Major Kira Nerys, played
by Nana Visitor
When Commander Benjamin Sisko arrives to take command of Deep Space 9, he not only has to battle prejudices, Cardassians and general apathy as much of the population of the station prepare to leave, but has to deal also with the feisty and opinionated Major Kira Nerys. She is the military liaison to the Bajoran government, and she is not happy to see Sisko. She sees him, and the Federation, as just another occupying force, and having just got rid of the Cardassians after fifty years of oppression she is not eager to cede authority again. She is certainly not backward in coming forward, telling Sisko what she thinks of him and his Starfleet when they first meet, but she gradually comes to realise that he is more than just a soldier or a bureaucrat, and ends up trusting and even liking him. She has a deep relationship with Odo, the station’s changeling security officer, and is in fact in love with him, though it takes some time before she will admit this to herself.
She has also no time for Doctor Bashir, the young, bright, energetic prodigy who has come to take over as CMO, seeing him as a puppy-dog idealist, a boy on an adventure rather than anything serious. She mistrusts and pretty much loathes Quark, the Ferengi bar owner, though he is somewhat infatuated with her. She was in the Bajoran resistance and went on many raids against the Cardassians; she will of course never trust one of their race, and becomes both a thorn in the side of and also something of a fascination to Gul Dukat. She is deeply religious, as are all Bajorans, and even though Sisko has met the wormhole aliens and seen them to be such, she prefers to think of them as the gods of her people, The Prophets. She is secretly annoyed that they have chosen him, an outsider, as their emissary. She’s another strong female character, carrying herself with a military bearing at all times, almost as if she is trying to deny she is a woman, and is nothing more or less than a soldier.
As we learn in the penultimate TNG episode, “Pre-emptive strike”, Bajorans have their family or surname first, and are addressed by this formally, as in “Major Kira” but the last name when using personal address, as in “I love you, Nerys”. Kira has a romantic relationship with one of the vedeks, Bareil, who later dies, his death hitting her hard. She remains on DS9 as a liaison officer to the Dominion when they take over the station during the Dominion War, and is able to use her experience as a rebel on her home planet to create a resistance movement, funnelling information back to Starfleet and eventually allowing them to retake the station.