You forgot this Defiant, were not? Way before Deep Space Nine had his badass version of the Defiant, the classics Trek gave us a sisterhood of the USS Enterprise called the USS Defiant. This ship gets the number one slot for being the fastest Trek ship ever because of the simple fact that it went on the earliest voyage.
In his first appearance in “The Tholian web”, the Defiant phases in and out of our dimension and into another. Captain Kirk is briefly transformed into a sort of interdimensional ghost that both haunts Defiant and the Enterprise. Towards the end of “The Tholian Web”, the Defiant cuts out of our universe and goes … somewhere else.
Literally four decades later, in the Enterprise two-parter “In a mirror dark”, we learn that the Defiant traveled in the evil Mirror Universe, but also in the past of the Mirror Universe. Let’s just repeat that: the Defiant traveled not only to a parallel dimension, but it traveled time through. This would be when Marty McFly ends up in a bizarre version of the Wild West ruled by vampires in Back to the Future III.
This means that the Defiant retroactively, the Terran Empire in the Mirror Universe provides advanced knowledge of the United Federation of Planets, long before the Federation even exists in the regular universe. The journey of the Defiant stood centrally in the Discovery Season 1 episode “Despite Yourself”, because, without this topsy-turvy journey of this ship, no one in any of the universes would understand anything at all. If not for the Defiant, TOS cosplay would never happen on the show Enterprise. And, Emperor Georgiou would never know where Michael Burnham came in Discovery.
Goes one out for the Defiant!
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