“The Visitor”

Couldn't agree more. Fabulous episode. Possibly the best episode of DS9? Definitely top 3 with Pale Moonlight and Die is Cast.

When an episode of Star Trek almost moves me to tears, you know they have done something right.

*Minor* complaint: Nog as a Captain? Doesn't...really...work for me.

Of course, that takes nothing away from this stellar episode. The writing, the performances, the directing...all excellent. And seriously, Tony Todd deserved an Emmy nomination for his performance here.

"The Visitor" is full of affecting scenes. One that stands out is where Kira and Jake are having a quiet conversation regarding his future, and the possibility of him leaving the station. I really *felt* this scene and it nearly brought me to tears.

Epic episode. Truly a triumph for television as a medium of human expression. Transcends Trek, all together, and speaks to the human condition. A million and two stars!!

My girlfriend HATES Star Trek. She cried during this episode. 'Nuff said.

"The Visitor" is one of the most moving performances you will ever see on television. You don't have to know anything about Star Trek to be affected by this story.

Watching the first two seasons of DS9, I would have been extremely surprised to see an episode move me as much as "The Inner Light" did.

Very happy to be wrong.

Quite possibly the single greatest episode of television produced. True and Pure magic.

I don't know how many times I've watched this episode. The original airing, countless times on the tape I made from that airing, possibly when they first reran it, and now on DVD, and not once has it failed to bring me to tears. As you say, it could have been maudlin or melodramatic, and most times I go in with the mind set that now that I'm X months/years older and more jaded than the last time, maudlin is exactly how it will seem. And time and again I'm proven wrong. This may not be the best Star Trek episode, but it's probably the best episode of television to come out of the Star Trek franchise.

Outstanding television. Easily the best episode of any show I have ever watched. Unbelievably good acting and a brilliant storyline.

This is a fine episode, but it's not flawless. (1) Jake takes his "cup of hemlock" in the
opening shot, which is fine for dramatic effect, but how could he have been so certain
about his timing? More plausible to have waited till his dad actually appeared - now
that would have been a strong scene! (2) Telling the tale to a stranger present within
the tale is a old literary device and nice for a "literary" story - but a pretty girl in a
skimpy dress is a touch trite. Pick a more believable "visitor" - his estranged wife, an
old friend, his publisher would have been okay (see 3, and could still have been a pretty
lady). (3) Big one this. No writer would hand over his original manuscript to a
complete stranger! She's told him she wants to write; his first thought would be she
would plagiarise his tales. All stems from 2, which was lazy writing in the first place.

I watched this one a few weeks ago, and was taken aback at how quickly I ended in tears watching it. Probably the only time I've ever cried at TV show. The part where Sisko reappears at the station and is lying on a sickbay bed, the way Jake suddenly breaks down in tears is heartbreaking.

All round simply outstanding. Not just one of Trek's best episodes, but one of the best TV episodes of all time.

You bunch of wusses. I watched this again on Saturday night with my heavily pregnant wife who is extremely emotional. Neither of us cried. Though I did find it very moving.
She actually commented that it was "A bit slow."
Obviously one for the boys. ;o)

Nuh-uh! As a woman, let me assure you that even us girls can recognize a damn good episode when we see one. :)

Let me be honest: I've been in the middle of a DVD marathon recently and everything was smooth sailing until I hit this episode. What an hour of television! It left me emotionally drained; instead of forging ahead on the DVD that day, I had to take time off. I don't know about you guys, but I was left pensive and melancholy long after the credits rolled.

"The Visitor" is probably up there with "The Inner Light" in my books--both pack an emotional wallop and feature wonderful, intimate performances. Like that TNG episode, the human story here just rings so true. This is the kind of Trek episode that can prompt people to step back and take stock of their own lives.

I can't think of a greater compliment that that.

I just watched this episode again the other day and, coming from someone who's seen every single episode of every ST series, all I can say is "wow".

This has to be the most moving and heartbreaking piece of Star Trek since the end of Wrath of Kahn and TNG's The Inner Light. Still moves me to tears even upon recent 3rd viewing since it's premiere. A definitive classic.

IMO, this is the best episode of Star Trek ever produced. Brilliant story with amazing acting. What more can you want?

