that it failed its maiden voyage is significant. With this defeat, DS9 was reminding us that unexpected things could happen in this Star Trek series; people could die and cool new starships could lose. Badly.
The Mystery of the Dominion
Unlike previous Trek baddies, de facto showrunner Ira Steven Behr wanted the Dominion to feel bigger, but also more intricate and realistic than previous Trek villains. The Federation was composed of various species, but its enemies tended to be one-race governments—the Romulans, the Cardassians, the Klingons. With the Dominion, Behr challenged writers Robert Hewitt Wolfe, James Crocker, and Peter Allan Fields (and others) to come up with a new kind of enemy in the Gamma Quadrant. Part of the influence was Isaac Asimov’s Foundation books, and Wolfe specifically referred to the Dominion as an “Anti-Federation.”