Settle in, there’s a lot to unpack here.
The pilot episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (hereby referred to as DS9) discusses the concept of time quite a bit, and seemingly never in a way the Star Trek franchise has done in the past. Where Star Trek or Star Trek: The Next Generation deal more in social and scientific accomplishments in time, Deep Space Nine kicks things right off in with a discussion of the emotions of time.
Just that difference alone starts to establish what kind of show DS9 is. It’s not a show about exploration. It’s not the “wagon train in space.” It’s a show about surviving. This is the newly established settlement in space. And who’s the sheriff who rides in to keep the peace? Commander Benjamin Sisko. Sisko’s clearly not the Roddenberry Model of Greatness that you’d expect from a Trek series, but he’s also the first Starfleet leader we’ve seen with any real attachments. The entire episode focuses around Sisko getting over the death of his wife and strengthening his relationship with his son, and it’s this emotional core that really makes this 2-hour pilot more than just introducing characters and setting up the pieces.
DS9 is a darker series than any other in the franchise, and it takes no time at all to establish that. “Emissary” opens on the Battle of Wolf 359, the battle between a Starfleet armada and a Borg ship during the famous TNG two-parter, “The Best of Both Worlds.” The aftermath of this battle had only been shown in “Best of Both Worlds,” but “Emissary” starts off with a quick Star Wars-like opening crawl catching new viewers up and cutting right to Locutus scaring the crap out of everyone in that armada of ships, and proceeding to destroy them all. And not only is it a ballsy opening, this sequences tells you right away that this is not a show in which rule-abiding and friendship will solve everything, which TNG was guilty of doing. Benjamin Sisko’s character seems created to go against just being another Captain Picard. The emotionally powerful first few minutes of “Emissary” seem to go against the entire TNG type as a whole.
Benjamin Sisko (Avery Brooks), first officer of the USS Saratoga, manages to escape the ship with his son, Jake (Cirroc Lofton), before the ship is completely destroyed. Unfortunately, his wife, Jennifer, dies before he can get to her.
Three years later, Sisko doesn’t seem like he’s gotten over that loss, putting on a daddy brave-face in nearly every scene with Jake. Sisko’s been spending the last three years overseeing the construction of new ships, instead of being out in the field. Now he has new orders, report to an abandoned Cardassian space station orbiting the planet Bajor, Deep Space Nine. We find this out when Sisko breaks the news to his son. Jake doesn’t like the idea, and while Sisko does his best to sound optimistic about it all, it’s not much of a mask. And then their transport ship arrives at DS9. Cue title sequence.
This title sequence, beyond having a very bittersweet score, does wonders to establish what the series is. All we see is shot after shot of the station, and a couple of things that happen to come near it. While TOS and TNG’s sequences focused on exploration, DS9’s says “This show is about one small part of an ever-expanding universe. Let other people keep boldly going, there’s plenty going on right here.”
It’s interesting that immediately after the title sequence, we see the inside of the station for the first time. Specifically, how ruined it all is. The people are leaving, businesses are closing, nearly every system is totaled, and looters are getting their hands on the rest. The situation is undeniably screwed. It helps, though, that we hear all this from Chief Petty Officer Miles O’Brien (Colm Meaney), a familiar transporter operator from TNG. O’Brien’s a regular in DS9, and while his big character beat doesn’t come until later in the episode, it says a great deal about him in just a few words. But more on that later.
Sisko and O’Brien arrive at Ops, the equivalent in this series to the bridge of every other Trek series. Here we meet Major Kira (Nana Visitor), a fiery Bajoran who does nothing to hide her doubts that the Federation is really there to help. After all, that’s what the Cardassians said when they first arrived. Kira’s home planet, Bajor, was occupied by the Cardassians for more than half a century before Bajoran rebels were finally able to clear them out (but not before the Cardassians stripped the planet of every possible resource).
Here’s one of our first real Trek moments in “Emissary.” Trek is known for its sci-fi story arcs reflecting modern issues today. One can’t help but look at Bajor and not notice the similarities between the Bajorans and the Jews after the Holocaust. Bajor’s situation is as chaotic as Israel’s, and like the people of Israel, spirituality is a very key part in the Bajorans’ lives. In fact, the first Bajoran we see in the episode is a priest that asks is Sisko will learn more about their gods, The Prophets. Sisko barely hides his disdain for religion in general in his cold “Another time, perhaps.” So when someone like Sisko arrives on the station and says he’s now in charge, it’s not unreasonable from Kira’s perspective for her to be angry, even hateful at the thought.
Meanwhile, one of the looters, a Ferengi child, Nog (Aron Eisenberg), gets caught by the station’s chief of security, Constable Odo, a changeling. A living liquid, Odo can shapeshift into anything or anyone. Odo’s a bit ticked when Sisko breaks up the chaos with a phaser blast (another tactic you wouldn’t see from Picard), but when Sisko explains to Nog’s uncle, Quark (Armin Shimmerman) that Nog wasn’t going to get off easy, Odo changes his mind. Once this is cleared up, however, Sisko gets a call from Ops that it’s time to speak with Captain Picard, a conversations Sisko’s been dreading.