Just rewatched this episode. I still find it very moving - the final time Sisko reappears and is sitting watching Jake sleep - fantastic! For pure emotional impact, nothing but "Inner Light" and possible "Children of Time" compare. Makes me wonder about how Jake reacted to his father taking up residence in the wormhole with the prophets...

This was not a bad episode but I'm having trouble understanding what makes it the best ever. I am a big crybaby and I didn't cry during this episode, mostly because I knew there would be a "Reset button" at the end. This episode was as good as Voyager's "Year of Hell", but not better.

WOW, watched it again - almost 15 years since it aired and it still get me. I think this is absolutely the best piece of sci-fi ever made. Best performance by Jake's character in the entire series. Wonder what Michael Taylor is up to today?

My favourite episode -- not just within DS9, but within all of Star Trek. It just clicks on very possible level.

Great episode, but I cannot understand the 'temporal mechanics' of Sisko returning to the original time of the accident.

I understand that originally Sisko was there, then had the accident, then vanished. I was expecting that after the bond with Jake was cut, he would re-appear right after he had vanished.

Now, I guess to make it more dramatic, they show him a little before the accident, like he came back then. But how could he? There was a Sisko there already. Shouldn't there be 2 Siskos' until the previous one vanished? He was somehow switched with the original Sisko? (remember that we now see a Sisko who before the accident possesses the knowledge to avoid the accident, knowledge that was gained after the accident!)

And if he was switched, wasn't the moment in time he got back selected arbitrarily just to suit the plot? Why not appear 1 hour before the accident or 1 hour after? I mean the only logical time for his re-appearance would be the exact moment of his original disappearance...

Watched this last night, bought me to tears as usual. Even thinking about it tears me up a little.

Truly excellent. This episode is exhibit B on why DS9 is the best Trek, behind Duet and ahead of The Siege of AR-558.

Late to this series -- now watching from the series box set. I have grown to love the series.
However, I can't understand the excessive praise for this episode. Another "this never happened episode" - dark and very unflattering for jake and his life choices in an alternative time line.
I honestly felt it was a waste of "time" no pun intended . . . but then i am not a fan of temporal shifts or actions with no consequences and stories are fantasies within the fantasy of the trek world.
While I was not moved like so many, I can see why some were moved but it just had nothing to do with anything in Star Trek or DS9 - it was all about living a life with no consequences because we knew very quickly on it was never going to happen.

A very emotional episode. Its style reminds me of a Twilight Zone or a Night Gallery story.

Yes, it uses the almighty Reset Button[tm]. Yes, it sports some technobabble. But does it matter? In this episode, these tools are used very effectively in order to be able to tell a truly unique story. One which has a profound emotional impact on anyone open to it.

Was always one of my favourites, and a prime example of how DS9 can shine.

The reset button is a given the first moment you see Jake age. How else can Star Trek series continue? The most important thing is that this episode was a character exposition that explores Jake's personality and Sisko's influence through a What If situation. Given that Jake is without his father, what is he like. What will happen without Sisko in the grand scheme of things? (Klingons, Cardassians, etc). Overall, this episode had a few flaws including my doubts about this random young aspiring writer appearing out of nowhere, but in a sense her naivety played on Sisko's own suggestion to his son: to be a writer, you have to experience the world.

Quite simply the best Star Trek Episode I have ever seen. I actually believe this is better than The Inner Light, and knowing how good that episode is, Its high praise!! The entire episode had a constant tone, you care about the characters (and although some people have said that the idea of this sexy young lady appearing at his house is unrealistic - you get "stalkers" all the time).

Everything felt right to me, the time and effort was taken in writing this story. It stands out among all other episodes.

and yes I did cry :p

Recently, I got done watching all 7 seasons of Voyager, and I was very impressed with the show, but wasn't as moved by their return home to Earth as I was with this one episode of DS9. This has to be one of the greatest Star Trek eppys I've ever seen, and the father/son relationship between Ben and Jake reminds me of how much I love and care for my father. I was submerged in the story as if I were Jake trying to save my own father ... I don't know what else to say but it just makes me appreciate my own father so much more ...

