We missed you, Deep Space 9! After years of fans pleading, beginning, and cajoling Paramount for more Star Trek content that directly ties into the station-based spin-off, Star Trek: Lower Decks serves up a whole Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode in the aptly titled “Hear All, Trust Nothing.” This episode isn’t just some winking nod of a tease to DS9, it’s a full on DS9 episode — and it’s great!

The Cerritos is assigned to travel to starbase Deep Space 9 and open post-war trade negotiations with the Karemma. After negotiations overseen by Captain Freeman (Dawnn Lewis) and Colonel Kira Nerys (Nana Visitor) get off to a rocky start, the Karemma seemingly kidnap Quark (Armin Shimerman).

Meanwhile, Tendi (Noel Wells) and Rutherford (Eugene Cordero) encounter another Orion in Starfleet named Mesk (Adam Pally), while Mariner (Tawny Newsome) is introduced to Jennifer Sh’reyan’s (Lauren Lapkus) friends — and they don’t automatically get along.

There’s a huge amount packed into “Hear All, Trust Nothing,” not least the wonderful and welcome return of Nana Visitor as Kira and Armin Shimerman as Quark. It is so nice to hear both actors play their iconic roles again in animated form, and to revisit Deep Space 9 after all this time.

The animators did an incredible job this week re-creating the unique look and feel of the station, so that all the familiar locations — Ops, Kira’s office, the Promenade, the Wardroom, Quark’s, the holding cells — felt exactly right.

But despite being “the Deep Space Nine episode,” this is still very much a Lower Decks-centric tale: at no point does it feel like the Cerritos crew are being shuffled aside in favor of the DS9 characters, and there is robust and rich character development for both Mariner and Tendi along the way. “Hear All, Trust Nothing” capably services three plotlines, and it has two huge legacy characters.

And that’s no small feat — episode writer Grace Parra Janney does an excellent job balancing the competing priorities of the episode without shortchanging how cool it is to be back on the Cardassian space station.

After all, the DS9 A-plot is a classic Quark misadventure: Quark has a new scheme that is making him a lot of money, and by the end of the episode his scheme has been exposed and he’s lost most of that latinum. It’s a time-honored classic, and it’s so nice to see it back briefly in Lower Decks — plus, it’s so much fun to discover that Shaxs and Kira have a history from their shared time in the Bajoran Resistance. It’s a nice touch.

And while the Tendi B-story has almost no connection to the Deep Space 9 station, it has a lot of thematic connections to Deep Space Nine the show. One of the main themes of that series was that to become your best self, you need to embrace who you are — both the good and the bad.

Tendi learns that lesson here too, ultimately embracing her family history and personal upbringing as an Orion pirate to save the day and rescue Quark from the Karemma — as does Mariner, who learns that Jennifer is only interested in her true personality, not her faux politeness shown when trying to blend in with Jennifer’s friends.

It’s some nice growth for our Orion ensign, who has not gotten as much attention as some of the other characters this season. Seeing her interactions with the showy and ultimately deflated Mesk were a lot of fun, because while he talks a good game about being an Orion pirate — but doesn’t know how to actually BE an Orion pirate — Tendi keeps it to herself and knows all the tricks.

I hope that the integration of this part of her personal history is explored in more detail in the show, and that the one-time Mistress of the Winter Constellation reaches a comfortable place of reconciliation between her Orion nature and her desire to grow and be a better person.

TREK TROPE TRIBUTES

• As discussed above, the A-plot of this episode is a classic Quark episode, complete with a get-rich scheme… which ends with our favorite Ferengi losing it all.
   
• My favorite joke in the whole of Lower Decks so far is the way they spoofed the Deep Space Nine opening titles in the episode, with the Cerritos slowly orbiting the station. I love it when they break the fourth wall and comment on a trope like that — that some consider the DS9 main title sequence to be slow and boring. Just so, so well done.

CANON CONNECTIONS

• It’s been over five in-universe years since our last visit to starbase Deep Space 9, as  “Hear All, Trust Nothing” (set in 2381) takes place half a decade after the events of “What You Leave Behind” (set in 2375).
   
• Colonel Kira remains in command, and there is no indication of either Captain Sisko’s return — or that Bajor has joined the Federation.
   
• Quark’s bar now has it’s own hexagon-themed logo design, sported on merchandise and in the form of a large neon sign at the bar’s entrance — this will later be seen at the franchise location on planet Freecloud in 2399.
   
