HERE THERE BE SPOILERS
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine has a fan reputation of probably being the most overall well-written installment of 90s Trek, if not the franchise as a whole. That reputation holds up, at least as far as “Emmissary” goes. DS9 literally starts with a bang right out of the gate, opening with the events of Wolf 359 and Sisko’s personal involvement. The episode stands up remarkably well on rewatch, especially in terms of the performance Avery Brooks gives. His Sisko is a very different leader than Picard, and Deep Space Nine is very much not the Enterprise. However, “Emissary” reassures us that even with these differences, Trek is still Trek.
Plot Ahoy!
Because this is a longer episode, I’m going to stress that you should either a) watch it or b) check out the Memory Alpha link.
“Emissary” opens with the Saratoga becoming embroiled in the conflict at Wolf 359. Unfortunately, the ship sustains critical damage, and First Officer Benjamin Sisko races to his quarters to rescue his wife Jennifer and their son, Jake. He arrives too late for Jennifer and has to be dragged away from her body to join his son in the escape pod.
Three years later, we find Sisko and Jake sitting around a pond discussing Sisko’s new assignment on Deep Space Nine. They conclude their chat and disembark to find a station in chaos. Sisko meets Chief O’Brien, who will be his chief of operations, who informs him that Captain Picard of the Enterprise wants to see him. Ignoring the summons, Sisko heads to Ops, where he encounters his executive officer, Kira Nerys as he takes her office. Major Kira has absolutely no interest in having Federation aid, but Sisko manages to calm her down. They head to the Promenade where they help Odo foil a theft-in-progress. As it happens, the lookout is Nog, Quark’s nephew, and Sisko seizes on this as an opportunity to coerce Quark into changing his plans to flee.
However, before he can put his plan into action, Sisko answers Picard’s summons. Picard explains that Sisko’s mission is to secure Bajor’s admission into the Federation. Openly hostile, Sisko asserts his desire to leave the station as soon as possible, even to the point of resigning his commission. However, he does tell Picard that he will perform his duties to the best of his abilities until that point. Back on DS9, Sisko makes his way to Odo’s office where he convinces Quark to keep his bar open as an anchor for life on the Promenade, despite Odo’s assurances that Quark is a criminal. Leaving there, Sisko finds Major Kira clearing out debris, and they discuss Bajor’s political situation while they pick up trash. Kira admits that Bajor is on the verge of an all out civil war. She recommends that he solicit aid from Kai Opaka, the Bajoran spiritual leader.
On Bajor, Sisko meets with Kai Opaka who warns him that the Cardassians are trying to find the Celestial Temple using the Orbs of the Prophets they looted from her people. She refuses to help with Bajor’s political strife until Sisko helps her defend the Prophets, commenting that it’s odd that the Emissary turns out to be a man who doesn’t want to be there. She sends an Orb back with him when he returns to DS9. Once on the station, he meets Jadzia Dax, his science officer. As it happens, she is a joined Trill, and Sisko was close to her symbiont’s previous host. They seamlessly renew their friendship.
Sisko’s chief medical officer, Julian Bashir, arrived with Dax and tries to convince her to go to dinner with him. Unsuccessful but undaunted, Bashir follows Kira to his medical bay, where he offends Kira with his comments regarding “frontier medicine.” Back in Ops, Sisko assigns Dax the task of investigating the Orb and possibly locating the Celestial Temple.
Meanwhile, O’Brien says goodbye to Captain Picard and the Enterprise before their departure. Upon that departure, the Cardassian former Prefect of Bajor, Gul Dukat’s ship arrives, and Dukat saunters into Sisko’s office to offer his aid in the form of a thinly veiled warning. Mostly, he’s just there to sniff around about the Orb, and Sisko denies any knowledge thereof. He leaves, and Dax confesses that she thinks she has a general location of the Temple based on where the Orbs were found. Via a caper capitalizing on Odo’s shapeshifting abilities, they distract the Cardassians long enough for Dax and Sisko to take a ship out to the area she identified previously. Dax notices some strange proton counts and heads for that area. They arrive and are pulled through a wormhole only to emerge in the Gamma Quadrant, which should be impossible.
