“The Visitor”
Written by Michael Taylor
Directed by David Livingston
Season 4, Episode 2
Production episode 40514-476
Original air date: October 9, 1995
Stardate: unknown
Station log: On a rainy night in Louisiana, an old man sits at his desk, which includes a picture of Sisko and Jake, a baseball, and a hypospray, which he applies.
The doorbell rings—it’s a young woman named Melanie, who is scratched from a tree branch. She’s an aspiring writer, and she wanted to meet the old man: her favorite author, Jake Sisko. He’s only written a novel, Anslem, and a collection of short stories, and she wishes there had been more. She asks why he stopped writing, and he says that if she had come any other day, he would’ve refused and sent her on way. But today, of all days, he’s willing to tell the story.
It started many years ago, when he was only eighteen, and his father died. He was working hard on a short story that was frustrating the crap out of him, and Sisko distracted him by bringing him on the Defiant to observe a once-every-fifty-years event: the wormhole undergoing a subspace inversion.
Unfortunately, the inversion has done damage to the Defiant’s warp core. The engineering staff is all injured, and so Sisko has to save the day, with Jake’s help. But after he saves the Defiant, a discharge from the warp core hits him as he’s handing a tool to Jake, and he disappears.
There’s a memorial service, during which Kira speaks eloquently about how Sisko wasn’t just her CO and the Emissary, he was her friend. A few months later, after Jake and Nog spend some time on the holosuite that Jake barely even is able to register anything resembling enjoyment of, he goes to bed, unsure what he’s going to do with his life going forward—maybe take admission to Pennington, maybe stay on the station—when he sees Sisko for a few minutes in his quarters. Everyone assumes it was a dream, though Dax does do a thorough scan.
After eight or nine months, Jake is still on the station, with Nog having gone off to Starfleet Academy. Tensions with the Klingons have increased to the point that the Bajorans and Cardassians signed a mutual defense pact, which pissed off the Klingons. The civilian population on the station has been encouraged to resettle elsewhere, but Jake refuses to go, despite urgings from both Kira and Worf, the former later pleading with him, but understanding why he wants to stay.
Then Sisko reappears again in a corridor. This time he’s around for a bit longer—he thinks it’s only been a minute since being in the Defiant engine room. Dax and O’Brien theorize that the warp field dragged him into subspace, putting his temporal signature out of whack. O’Brien and Dax try some technobabble to keep him around, but it doesn’t work. Before Sisko disappears again, Sisko tries to get Jake to promise to move on with his life.
For the next several months, Dax and O’Brien try to get Sisko back, but it doesn’t work, and eventually the political situation changes to the point that the Federation turns Deep Space 9 over to the Klingons. Jake is forced to leave his home, and he attends the Pennington School, then moves to Louisiana to be near his grandfather. (Melanie at that point tells the elderly Sisko that his grandfather’s restaurant is still there, still called Sisko’s, and they still have the letter of acceptance for Anslem on the wall that Jake’s grandfather put there.)
Eventually, Jake met a Bajoran painter named Korena and married her. On the day he won the Betar Prize for his short fiction, Korena came home to find Commander Nog visiting to celebrate his friend’s award. He’s visited the Bajoran sector recently—the Klingons have let the Federation check the Gamma Quadrant to see how the Dominion would react after all these years—and he tells Jake that the station is a bit run down, though Morn is now running the bar, amusingly enough.
Later that night, there’s a burst of light, and Sisko appears in Jake’s living room. Sisko is thrilled to meet his daughter in law, who shows him Jake’s books. Sisko is very proud, but Jake is sorry that he gave up looking for his father. Sisko insists that he’s proud of Jake—and he definitely wants grandchildren—but then he fades away.
Jake consults Dax, who figures out the pattern to Sisko’s appearances—near Jake, but always when the wormhole undergoes a particular something-or-other. Jake, knowing it’ll be several years before it happens again, goes back to school at age 37 to study subspace mechanics. He becomes so obsessed that he loses Korena, as they’re divorced by the time he gets his doctorate. But Jake figures out a way to re-create the accident, once it hits 50 years since the event. Captain Nog is able to get the Defiant out of mothballs to do so, and Worf throws his weight around with the Klingons to get permission to go to the Bajoran sector.
With a cantankerous Dax and Bashir assisting, Jake is able to locate Sisko in subspace, and they’re both pulled into a subspace fragment. Sisko is disappointed to learn that Korena and Jake are no longer together, and even more disappointed that he’s abandoned his writing. Sisko begs Jake to let it go, to make a life for himself.
Jake makes it back to the Defiant engine room; Sisko doesn’t. Jake breaks down crying. Eventually he figures out that if he dies when he and Sisko are together, Sisko will go back to the time and place of the accident instead of bouncing back to subspace. After figuring that out, though, he spent the rest of the years between that discovery and Sisko’s next scheduled appearance writing a bunch of short stories, which he gives to Melanie.
After Melanie leaves with his manuscripts, Jake waits for his father to appear, gathering another copy of the manuscript and his father’s baseball, eventually falling asleep on the couch. When he wakes up, he sees Sisko watching him. Sisko is glad he still has the house, and has gotten back to writing. Sisko hates his plan to die, but Jake insists that this will give them a second chance—he isn’t just doing it for his father, he’s doing it for the boy he was, so he won’t lose his father.
Jake dies. Sisko is back on the Defiant in the present day. He ducks the discharge from the warp core and knocks Jake to the floor. They’re both okay, and Sisko clutches Jake to him.
Can’t we just reverse the polarity? The wormhole goes through a subspace inversion and Sisko gets sucked into subspace, but he’s tethered to Jake because they were holding the same framistat that looks like a giant key that Sisko used to save the ship and blah blah blah.
The Sisko is of Bajor: Sisko’s death leads to Bajor not trusting the Federation entirely. They sign a mutual defense pact with the Cardassians, but then the sector eventually winds up under Klingon control.
Don’t ask my opinion next time: Kira sports a new uniform, which is more skintight with an open neck, smaller shoulderpads, and high heels. While Nana Visitor loved it, a lot of fans were unhappy at the transformation of Kira into a “Baywatch babe.”
The slug in your belly: Jadzia Dax survives into middle age in the alternate future, and retains her friendship with Bashir. Since Jadzia will be killed in “Tears of the Prophets” at the end of the sixth season, it’s curious that, in essence, by saving his father’s life, Jake condemned Jadzia to an earlier demise.
Rules of Acquisition: In the months following Sisko’s “death,” Quark is actually willing to let Nog take some time off so he and Jake can use the holosuite.
Victory is life: In the alternate future, the Dominion War never happens. There’s obviously still tension, but it never breaks out into all-out war.
Tough little ship: The original incident happens on the Defiant, and when fifty years have passed, and there’s another subspace inversion, Captain Nog is able to get the ship back in service, though Dax complains about how nothing works and Bashir doesn’t know how they ever managed with two-dimensional consoles.
No sex, please, we’re Starfleet: Jake meets and marries a Bajoran painter, but the relationship falls apart when he becomes obsessed with rescuing his father.
Keep your ears open: “Did you start the grill?”
“What are we having?”
“Blackened redfish fresh from the bayou.”
“Fish? When these woods are crawling with perfectly good slugs?”
“I suppose you’re going to ask me to chew your food for you?”
“I have to admit I’ve been more popular with women since I stopped asking them to do that.”
“I tried to tell you that twenty years ago.”
“I’m a slow learner.”
Korena and Nog discussing the finer points of cooking, with Jake jumping in when they modulate to the finer points of dating.
Welcome aboard: Tony Todd, who played Kurn on three episodes of TNG (“Sins of the Father,” the “Redemption” two-parter) and will reprise that role in “Sons of Mogh,” plays the older version of Jake. Galyn Görg plays Korena (she’ll also appear in Voyager’s “Warlord”), Rachel Robinson (daughter of Andrew “Garak” Robinson) plays Melanie, and of course we have Aron Eisenberg as Nog.
Trivial matters: The script was written by newcomer Michael Taylor, who would join the writing staff soon thereafter and remain until the show’s conclusion, then moving over to Voyager for its final three seasons. He’d write or co-write several notable episodes, in particular “In the Pale Moonlight,” and he has since worked on The Dead Zone (with Michael Piller), Battlestar Galactica, and Caprica (both with Ronald D. Moore). He’s currently an executive producer of Defiance.
The structure of this episode inspired the tenth anniversary anthology Prophecy and Change, with the framing story “Revisited,” in which Melanie visits an elderly Jake in the mainline timeline, and he tells her stories of his youth on Deep Space 9—to wit, the stories in the anthology.
Jake will eventually start to write Anslem in the mainline timeline, in “The Muse.” He was accepted into the Pennington School in “Explorers.”
In the tie-in fiction, Jake eventually does marry Korena, as seen in Fragments and Omens by J. Noah Kym, the Bajor portion of Worlds of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Volume 2. They’re seen as a couple in your humble rewatcher’s Satisfaction is Not Guaranteed (the Ferengi portion of WoDS9 Volume 3), the framing sequence of Andy Mangels & Michael A. Martin’s Enterprise novel The Good that Men Do, and David R. George III’s Typhon Pact novels Rough Beasts of Empire and Raise the Dawn.
The future Starfleet uniforms and combadges were the same as those seen in the future segments of “All Good Things…”
This episode was nominated for a Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation, but it lost to Babylon 5’s “The Coming of Shadows.” (Don’t get me wrong, “…Shadows” was a great hour of television, no doubt, but DS9 was seriously robbed here.)