I just started watching DS9 after years of avoiding because I thought nothing could be better than TNG. DS9 is so amazing, and this episode crystallizes exactly why. I actually had to pause this episode and take some time before continuing it. I was in tears. Avery Brooks' (Benjamin) acting is just so resonant with me, I couldn't help but call my dad for a beer after I was done. My favourite part is when Jake is leaving the station, and it slowly fades into the distance... I cried. 4real

Been rewatching DS9 from start for first time in five years, and I forgot how much this episode moves me (along with It's Only a Paper Moon). No one has commented on it, but I think Cirroc Lofton was just so great in this episode, the moment he sees his dad "die" there is such pain in his eyes. The scene showing the memorial moved me, to see how crowded it was, great set dressing. And the simple scene of Dax hoding Jake on her lap stroking his head, he looking so hurt and destroyed by Sisko's death...wow.

I also have to say, I love Nana Visitor but sometimes think she overacts just a bit, but the scene where she and Jake discuss his getting off the station was perfectly acted, and the touching of the foreheads, so loving.

It was nice to see a Jake episode, I always liked Jake, he was the anti-Wesley (and I have no atred of Wesley like so many, just thought he was written so poorly). Jake is a normal kid and loves his dad. The Ben/Jake dynamic is one of the best and most overlooked aspects of DS9, but it kept the show so grounded in reality. It seemed the cast was showing their affection for Lofton in the scenes and that was wonderful.

(Just a not, I am not slighting Tony Todd, I thought he was really very good in this, and it was noce to see him in a non-horror/bad guy role!)

As to Paul Fox's comment: "but a pretty girl in a
skimpy dress is a touch trite" - um, sure she was pretty, but she was far from in a skimpy dress. She was covered from head to toe. I can understand if you wanted to see that lovely lady in a skimpy dress, but thems just ain't the facts. LOL

Great episode, outstanding.

I know I'm going to be stepping on a lot of toes with this one, but here it goes...this episode wants to be so much better than it can be (just listening to the score points that out, it is rife with a seriousness that the episode content can't deliver upon). The episode is emblematic of one of the great ironies of the series, that the best characters never appeared in the opening credits (at least not the actors portraying them). This episode is potentially an okay story about carrying regrets and so forth, but the technobabble side of things muddies the waters significantly. It's hard to fall into the emotional depths Todd is going for when he's talking a bunch of nonsense about subspace... there are other superficial flaws like the silliness of Dax and Bashir in that ageing makeup, no talk about how stupid the Bajorans are AGAIN, but none of those don't comprise the major flaw in the episode. Jake goes through life miserably and broken because of an accident which robbed him of his father. Now, either it's an allegory for untimely loss, which is relatable and relevant to anyone or it's not. If it is, then what is the message here? There is no way to get over that loss and in the end it will destroy you unless you have some fancy fake science to hit the reset button. It may be an allegory about the afterlife, which is more silly than the first alternative, and that "subspace connection" represents the love between Jake and Benjamin, again furthering the notion that one should never come to terms with loss. It's not a terrible episode, but it's damned confused and as usual Brooks' acting leaves much to be desired. The best scene is an early one between Kira and Jake where she agrees to let him stay on the station, it's the only one with believable character motivations. The character of Melanie is given no depth, she is just a sounding board, she could have been anyone. It could be that the story is trying to be about writing and creating art, in which case it's a definite failure, but it's done with enough care that I won't be that hard on it. Overall, it's pretty confused with some touching moments that have no relevance outside the particulars of this episode, making it about average for DS9.

Bob : "Transcends Trek, all together, and speaks to the human condition."
Star Trek is a commentary on the human condition more than anything else, how does one "transcend" that to itself?

Paul : "My girlfriend HATES Star Trek. She cried during this episode. 'Nuff said." Can't argue with that one.

I won't go as far as Elliot, and I was certainly affected by several parts of "The Visitor". But the Reset Button effect in this episode is just too darn overwhelming. While not ruining it outright, the RB still puts such a heavy damper on the proceedings that I wasn't 'transported' the way the best Trek episodes can.

