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Farrell decided last summer, following several weeks of deep thought, conversations with business associates, friends and family, that the 1997-98 season would be her last. While most everybody else in the DS9 cast had signed two-year deals taking them through season seven, Farrell chose not to do so. When it came time to negotiate for a seventh year, Paramount made an offer, and the actress turned it down. According to Farrell, there was little haggling about money after that, and she decided simply to complete her contractual obligation and move on. In fact, by the time she filmed “Tears of the Prophets,” she had auditioned numerous times for a role in a sitcom pilot entitled Becker. Nine days after shooting her death scene, Farrell won the job playing Reggie, a practically broke woman who runs a Bronx diner she just inherited from her father. Ted Danson plays the tell-it-like-it-is Dr. Becker. Just a few weeks later, CBS announced that Becker would be a mid-season replacement. As soon as Farrell made up her mind to depart, she went about informing her co-stars and the show’s crew. She didn’t want anyone to find out about it via internet gossip or the industry trade publications. “I think it’s kind of rude when you work with people for a long time and don’t tell them that you’re not going to be working with them anymore,” Farrell reasons. “Many of them thought for sure that I was coming back. They didn’t think in a million years that I would actually leave. Colm [Meaney] was the least surprised, because he knew how I felt. My impression was that Nana [Visitor] thought it was more about the money, that they would come up with it. The crew was shocked. I think most people, most fans, thought it was a money issue, that it would be solved and we would all just keep going. I told the truth, and said how I felt. I didn’t pull any punches. “It took a long time for everybody to get that I was really leaving. Until ‘Tears of the Prophets’ was written, most people didn’t believe it. When I got to the set the day we read the preliminary script, it was really rough. I had many shocked people around me. They were saying, ‘You can’t leave’ or ‘I can’t believe you’re going to die!’ Everyone was dealing with their own emotions about it. That was a tough day at work. It was sad, exciting and scary all at once. It was very bittersweet.” And how about Michael Dorn? What was the reaction of Farrell’s pal and Klingon husband Worf? “Michael was very funny. He said it didn’t feel real until I was lying there on the biobed,” she explains. “That’s when it hit him. And it worked well for him, because he gave a great performance in the episode, a great in-the-moment performance. He’s probably not too sad to see me go, because we’re good friends, and he knows he’ll see my sorry ass out in the real world. Colm and Rene Auberjonois, too, were very cool about it. They said, ‘We’ll see you.’” Finally, the day came for Dukat to fire the shots that cut Dax down just as she and Worf were in the process of enjoying married life, just as Dr. Bashir had figured out a way for Dax to give birth to a Klingon baby. Farrell remembers that there were few laughs on set as she filmed her two most important scenes, the one in which she succumbed to her wounds after bidding Worf farewell. As often happens in episodic television, scenes from “Tears of the Prophets” were filmed out of order, meaning Farrell technically died before she was shot. “The death scene was done on the first day of the episode, and the day before the last day was me getting zapped,” Farrell says with a bemused laugh. “They asked me what I wanted to shoot first, the death scene or another scene that day that had all of us together. I said, ‘Please let me die first.’ I figured if we did it that way, I would have the rest of the day to get cheered up. I didn’t want to die, then be sent home. That would have been such a drag. “My very last shot was of me lying on the ground. It was weird. I couldn’t believe it was actually happening. I had to pinch myself. You also have to understand that I was on that ground knowing that the very next day I was going right back to Paramount to see all the head people I already worked for to talk about Becker. I was feeling really good about my chances. Knowing that this other opportunity could really happen made me a little less sad about Dax dying.”
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