Although always intended as the second episode of the season, it wound up being filmed third, with “Hippocratic Oath” filmed second, to accommodate Colm Meaney’s schedule on a film.
Walk with the Prophets: “Let it go, Jake!” Let me be blunt: if you don’t think this is one of the ten best Star Trek stories ever told, then you have no soul and I have nothing to say to you.
I remember being at the Hugo Awards in Los Angeles when this episode was one of the ones up for Best Dramatic Presentation, and they showed a clip from the scene where Jake is trading technobabble with Dax and Bashir—it’s quite possibly the worst scene to show out of context, because it’s filled with nonsense “science,” and then they cut it off before the emotional scene with Sisko. I was already livid, more so when the episode didn’t win.
That is, of course, the weakest scene in the episode, but it’s there for an important purpose: to get Jake and Sisko back together so that Sisko can be devastated by what his son has turned into, and turned away from, in the interests of getting his Dad back.
Ultimately, the episode is about love between father and son, which has been a cornerstone of the series, and we get to see it from all possible angles. On the one hand, the loss of Sisko is devastating to Jake. For almost two years, he mopes, made worse by the knowledge that his father is just lost, not dead, and then he tries to move on with his life, only to once again fall into the spiral of obsession.
But we see the good side of it, too, mostly in Sisko’s reactions to Jake’s passing life: the joy he takes in seeing that he’s a published novelist, in meeting Korena, in just staring at his elderly face as he’s asleep. That last may be my favorite shot in the whole episode, made even stronger by foregoing the lightning-style pyrotechnics that accompany Sisko’s other appearances, just quietly cutting from Jake asleep to Sisko watching him and smiling.
The heart and soul of the episode is Tony Todd, who imbues the older Jake with such passion and heart. The elderly version of Jake is a wise, charming old man, one who is comfortable with the decisions he’s made in his life. But we’ve also got the obsessed middle-aged version, who’s lost all sign of personality because it’s been subsumed to the mission he’s set for himself. And then there’s the late 30s Jake (the only version in which Todd wears no old-age makeup), and it’s stellar, especially since he spends those two scenes perfectly mimicking Cirroc Lofton’s mannerisms. He doesn’t do that for the middle-aged and elderly versions of Jake, which is a masterful choice, because those two iterations of Jake’s life are too far removed from the Jake we know.
Not that Lofton doesn’t deserve credit. We get very little of the Jake we’re used to in his scenes, with him focused on writing before the accident (a mode we haven’t seen Jake in that much as yet) and him moping afterward. The scene with Kira at the upper pylon is a tour de force from both Lofton and Nana Visitor, as Jake’s anguish is palpable.
Everyone who gets substantive screen time puts in a great performance here. Alexander Siddig and Terry Farrell are absolutely delightful playing Bashir and Dax as a couple of cranky old farts. We get a nice preview of what Nog will be like as a Starfleet officer, as Aron Eisenberg convincingly plays Nog as a more mature adult—as well as the excited youth in the early scenes with Jake not long after the accident. Galyn Görg doesn’t get as much to do as one would like, but you can see what Jake sees in her, and Rachel Robinson proves quite adept at being the wide-eyed young writer wannabe.
It’s funny, but looking at this episode from the outside it looks like it should be a stinker: the plot hinges on a particularly lame batch of technobabble, it has the resettiest reset button in the history of resets, and most of the screentime is taken up by a guest actor. But when the actor’s of Todd’s high caliber, that part isn’t even a factor, and as for the rest of it, it’s just a means to an end, whereby we see up close and personal the bond between father and son.
I haven’t mentioned Avery Brooks directly yet, but this is at least as much his episode as Todd’s—his absence informs every scene he’s not in, and his presence enlivens every scene he’s in. Every character note is perfect—the wide smile when he asks about grandchildren, the anguished query as to what Jake has done with his life, the glee with which he holds the copies of Jake’s books, the confusion in the infirmary when he realizes he’s a year in the future—and all of it bound together by the intensity of his love for his son.
Just a great great hour of television. One of the finest there has ever been.
Warp factor rating: 10
Keith R.A. DeCandido is running a Kickstarter for a new story in the Dragon Precinct universe, featuring the characters of Gan Brightblade and his friends from that novel. He hopes you’ll support it—just two bucks will get you a copy of the story itself! Details can be found here.
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I know this episode is supposed to be one of the best. You present an excellent argument for this. In general, I like the best episodes, and tend to agree with other fans on what they are.
This episode is everything that you say it is, but I just can’t get into it. I can’t like it. There must be something horribly wrong with me – on an aesthetic level it is wonderful, but the story just won’t hold me. I wish it would.
I’d say the Hugo voters got it right. “The Coming of Shadows” is my all-time favorite B5 episode. “The Visitor” is in the top 40 DS9 episodes and top 100 Trek episodes/stories.
As time as gone on, I’ve found myself less willing to give the nonsense technobabble and reset button a pass. Tony Todd and the other actors are all stellar, but the story they are in could use a little tweaking.
I guess I have no soul and krad isn’t going to talk to me. This episode has never done anything in the least for me. Those things that from the outside make this look like it should be a stinker? They’re all I see. (Plus the fact that Tony Todd looks absolutely nothing like Cirroc Lofton.) I also have problems with Jake turning into JD Salinger. And Bajor entering into a defense treaty with Kardassia? I’m supposed to believe that?Major spoiler, mouse over to see, LisaMarie especially DO NOT PEEK! And apparently he’s going to do that anyway since Sisko will eventually turn into a wormhole alien for all intents and purposes.
And then there’s the problem, which krad dances around, that the galaxy might have been a somewhat more peaceful place if this hadn’t been reversed. I think we get better explorations of the father-son dynamic in most scenes between the two than we do in this whole hour.
Any time I see Tony Todd in anything, he’s usually playing a rough and tumble guy, a bad guy, or just plain weirdo. I always think back to this episode and think; “Why has he been typecast as that guy and not this guy when he can plainly act very well?”
Either way, technobabble aside, it’s a great episode. I find myself less and less interested in the explanation of, “It’s supposed to be that way,” or “you know what you’re watching going in.” Those excuses work for crap like Transformers, but usually not for Trek. THere must be a reason, and a good one. This doesn’t have a good one, yet somehow works.
ALso, I had no idea that was Andrew Robinson’s daughter. The more you know.
This is just about the only episode of any Trek that can move me to tears, and that has much to do with Avery Brooks. I’ve always read that he took Ceroc Lofton under his wing and they had a great relationship off screen and you can so clearly see that in his performance here. He transferred what he felt for the actor, the young man, the boy that was, into his character’s feelings for Tony Todd and the anguish at the life that he gave up for his father is true and heartfelt.
This is a great episode with alot of emotion and hand wavy technobabble but I do like it. I still find it really sad to watch though I know the timeline resets because of Jake’s death. Dying is never fun to see except when its bad guys.
Truth be told, I wouldn’t say The Visitor was robbed in the Hugo Awards. That year’s winner was a deserving show. Babylon 5’s The Coming of Shadows was one of that show’s greatest hours, mixing brilliant character work and galaxy-changing events.
Concerning your trivia section, was Michael Taylor really part of the DS9 writing staff?
I thought Taylor, like Bryan Fuller, only wrote a couple of freelance DS9 scripts as testing grounds before full-time spots opened up in the Voyager staff.
The DS9 staff had little to no turnover. The only spot that opened in that period was Robert Hewitt Wolfe’s, filled by Thompson and Weddle.
At the risk of being stoned, I’ll say that I’d have given the award to “Coming of Shadows.” I like episodes that change the status quo, and “Shadows” took the status quo, put it through a shredder, then stomped on the pieces with cleats. “Visitor” was ultimately a “Reset Button” episode. It was a deep and meaningful journey to the button, granted, but it still became obvious pretty quickly that we were headed for the button, and that knocks it down a notch or two in my book.
@1,
Totally understand where you’re coming from. For me, it’s TNG’s “Family” that everyone else loves and I’ve never managed to watch all the way through. I can listen to other people describe its merits and agree with them, but the episode itself just makes me uncomfortable. Others may disagree, but I don’t think that not being able to like a “good” episode means that there’s something wrong with you.
Sorry, krad, for me this is one of the ten worst episodes of DS9. I haven’t rewatched it in years, though, and I intend to now, because you’ve done a great job of selling it – but whenever I saw it before, all I saw were those flaws. I hate reset episodes because they do a poor job predicting a plausible future for the show, and because they do that, their projections are never revisited, and in the long run that glimpse of future has no lasting consequence for those that see it, so why should I care? It’s exasperating, because I think it could be done right: know where your program is going, show us an incrementally involving future over multiple episodes, make sure it leaves an impact on those who see it, and actually teach us something about the meaning of choices.
If I want to watch a Star Trek character age in a world I shouldn’t care about and experience great pathos, Tapestry or The Inner Light give me much more compelling takes on this sort of concept. All Good Things… does a pretty good job, too. This one just leaves me cold.
I guess I have no soul too. Jake’s obssesive behaviour here really bothered me. The ‘correct’ ending here would have been for Jake to have realized how he had wasted his life and regret it, though I’m not sure how they could have done it within the Trek universe. Perhaps as some sort of alternate universe episode?
First, GREAT episode. Most of the times in fiction a character is maneuvered into a ‘noble’ suicide I find it disgusting and trite. This one, however, made sense (within the technobabble) and actually helped his loved ones.