I'll try not to belabor the point, but here's a synopsis:

1. Avery Brooks' over-emoting. It so SO hard to ignore a story's 'scaffolding' when I feel like I'm watching an actor perform, instead of a character living his life.
2. The aged crewmembers, and 'getting the gang back together'. This was just too pat and expected (although I did think Terry Farrell's age makeup was outstanding).
3. The surprise writer-guest. This worn-out storytelling tactic is another example of the 'scaffolding' getting in the way of the story.
4. Worst of all, the Reset Syndrome. The moment we find out Tony Todd is playing old Jake, we know nothing will 'take' at the end. Despite the episode's emotional power (and there is plenty), the unavoidable Reset taints it with a fairytale quality that can't help but detract from it.

I also wanted to point out an element in the production of this episode that really ticked me off : we have never seen a black Bajoran before--which simply implies that their species evolved differently and their skin colouring is effected by different phenomena than humans, vulcans or klingons--but because Jake has married a Bajoran woman, she must be black. This, especially in the context of Star Trek, is offensive. I'm sure it wasn't written into the story, but someone's decision behind the scenes to cast racially in the 1990s is damned frustrating.

Upon another viewing, I'm afraid my opinion regarding the content hasn't changed much. There simply is too much in the way of awkward production, acting and techy script to get at the emotional heart, which as I've already said is unsure of itself. The episode is riding on a feeling, that of loss, but hasn't found a true premise to transform that feeling into a story. It's a glaring irony couched in this story about two writers.

Elliot, you are dead inside.

"Jake goes through life miserably and broken because of an accident which robbed him of his father. Now, either it's an allegory for untimely loss, which is relatable and relevant to anyone or it's not. If it is, then what is the message here? There is no way to get over that loss and in the end it will destroy you unless you have some fancy fake science to hit the reset button."



This was already addressed. Jake DID get over his fathers death. He left the station, returned to Earth, began a successful career in writing, started a family, etc. The technobabble you deride, yet is pretty much intrinsic to Trek, is what makes his situation different from someone else's - he hasn't completely lost his father. Sisko continuously pops up in Jake's life, reminding the boy of everything he has lost just when he manages to move past it. By asking that question you seemingly ignored these pretty vital plot points.

Also Kai Opaka's actresses skin was darkened somewhat for that role (or she had a deep tan, I dunno). I always thought she was played by an african american until I went and googled it. I don't disagree tho that the conceit was unnecessary, especially for the show that gave us the first (American) black/white kiss.

@Elliott We've seen black Bajorans before - I can remember one in The Siege off the top of my head, and I'm sure there would be more if I looked. However, the point about the racial casting is probably apt. It always niggled at me that Sisko's love interests were always black - Jennifer, Fenna, Kassidy...not impossible that it's accidental, but unlikely.

This is a great episode, but it has a couple flaws that keep it from being DS9's best (or among the top five in ST history).

For one thing, this episode suffers from bad timing. The events of "Way of the Warrior" make "Visitor" seem out of place. I would have preferred this ep late in season three or later in season four. Oh, and the fact that the photo of Jake and Ben shows Ben with the shaved head, considering the shaved head was such a new thing at this point in the series, is a tad hard to swallow.

I also didn't like the fact that Kasidy Yates is nowhere to be found. Given that she was so important to Sisko only a week earlier, shouldn't she be in this episode, even if it's briefly? Of course, the same could be said for the end of season five and for much of season six.

Last point: Avery Brooks at some key points in the series misses the mark, and I think he does with the "Jake, what's happened to you?" line. It's really awkwardly said. I liked Brooks for much of DS9, there are a few points (like this one) where he misses the mark at a key moment.

Oh, and it sucks for Cirroc Lofton that he couldn't be in much of the biggest Jake episode the series ever tried (other than "Nor the Battle of the Strong").

the best episode ever of ds9

I can identify with the Jake in the timeline shown here, because at age 19 I lost my father suddenly (car accident) and he visits me in my dreams periodically, it seems every year or every few years, and when this happens it seems as though he never died. I am now almost as old as he was when he died, so I can identify with the scene where they are both in sub-space and Jake is the same age as his father (or a bit older). I can also identify with the feeling of having wasted time when I know he would have preferred me to spend it wisely, living. So this episode is very close to home. I like the character of Sisko a lot, because he is such a good father. Here he shows it by always urging his son to do what is best for him, to live his life fully, despite the misfortune of what has happened to them ... In a way this story represents what happens when we lose our parents - how they stay with us for the rest of our lives. But the sci-fi angle with alternate timelines and sub-space adds a new twist on it that is quite compelling and moving.

