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31 Years Later, Star Trek Just Made a Classic Episode Even Harder to Watch
Star Trek has the gift and the curse of being one of the most relevant sci-fi franchises ever created. So many visions of the future that Star Trek imagined have actually come to pass, and even they they may be slower in the coming, so are many of the alturistic ideals the franchise introduced to mainstream audiences.
That’s all to say: it’s impossible not to have your perspective on Star Trek change with time. Certain epiosdes that once seemded so far ‘out there’ and fantastical now seem mundane in modern context; other episodes that seemed provacatie or foward-thinking at one time, now seem woefully outdated or misguided in the modern era.
Then there are the rare gems of Star Trek episodes that only get deeper and more resonant with more age, more life experience, or more Star Trek content that significantly changes or reframes or prior understanding. And one of the best examples of the latter is an episode that aired over 30 years ago, but gets exponentionally harder to watch now, emotionally speaking, since there has been so much additoinal lore built around it – including in Star Trek’s latest show!
“The Visitor” Is One of Star Trek’s Most Deeply Emotional Sci-Fi Stories
“The Visitor” is the third episode in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Season 4, wich first aired in 1995. The story of the episode sees Deep Space Nine space station captain Benjamin Sisko (Avery Brooks) save the ship USS Defiance by sacrificing himself in an warp core accident that blasts Sisko into subspace, out of sync with the normal flow of time/space in our reality. Ben’s son Jake (Cirroc Lofton) is soon visited by the “ghost” of his father, which becomes a sporadic recurrence in the boy’s life whenver certain cosmic conditions are right. Jake becomes convinced he can learn the pattern and save his dad, and it slowly becomes his life’s obessession.
Jake’s mission costs him a career as a successful writer and a marriage to a good woman; he even pulls his old friends and colleagues from DS9 out of retirement to try to recreate the accident that made his dad disappear. The end of the episode was unusually dark for Star Trek: The entire story is framed by an elderly Jake recounting Ben Sisko’s disappearance to a writing fan who tracked him down for a chat. During the climax of the episode, the visitor leaves the elderly Jake, and Ben Sisko’s subpsace ghost returns to visit his son one last time.
(SPOILERS!) It’s reavaled that an injection Old Man Jake gave himself at the beginning of the episode was actually poison: Jake is the thether that keeps pulling Ben Sisko out of subspace for brief moments, on an endless loop. By dying, Jake gives his dad the opportunity to break the tether and ride the subspace connection all the way back to the start of the warp core accident, decades before. On the second go, Ben avoids the warp core blast and his subspace purgatory, thereby averting the entire timeline where Jake had to sacrifice his life and joy to rescue his father. Ben hugs the young Jake tightly, knowing more than ever how important his role is as a dad, an dhow much his son loves him.
“The Visitor” Foreshadows The Ultimate Fate of Cpt. Ben Sisko
At the end of DS9, Ben Sisko was finally forced to face his destiny as “The Emissary of the Prophets,” a major religous figure of prophecy in the religion of the Bajoran people. One of Sisko’s formative acts for proving his power as a the Emissary was discovering the Bajoran wormhole, which was the only stable wormhole in the Milky Way galaxy. The Bajoran’s believed that the wormhole provided passage to a divine place they referred to as the “Celestial Temple,” and that The Emissary’s ultimate destiny was to reach that place and join the rest of the prophets before him.
That destiny came to pass in the DS9 finale, when Sisko sacrifices himself to the hellish flames in the Fire Caves on Bajor, to stop his evil rival Dukat (Marc Alaimo) from the apocalyptic act of releasing the dreaded Pah-wraiths entities into the galaxy. Instead of death, Benjamin Sisko was transported to the Celestial Temple alongside the other Bajoran prophets, where he is informed he will still have lifetimes of divine work ahead of him.
Sisko’s Fate Is Even More Tragic After Re-Watching “The Visitor”
The entire thematic point of “The Visitor” is taking a deep (and sometimes uncomfortable) look at the bond between parent and child. While so many other TV shows and films present that bond as the purest form of love and connection, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine boldly added a layer of context for how that bond can also become toxic to the child, resulting in parental issues that hinder them from living their best life. On a more personal character note, The episode reinforced the father/son bond between Ben and Jake Sisko in a way no other Star Trek show ever has. Jake loved his father enough to sacrifice his entire (alternate) lifetime and last bit of life to save his dad; Ben was forever changed as a father, knowing just how profoundly his absence could affect his son’s life.
…That brings us back to Deep Space Nine‘s final two-episode story arc, “What You Leave Behind”. Part of Ben Sisko’s evolution into “The Emissary” was detaching from his human connections – as evidenced in one of the final scenes where Sisko appears to his wife, Kasidy (Penny Johnson), in a vision. The aloof way that Ben interacts with her and the cryptic platitudes he speaks in let Kasidy (and the audience) know that the divine being “The Emissary” is not exactly the same warm, passionate, very human man she once knew.
After rewatching “The Visitor”, it’s impossible not to feel the tragic loss of Jake and Ben’s bond, as the latter became something more than human, and had to leave those connections behind. It’s also why the makers of Deep Space Nine had the show’s final scene be one where viewers get reassurance that a fatherless Jake won’t end up the same way as his variant from “The Visitor”, as Kira joins him watching the Celestial Temple and remembering the respective loved ones they’ve lost. Meanwhile, fans had even more reason to love Ben Sisko, and feel his loss just as much as Jake did.
The new Star Trek TV series Starfleet Academy has now revisited the Sisko family, and brought fans some nice closure to any lasting anxiety about Jake and Ben’s relationship. Be sure to check that out.
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine can be streamed on Paramount+. Discuss your favorite episodes with us over on the ComicBook Forum!