Second, in terms of the Dominion War, remember that the Klingon empire is pretty much being run by the Dominion behind the scenes. Sisco was a major part of denying the Klingons the wormhole and exposing the Founder influence in the empire. Because the Klingons control the wormhole the Dominion can just sit back and wait for the Federation to grow complacent before striking. Even if it is a matter of decades or centuries. Perhaps even waiting until they can maneuver a changeling into the throne. Only because the Federation has entrenched itself in Bajor and DS9 do they have to strike while the Federation is at its most prepared. I feel we just didn’t go far enough into the future to see the combined Klingon-Dominion forces conquer the major powers of the Alpha Quadrant.
Third, Coming of Shadows was also awesome and I’m not sure which way I would have voted if I were so privileged.
Put me on the list of people who think this is first-rate. I wouldn’t hold technobabble, or an inability (without a rigid plan for the series) to realistically plot out exactly what the future would have looked like, against it. (Having a rigid plan, of course, can result in lots of problems – the future flashforwards in “Babylon Squared”, for example, were either actively deliberately misleading or end up making almost no actual sense with the way the plot really played out.)
I wonder if people’s response depends in part on where they are in their life? Watching this when it first aired I thought it was good; watching it now, two years after my father died and my daughter was born in the same year, the episode moved me to tears.
This is an utterly fantastic episode, yes. In addition to all the factors you cite, Keith, I think a lot of the credit goes to Dennis McCarthy for the beautiful, touching, magnificent musical score he contributed. This is one of the few 1990s episodes of the franchise that was allowed to use music with a distinct melodic theme rather than just wallpaper music, and McCarthy can write wonderful melodies. This is one of his best, and it makes me cry every time I listen to it.
I do have some technical quibbles beyond those mentioned, though. For one thing, how is Sisko breathing in a subspace pocket? Also, there seems to be a chronological discrepancy. The episode begins in early 2372. Sisko’s first return is a few months later, his second about 8-9 months after that. His third is about 20 years after Jake & Nog’s double date in “Life Support,” so about 2391. The next time he was shown returning was said to be almost 50 years after his disappearance, maybe 2421. But when Sisko returns then and asks how long it’s been since his last visit, he’s told it’s been 14 years, suggesting there was an unchronicled visit in 2407. But there’s nothing in dialogue to suggest this.
By the way, does anyone know how Galyn Görg’s name is pronounced? I found out not long ago that her last name is pronounced like “George,” but I can’t find anything about how her first name is pronounced.
@6: You’re right, Taylor was never on DS9’s staff.
I’m afraid I have to agree on Hugo getting it right as well. This was a great episode of DS9, but Coming of Shadows was more than that, it was the episode that really set out the main plotlines that got B5 finally properly up and running after all the forboding and foreshadowing, and is even better in hindsight when you see how all the various threads leading out of that episode played out.
On the other hand, well, as I said, this was a great episode of DS9, but it was just that. It barely put a foot wrong, aside from the reset button ending which, sadly, was inevitable and necessary. As a standalone episode it was superb, and after the high stakes, high action drama of the previous episode, it was a terrific idea to follow it with such a low-key character driven episode. But top ten ST stories ever? Not sure, but it would make it to the shortlist without doubt.
This is a great hour of television and I find it moving, but I’m not sure how good it is in the context of being an episode of Star Trek. It has the same problem “Family” did of being a small story in a setting that is designed for big ones. I would never use “The Visitor” or “Family” or “The Trouble with Tribbles” to sell their respective series because they are so small and different no matter how much I personally love them.
While the Hugo committee might not have shown the right clip I can’t condemn the voters for their choice. Speculative fiction fans lean toward big stories. “Coming of Shadows” was a big game changing story. “The Visitor” was a small story and if you scrubbed out the technobabble it turns into a ghost story. A ghost story winning a visual presentation Hugo would be pretty extraordinary in any year.
One of the best hours of TV ever, leaves me a sobbing wreck everytime.
Around that time, it was pretty much heresy in much of fandom to even acknowledge any excellence in Deep Space Nine because the All-Holy Babylon Five was so far above all else that Shakespeare traveled through time to steal plots from Babylon Five. So I can see where “The Visitor” wouldn’t have stood a chance at the Hugos, and where they’d have deliberately picked a weak clip because God forbid that Other, Lesser Show get any credit at all.
Since my attitude was more “awesome, two space station shows!” rather than holy war, the overall attitude kind of turned me off B5. I should probably try revisiting B5 now that I’m more removed from the contextual irritation because it’s not the show’s fault that its fans made me view it with an attitude of “oh, get over yourself.”
I was leery of having the commanding officer’s son on board the station, but this episode showed the right way to incorporate a family member into the plot. That really was a lovely father/son relationship.
I too have some reservations on this episode, though I do rate it highly. The old age makeup is distracting, for one. But more importantly, the implications of Jake’s actions, both for him personally and what he did to the timeline, are troubling to say the least. It colors everything we know about Jake from before the series begins to beyond its ending. I also don’t like how Melanie is discarded from the plot as if her part of the story is settled, when there’s a good chance she is about to be erased from history along with countless others who were born in that future timeline. Depending on the wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey, of course.
Great review of an absolutely wonderful episode. I once saw this episode with a friend who didn’t get any emotional impact from it. After the ending, she said “Why was Sisko sad? He just averted the bad future.” It took all my self-control not to scream when I told her it was because he’d just had to watch his son kill himself for him after seeing what a wreck his obsession would make his life! I wouldn’t go so far as to say that she has no soul, but it definitely made me see her in a less flattering light.
-Andy
Perhaps this episode and the above comments illustrate a difference in taste among Star Trek Fans. Some of us love the universe, and are more attracted to “Horatio Hornblower” episodes, like “Best of Both Worlds” or “The Pegasus,” because these sort of expand our view of the setting, or explain things like why the Federation doesn’t have the Cloak. Other are more interested in the particular characters, and prefer shows about their lives and relationships, like this episode, which frankly doesn’t do much for me. Of course, most of us are somewhere in the middle and can appreciate both, but I think we tend to lean one way or the other.
@17: If the same people could be born in the Prime and Mirror Universes over the course of three centuries (Jake being the one known exception), then it’s likely that a version of Melanie would’ve been born even after the change to history.
Indeed, the frame story of the Prophecy and Change anthology is the version of Old Jake and Melanie’s meeting in the timeline where Sisko didn’t die. So in the novel continuity, at least, she was indeed born.
Something I forgot to address. While The Visitor might be perceived as a “reset button” episode, it really isn’t when you think about it.
Jake merely delayed the inevitable, which was letting his father go.
Four years after this episode, we get the series finale, with Sisko becoming a Prophet, moving away from his corporeal existence, leaving Kasidy a single mom, and Jake fatherless.
In hindsight, this makes The Visitor even more heartbreaking (and I imagine Ira Behr might have had early ideas about turning Sisko into a prophet at this point in producton, foreseeing the show’s eventual end).
Oh I agree. This is my favorite ST episode ever. Such incredible writing and performances. The idea that someone can stop living even though they are attempting a rescue, or that the loss to Jake can just reverberate across time. Such a beautiful episode. Todd was so good I never doubted I was seeing Jake. And though a reset, it explored life without Sisko. And Jake’s sacrifice at the end wasnt easy. But he had already sacrificed his life in pursuit of his dad.
Shanna: Yes, I remember those days well. I also remember a discussion in the bar at Dragon Con in 1999 with two B5 fans who called me a dinosaur for clinging to Star Trek, which was on its way out. “Ten years from now,” one of them said, “all anybody will be talking about is B5 and Trek will just be a minor footnote,” which is pretty much the opposite of what happened.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
It’s been a couple of years since I did my rewatch, but doesn’t Sisko remember what happened?
A wonderful episode. It’s arguably (judging from the above comments) DS9’s Inner Light.
I think the silly Treknobabble pushes it into the realm of fantasy more than science fiction, so in that way it reminds me of some of the best episodes of the Twilight Zone. And as both a TZ and Trek fan, I’m very cool with that.
Some of these comments…whew. I have to say I’m rather disappointed at the utter lack of comprehension and appreciation for this magnificent hour of television that had me in tears of sorrow and joy at the end.
I’ve been looking forward to this episode as much as I was looking forward to “The Way of the Warrior.” The love between father and son is explored at every angle. Cirroc Lofton and Tony Todd convey Jake’s anguish so beautfully, and even fifteen-year-old me cried nineteen years ago. I never saw B5’s Coming of Shadows or whichever, but there would have been no competition for me.
For a parent, there isn’t much you wouldn’t do to try to help them, and this episode wonderfully showcases the father and son bond, one I would have given anything to experience as a fifteen-year-old.
Lisamarie, if you’re reading this, do scroll away. Spoiler Alert.
@21, I had the same thought about the end of the series. Made it even sadder to know that after all Jake went through here, he still loses his father. That particular bit of writing never sat well with me, and I’m not looking forward to the series finale for this reason. But we have a ways to go before then, so lets enjoy the ride :)
@25, I have always considered this episode DS9’s City on the Edge of Forever/Inner Light moment.
Thank you for a wonderful rewatch, Krad! I must say this is one of my favourite episodes of the series, and indeed wider franchise. And adds to my watching of that final scene of the show, of a son staring out for his father.
There is this great music video on youtube called ‘The sisko‘ which is rather focused on Ben, but also gives importance to Jake’s pov, finishing with that beautiful final image from ‘What you leave behind’.
Thinking about the Relaunch novels, which I recently got back into – I hadn’t connected the actions of Jake early in the novels to ‘The Visitor’, but it really makes sense. In Avatar Jake begins what is an obsessive journey into the wormhole & then the GQ from a point of melancholy and paternal longing. Very similar to the obsessions of alter-Jake here.
