In a first bold move that would prove to be one of many overits seven - season running , Deep Space Nineopens withStar Trek‘s new hero staring down the horrifying visage of its honest-to-god one : Jean - Luc Picard , corrupted and misuse into Locutus of Borg . It set a remarkable phase through which to meet the franchise ’s latest protagonist , and over three X afterwards , those opening scenes aboard the USSSaratogaremain one ofStar Trek‘s most haunting and compelling opening salvos .
Thirty - two old age ago today on January 3 , 1993,Deep SpaceNine‘s buffer , “ Emissary ” , opened not on the titular place station that would become then - Commander Sisko ’s home , but with a title card that tookTrekback to what was then its great , and one of Starfleet ’s lowest , point : theBattle of Wolf 359inThe Next Generation‘s season four opener , concluding one of the greatestTrekcliffhangers of all sentence in “ The Best of Both Worlds . ” There , the series had kept the massacre of Wolf 359 off screen . Now , Star Trekwas quick to show it , and put its new agonist right at the very middle of that threat . It ’s an unbelievable gambit , one that like a shot say the audience that this newStar Trekseries was not going to go where they expected .
The scenes aboard theSaratogaas it prepares to be one of the many doomed vessels gathering to stop the Borg at Wolf 359 withstand a remarkable mirror up to whatTrekwas at the moment . Star Trekis used to picture of Starfleet officers thriving under atmospheric pressure , in the side of impossible betting odds , but there is a crude matter - of - factness to howDS9depicts the events of the engagement thatTNGnever showed . TheSaratogahas no luck against Locutus , and Starfleet calm air and collectedness is not given time to prevail in the aspect of the ship being now disable , slaughter the bridge work party . This is not an attack they seethe about the bridgework and get up from ; most of them are just deadened , as Sisko and a lonesome go Bolian lieutenant realize the ship is lose .
© Paramount
The fit outside the bridge are even worse : after years and yr of depicting theEnterpriseas a ship with a prosper civilian accompaniment , one always safeguard when it vanish into engagement , the corridors of theSaratoga — a Miranda - class ship , tiny in equivalence to the scale of the Galaxy - class — are fill with wailing , injured civilian scrambling for life pods . It all climaxes , of course , with a humbling personal cost to Starfleet ’s hubris for Sisko when he return to his own quarters to incur his wife Jennifer bushed among the debris , and his son Jake barely alert , as he himself is forcibly dragged wail in sorrow to a shuttle as theSaratogaexplodes , the fireworks of its destruction ponder in the viewport Siskovengefullyglares out of . In just four and a half minutes , Star Trekfans have just watch their new star face tragedy unlike anything they ’d really gotten to see before , and crucially , they had seen it through the centre of a man who pretend perhaps more like any of us would than the ideals of someone like Kirk or Picard would .
It ’s this tragical , vulnerable human beings that informs the Sisko we meet throughout the rest of “ Emissary”—shaping a focal figure far from what we ’d acquire of a typicalStar Trekprotagonist . He ’s piffling , in the way he treat with both the people he ’s working with upon assigning to Deep Space Nine and with Starfleet itself when he finds himself face to face with Picard ( now back to his heroic self and not expecting to be challenged in any manner , rent alone the way Sisko does ) . He ’s still very clearly regulate by the trauma of Wolf 359 , not fully processing it or even compartmentalizing it — and it almost takes a literal act of god for him to even start to do so , when his showdown with the wormhole entities the Bajorans worship as their spiritual gods is almost entirely compromise by the fact that Sisko ca n’t move on from the loss of Jennifer .
It ’s an unstained opinion of Starfleet in the shadows of what was , up to that point , one of its blue pointsever describe on projection screen : a low point that is arguably only agree by whatDeep Space Nineitself would get into later in its run duringthe Dominion War . And that unvarnished view comes in the shape of Sisko himself , a man who is permit to be vulnerable and flawed in shipway that defy what we had come to require ( and still , for the most part , come in to expect — just look at the detrition even all these years later over howDiscoveryportrayed Michael Burnham , who fees like one of theStar Trekprotagonistsmost form by Sisko ’s legacysince ) . It ’s a shape that is formed from the minuteDeep Space Ninegets go , and one that is still defining the show all these year later .
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