Season synopsis
Contains spoilers for this season and earlier seasons.
After the Jem’Hadar attack, the Defiant gives Sisko’s crew a small warship for dangerous work beyond the station. In The Search, Sisko takes it through the wormhole to seek the Dominion’s Founders, while Odo finally meets his own kind and learns about the Great Link. The Founders offer him a place among them, but he refuses to join and returns to Deep Space Nine, choosing his station crew over life with his people.
Garak’s shop bombing leads to a joint Romulan-Cardassian intelligence operation against the Founders. Enabran Tain orders Garak to interrogate Odo using a device that prevents him from changing shape; Garak eventually stops the torture. The fleet attacks an abandoned world and is annihilated in a Dominion ambush, its supposed Romulan commander revealed as a Founder who helped arrange the trap. Sisko has disobeyed orders to rescue Odo, and the Defiant retrieves him and Garak. Tain refuses to leave his doomed ship with them.
The finale begins with Sisko’s promotion to captain, before Ambassador Krajensky reports a coup on Tzenketh and accompanies the Defiant on a border patrol. Krajensky is actually a Changeling who sabotages the ship to provoke a war. As the infiltrator impersonates crewmembers, Odo confronts and kills it, breaking his people’s prohibition against harming one another. O’Brien regains control in time for Sisko to cancel the self-destruct. The coup report was false, but the dying Changeling’s warning suggests other infiltrators are already among them.