Episode Behind the Scenes

TREKCORE > DS9 > EPISODES > THE ADVERSARY > Behind the Scenes
 
The working title of this episode was "Flashpoint". In the Deep Space Nine Chronicles intro, it is stated that the episode was untitled until a contest was held and "The Adversary" was selected.
   
The producers had initially planned to do a show that had a cliff-hanger ending involving Changelings on Earth. The story was set to introduce Joseph Sisko and would take place in Starfleet Headquarters, with the end to revolve around Benjamin Sisko saying that the Founders had infiltrated the very heart of...and that was the end of the show. However, for reasons still unknown, Paramount nixed the idea, saying they didn't want a cliff-hanger ending, and so the writers came up with a story about a Changeling wreaking havoc on the Defiant instead. As Robert Hewitt Wolfe puts it, "That's when the idea of the Defiant heading inexplicably toward destruction, like the death machine that she really is, being all locked down and going like a runaway train, became the basic hook that everyone really liked." However, the Changelings-on-Earth story later served as the basis for the episodes "Homefront" and "Paradise Lost" the following season. (Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Companion)
   
The scene in the Defiant's mess hall where the senior officers are taking blood samples of each other to determine which one of them is the Changeling is very reminiscent of the 1982 John Carpenter film The Thing. This film is based on the 1938 John W. Campbell, Jr. (writing under the pseudonym of Don A. Stuart) short story "Who Goes There?", which contains a very similar scene. However, the writers cite neither the original story nor the Carpenter film as their primary inspiration for this episode, but rather the 1951 Christian Nyby film adaptation, called The Thing From Another World. That film did not feature the theme of paranoia or shapeshifters as the story or the later film adaptation did. Paranoia was something the writers were interested in exploring, as it was something rarely seen in the Star Trek universe. (Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Companion)
   
The writers decided to use the line "No changeling has ever harmed another" as an important element in this episode. This line had been heard a few times already (in "The Search, Part II", "Heart of Stone" and "The Die is Cast"), and its importance would return in the fourth season finale, "Broken Link", where Odo receives his punishment for killing a fellow Changeling.
   
The character of Michael Eddington was deliberately set up as a red herring in this episode. The writers felt that the way actor Kenneth Marshall had portrayed the character in "The Search, Part I", "The Search, Part II" and "The Die is Cast" had always implied some kind of underlying threat, so they decided to use that to their advantage in this episode. Indeed, after the episode aired, the word around the internet was that Eddington was a Changeling infiltrator, and that this was obviously going to have a bearing on the upcoming season. Upon hearing this, the writers decided that they would never make Eddington a Changeling.(Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Companion) Later on, it would be revealed that Eddington was a threat, but not in the manner people expected: he was a member of the Maquis who would eventually betray Starfleet.
   
Sisko's opening log entry was not in the final draft shooting script.
   
The fight between Odo and the Changeling at the end of the episode was extremely complicated to put together due to all the morphing effects. Producer Steve Oster points out that there are more morphing effects in this short scene than in the entire third season. According to actor Rene Auberjonois, after principal photography was completed, all the cast were allowed to leave except himself and Lawrence Pressman. He explains that during the main shoot, he and Pressman had filmed the scene as normal, but to make sure the effects would work properly, each of them then had to re-enact the scene separately, looking at a monitor and matching their movements exactly. (Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Companion) There are actually some clips of both actors shooting the fight without the other present in the Deep Space Nine Chronicles intro to this episode.
   
The scene when Krajensky morphs into a Changeling and escapes through the vent is one of visual effects supervisor Glenn Neufeld's favorite shots from the entire seven years of DS9.
   
Ronald D. Moore is a big fan of this episode because he considers it to be very un-Star Trek; "It really appealed to me on this sort of visceral John Wayne level. There's a monster on the ship, it's after us, and we're gonna hunt it down and kill it. We're not gonna negotiate with it, we're not gonna worry about whether it's sentient, we're not gonna play any of the usual Star Trek games with it. It's just, 'Find and kill the monster.' There was something very pure about that show." (Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Companion)
   
Ira Steven Behr sees this episode as an important step in the show's movement towards serialization, which would reach a peak in the six-episode arc which opened season six and the nine-episode, ten-hour arc which acted as the finale of the series itself; ""The Adversary" was the first one where we really knew we were going to be starting to get the S-word, serialized, just a tad. In spite of all the finger-wagging and knowing we weren't supposed to, it was just a little bit, a little bit." (The Birth of the Dominion and Beyond, DS9 Season 3 DVD special features)