• Morn, of course, remains at his usual seat in Quark’s bar.

• The Karemma were mercantile members of the Dominion; members of that species previously appeared in “The Search, Part I” and “Starship Down.”
   
• The Federation’s gifts to the Karemma include Vulcan port (seen in “The Maquis, Part I”), Aldeberan whiskey (seen in “Relics”), Romulan Ale, and Galardonian spider-cow milk (from “Second Contact”).
   
• Mariner tries to get out of Jennifer’s friend’s “salon” by claiming that she needs to give the Lower Deckers a tour of DS9 — or else “they’ll get lost and show up in a Mirror Universe with Smiley.” a reference to the alternate-universe counterpart of Miles O’Brien.
• The dart board belonging to Miles O’Brien and Julian Bashir is still hanging in Quark’s bar, and Colonel Kira still has Captain Sisko’s baseball on her office desk.
   
• Mesk is drinking a Modela aperitif when he first approaches Tendi, the layered drink Quark prepared for Jadzia Dax in “Dramatis Personae.” Kira and Shaxs each drink one later in the episode as well, as it’s a specialty of the “Quark 2000” replicator.

• Rutherford sits with his legs dangling off the upper level of the Promenade, just like Jake and Nog used to do. It looks like there’s less of a prohibition against loitering on the Promenade since Odo left.
   
• We get a couple of references to the Dominion War in this episode, a reminder that in universe it wasn’t all that long ago.
   
• Tendi’s family are members of the Orion Syndicate, the famous criminal organization that has showed up in a number of episodes of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.
   
• Mariner — who served aboard Deep Space 9, we learned in Season 1 — still has the holosuite program of Kira with Quark’s head superimposed from “Meridian.”
   
• There are so many great little details in the animated Deep Space 9 station sets, that show the animators were paying attention to the DS9 sets — ranging from the big things like the wheel doors and how they rotate, to the very small, like the triangular stickers that were all over the DS9 set, including on the walls between the holding cells.

OTHER OBSERVATIONS

• A surprisingly great Dabo player, Boimler leaves Quark’s with an armful of gift-shop merchandise thanks to his Quark’s Bucks winnings — including a blue raktajino mug, a Ferengi doll (modeled after the Star Trek Experience “Alien Beans” Ferengi), and more.
   
• The Cerritos was originally meant to be supporting the USS Vancouver – introduced in “Cupid’s Errant Arrow” — before Starfleet asked the Cerritos to lead negotiations with the Karemma and reassigned the Vancouver.
   
• Admiral Buenamigo has a model of the Alamo on his office shelves — Miles and Julian would be proud.
   
• Shaxs describes Deep Space 9 — formerly called Terok Nor — as a “tacky Cardassian fascist eyesore.”

• Quark’s has become a franchise by 2381, now expanded out to 21 locations (including one at Starbase 25) — some called “Quark’s Express,” a take on compressed versions of restaurants in US airports. Mariner is less than impressed that her friends are excited about a franchise restaurant, calling them “a bunch of tourists.”
   
• It is unknown whether the Promenade still has the Klingon restaurant, but it does have a “Bat’leths R Us” store.
   
• When Kira enters her office and pauses in front of the window to watch the wormhole open, you wonder if she’s thinking about her lost friend, the Emissary of the Prophets.
   
• Fred Tatiscore pulls double duty in this episode, voicing not just Shaxs but also Karemma trade minister Korzak.
   
• Apparently, there’s no right way to dance the “Kobayashi Maroon.”

If you’re a Deep Space Nine fan, and you enjoyed “Hear All, Trust Nothing,” make sure you say so online. DS9 fans have been feeling a bit neglected by the powers that be — with so much from the OTHER legacy shows popping up in the modern era —  and we just got a whole episode featuring two legacy DS9 characters set on the station itself.

“Hear All, Trust Nothing” is exactly what you want from a legacy character featured episode of Star Trek: a great story for our Lower Decks characters, but a great time with some old friends too. I hope we see the station again soon — it’s been too long!

Star Trek: Lower Decks returns with “A Mathematically Perfect Redemption” on Thursday, October 6 on Paramount+ in the United States, Australia, Latin America, and the Nordics, as well as on CTV Sci Fi Channel in Canada and on Prime Video in many other regions.