Thankfully Rising Son, [url=http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=u0EDrEQ_0IMC&printsec=frontcover&]Unity and Bajor: Fragments and Omens[/url] make it all better :)
I hate it when links come out ugly! :/
To repeat:
Thinking about the Relaunch novels, which I recently got back into – I
hadn’t connected the actions of Jake early in the novels to ‘The
Visitor’, but it really makes sense. In Avatar Jake begins what is an obsessive journey into the wormhole & then the GQ from a point of melancholy and paternal longing. Very similar to the obsessions of alter-Jake here. Thankfully Rising Son, Unity and Bajor: Fragments and Omens make it all better :)
I have, for years, cited DS9 and Babylon 5 as my two favorite TV shows of all time. Even still, I support and agree with the decision to award the Hugo to “The Coming of Shadows” instead of “The Visitor.” “Shadows” has everything that makes B5 a phenomenal show, whereas “Visitor” isn’t even typical for the show it was in. Aside from the exploration of the Father-Son relationship in Sisko and Jake, it had virtually nothing that made DS9 what it is.
Don’t get me wrong, “Visitor” is a good stand-alone story, and it does make for good sci-fi. However, it falls short in its complete dependance on made-up technobabble and the fact that it’s just not quite a DS9 story.
Quoth Clomer: “Aside from the exploration of the Father-Son relationship in Sisko and Jake, it had virtually nothing that made DS9 what it is.”
That’s a HUGE caveat there, one that renders your statement meaningless. The father-son relationship is a massive part of what “made DS9 what it is,” as you put it, and to dismiss it is to do both the relationship and the show a tremendous disservice, IMO.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Keith, I’m going to have to disagree a bit on how much the Jake/Benjamin relationship really defines the series.
Although Brandon Tartikoff envisioned DS9 as Rifleman in space, with the father/son concept as a central aspect in Rick and Michael’s bible, we all know Jake Sisko didn’t factor into the series proper as much as was probably intended. If he had, we would have had multiple Jake-centric episodes per season, instead of one or maybe two (or none in season 7).
One only has to look into how far Nog came as a character, and how many episodes he had compared to Jake. And we saw Sisko as the Captain far more often than the Sisko as the Father.
Not to take away from The Visitor, which was a truly powerful hour, among the best Trek’s ever done, but both viewers and writers knew that relationship wasn’t as effectively used as it could have been.
Eduardo: I couldn’t possibly disagree with you more. The Siskos’ relationship is one of the things that makes DS9 stand out from all the other Trek shows, and the reason why has nothing to do with how many episodes focused on it, but how it was always an undercurrent of the show, showing up in all sorts of places. It wasn’t a focus of the show, but it was an integral part of the texture of the show.
Plus the relationship did get a spotlight, it was often brilliant: “Explorers,” “In the Cards,” “Rapture,” and, of course, this one.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
I do love this episode, although I also think that the Hugo voters got it right, Coming of Shadows is a great episode. But this episode is incredibly moving.
I am bothered by the fact that the universe in general was more peaceful and ended up in better shape when Sisko died. Jadzia lives, Nog doesn’t lose a leg. The Changelings that infiltrated the Federation and other governments apparently had the Dominion feeling safe enough that things never escalated.
The emotional effect is great. In retropect, saving Sisko really ended up putting the needs of the one (Jake) over the needs of the many, which is really ironic.
This is the second best of all ST episodes (behind #1 “The Inner Light”), and the best of DS9. A welcome departure from all the boring Dominion-centered episodes that plagued DS9 as the seasons wore on.
Wow… what timing.
Back when this episode first aired, it affected me pretty strongly. (I still think the B5 ep was slightly better overall, but for entirely different reasons). There was no way that this one couldn’t have failed to score high for me, since ever since I was old enough to read books with more mature themes (say, 12-15 years before this aired) the only plots that would ever pull on my emotions involved goodbyes. So this episode, with its Old Jake making the Big Exit to effect the changed reality, really got to me. The Reset Button, was not a cliche’ that really bothered me (yet!) at that time, so that didn’t bug me.
And now for the timing… When I saw the heading for this post a few minutes ago, I was like “oh, no, not that one, not NOW” – for the plain fact that my mother passed away overnight last night. And unlike Jake and Sisko, she gets no Reset Button. :-(
I do wish I had this one handy on a DVD as I think I’d cue it up…
Andy_T: condolences on your loss.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
The shot when Jake wakens to find Sisko watching him is I think the most beautiful thing Star Trek has ever done. The sort of loving wonder with which he looks at his son all grown up to old age…makes me cry instantly. I remember Avery Brooks talking about how important he felt DS9 was in foregrounding a loving relationship between a black father and son, and this episode has to be the pinnacle of that.
I thought I had no soul because I hate The Inner Light and always have; but at least it’s not technobabble or the “reset button” which bugs me about that one. There’s only one thing to do when you are so out of synch with the rest of the commenters, so I’m going to do it:
When this aired when I was 16, I don’t think I took the full impact of the episode. When I rewatched it at 34, having lost one parent and becoming a father, I really got it. This is an episode about second chances- there’s some technobabble that makes it SF and trek, but the reality is that it’s about love and loss more than exploration and science. What would any of us do if a loved one was wrongly taken away from us but there might be a chance to get them back?
The other thing that strikes me is that this episode could not have happened without three seasons of building up the relationship between father and son- the credit for which goes to Brooks, Lofton, and the writing staff that let their relationship grown on us. Unlike Wes Crusher, Jake Sisko is the same kid we all were- experiencing things for the first time, discovering who he is, and bonded strongly on our parents. We get to see Jake and Ben be nothing more than father and son- having dinners, conversations, adventures. Had that not happened, this episode would have fallen very flat, but because we like the Siskos, because we see ourselves in Jake, because can relate to what this episode ia bout, it would have been sitting next to “Remember Me” from S4 of TNG, which was a 6, as opposed to one of the 10 best episodes of DS9.
Krad, is your first link about admission to the Pennington (under the picture of Sisko fading in the engine room) meant to link to “Explorers” rather than your kickstarter? I think the kickstarter link is in a good place in your bio (which people read). BTW, everyone, Keith has a link to his kickstarter.
I think the interactions between the Siskos here were pretty moving. I think Brooks does a particularly good job with those scenes. Though, I have always liked Brooks’ acting. I can see where people might have some problems with this episode–like telling the visitor his whole father story right before erasing the telling of that story (and the story itself) from history, or old Jake never learning his lesson of letting his father go from just erasing it from history–but to call this whole episode out because of the technobabble would mean that you have to call out a LOT of Star Trek episodes because of the technobabble. I feel that this is definitely not the most offensive technobabble and reliance thereon that we’ve seen.
As for the “universe in general” being better off in the alternate timeline, @33, I didn’t realize that Jadzia Dax and Nog’s leg were so integral to the universe as a whole. I think the idea here is that the Dominion war never happened, and to be sure, that’s a good thing. A lot of lives were lost during the war. But it lasted for three years and was suddenly over. The tensions (cold war, war, whatever) with the Klingons apparently went on for decades in the alternate universe, and then only maybe started to fizzle a little, but it seems that they do not have the relationship with the Federation that they had during TNG. And it’s not entirely clear whether the Dominion threat was entirely neutralized or merely postponed several decades. I wouldn’t exactly call the alternate timeline peaceful. I’m not going to say the Dominion war was better by any means, but I don’t know that we have a strong enough case that the galaxy was ultimately more peaceful in this alternate timeline.
I like that they brought back the uniforms from “All Good Things…” here and would continue that trend on Voyager, because of the consistency it gives to all the different alternate futures. The inconsistency is in Nog’s commander uniform…for some reason sticking to TNG style. It was impossible to predict the upcoming uniform change for First Contact, but at this point it seems like they had made the decision to switch all of the Federation over to the DS9 style uniforms. Voyager had launched with all of the crew wearing them, and Generations had the Enterprise-D crew transitioning over to them (I’m pretty sure Worf even got the new uniform in that movie, so it’s strange that he wore his old one in “Way of the Warrior,” though maybe he had a few old ones still laying around). So it seems like they should’ve at least put Nog in a DS9 style uniform thinking that all of Starfleet would have them by then.
@39, in Generations the crew still had the regular TNG-style uniforms with the DS9-style as an alternate. Many of the cast wore both, except for Crusher, Troi, and Worf, who never donned the DS9 style. Worf looked exactly the same when he came to DS9 as when we previously saw him, in Generations. As for Nog, as you say there was no way to predict the First Contact uniforms at this point, but like the Enterprise-D, the rest of Starfleet was wearing the TNG or DS9 style, so it made sense to have Nog in the TNG style because he wasn’t serving on DS9.
Good news/bad news –
Yesterday, I was an episode behind in my follow along rewatch, and I remembered how much I disliked the episode. Clearly, I had no soul.
This morning, it pulled on my heart strings, even if I still didn’t think it was that great. So I guess I have part of a soul.
Maybe I can be salvaged?
Well, I’m with Krad and would put this episode in the top five of best ST stories. Deeply touching, beautifully acted and a fine portrayal of grief and obsession. I also agree that it should have won the Hugo and I speak as a huge B5 fan. Oddly enough, the reason I think ‘The Visitor’ trumps ‘Coming of Shadows’ is precisely because the latter was such a game changer for its series. Its power derives from that whereas ‘The Visitor’ stands alone and could be watched and appreciated by anyone without a good knowledge of the preceding episodes. But it was unlucky that both excellent episodes ended up against eachother.
