The opening scenes of Deep Space Nine are the best introduction to Star Trek

In a bold first move that would prove to be one of many above his seven-season run, Deep Space Nine open with Star TrekThe new hero of the look staring at the horrible face of his old: Jean-Luc Picard, corrupted and perverted in Borg Locutus. It sets a remarkable stage through which to meet the last protagonist of the franchise, and more than three decades later, those opening scenes aboard the USS. Saratoga remain one of Star Trek‘s more disturbing and copulent opening salvo.

Thirty-two years ago today, January 3, 1993, Deep Space Ninethe pilot of “Emissary”opened not on the titular space station that would become Commander Sisko’s home, but with a title card he took Trek back to what was then its highest point, and one of Starfleet’s lowest points: the 359 Wolf Battle in The Next GenerationThe fourth opening season, concluding one of the greatest Trek All-time cliffhangers in “The Best of Both Worlds.” There, the series had kept the slaughter of Wolf 359 off-screen. now, Star Trek he was ready to show, and put his new protagonist right at the heart of that terror. It’s an incredible gambit, one that immediately tells the audience that it’s new Star Trek The series had not gone where they expected.

The scenes on board the Saratoga as he prepares to be one of the many doomed vessels that gather to stop the Borg at Wolf 359 holds a remarkable mirror up to what Trek was in the moment. Star Trek is used to scenes of Starfleet officers thriving under pressure, in the face of impossible odds, but there is a matter of stark billing in how DS9 depicts the events of the battle which TNG never shown. U Saratoga he has no chance against Locutus, and the calm and collection of Starfleet is not given time to prevail in the face of the ship that is immediately incapacitated, slaughtering the deck crew. This is not an attack that they roll onto the deck and get up; most of them are simply dead, as Sisko and the only surviving Bolian lieutenant realize that the ship is lost.

The scenes outside the bridge are even worse: after years and years of representing the The company as a ship with a thriving civilian complement, one always safeguarded when flying in battle, the corridors of the Saratoga– a Miranda-class ship, tiny compared to the scale of the Galaxy-class – are filled with wounded, wailing civilians, searching for life pods. All of this culminates, of course, in a humiliating personal cost to Starfleet hubris for Sisko when he returns to his quarters to find his wife Jennifer dead in the rubble, and his son Jake barely alive, as he himself is dragged by the force in the wail of pain. to a shuttle like the Saratoga explode, the fireworks of its destruction reflected in the Sisko viewport vengefully look out In just four and a half minutes, Star Trek fans had just seen his new star-faced tragedy unlike anything they’d really seen before, and crucially, they’d seen it through the eyes of a man who acted perhaps most like anyone of us that the ideals of someone like Kirk or. Picard would.

It is this tragic and vulnerable humanity that informs the Sisko that we meet throughout the rest of “Emissary” – forming a focal figure far from what we have assumed of a typical one. Star Trek protagonist It is insignificant, in the way he deals both with the people he works with the assignment to Deep Space Nine and with Starfleet itself when he comes face to face with Picard (now he returns to his heroic and did not expect to be defiant in any way, not to mention Sisko’s way). He is still very clearly shaped by the trauma of Wolf 359, he has not fully processed it or even compartmentalized it – and it takes almost a literal act of God for him to even begin to do so, when his encounter with the wormhole entity that the Bajorans worship as their spiritual gods is almost completely compromised by the fact that Sisko can’t get over the loss of Jennifer.

It’s an unvarnished view of Starfleet in the shadow of what was, up to that point, one of its lowest points. never represented on screen: a low point which is likely to be assumed only by what Deep Space Nine he himself enters later in his run during the Dominion War. And that unvarnished sight comes in the form of Sisko himself, a man who is allowed to be vulnerable and imperfect in ways that defy what we’ve come to expect (and still, for the most part, come to expect — just watch the friction. even all these years later on how Discovery portrays Michael Burnham, who pays as one of the Star Trek protagonists more shaped by Sisko’s legacy since). It is a form that is formed by the minute Deep Space Nine goes, and the one that still defines the show all these years later.

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