It’s odd. During TNG’s spotty moments, Patrick Stewart’s acting basically carried the show. But the scenes with Picard here are easily the weakest parts of the episodes. Maybe Patrick Stewart was having a bad day filming these scenes, but both the acting and the dialogue just seem so off compared to the rest of the episode. We first meet Picard in the Enterprise conference room, at which point he immediately mispronounces “Bajor.” Normally, even I would consider pointing that out to be too nit-picky, but when he later says things like “I’ve come to know the Bajorans,” and he doesn’t know how to say their own planet, it just emphasizes how clunky these scenes are. Here Picard’s getting the spinoff treatment, being the regular character from the established show to give the new one a send-off. It’s very clear by the clumsy writing of these scenes that there’s no other reason for him to be there. At the very least, we get some more characterization of Sisko, who makes no effort hiding the pent-up rage he has towards Picard. After all, Picard inadvertently killed his wife. Picard is rather taken aback when Sisko mentions where they’ve met before. If we had seen more encounters with Starfleet officers like this for Picard, his character arc in Star Trek: First Contact might have been a little easier to accept.
Sisko requests that Starfleet find someone to replace him, as a broken down Cardassian space station is no place to raise a child. But in the meantime, he’ll carry out his orders, to prepare the politically conflicted Bajor for entry into the Federation. What’s the first step? Get Deep Space Nine’s economy going again, as a symbol for what the Federation can bring to the Bajoran table. To do that, Sisko recruits Quark to reopen his bar and stay on the station in exchange for letting Nog out of the brig. Quark’s reluctant, but he accepts. Quark doesn’t have many moments in this pilot, as right now he’s basically just every other Ferengi character that Shimmerman played on TNG. But it helps that instead of an idiotic little goblin, Quark shows some signs that he’s a sly manipulator. And according to Odo, he has the character references of a politician.
Still, at this point, the stakes of the episode aren’t terribly high. Really, why is this station that big of a deal when there’s an entire planet suffering? At this point, DS9 is easily more trouble fixing than it’s worth. Kira predicts the Federation will be gone in a week, as will her own home planets provisional government. After that, civil war among the Bajorans is inevitable. Kira believes that only the Kai, the spiritual leader of the Bajoran people, can bring the unity the planet desperately needs. And as if on cue, the priest Sisko evaded earlier shows up again to take Sisko to meet the Kai.
Religions in Star Trek have always been flawed somehow. We’ve seen foolish superstition stand in the way of social and scientific progress. We’ve seen “flim flam artists” impersonate the Devil. We’ve seen the entirety of “Star Trek V.” But the Bajoran religion and worship of the Prophets seems different. Not that their religion seems perfect, but at least here, we see both the political, manipulative side as well as the hopeful, spiritual side.
The Kai leads Sisko into a secret chamber, where she shows him an “orb,” a spiritual artifact said to be given to the Bajorans by the Prophets themselves. Sisko couldn’t care less about any of this, he just wants the Kai to get out there and promote peace, dammit. But the orb opens, revealing a strange light, and suddenly Sisko finds himself in a memory. Specifically, when he first met his wife, Jennifer. Finally, we see a genuinely happy Sisko, if only for a moment. He realizes he’s reliving the moment, but while Captain Picard would focus on getting back to the real world, Sisko couldn’t care less about figuring out why this is happening. He’s with Jennifer again. It’s a heartfelt, blissful moment that’s taken away quickly as the orb closes and Sisko finds himself back in the Bajoran chamber. The Kai says that there were other orbs like this, but the Cardassians stole them. Then she gives Sisko a task: use the orb to find the Celestial Temple, the legendary home of The Prophets, before the Cardassians do. Sisko questions why he’s the one that has to do it, and the Kai doesn’t answer. I wish she had, because it still doesn’t seem to be clear by the end of the episode why it had to be Sisko that finds the temple.
Still, Sisko reluctantly agrees and returns to DS9 just in time for some more character introductions. Chief Medical Officer Julian Bashir, a young, but rather arrogant man who chose to go to DS9 so he could practice “frontier medicine.” Stupidly, he says this to Kira, whose home is the frontier. Bashir comes off as one of those guys who goes over to Africa to help out and has a good experience, but doesn’t really understand that people live there in those conditions every single day.
The other new character introduced is Science Officer Jadzia Dax, a beautiful Trill woman with just the right balance of confidence and intelligence. Jadzia is kind of an old friend of Sisko’s, or rather, she used to be. Jadzia studies the orb that triggered Sisko’s vision looking for clues that can help in the search for the Celestial Temple, but the orb shows her one of her memories as well. The Trill are a joined species, meaning that they have a symbiotic relationship with what’s basically a large, slug like creature, which is surgically transferred from host to host over generations. Jadzia’s previous host was an old man named Kurzon, an old friend of Sisko’s. Sisko had never met Jadzia before that day, but he had known Dax, Jadzia’s personal slug, for a long time through Kurzon Dax. We see in Jadzia’s orb-flashback her joining, as they transfer Dax from Kurzon to Jadzia. While the scene is more about establishing her backstory than anything else, it’s a solid character beat for Jadzia to see her mourn Kurzon’s death, but feel immediately relieved and immeasurably different when she’s joined with the Dax symbiont.