Actually, as well down as the episode is, it does destroy not only the continuity, but the entire plot as established, especially regarding Sisko's role as the emissary and the Dominion war arc...

As close to perfection as you're likely to see on television.

On a side note, I always thought the titular 'visitor' was Captain Sisko; dropping in on his son's lonely life over the years.

On another, less relevant side note, and almost imperceptibly, Kira gets a new bitchin uniform from this episode.

This tries to be the DS9 Inner Light and although it does surprisingly good, it's got nowhere near the emotional impact of IL.

The reason I say surprisingly is because I didn't imagine there can be a really good "emotional" episode within the DS9 universe or any other Star Trek except TNG. The only reason Inner Light could work so well is without doubt Patrick Stewart, the only truly first class actor ever cast in ST. Avery Brooks is just too much of a one-dimensional TV actor to pull off anything more subtle than "Sisko to the bridge, give me the status report". And the strange girl was certainly no Margot Rose.

But it has its moments, the directing is excellent, Todd's AND Lofton's (yes) performance is eminently watchable and some scenes (like the Kira-Jake one) truly stand out. But it's NOT Inner Light.

Just an addition to my comment about how average Avery is - roll to around 28th min, where he's sitting on a sofa with Junior and says: "Talk to me. I've missed so much. Let's not waste what little time we have." What a terrible delivery.

Am I the only who noticed this wasn't a total reset? In the final scene, Ben Sisko clearly remembers everything that happened.

Steve, that's what I thought too, that Ben remembered things, at least from his perspective.

To me, the time to complain about the Reset Button is when the crew gets into a dire situation and you're wondering how the writers are possibly going to get out of it, and at the last moment a god-like alien or some bit of technobabble comes out of nowhere and snaps everything back to the beginning, no harm done.

This isn't like that because Jake starts trying to fix the problem early on, and you know it's just a matter of time until he does. The dire situation is just a backdrop for the character interplay. You don't spend the hour wondering, "Is Ben really dead?" or even, "How will they bring Ben back?" Those details aren't important; what's important is the life Jake led while he was gone and what happens during his visits.

Incredible episode. It seems odd to call it the best episode of DS9, because it's not really about DS9, and the main actor is a guest star! If someone asked me what DS9 episode to view to get hooked on the series, I wouldn't pick this one, because it doesn't tell what the show is about. This story could have been told on any show with an established father/son pairing and a sci-fi/fantasy way to setup the situation -- and great writing, acting, and directing, of course. I just call it one of the best TV episodes I've ever seen, and leave it at that.

OK, I was the Bob who posted in 2007. I just reviewed this episode, again, and it has aged extremely well.

Any person who loved his or her father would regard this episode on par or better with "Good Bye Lenin", which portrayed the love of a son for his mother. This episode still emotionally effects me, more than a decade later.

A previous poster commented on my original post saying that all of Trek speaks to the human condition. This is wrong.

Star Trek presents a sort of utopian vision for the future - this was typical in the 1960's, when kids were rebellious and parents were passive. Everyone had this irrational notion that things were always going to get better. It was a delusion that drove many to complacency. Unfortunately, the real world kicked that shit in the balls around 1980 when Reagan stole the election by bribing the Iranians, and it was apparent that unless you were super-rich, your life had no value to the powers that be. The rest of the world was soon dragged into our nightmare.

Even Star Trek has been "rebooted" into this horrible Battlestar Galactica ripoff that makes the Vulcans into a bunch of arrogant high-elfs and the humans into a bunch of neo-cons. It's sick and pathetic. Only a third-rate TV director could fuck up Star Trek this epically. The franchise is pretty much dead, whether or not Viacom acknowledges it.