On the way back through the wormhole, Dax finds a planet, so she and Sisko head over to investigate. Dax sees a beautiful park, but Sisko sees a desolate landscape. Sisko gets sucked into the planet, where he encounters the Prophets, and they send Dax back through the wormhole in the form of an orb. The Prophets, Sisko discovers, are non-corporeal beings who exist outside of time as he understands it. What follows is a long sequence in which Sisko tries to explain to them about humans and linear time, featuring visions of the highlights of his marriage. The visions keep returning him to Jennifer’s death, and the Prophets want to know why he remains there, in that moment. Sisko confesses that he has been unable to move past his loss, and Prophets comment that he doesn’t live exclusively in linear time either.
Back on the station, Kira has O’Brien move DS9 to the mouth of the wormhole in order to guarantee that Bajor stakes a claim. Gul Dukat notices, obviously, and directs his ship through the wormhole. The Prophets seal the wormhole, stranding Dukat. Dukat’s disappearance prompts the Cardassians to send three warships to DS9 to demand Dukat’s return. Kira and Gul Jasad face-off, and Jasad gives Kira an ultimatum: surrender or be destroyed. Kira has O’Brien fire all of the station’s photon torpedoes across the Cardassian bows and rig up a way to fool the Cardassian sensors into believing the station has more armaments than it actually does. Unfortunately, despite some initial success with this bluff, Jasad decides to fire on the station, rapidly eroding their shields. Kira is about to surrender when the wormhole reopens, and Sisko’s runabout emerges, towing Dukat’s ship behind it. Jasad calls off the attack.
Fortunately, while the station sustained severe damage, there were no fatalities, Bashir having moved quickly to provide treatment with Odo’s help. Later, once the Enterprise returns, Picard visits Sisko’s office where Sisko informs him that Sisko intends on remaining on DS9.
Analysis
The choice to open with Wolf 359 and Jennifer Sisko’s death sets the tone for the rest of the episode. That three years have elapsed between the events of Wolf 359 and Sisko’s arrival on Deep Space Nine is both immaterial and very significant. We learn from Captain Picard that Sisko has remained at Utopia Planitia for the entirety of those three years, and Picard clearly believes that Sisko’s reluctance to leave is unusual. He’s got a point. Sisko was the XO aboard the Saratoga, a position usually reserved for those officers interested in assuming command of a starship themselves. We also learn that Sisko has exactly zero desire to be there, to the extent that he considers resigning his commission. From the bits and pieces that we’ve seen of the station and her crew, Sisko also has a point. Deep Space Nine is located in a backwater system with minimal Starfleet presence. The departing Cardassians have destroyed the station, cannibalizing all the useful parts and rendering the station virtually defenseless. His quarters don’t even have beds for himself and his son, Jake. His XO is both openly hostile to him, to Starfleet, and to the Federation. On top of all of that, the planet he’s charged with bringing into the Federation is on the brink of civil war in the wake of the Cardassian withdrawal. Sisko has inherited a hot mess.
What’s great about this opening is that the wreckage on the station and Bajor mirrors Sisko’s emotional wreckage in the wake of his wife’s death. At one point, Kira comments that she doesn’t expect Starfleet officers are used to getting their hands dirty, and she’s alluding one of the major themes in “Emissary.” This idea that the characters are going to have to do what needs to be done, whether that work is physically repairing the station or making the choice to start living again, permeates everything. Moreover, this work will be and will have to be done outside of Starfleet’s general purview and modus operandi. Visually, Chief O’Brien’s uniform now has three-quarter length sleeves because he’s going to be up to his elbows in malfunctioning Cardassian tech. At one point, he has to resort to percussive maintenance to coerce the Cardassian transporter to function, which never would have happened on the Enterprise. Major Kira, despite being the XO, literally chucks off her jacket to start hauling away debris. Sisko strongarms Quark into becoming the anchor for the Promenade, and Odo talks his way onto a runabout in order to investigate his own origins.
