[Zeke]

Sa'ar's right. He'll have trouble finding the "Maquis" fiver (it's one of my favourite episodes, so I've had it called forever but haven't written it yet), so he'll have to use that time to think of a new quote instead.

Yeah, the other series generally didn't point out how rough things were for the folks who didn't live on shiny starships. DS9 is not rerun-friendly, but it's probably the most powerful of the modern series.

Oh yeah, it's no contest. DS9 earned the "deep" in its name. It was the only Trek show that was never the flagship of the franchise, so it didn't have to try to be all things to all viewers. (Ira Steven Behr once said something to the effect of "Eventually we realized no one was paying any attention to us, so we could do whatever we wanted.") As a result, while the other shows all had individual episodes that were brilliant and thought-provoking, DS9 was the only one where those episodes built on each other to create something bigger. You can talk about themes and dramatic structure in DS9 as a whole, not just individual episodes, and that's something no other Trek show can say. (VOY comes closest with the series-long arc of getting home and not killing each other on the way. ENT S3 was a mini-DS9, but in general the Enterprise shows were pretty ad hoc.)

The remarkable thing is that DS9 accomplished so much without a Babylon 5-style grand plan. The writers found the perfect balance between keeping a story going and making changes to keep the network and viewers happy. The advantages are clear from how B5 played out -- JMS has talked a lot about having a "back door" for every character to preserve the arc, but whenever he had to use one, the execution was weird and jarring. To be fair, there was nothing he could've done about losing his original commander (it wasn't the network like we all thought -- he's recently revealed what really happened). Having to replace Sisko would have gutted DS9 just as much.

You can definitely see BSG2K's DNA all through it.

True -- much like how you can see Wolverine's DNA all through Batman. One is a more modern and in-your-face and generally X-treem version, which is the sort of thing I don't care for but always sells well -- and I'd be foolish to deny that great stuff has been done with both of them, but I still know which one I prefer.