Before the Enterprise ships off, O’Brien takes one last tour around the ship. He walks around the bridge, but O’Brien doesn’t dare disturb the Captain in his ready room. He heads down to a transporter room to beam out when Picard catches up to say goodbye. Similarly to Sisko’s scene with Picard, this one is clunky for Picard but beneficial for O’Brien. Picard mentions that this transporter chamber is apparently O’Brien’s favorite. But O’Brien responds “It’s just a transporter room, sir.” O’Brien is a noncommissioned officer, the only one to be a major character in the Trek franchise. He’s also the only character who deals a lot in technobabble, but doesn’t seem particularly interested in it. In just that line alone, we see that O’Brien isn’t going to be the nerdy LaForge-type character of DS9. He’s the 24th century equivalent to a blue-collar guy. He doesn’t have the sentimentality that Geordi might have for the Engineering section. O’Brien’s just doing his job. His emotional attachments are with his family.
Back on the station, a Cardassian ship arrives, and we meet the eerily cordial Gul Dukat (Marc Alaimo) for the first time. Dukat and Sisko exchange words, trying to get each other to reveal what they’ve learned about the Celestial Temple. Where Picard would’ve been polite (or respectfully put on a polite front), Sisko doesn’t even try to hide his disdain, even going so far as to flat-out lie, saying he doesn’t know what orb Dukat’s talking about. Sisko’s willing to get his hands dirty.
After both sides essentially end up figuring out that neither of them have any ideas, Dax finds a unique signature in a cluster near Bajor, one that could be the Celestial Temple. While Kira and Odo take advantage of Quark’s dirty gambling operation to keep the Cardassians distracted (where Odo hilariously disguises himself as a bag), Sisko and Dax head for that unique anomaly, and discover what seems to be the first stable wormhole known to exist. Suddenly, Bajor has something of value, and just like that, the stakes of the show get bigger. Suddenly, Deep Space Nine is a station of strategic importance, and it’s going to take a lot of work to make sure it holds together.
Sisko and Dax are taken off their runabout (a larger shuttlecraft, essentially), and find themselves in, well, they’re not sure. Dax sees a calm, green field, but Sisko sees a chaotic, stormy rock formation. Interesting how their perspectives determined their environment. They’re soon met by a strange column of light, similar to the light in the orb. Sisko tries to establish contact, but the light strikes Sisko and Dax, and Dax finds herself back on DS9. Meanwhile, Sisko meets the Prophets, who take the forms of people from his past. Jennifer, Jake, his new officers, even Picard/Locutus. Sisko and the Prophets try their best to find some common ground, but it’s extremely difficult. The Prophets don’t understand the concepts of time, death, loss, and nearly everything else Sisko is struggling with at the time. These scenes where Sisko tries to explain concepts like linear existence are incredibly clunky. How many alien characters over the years have had lines like “What is this…time?” We already saw the Prophets being weird pillars of light, it’s pretty clear they’re a wildly different race than we’re used to seeing on Trek. It doesn’t help that these scenes are unnecessarily long, too. Some moments in it, like Sisko using baseball to explain man’s outlook on life (not knowing what’s going to happen is part of the fun), and the Prophets helping Sisko realize that he’s never truly gotten over Jennifer’s death, work well. But nearly everything else is handled clumsily, at least in the dialogue. It’s at least still visually interesting.
Meanwhile, back on DS9, several Cardassian ships are getting ready to fire on the station. Gul Dukat took his ship into the newly discovered wormhole and hasn’t come back, so some other Cardassian ships have arrived and decided to shoot DS9 first and ask questions later. DS9 has no weapons yet, so any conflict is going to be over quick. But with the help of some technobabble from O’Brien and Dax, Kira makes a hell of a bluff. It’s Kira’s bitter resiliency that makes the scene work, even if her bluff doesn’t succeed. The Cardassians fire anyway, and get close to destroying the station altogether, but Sisko emerges from the wormhole back in the runabout, dragging Dukat’s ship behind him in a tractor beam. The Cardassians back off, and the day is saved.
The Enterprise returns briefly to allow for one final scene with Sisko and Picard. Still clunky, but not as weak as the earlier Picard scenes. Sisko changes his mind about quitting Starfleet, and Picard wishes him good luck on his new mission.
Finally, we finally get to the show’s final stasis. The Promenade is bustling with people again. Life has returned to the station. The wormhole sits not too far from Bajor. Even though there’s a long way to go for this station, this hopeful moment feels well-earned after everything the characters have been through. And just like Sisko’s favorite sport, the fact that anything could happen just makes it that much more exciting.
Grade: B+
Other Random Things
-Avery Brooks sure does let out some occasional funk while playing Sisko. I particularly enjoyed that “Oh!” he shouts out when he’s back at the beach with Jennifer.
-Seriously, way to mispronounce “BAY-jore,” Picard.
-Wow, the local anesthesia for Trill must be amazing. I would have at least winced a little if someone casually cut me open and slid a huge slug into me.