Yet, this episode still rises above what all the retroactive modifications to the Star Trek franchise have done to the story. It still says that, no matter what, you will always have some sort of love for your parents. No matter what happens, in the Star Trek Universe or the real-life universe, that there is always that thread to hold on to. That thread that makes us humans the paragon of animals.

Nothing on TV has distilled this down to its essence, before this episode. Nothing has since. Thus, I stand behind my original statement.

It is the Omega of the medium of television. Full Stop. One day, film may do better, and I'll be waiting.

@Cindi: "The reason I say surprisingly is because I didn't imagine there can be a really good "emotional" episode within the DS9 universe or any other Star Trek except TNG."

Eh? I agree that Stewart is probably the finest Trek actor there has ever been, but really? Really? Or are you suggesting that only Stewart's involvement permits a really good "emotional" episode, and therefore these are only available to TNG?

I simply cannot fathom the criticism being levelled at this story, and the less said about Elliot's typically tiresome self-important nitpicking the better.

This is a timeless story, marvellously told, that is as tragic as it is affecting. I've never had a problem with Brooks' performance in this episode (even if he can be weird in some others - which is still less about his acting than Brooks' idiosyncratic speaking pattern) and Todd is, as ever, perfect.

And while I would never slag "The Inner Light", it hasn't aged quite as well for me, probably because it's more a dream of a nostalgic and perfect family life - the only tragedy is that it is something Picard seemingly will never have. It's a lovely story too, but more of a broad brushstroke of a man's happy life. Compared to Jake's life of obsession and sacrifice, I'm not sure it means as much to me as a viewer. As others have pointed out, it's not a "reset button" either, even if it doesn't come up again (except, interestingly, in Jake's last scene in the finale).

Don't know why everyone compares the with The Inner Light. With it's sad alternate timeline of unfulfilled dreams and missed opportunities, I think it's closer to Tapestry. Which is also excellent, by the way.

@Bob: You are right.. one of the best moments in television. Good Bye Lenin is also one of my favorites, but speaking of love between father and son, you should really see "La vita e Bella", stunning.

And "Cinema Paraadiso", atlhough in the latter we would be speaking of a father figure.

A real shame that the Start Trek franchise is dead on TV.. carried some real values.

@ Josh: If those elements which bring the story down in particular don't bother you, like Brooke's acting, then there oughtn't be a reason for you to level anything but praise on this episode. That makes sense. But let's carry the "The Inner Light" comparison a little further:

1) Acting: In my opinion, the performances of Patrick Stewart AND importantly Margot Rose outshine those of certainly Lofton and even Todd (whom I deeply respect as an actor) by a considerably measure.

2) Production: "The Vistor" has many very-well crafted scenes--most of them in Old Jake's house in the Bayou--but also suffers from the occasional "filler" syndrom--most of them aboard the Defiant. TIL has literally no filler every scene is exactly what it should be without at any moment slipping out of the dramatic thread. It's like a brilliant play condensed into a 1-hour TV episode.

3) Technobabble: The only technobabble in TIL is some very, very low-key medical stuff from Beverly and the most rudimentary of establishing elements about the probe from Geordi and Data. Picard has literally no babble to spout. In "The Visitor", the lead character has to spit out, again and again, silly word vomit about fake temporal physics and warp drive, etc. Todd does fine with it, but it's not the kind of thing a character in the kind of emotional straights they were going for should ever have to say, let alone right in the middle of the apex of his journey!

Again, if these things don't bother you, I don't wish to rob you of your enjoyment of the episode, but for me, the abundance of flaws makes it a pretty good, but certainly not ground-breaking or quintessentially perfect episode of DS9 or TV in general. DS9 did do an episode that I think more closely achieves this end, for the record, and that episode is "Far Beyond the Stars." Infinitely better and it even has Sisko-Acting TM!

Incredible episode. Very powerful and moving. The complaints I'm reading here are definitely coming from humans I do not relate to. OK, is it as good as The Inner Light? No. But nothing is, and we have to get over it. The Inner Light is like The Beatles of TV - it was surreal magic that will never be repeated. And Patrick Stewart's acting talent is light years beyond any other Trek actor. Robert Picardo is the only other actor that is anywhere close, and even he is no Patrick Stewart. However, we don't have to compare and judge everything based on that, and it is no reason to dismiss this incredible episode. As someone mentioned here, The Visitor is one of three Star Trek moments that transcend even Star Trek itself - the other two being the end of The Wrath of Kahn and the aforementioned Inner Light. Ignore the silly nitpickers and lose yourself in this amazing hour of TV. A masterpiece for sure.