As to the B5/ST rivalry, my memory is that sulking ST fans were just as furious that another series was daring to to do space SF. Indeed I met someone a couple of weeks back who reacted with surprising anger when I recommended B5 to him as he thought that was breaking faith with his belovéd ST. Faults on both sides, I’m certain and as my silver haired mother says ‘It was all a long time ago and I’m sure everyone meant well’.
@39: On the question of the Dominion threat, it may be Federation-centric to assume the quadrant as a whole is better off. Sure, the UFP hasn’t been fighting against the Dominion, but the UFP was cut off from the wormhole when the Klingons took it over, and — spoiler alert, though it’s already been mentioned — the Klingons had been infiltrated by the Dominion at that point. So in the 50 years that followed, the Dominion may have completely conquered the Klingons, the Romulans, and maybe other powers in the region, with the Federation being gradually surrounded by Dominion puppets. So things might’ve ended up much worse in the long run.
@42: I always looked sadly on the animosity between B5 and Trek fans, because I felt that was missing the point of both franchises. Both of them taught that diversity is a thing to be embraced and celebrated rather than feared, that it’s better to accept and cooperate with the Other and that fighting with them is self-destructive.
I guess I’m in the “no soul” category. This one always irked me.
Nothing against the acting — that was superb. And I can forgive the reset button and the plot holes.
And I very much agree that the Sisko/Jake relationship is a very important part of DS9. In fact, that’s the problem. That relationship is important because it’s always portrayed as a very healthy relationship. Yet this episode spoils the whole relationship, by portraying Jake as codependent on his father. Sure, there are extenuating circumstances (his age, the fact that he’s already lost his mother, and the traumatic proximity to his father’s accident); but still, the way Jake ruins his marriage and his career and his lifelong happiness out of obsession does sad things to the love that he and his father always shared.
The fact that the future without Sisko is arguably better than the future with him is another sore spot for me, although it’s much less important than the tainting of the father/son relationship.
@39, 44- if it makes you feel better, by 2385 the Founders had completely infiltrated the government of Earth. By 2390 they had laced the water with creativity-deadening chemicals, bringing the advancement of human culture to a halt, which is why in the end Melanie can’t find anything better to inspire her than an author who hasn’t published for 50 years. In the mid-2450, due to a lack of technological progress, all the Alpha Quadrant societies are eaten by the Borg.
crzydroid: Yeep. Thanks for catching that. Stupid copy-and-paste function. It’s fixed….
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
This episode was broadcast about 5 years after I lost my father, and I found it incredibly moving. It’s definitely one of my favorites. As it so happens, the year it was nominated for the Hugo was the first year I was ever nominated for the Hugo, and Nomi and I got to meet Michael Taylor in the reception for nominees that preceded the ceremony. I was surprised to learn that Taylor was not writing from personal experience; he had not lost his father. Which, for my money, just shows what an incredible achievement this episode is.
— Michael A. Burstein
Holy moly, lots of comments!
I will say that overall, I enjoyed it, but a few things marred it for me:
1)I found the framing story a bit odd. Maybe this kind of thing happens to authors, but the whole ‘random stranger shows up at my door’ thing was just a bit werid to me.
2)The person who actually needs to learn the lesson doesn’t learn it. It’s hard for me to have a sense of satisfaction with this because it seems like it should be a cautionary tale for Jake to realize that he needs to ‘look up once in a while’. But Jake doesn’t actually ever realize this (well, maybe old Jake does at the very end), and especially not in the timeline that we go back to. Maybe Jake doesn’t HAVE to learn it in this timeline, but…I don’t know. It just didn’t have a good sense of resolution for me, or a sense that something was accomplished.
Avery Brooks was always at his best when portraying Sisko the father, and Cirroc Lofton was always at his best as Jake the son. That relationship is a big reason why I enjoyed DS9 so much. I can’t imagine it without them.
While I thought “The Visitors” was better than B5 “The Coming of the Shadows” (which was also Hugo-winner quality) and did affect me emotionally, I thought the winner that year should have been “The 12 Monkeys.” (and I still think it is the best SF of the three).
It was a very good year.
I dashed off my last comment right before my son started crying and I had to get him back to sleep, but I wanted to mention what I really liked, which was Avery Brooks stealing the show. I loved his palpable joy at the prospect of grandchildren, and also the scene of him looking over old Jake with a smile. My boys are still very young, but I imagine they’ll always be my little boys, even when they are grown…even if somehow they ended up older than me!
And, I finally got a chance to check out some of the other comments. A few things:
1)Thanks to all who called me out to warn me of spoilers :) Awwww….I will have to check this thread out after we finish the series, if I remember.
2)That said, based on my vague knowledge of what is to come, looks like Jake may have accidentally broken things with his obsession of bringing his father back, which gives this episode a slightly more sinister implication! (Although, if the alternative was to let him just spend infinity in this subspace pocket, that also pretty much sucks!)
3)As for having no soul – I couldn’t stand Darmok.
4)Regarding rivalries, it’s kind of embarassing, but it took me more time than it should have for me to realize Star Wars and Star Trek fandom didn’t have to be mutually exclusive ;)
@45, LOL.
I’m very surprised that a decent number of people get nothing out of this episode. It’s by far my favorite standalone episode of any Trek series.
And it’s not a complete reset button because Sisko remembers everything.
As a fan of both Ds9 and B5, even back then, I was affected by both of the episodes. But the Hugo comittee really got it right. The Coming of Shadows was the better episode. It also had the emotional beats to go along with the galaxy wide events(Is everyone just blanking out Andreas Katsulas performance?? It seriously affected me when I saw it. As well as the Emperors speech to Sheridan). Not to knock The Visitor, which also was amazing for different reasons (the Sisko’s relationship). I’d certainly put “The Visitor” above the successor B5 episode that won the Hugo, Severed Dreams, as that was lacking in the emotional beats and was more of a spacebattles-fest. In fact, maybe the argument could be made that “Severed Dreams” won due to B5’s popularity, though I can’t remember the competition that year clearly. But “The Visitor” above “The Coming of Shadows”? Not a chance. For me anyway.
And Krad…this statement, “I also remember a discussion in the bar at Dragon Con in 1999 with two B5 fans who called me a dinosaur for clinging to Star Trek, which was on its way out. “Ten years from now,” one of them said, “all anybody will be talking about is B5 and Trek will just be a minor footnote,” which is pretty much the opposite of what happened.” doesn’t really refelect well. Theres an element of glee somewhere in your recounting of that ancedote. Am I wrong?
i love this ep....and i understand that is one of the best
Eoin8472: If there’s any glee, it’s in the fact that the two people who said what they said — who did so in as obnoxious a manner as humanly possible — were wrong. What they were wrong about is not why I’m gleeful, it’s that they were wrong after being so cocksure that they were right.
And also generally, I had a lot of bad experiences with the nut-bar contingent of B5 fandom in the 1990s, going all the way back to the GEnie bulletin board when I had the temerity to actually raise some criticisms of “Midnight on the Firing Line” and was basically driven out of the forum with torches and pitchforks for daring to say anything negative about the precious B5.
(As for my actual opinion of the show, I think the second through fourth seasons were 66 of the best hours of genre television ever produced. Great stuff. However, the first season was spectacularly awful, and the fifth season was ten hours of story endlessly stretched out into 22 episodes.)
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
I thought B5 was good and innovative for the majority of its run, but I think JMS made a mistake by insisting on writing every script. After a while I think he overextended himself and started getting repetitive. Like Rod Serling on The Twilight Zone, he eventually reached a point where every dialogue exchange in every script just sounded like one man talking to himself. When they finally brought in Neil Gaiman to do “Day of the Dead” in the fifth season, it was so refreshing to finally hear a different authorial voice again, a different style of dialogue.
Beautiful moving and powerful. I watched this episode for the first time last year and it is the only Trek episode that has brought tears to my eyes. The palpable anguish and grief felt by Jake is heartrending, and then to see Benjamin accept his fate and urge his son to succeed is truly touching. I cannot see how this could fail to move anyone who has lost a parent or close grandparent.
Quoth Christopher on JMS and B5: “I think JMS made a mistake by insisting on writing every script.”
He didn’t, at first. Of the 44 episodes of the first two seasons, people other than Straczynski wrote 17 of them — some of them with very distinctive voices, like David Gerrold and D.C. Fontana and Peter David.
Once the third season rolled around, though, yeah, he pretty much did it all himself for that and the fourth season. Thing is, though? Those were B5’s two best seasons. By far.
It is true, though, that “Day of the Dead” was the first non-JMS script in 56 episodes — the previous one was episode 17 of season 2, “Knives” by Larry DiTillio.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@60: I know that. I meant writing every script in seasons 3-4. I did say that when Gaiman’s script came along, it was good to hear another authorial voice again — meaning like the other voices we often got in seasons 1-2 from folks like DiTillio, Gerrold, etc. Although I should’ve made that clearer.
And yeah, those were good seasons, but as I said, eventually every single character talked like JMS, and the repetitiveness of it got tiresome for me. It would’ve been fine if he’d come up with all the stories, done all the final rewrites, but it would’ve been nice if he’d kept a staff around to share the actual scripting process so there could’ve been more variety in the dialogue, maybe some additional plot and character textures that wouldn’t have occurred to him alone. I felt the quality began to sag eventually, perhaps because he was driving himself too hard.
I know I’m late to the party–I got behind in reading this blog. But I just had to chime in and say The Visitor is 42 of my favorite minutes of television ever.
Echoing what SSteve said. So far, this is the best episode of Star Trek I’ve ever seen. Amazing, impactful episode. Yeah, we all knew the reset was coming (except my girlfriend, who thought that Sisko might be dead forever until well into the episode), but it didn’t reduce what this episode showed about the characters.
