In a bold first step that could be one of many during its seven-season run, Deep Space Nine opens with Star TrekA new hero looking down with a haunting eye on his old self: Jean-Luc Picard, corrupted and twisted into Locutus of the Borg. It sets the stage for a wonderful encounter with the franchise’s latest character, and more than three decades later, those opening scenes on the USS. Saratoga stay one of the Star Trekthe opening salvos are very strange and compelling.
Thirty-two years ago today on January 3, 1993, Deep Space It is ninethe pilot, “Emissary”, did not open on the main space station that would be the home of Commander Sisko at the time, but with a title card that took. A journey back to what was then the biggest, and one of Starfleet’s low points: the Battle of Wolf 359 in The Next GenerationIt’s the first game of the fourth season, which ends in a big way A journey cliffhangers of all time in “The Best of Both Worlds.” There, the series kept Wolf 359 off-screen. Now, Star Trek it was ready to show it, and it placed its new character right at the heart of that fear. It’s a wonderful gambit, telling the audience immediately that this is new Star Trek The series was not going where they expected.
Scenes on the ship Saratoga as it prepares to become one of the many doomed ships that gather to stop the Borg eWolf 359 holds a spectacular mirror for how long. A journey it was at that time. Star Trek used for scenes of Starfleet officers succeeding under pressure, when faced with impossible odds, but there is a clear story of how DS9 it shows the events of the war TNG he never showed. I Saratoga it has no chance against Locutus, and the calm and collectedness of Starfleet is not given time to prevail in the face of the ship is quickly crippled, killing the bridge crew. This is not an attack they roll about the bridge and get up; most of them are dead, as Sisko and the one surviving Bolian lieutenant realize that the ship is lost.
The scenes outside the bridge are even worse: after years and years of showing Business as a ship with a successful civilian assistant, one was always protected when flying in battle, corridors Saratoga-a Miranda-class ship, small compared to the average Galaxy-class-is filled with crying, injured civilians looking for life pods. It all culminates, of course, in a humbling personal cost to Starfleet’s hubris for Sisko when he returns to his base to find his wife Jennifer dead in the rubble, and his son Jake barely alive, as he himself is dragged away crying in grief. in the shuttle as Saratoga exploded, the fireworks of its destruction visible at the Sisko observatory with revenge the glares came out. In just four and a half minutes, Star Trek fans have just watched their new star face a tragedy unlike anything they’ve seen before, and most importantly, they’ve seen it through the eyes of a man who acted perhaps the way any of us would rather than the views of someone like Kirk or. Picard would.
It’s this sad, vulnerable humanity that informs the Sisko we encounter throughout “Emissary”—shaping a person far more grounded than we would normally imagine. Star Trek the main character. Small, in the way he interacts with his co-workers when he was assigned to Deep Space Nine and Starfleet itself when he finds himself facing Picard (now he’s back to his heroics and doesn’t expect to be challenged in any way. ,let alone the way Sisko does). He’s still very clearly shaping the trauma of Wolf 359, not fully processing it or even dissecting it—and it probably takes a real act of god for him to even begin to do so, when he meets the wormhole entities that the Bajorans worship as their spiritual gods are almost entirely compromised by the fact that Sisko can’t move forward. on the loss of Jennifer.
Starfleet’s unflinching look into the shadows of what was, until then, one of the lowest points ever shown on screen: a low point that can only be matched by that. Deep Space Nine itself would enter later in its run during the Civil War. And that consistent perspective comes in the form of Sisko himself, a man allowed to be vulnerable and flawed in ways that defy our expectations (and still, for the most part, expect—just look at the conflict. Even all these years later on how Adoption featured Michael Burnham, billed as one of the Star Trek the characters most named after Sisko’s legacy since). It is a shape built from minutes Deep Space Nine it goes, and one that still defines the program all these years later.
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