Despite the chaos, there’s a very real feeling of emergence in “Emissary.” Beyond the fact that the story has Sisko’s emergence from the wormhole as a major plot point, thematically emergence is as important as work in “Emissary.” Bajor is grappling with freedom from the Cardassian occupation. Sisko gets to take the first steps of moving forward in his life. However, there’s just enough conflict present in the episode to guarantee us that these characters do not have smooth sailing ahead. Kira’s prickly personality comes across beautifully, but she, too, will be moving beyond the trauma of her past in the refugee camps and in the Resistance. She shuts down Julian Bashir sharply when he talks about having chosen DS9 because it’s the rough and tumble frontier. She also weaponizes her trauma when she stares down Gul Jasad. Some of O’Brien’s own trauma leaks out when he mentions Setlik III. He assures Kira that he knows what Cardassians do with their prisoners, but he takes his new short-sleeves and buckles down to get things done. Even Bashir, who so spectacularly ate shoe leather earlier in the episode, does not hesitate to run to the ruins of the Promenade to treat the wounded after the Cardassian attack. He wants to be a hero, but being a hero involves doing the work. That he has Odo help him save the woman’s life by literally forcing her blood to remain in her body is a nice touch.
Still, most of the episode’s success stems from Avery Brooks’ performance. He gives us a Sisko that is snarky and manipulative. He and Terry Farrell have an immediate chemistry that makes it believable that she remembers being his friend as Curzon. Moreover, he carries the bulk of the sequence with the Prophets. Admittedly, the episode begins to drag while Sisko is in the wormhole alone. Certainly, Sisko’s attempts to explain the concepts of linear time and loss to a species living outside of time deserve screen time. However, when juxtaposed with the conflict between the Cardassians and the station, the use of a baseball game as a metaphor for how we as humans perceive our lives seems a little imbalanced. However, I love that the wormhole aliens, through their exploration of him, force him to confront that he is emotionally stuck in the moment he discovered Jennifer’s body. They find their point of commonality, of reference in the very thing that Sisko has to leave in the past. They begin to understand humanity by watching him begin to live again. I admire that Brooks makes the choice to allow Sisko to cry, and I love even more that the story’s structure makes it clear that Sisko’s grief is not a weakness. “Emissary” puts Sisko through the wringer, and Brooks shows him feeling every bit of it.
Marc Alaimo’s appearance as Gul Dukat deserves some mention as well. Everything about Dukat screams malevolence. Dukat sleazes his way into Sisko’s office; he doesn’t merely walk or stand. The physicality of Dukat’s presence is fantastic because he manages to convey that sleaze from underneath that extensive Cardassian makeup. Similarly buried under latex, Armin Shimmerman does the same thing with Quark. Despite the prosthetics, he conveys Quark’s skeevy interest in Kira with just his eyes. Then, Rene Auberjonois gives us Odo’s intensity behind what is largely a featureless mask. In fact, DS9’s main cast features more non-humans, requiring such intensive makeup effects, than any other installment in the franchise. It’s a testament to just how good these actors are that we get such a real impression of who they are in these first two hours.
In fact, “Emissary” just does such a fantastic job of introducing the characters and setting up the world that it’s definitely one of my favorite Star Trek series premieres.
Rating:
Four baseballs and first base
Stray Thoughts From the Couch:
- The events of Setlik III served as the basis for the TNG episode “The Wounded,” and they will haunt O’Brien during DS9. He talks about it in “Empok Nor” and “Paradise,” but everything really comes to a head in season two’s “Tribunal.”
- I really loved that Captain Picard beamed O’Brien off the Enterprise for the final time and that O’Brien got a bit of a send-off when transferring to the station.
- During season seven, it comes to light that Sisko is part Prophet. I find it strange that Prophets grill him so intensely when they encounter him. Shouldn’t they recognize him? Isn’t that part of being the Emissary? I found that very jarring.
- I like how everyone’s introduction came about more or less organically in the story with the exception of Major Kira’s. I realize that the writers want to convey how prickly she is, but really, she just comes across as oversharing with Sisko.