I groaned when I first realised we were looking at Jake in the future… how wrong I was!
This is one of those rare episodes in which I had to fight back the tears: what a great episode (one of the best in Star Trek for me).
I am surprised to find such polarized views in the comments…
Late to the party – as usual for me.
I have never really tried to rank episodes of the various ST series, either individually or as a whole. I know that “Far Beyond the Stars” is my favorite episode, and obviously I have a handful of personal favorites, but have never really thought to rank them beyond that. That being said, I’m fairly certain that, were I ranking them past #1, The Visitor would probably be #2. This is a magnificent hour of television that I didn’t see until a good decade or so after it initially aired (I didn’t really follow DS9 during its initial run, picking up a handful during the peak of the Dominion War; otherwise I didn’t catch the series in full until I found SpikeTV airing it in order in 2006). Nevertheless, it was, to me, a profoundly moving episode. It made me cry the first time I saw it, and having lost my own dad a couple years later, it took on a whole new level of poignancy to me.
If I kept track correctly, 7 different commenters said this episode made them cry. Is the percentage normally that high? And why did I go through and count? Because I’m number 8. I went through all of ST:TNG along with Keith’s rewatch, but for DS9 I’ve read all of the threads and only watched 1-2 episodes per season. I decided season 4 was the time to start watching all of the episodes. Boy, was this episode a great one to start off with!
I’m in my mid 30s and lost my mom 6 years ago, so that probably contributed to my being moved so much by the episode. I don’t even know what I’ll do whenever my dad passes away. As to the reset, you should ALWAYS know the reset is coming, so just go with it. No sense being bothered by a trope that will never go away.
Tom Green: Yes, and no. Part of the appeal of DS9 was that the reset button wasn’t always hit…..
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
This is my favorite episode of Deep Space 9. I paused in my rewatch for several days (rewatching Voyager in the meantime) for my partner to have a free evening to watch this with me, because it was really important.
The emotion and affection shown by the Siskos, throughout the series but especially in this episode, is really significant. Black men are too often socialized to not cry or be affectionate with other men, even in a platonic way. As a queer black person who has transitioned from female to male, this episode had even more of an impact on me now than when I watched it on first airing, well before my transition.
The technobabble rationale for the accident and the “reset button” nature of the plot were completely irrelevant to me. This is the story of the love of a black man and his son for each other, pure and simple.
Another of my absolute favorite episodes of all of Trek, and probably my #2 favorite after “Yesterday’s Enterprise”. I was 16 when this aired and I first watched it and I was practically bawling my eyes out through most of the episode. I had not at the time and still have not lost a parent, much less anyone close to me, but I still understood and connected with the loss that Jake felt regarding his father. This episode is like Exhibit A in how Trek was shunned by the Emmy’s for its acting and writing. I mean how Tony Todd and Avery Brooks didn’t get acting nominations for this is just criminal. And this is some of Cirroc Lofton’s best acting ever. I like to think how the love between the Sisko’s reads as so true to the viewer is because Cirroc and Avery have a close relationship in real life. It’s strange but I love this episode so much that I actually avoid rewatching it often so that I don’t lessen the emotional impact that left such a vivid impression on me the first time I watched it 20 years ago.
To me this episode was the opposite of City on the Edge of Forever from the TOS.
Spock convinces Kirk that Edith Keeler must die to save hundreds of millions of lives that would be lost through Nazi domination.
Here, Jake saves his father and, albeit without realizing it, causes the deaths of billions.
@70/mendez: See my comment in post #43. I think there still would’ve been a Dominion conquest of the quadrant, even if they delayed going after the Federation. And that could’ve put the Federation in a far worse position in the long run.
I always, ALWAYS cry like a baby when I watch this episode. It’s so touching… Sisko just staring lovingly at the old Jake sleeping… man.
Oh, and despite that, I “love it” how the Bajoran Jake marries is also dark-skinned…
@11 – bmac: I don’t know, I watched this episode for the first time before being a parent,a and still cried…
@24 – treebee72: I think Sisko has an idea of what happened, moreso if you take into account that he’s half wormhole alien.
@25 – Alright Then: Yep, this is DS9’s Inner Light.
@72/lordm: Sisko is not “half wormhole alien.” Both his parents were human — but his biological mother was possessed by a wormhole alien and forced to mate with his father against her will. Which was a terrible, rapey thing to do and a really, horrifically wrong idea by the writers, but it doesn’t make him half-alien.
I always wondered if Old Jake should not have told Melanie about ‘cutting the cord’ between himself and Ben, and they would return to the day of the accident, because she must have realised that they would never get to meet and never get to hear his story now.
“Poke your head up every once in a while and take a look around…see what’s going on. It’s life”. That sounds like what Ferris Bueller said: “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it”.
I consider Babylon 5 and Three Kingdoms (a Chinese show based on the classic historical novel) to be the two greatest television series ever made.
But “The Visitor” is possibly the single best hour of television I have ever seen. Losing out in that Hugo was no less than a tragedy.
I can’t agree with this rating at all. looking at it as pure entertainment, I thought the pacing was really slow, and the acting a bit wooden. with the exception of young Jake, who in those few moments where he was lamenting the loss of his father, really hit the right tone. That said, he has a rather unhealthy obsession with his father. let’s not forget that by taking the action he did, he essentially erased half a lifetime of everybody else’s existence. TNG’s The Inner Light was so much more cogent, poignant, and genuinely bittersweet.
I hope Tony Todd is cast in Star Trek: Discovery as rumored, perhaps even as the captain of the Discovery itself. Going by his work as the elder Jake Sisko and as Kurn, he really is a very talented actor.
I haven’t heard that rumor, but it would be great.
I actually don’t think it’s fair to call this a “reset button” episode. I remember loving it so much at the time precisely because there WAS a consequence to the whole thing: Sisko Sr. remembers everything that happened. He spends the rest of the series well aware of the lengths his son would go to in order to save him. He understands now exactly what he means to Jake. That’s not a reset button; that’s “It’s a Wonderful Life”.
I’m somewhat relieved to see a mixed reaction to this episode. I’ve had twenty years of seeing it nominated as one of the greatest Star Treks ever, with the implied caveat that anyone who disagrees is a dullard who judges Star Trek episodes on how many ships blow up in them. But I’ve never really liked it. I don’t think I’ve ever quite got past the memory of my first viewing. It was a telefantasy convention in 1995 and the first night they showed “The Way of the Warrior” and I loved it. The BBC had only shown four or five episodes of DS9 at the time and I was fascinated to see how the characters and their universe had developed. I wanted to see more and was delighted to hear they were showing the next two episodes on Sunday night. When I got there, they admitted they hadn’t got “Hippocratic Oath”, just this one. I really wish it had been the other way round. My 16-year-old self would have enjoyed “Hippocratic Oath” more. So would my 37-year-old self.
Because this episode had nothing of what I wanted. It’s got nothing to do with the DS9 characters and the universe they inhabit, they’re barely in it. Instead it’s all about a guest actor pretending he looks like an older Cirroc Lofton. It’s Worf’s second episode, I wanted to see how he fitted in to the show and related to the other characters. Instead he has one scene and about two lines, then gets used as an off screen plot device to get them into Klingon space as if everyone’s forgotten his discommendation only last week. (And the fact I’d just seen the exact same plot device used in “All Good Things” made it seem even more lazy.) Worse, it’s just deeply depressing. I walked back to the main convention hall in the dark, grateful that there weren’t any nearby train tracks to throw myself on, and that I didn’t drink so wouldn’t be drinking myself into oblivion to forget it.
Worse, it’s one of those episodes that ends with the science-fiction equivalent of “And they woke up and it was all a dream.” Nothing in the episode has any meaning, even Sisko doesn’t seem to think of these events again. At the end, Old Jake gives Melanie his story notes and a speech about living life and they both act as though this is some great gift, then he erases their entire conversation and indeed her from history, making it as hollow as everything else in the episode.
This episode has everything to do with the DS9 characters, obviously the Siskos in particular. Not the best episode to see if you haven’t seen much DS9 before, but saying it has nothing to do with the characters is ridiculous.
cap-mjb: Several fourth-season scripts — including this one — were written before the final decision to add Michael Dorn to the cast was made, which is why Worf’s role is minimal in the early episodes of the season. If it feels like he was hastily added to this episode, it’s because he was. *wry grin*
I’m with MaGnUs, BTW, this only has “nothing to do with the DS9 characters” if you don’t believe that Benjamin Sisko and Jake Sisko are DS9 character, which is absurd. This episode is about the Sisko family, which is one of the cornerstones of DS9 and one of the things that makes DS9 unique.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Oh well, I’ve always suspected that I have no soul.
I fully agree with comment #44. The episode taints the Sisko-Jake relationship. Sirko tells Jake repeatedly that he wants him to write books and have children. He wants him to build a life of his own, as any good parent would. The fact that Jake doesn’t listen to him, and places saving him above everything else, means that all of Sisko’s wonderful parenting was for nothing.
@86/Jana: I’m not so sure. I think that if Sisko had died a “normal” death, Jake would’ve mourned and moved on and lived the life his father wanted. But in this case, he couldn’t do that, because he knew his father was still alive and trapped and condemned to an eternity of solitude, and he couldn’t leave him to that fate.
No soul? Are you a ginger?
@87/Christopher: You may be right. After all, we see Jake move on. He only becomes obsessed with rescuing his father after Sisko appears in his house many years after the accident.
