Deep Space Nine‘s Opening Scenes Are Star Trek‘s Best Introduction

In a first bold move that would prove to be one of many over its seven-season run, Deep Space Nine opens with Star Trek‘s new hero staring down the horrifying visage of its old one: Jean-Luc Picard, corrupted and perverted into Locutus of Borg. It sets a remarkable stage through which to meet the franchise’s latest protagonist, and over three decades later, those opening scenes aboard the USS Saratoga remain one of Star Trek‘s most haunting and compelling opening salvos.

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

The scenes aboard the Saratoga as it prepares to be one of the many doomed vessels gathering to stop the Borg at Wolf 359 hold a remarkable mirror up to what Trek was at the moment. Star Trek is used to scenes of Starfleet officers thriving under pressure, in the face of impossible odds, but there is a stark matter-of-factness to how DS9 depicts the events of the battle that TNG never showed. The Saratoga has no chance against Locutus, and Starfleet calm and collectedness is not given time to prevail in the face of the ship being immediately incapacitated, slaughtering the bridge crew. This is not an attack they roll about the bridge and get up from; most of them are just dead, as Sisko and a sole surviving Bolian lieutenant realize the ship is lost.

The scenes outside the bridge are even worse: after years and years of depicting the Enterprise as a ship with a thriving civilian complement, one always safeguarded when it flew into battle, the corridors of the Saratoga—a Miranda-class ship, tiny in comparison to the scale of the Galaxy-class—are filled with wailing, injured civilians scrambling for life pods. It all climaxes, of course, with a humbling personal cost to Starfleet’s hubris for Sisko when he returns to his own quarters to find his wife Jennifer dead among the debris, and his son Jake barely alive, as he himself is forcibly dragged wailing in grief to a shuttle as the Saratoga explodes, the fireworks of its destruction reflected in the viewport Sisko vengefully glares out of. In just four and a half minutes, Star Trek fans have just watched their new star face tragedy unlike anything they’d really gotten to see before, and crucially, they had seen it through the eyes of a man who acted perhaps more like any of us would than the ideals of someone like Kirk or Picard would.

It’s this tragic, vulnerable humanity that informs the Sisko we meet throughout the rest of “Emissary”—shaping a focal figure far from what we’d assume of a typical Star Trek protagonist. He’s petty, in the way he deals with both the people he’s working with upon assignment 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 way, let alone the way Sisko does). He’s still very clearly shaped 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 begin to do so, when his encounter with the wormhole entities the Bajorans worship as their spiritual gods is almost entirely compromised by the fact that Sisko can’t move on from the loss of Jennifer.

It’s an unvarnished view of Starfleet in the shadows of what was, up to that point, one of its lowest points ever depicted on screen: a low point that is arguably only matched by what Deep Space Nine itself would get into later in its run during the Dominion War. And that unvarnished view comes in the shape of Sisko himself, a man who is allowed to be vulnerable and flawed in ways that defy what we had come to expect (and still, for the most part, come to expect—just look at the friction even all these years later over how Discovery portrayed Michael Burnham, who fees like one of the Star Trek protagonists most shaped by Sisko’s legacy since). It’s a shape that is formed from the minute Deep Space Nine gets going, and one that is still defining the show all these years later.

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