Emissary (DS9)

Nineteen ninety-three was an unprecedented year in Star Trek history. Up until then, there had only ever been one Star Trek on the air. But with the success of The Next Generation and the Original Series movies, Paramount was ready to introduce a second concurrent show.

Everything that makes Deep Space Nine special stems from this decision. With most of the Next Generation's creative team at work on TNG still, a new team of creators stepped up for Deep Space Nine. And in order for the show to draw an audience, it had to deviate from the Star Trek viewers knew. Those new creators and that new direction would spin Deep Space Nine into something different from any other show in the franchise.

(I owe a lot in the forthcoming reviews to Terry Erdmann's extremely excellent book, The Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Companion. I've read that book so many times I've internalized a lot of it, so any behind the scenes story I tell probably comes from there (or MAYBE from the DVD special features.))

Anyway, Deep Space Nine. If Star Trek is “Wagon Train to the Stars,” as Gene Roddenberry initially envisioned it, Deep Space Nine is “The Rifleman” in space. A man and his son in a lawless, frontier town.

So, the episode starts differently than any other Star Trek pilot. It starts a few years before the action of the main show, during the Battle of Wolf 359, also known as TNG two-parter “The Best of Both Worlds.” Surprisingly little is ever done with this particular tie-in to TNG, but what's important is we see a defining moment in Benjamin Sisko's life – the death of his wife, Jennifer.

The man we're meeting, our new captain, is not a swashbuckling lady's man like James Kirk, or a married-to-the-stars lifelong bachelor like Picard (I know, in the books he's not a lifelong bachelor, but give me my rhetoric). Sisko is a single father and a widower. Moreover, he's a broken man. He's given Starfleet everything, and Starfleet has taken everything from him. And now it's sending him to the worst imaginable assignment: to oversee longterm rebuilding efforts on a decrepit space station orbiting a war-torn world.

Our new captain is also a black man. I never thought this was all that important in the 24^th Century. But what I've come to realize is it's very important here in the 21^st. It's important to Avery Brooks, and it's important to the franchise. But here, in the pilot, it has only the meaning the viewer chooses to give it. There are many more compelling things about Sisko's character than the color of his skin.

This is a pilot that moves fast. Sisko and his son arrive on the station to face one crisis after another. The station, built by the Cardassians and abandoned when they left town, is literally out to get them. The first person we meet is a hapless Miles O'Brien, freshly transplanted from TNG bit player, who has evidently been here a while trying and failing to fix up the place. A quick scene in the Sisko quarters gets at the gist: the station is a mess, and for Jake it's like when the family vacation turns out to be to a run down old cabin in the woods – and then your Dad tells you you're moving there. Cirroc Lofton nails every note of that.

O'Brien asks Sisko if he's ever met a Bajoran woman, in a way that is supposed to, I believe, remind viewers in the know of some of O'Brien's past run-ins with Ro Laren. And then we get Major Kira 1.0. The Bajoran liason officer, Kira Nerys is much angrier and more one-note than the complex character Nana Visitor will settle into over the next couple episodes. Still some nice notes in the introduction, with Sisko and Kira's first meeting being a power struggle, where neither wins easily, but Sisko clearly takes the upper hand.

One of Gene Roddenberry's cardinal rules was that Starfleet personel did not have interpersonal conflict, and on TOS and TNG that meant no intercast conflict (barring alien influences). But with non-Starfleet crew and even civilians in the cast, Deep Space Nine was free to thrive on intercast conflict, and this is evident even in the pilot.

There's a lot more to set up in this episode. Sisko blackmails Quark into staying and becoming a community leader. And the Kai of Bajor (kind of like the pope) declares Sisko to be the Emissary of the Prophets, and leads him to an ancient Bajoran artifact called an orb. The main plot of the episode is about these orbs leading Sisko to discover a wormhole into the Gamma Quadrant, in which the Prophets, non-linear aliens worshiped by the Bajorans as gods, reside.

It's a lot to take in. It's already setting itself up as a show that will require a lot more investment than The Next Generation, where all you need is a basic familiarity with the crew to enjoy any given episode. DS9 promises us politics, it promises us religion, it promises us ongoing character conflicts. Big stuff for Star Trek in 1993.

There's a scene between Captain Picard and Sisko that bears mentioning. Every pilot has a “pass the torch” guest star in the pilot. It's a tradition. But in the TNG, it's Dr. McCoy opposite Data. In Voyager it's Quark opposite Kim and Paris. Here, it's the old Captain, probably one of if not the most acclaimed actor in Star Trek history and the new Captain. And they're not being friendly with each other. It's a gutsy move, symbolically setting this show up not as a friend to TNG but as an icy rival. The scenes are nothing special, but it's a joy to watch these two actors play against each other for the first and last time. It's a moment for me where I'd like to imagine, if I were watching this show for the first time, I would know it has what it takes to carry the torch.

There's a few more regulars to meet. The writers smartly delay the arrival of Julian Bashir and Jadzia Dax, two characters it will take them a good long while to figure out exactly what to do with. Here they've chosen to have the former hit on the latter, a relationship that will never pan out, nor should it have. Dax is a Trill, which means she plays host to a symbiotic lifeform, which in retrospect was probably one more plot thread than the show needed, since unlike almost all of the others it never really ties into the larger narrative of the show. But it's ok, it's a pilot. Lots of things have been thrown in the stew, and we're seeing what works.

One thing that works is Marc Alaimo as Gul Dukat, former prefect of Deep Space Nine. He's not the first Cardassian to appear on Star Trek, but he redefines the genre, with just the right mix of smug bravado and creepiness. The supporting cast might still be finding it's legs, but the show has found it's hero and it's villian and they will both stick it out until the end.

The pilot has also found it's Trekkiness, as the tension builds on a political faceoff, but the real climax is a conversation about the nature of humanity. The Cage was about God-Like aliens testing humanity. Where No Man Has Gone before was about the test of humans turned into gods. Encounter at Farpoint saw a being with god-like powers literally put humanity on trial. Here a human being tries to teach someone's actual gods how to play baseball. Not just that, but also tries to teach them why the human experience of time, for all it's flaws, is special, meaningful, and irreplaceable.

And unlike some other god-like beings, these ones aren't going away. They'll be Sisko's neighbors for the rest of the show. The Bajorans will still live down the street, and the Cardassians will be waiting in the next town over. Emissary doesn't end with the captain pointing his finger and the ship warping away. It ends with a slow zoom out as repairs and lives continue. The message is clear: get comfortable. We're not going anywhere.