I guess I watched this from Sisko’s point of view. He sees his son achieve everything he had wished for, and that’s a joy and a consolation, and he’s looking forward to seeing more of the same (grandchildren!), only to learn next time that everything has gone downhill, and it was his appearance that caused it. It’s a parent’s nightmare. But it turns out alright in the end. Hmm, perhaps I like the episode a bit better now.
@88/MaGnUs: Sadly, no.
Chris is right, it wasn’t a regular death, it was the fact that Jake knew Ben was alive and trapped in “limbo”.
Well maybe my soul is just out for a stroll or caught in subspace for a short time but this isn’t one of my favorites. I don’t overall dislike it, it’s just when it came up in rewatch I wasn’t really looking forward to it.
Overall I loved the Sisko’s relationship throughout the series. It was just a beautiful supportive father son story and while their race was incredibly important because these types of stories weren’t being told at the time, it also wasn’t important because it never screamed “hey look at us scripting an amazing race story.” That made the story carry all the weight and heart in the world to me because it was completely about the relationship. But this episode just didn’t really stand out. I’ve lost a parent but don’t have children so I don’t know if that affects my view. I will say I loved the scene of Sisko senior watching over Jake as he slept.
I’ve always been a Jake fan (Cirroc was adorable even as an adult. I saw him at a convention with the rest of the cast minus Avery, and he spoke about how in some ways the actor had been an offscreen father to him as well, and practically looked down with an ‘aw shucks’ shy move like he was also still intimidated by him like a kid would be). I always wanted to smack Wesley (even though I was a bright kid who was sometimes bullied). Jake was just so down to earth, and a while very intelligent, a typical teen with normal struggles to find what he liked and what he wanted to do. His advice to his dad would always make me laugh.
I often agree with Lisamarie and @48 sums it up for me. The setup/framing was weird. Maybe authors swing by each others houses but a young girl showing up on a dark and stormy night to some strange guy’s house in the woods who has been out of the career and spotlight for years seems off. And that he tells her his life story seems off. It’s meant to be touching but I felt an undercurrent of weird. And then she leaves knowing he is going to cut the cord, which I assume she picks up will be suicide. Bye, I’ve got my manuscripts! And then she may not even exist after Jake cuts the cord. Maybe I’ve been in the entertainment business too long where if people are fans and show up at your door at night wanting to get to know you, you look into contacting some law enforcement. And…you don’t randomly show up at other people’s doors.
I’ll agree it also felt a little unresolved too. Since we went back in time, Sisko Sr knows what his son would do for him, but Jake doesn’t know what happened, and therefore doesn’t reciprocate and doesn’t really learn to put his head up once in a while. Well, I didn’t add much new, but just some agreement. The episode more sat there for me (I loved Inner Light, and Darmok!)
@91/Cutenewt: “And…you don’t randomly show up at other people’s doors.” – You do when it’s raining, and you’re soaking wet, and it’s getting dark, and there’s no town or hotel nearby. I’ve done it myself when I was younger. Although it was a huge coincidence that she showed up at Jake’s door on the exact day when he finally carried out his plan.
@91/Cutenewt: “Maybe I’ve been in the entertainment business too long where if people are fans and show up at your door at night wanting to get to know you, you look into contacting some law enforcement.”
That’s in our time, when crime and violence are rampant. This was in the heart of the idyllic Federation, where crime is all but extinct and everyone is well-adjusted and fulfilled. I imagine the whole Earth would have the mentality of a small town where everyone’s treated as a neighbor to be welcomed in.
91, that is probably the biggest flaw of the episode, and one all too easily remedied, but perhaps I can sweep it under “Things are different during the Federation” or something as already suggested. Still, add in the big coincidence that he’s willing to do so, and it’s obvious she’s just a tool used to get the story narrated.
Jake was much better done that Wesley, who, no offense to Wil Wheaton, was played wrong and shoehorned too deeply into things he had no real business being in. And Alexander already went through this story! And I’m surprised they didn’t do it with Naomi instead of Janeway in Voyager.
@93, this is fiction after all.
But did Melanie actually believe one word of Jake’s story or did she call mental health services to report a potential suicide as soon as she was out the door?
Given the state of limbo Sisko is trapped in Jake’s obsession with freeing him is actually quite rational.
@95/Roxana: I imagine that everybody on 24th century Earth has a good education in weird physics, so I tend to think that she believed him.
God bless SF fans. “This is a powerfully emotional story, so instead of thinking about our feelings, let’s revive a franchise rivalry that’s two decades old.” :-)
Just watched this episode again. And cried. AGAIN. I miss my grandmother. She had the same accent as Picard’s mom when she appeared in “Where None Have Gone Before.”
“Dead? But I’m always wit you… youuu knowww dat!” God bless sassy french-Canadian grandmamans.
Wonderful comments. I don’t have much to add to the episode discussion except to join the chorus of those praising the writers and actors responsible for giving us the relationship of Ben and Jake.
As someone who grew up with a single dad I rarely find a TV/movie depiction of that relationship that hits so close to home. It’s often played as humor like “Mr. Mom” or that the dad is clueless etc. It’s so great to see a dad who loves his son, may not be a perfect parent but is certainly competent, wants to spend time with him, worried that he is making mistakes in raising him. Oh, did I mention he is shown that he LOVES his son?
And I totally get the emotion from Jake as well. Jake lost his mom suddenly when he was young and is probably still traumatized, and the idea of losing his dad is soooo scary and UNTHINKABLE because his dad is his EVERYTHING. His grandpa or aunt or friends on DS9 are not the same thing. It totally makes sense to me that Jake wasted his life trying to “save” his dad. Not logically, but emotionally.
Great stuff. I cried like a baby.
… :(
I thought “wow, only two episodes in and already a filler? That’s… really quite something”. I mean it’s really quite clear from the very beginning that Sisko is not going to die in this episode and that nothing what we see here will really matter in the end.
It was interesting to see the characters being older, but this is not what’s going to happen in “our” timeline. The universe they grew old in was a universe without Benjamin Sisko in it. “Our” timeline is a universe WITH Sisko.
While some quotes like the one in the review about Nog being more popular with women are very funny, this still is nothing more than a filler episode to me.
And I guess krad will now never speak to me again. :'(
@99/waka: It’s almost always a given in series fiction that the main characters won’t die; why should this episode have been any different? We don’t watch fiction just to be surprised by the ending; we watch it to experience the journey. Even if we know the heroes will survive and the villains will be defeated, the characters don’t know that, and so we can feel that uncertainty along with them. Experiencing fiction requires the willing suspension of disbelief. You know it’s just words on a page or actors on a stage, but you choose to pretend it’s real, and that allows you to care about what’s happening. So why should pretending you don’t know if the characters will survive be any harder? I’ll never understand that attitude. If the only way a story could be enjoyed was if you didn’t know the ending, then why do so many people love rereading their favorite books or rewatching their favorite movies/shows?
@100/ChristopherLBennett: It’s a bit hard to explain, but I instantly got the feeling “oh great, a filler episode” when Sisko vanished. I know all about suspension of disbelief and immersion. I have no problem accepting the Warp Drive technology, or that Peter Parker turns into a human spider after being bitten by a radioactive spider, but seeing one of the main cast die always feels like some sort of “trick” from the writers to me. They want to elicit a reaction, they want me to feel sorry for the other characters. But I can’t feel sorry for them if I just know that in the end Sisko won’t be dead.
And as I’ve said it’s not only that. It’s the fact that nothing that we see here happens in “our” timeline. We later learn that Jadzia certainly won’t get as old as she got to be in this timeline, what else will be different? Jake stopped writing and tried to rescue his father. Now that his father isn’t gone, he obviously doesn’t need to rescue him. Will his marriage still fail? Will Melanie still visit an old Jake in his home? Will Nog still become a Starfleet Captain (which is a bit unlikely since Nog’s interest lie in engineering)? And so on. Nothing we see unfolding in this episode will have any effect on the following episodes. And that’s why it feels so much like a filler episode to me.
@101/waka: When TOS was made, it was a requirement that each episode of a series stand by itself and have no effect on subsequent episodes, yet we still consider TOS worthwhile, along with all the other no-continuity shows that were made in its era. The quality of a story is primarily about the story itself. How it affects other stories can be a consideration, yes, but it makes no sense to define a story’s value exclusively by its effect on other stories. People today have become so obsessed with serialization that they’ve forgotten it’s not the only tool in the kit. There’s still value in living in the moment, in enjoying a story for what it is in itself.
Sisko was an engineer, and he became a Captain. Janeway was a science officer, Picard was interested in science too.
@102/ChristopherLBennett: There’s really no need to try to convince me that it was a good episode. Maybe that holds true for you and the vast majority of viewers. I simply didn’t like it.
@103/MaGnUs: True, and I only based my statement on a single Nog quote:”I may not have an instinct for business but I have my father’s hands and my uncle’s tenacity.” Sounded to me like he likes engineering more than anything else.
He does like engineering, but life takes you places you didn’t expect.
@3/DemetriosX: “Plus the fact that Tony Todd looks absolutely nothing like Cirroc Lofton”.
Of the episode’s flaws, this is an non-existent issue for me. I’d rather have the excellent performance of Tony Todd than some Cirroc Lofton lookalike who might not be as good.
Hmmm… for every rule there is an exception. I would put this at number 12 of the top 20 Star Trek stories ever. Talk to my doctor. I do indeed have a soul.
Erik: If your doctor has medical proof of the existence of a soul, said doctor should, perhaps, publish this information, as it might well revolutionize both medicine and religion…………………………..
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Please forgive this, but when I saw the title my first thought is “The Visitor plays the Kira”.
**and now he ducks**
@109: I don’t get it.
@110: Playing off the actress’ name.
Well, I broke down and did it – I watched this episode in full for only the second time – the first time being when it premiered all the way back in 1996. And I didn’t wait all this time because I hated it, but rather because I love it so. I previously commented here in this review (#69 as SpaceCadet four and a half years ago) and mentioned that I don’t watch this episode that often because I found it so emotionally affecting the first time and I didn’t want that reaction to lessen by rewatching too many times. But I really don’t think I watched it in full after the first time. I would just play the teaser and then stop. In more recent years I’ve been holding out hope that DS9 would be remastered and that would be a great opportunity to finally watch this episode again. But seeing now how that might actually never happen (or at least in the foreseeable future), I have ample time on my hands lately with the coronavirus quarantine, and both my parents are still alive and healthy so I can still appreciate them while there here with me, I figured now was as good a time as any to sit back and enjoy it again.
And cry like a baby I did just like the first time. Just beautifully written, and acted, and directed. I loved how the scene of Kira and Jake on the upper pylon was shot in the shadows – basically silhouettes against the star field but enough light to make out their faces. I believe the very last scene of the series in “What We Leave Behind”, also with Kira and Jake by the window as the camera pulls back from the station, is a direct echo of the scene in this episode. Others have noted that though here, Sisko and Jake are reunited, it’s all for naught because Sisko will leave Jake behind anyway only 4 years later in WWLB. But the circumstances are completely different. For one thing, Sisko isn’t tied to Jake like a tether through time (as far as we know) after the events of WWLB as he is here so Jake won’t upend his own life to try to rescue his father. And secondly, tying into the whole notion of the big reset button at the end of this episode – yes, all the preceding events are reset except for the memories of those events by Sisko. He therefore has the knowledge, and the passage of another 4 years of time, to instill in Jake to be his own independent person so that he doesn’t become the obsessive personality he otherwise would be in Sisko’s premature absence. So to me, there wasn’t a completely 100% reset button, and I believe Jake will be relatively alright without Sisko post-WWLB compared to Jake in alternate timeline “The Visitor.” Other things I liked were bittersweet things like seeing Nog being an officer and then a captain (which for obvious reasons will never have the opportunity to take place again) and seeing Jadzia much older; and future Bashir’s wisecrack about 2D displays is prescient seeing how the recent Star Trek: Picard was full of standard 3D displays such as on the La Sirena.
I still believe this is one of television’s finest hours, the best episode of DS9 (not every great story has to be of galactic importance or involve world-building but can be character-driven and intimate), and maybe I’ll tie it in first place with my other favorite Star Trek episode, “Yesterday’s Enterprise.”
Whoops, I mean I first watched it when it premiered back in “1995.”
I always turn this episode off, though I’ll admit it’s because of a bias on my part: I just can’t abide the character of Jake and the way Lofton played him. He was just always such a ninny. Tony Todd is awesome and I should love to see his older, sadder Jake, but…
@114: If I can persuade you to possibly watch this amazing episode, Lofton is only in the first two acts I believe before the part transitions to Tony Todd and Lofton returns for like a few seconds at the end. And I also have to add I thought Lofton was excellent with what he had to do here. He and Avery Brooks are close in real life so I think he used that relationship to convey the emotional scenes as if it was something happening to his actual father. This really is a beautiful father-son/parent-child story.
@114/Professor Lemonade: I guess if someone (me) actually didn’t mind Wesley Crusher, it’s entirely possible someone could detest Jake Sisko. I personally don’t see how “ninny” describes him, though. If you’ve only seen him in the earlier seasons, it’s clear that he’s a reletively inexperienced actor. However, I always found his performances pretty solid as the series moves on.
At the risk of sounding like a car salesman: As #115 pointed out, Cirroc Lofton has fairly limited screen time in “The Visitor”, so if young Jake is an impediment to your enjoying a Jake episode, fear not, this is Tony Todd’s show! It truly is one of the best Star Trek episodes, ever, imo.
Lockdown rewatch. I loved this episode originally and love it still, it’s easily in my top five episodes of the series. I remember it being quite emotional back in the day when I watched it, but watching it now (as I write it’s almost two years to the day since my own father passed away) I was in floods of tears. The father son relationship was always a strong point of the series and Cirroc Lofton does his bit at the beginning of this episode but its the performances of Tony Todd and Avery Brooks that drive the heart of it. It’s just wonderfully played especially the final scene between Todd and Brooks. I forgive it’s technobabble plot it doesn’t matter. Superb hour of Television. 10 out of 10 of course
The photo used in the article of Jake being held by his dad in the infirmary – man, Lofton knocked that out of the park. He’s so confused and excited and emotional and doing everything he can not to break down, and then Sisko opens his arms to him and he can’t help himself any more. Just writing about it chokes me up. Lofton killed that moment.
@118: Yeah, that moment you’re describing is just the first time of several instances in this episode that I “lost it” emotionally. I think so many people can relate to this connection between the father/son characters.
I compare this moment to “Shattered Mirror” later on in this same season where Jake’s “mom” literally dies before his eyes and it’s not a tenth as powerful as the scene in question in “The Visitor.” It just goes to show you what a difference in writing (and acting) can do to make a scene emotionally resonant.
I want to take a moment and address this concept of the Hugo committee. It is important to keep in mind that the Hugo committee (determined by each, individual Worldcon) has several jobs. They determine the timeline for nominations and voting. They collect the nominations and apply the current algorithm (which has varied from year to year) to them to determine the list of finalists (at the time of this award it would have been five finalists barring ties, currently it is six). They distribute the ballots and collect the final votes. They apply the current algorithm to those votes and determine the winner.
The committee can’t get an award right because the committee does not determine the winner. The voters of the World Science Fiction Convention determine the winner.
I know this may be picky, and Eoin, you may understand this and are only using shorthand, but I have talked to scores of people who think some secret group of Hugo potentates make the decisions on who wins the Hugo award and that is simply not the case. WSFS (The World Science Fiction Society) has spent hours developing and fine-tuning a voting algorithm to be as fair as possible to all nominees and finalists.
Having run the Events Division at one Worldcon and been a Vice Chair at another, and not really being an super SMOF, I think it is important to understand that ordinary people run the event and that other ordinary people nominate and vote to determine the winners.
I’m a crusty old fart and I’ve often been told I have no soul, and this episode still made me cry, so I don’t know what’s wrong with anyone who isn’t moved by it.
As someone who can be moved to tears by great writing or acting, just by contemplating how great it is, and as someone who has a relationship with my father that reminds me a lot of Jake and Benjamin’s; and as someone who wears glasses, I find this episode incredibly difficult to watch on a few levels.
@119 & 120 – that’s an extraordinary scene, the acting and the writing and the staging are just perfect.
DS9 isn’t just great sc fi, it’s great TV full stop and this episode proves it. Brooks and Lofton are in a class of their own.
Today was my first rewatch of this episode since my mother passed away two years ago and wow was it difficult to watch. I’ve always appreciated the episode, but now, even more. So much of it rings true. I couldn’t imagine how hard it would be to go through that loss again and again as Jake did. The performances of Tony Todd and Cirroc Lofton are phenomenal.
Beyond the theme of personal loss, another thing I like about this episode is how bleak the immediate future is portrayed minus Ben Sisko and how everything goes downhill without his stabilizing presence.
Seriously asking since I’ve only watched this episode twice (because I think it’s truly special and don’t want to over-watch it), but is the future depicted in this story truly worse than what actually ends up transpiring over the rest of the series and beyond? Yes, Benjamin dies but Jadzia lives on and presumably has a long marriage with Worf producing Trill/Klingon kids (that would have been cool to see!). And of bigger implication, we don’t have the devastating Dominion War which kills billions, not to mention the genocide of Cardassians on their home planet.
@124/garreth: You beat me to it. I agree, the timeline with Sisko got a lot worse than the one without him. The only thing that’s really worse in the “Visitor” timeline, other than Sisko’s death, is that the Klingons take over DS9 (and implicitly conquer Bajor).
@125/126: And that is why I specifically said “the immediate future.” In rereading my comment, I admit that the tone of it projects the far future as a complete lost cause too, but that wasn’t my intent. I wasn’t trying to speak for the future too far beyond S4 because I don’t know if the production staff were thinking that far ahead at the time.
@126/127: I think the implication of the writer of this episode was that the future of DS9/Bajor without Sisko would indeed be bleak. But the writer also could have no idea that the main writing staff write even bleaker stuff with Sisko still around! In hindsight of the audience after the conclusion of the series, it just makes Jake look even more selfish for erasing a relatively “not bad” state of affairs for the Alpha Quadrant because of his daddy issues (although I certainly sympathize).
Yes…but…
I just finished a mostly-complete personal DS9 rewatch, then came back to pick up this episode.
I don’t like how it plays around with continuity, how it ignores the implications of its hackneyed generic timeline tango plot, and how it suffers from being a self contained bottle episode-literally: when it ends, the whole loop of experiences of all those real people just goes “poof” and disappears. Or something. (see other peoples’ comments above)
“The Visitor” strikes me as bathos, vs. TNG:”The Inner Light’s” catharsis. Maybe because the effects on our characters in “The Visitor” evaporate into thin air, while “The Inner Light’s” events have a profound and lasting effect on a character we love.
Yes, “The Visitor” made me cry, and will again, if I rewatch. The performances were skillful. But I feel manipulated, not moved like I was by by “The Inner Light” (that also makes me cry, every time)
RIP Tony Todd.