The way I see it is when an episode like this moves you to tears and stays with you for weeks and months, who cares about the minor questionable plot and technical details. Isn't the goal of moving you emotionally much more important than the goal of getting all details exactly right?

Its a pure fantasy episode, I don't see why anyone cares about the implausible techno-babble or other minor details. If you accept the level of suspension of disbelief that the episode asks from you, it's terrific. If you can't, that's fine, but that's a personal subjective issue and not a major fault with the episode- which is touching and absorbing and has a number of valuable (and positive) messages about life and loss.

I can understand why people like this, like the Inner Light, but I have to agree with the Elliot camp...

It seems a little manipulative to me at times, along the lines of trying to hard to be moving. The story wasn't especially well-written or engaging, the aged crew gimmick is overdone, and the technobabble was poorly delivered by old-Jake. It seemed more like "let's be moving and heartfelt this week".

I think that Stewart's character growth was a little more convincing in the Inner Light. I feel that the old-Jake is inconsistent with the Jake we've come to know, whereas old Picard (both in the Inner Light and in the grand-finale of TNG) was what we might expect him to be.

Plus the story itself was a little bland. The earnest young writer going to see Jake didn't particularly do much for me either... too earnest, too worshipful.

ANYONE, hardcore Star Trek fan or not, that can watch this episode and deny it's one of the most powerfully moving stories in the entire franchise, has got their head in the wrong place. Period. FIRST CLASS STORYTELLING. Nothing else need be said.

DS9 was something special. It wasn't just a F&*(ing spinoff. It had something to offer. I present this as exhibit A... of many, many more to come.

lol - Posted as Dan with my Vulcan Pregnant Wife.

Watched this again recently. A good episode and like most episodes with a 'reset' it just needs to be enjoyed for what it is.
I think there is reviewing an episode and then overanalysing an episode. A lot of the comments on here seem to be doing the latter.

This episode moves me to tears (several times during the course of the show) EVERY single time I watch it, and I've seen it at least 3 times. The acting/music/lines must be good enough, or I doubt that would have happened.

I'm not sure I'd call this the best DS9 episode, but clearly it ought to be in the top 10 of DS9 episodes. I guess I'm partial to Sacrifice of Angels. The Pale Moonlight was great too.

Am going through the DS9 series now and agree with some of the posters that this is a very powerful episode of DS9 but I still feel a bit let down by Avery Brookes performance, its the only fly in the ointment of what is a pretty strong episode.

The best Jake and Sisko ep so far by a long shot.

9/10

My father died a couple years before this episode came out and I was Jake's age at the time. If anyone wanted to know what losing a parent young was like I would show them "The Visitor". There were some incidental things I found unconvincing, such as Sisko's mechanical "Sisko to Bridge" or Cirroc Lofton's pitiful "don't leave me" as running towards the empty sickbay bed, and that Jake used Melanie's name before she told it to him. But Tony Todd was brilliant. Generally it was a beautiful performance and probably one of my favorite episodes of Television of all time.

I enjoyed Star Trek in reruns as a child with my mom, loved TNG as a teen but didn't continue once I got married in 91. In the last couple of months I have rewatched ST and finally watched all of TNG. The last week I have been watching DS9. I was simply going along enjoying it for the most part until this episode....
I am a television junkie and I would say The Visitor is in the top 10 and maybe 5 episodes of television of all time.
I had to take a break after this episode rather than continuing on. It's stuck with me and made me contemplate my life and my life choices like nothing has in a very long time. Am I living my life to the fullest?
Wonderful television.

Incredible. All I can say.

Never posted on here before. Aware the site has been pretty dormant for a while. I just finished watching DS9, got into after watching all of TNG after deciding to download it when I caught "the Inner Light" on an Aussie TV channel when I got home from work one night.

This episode spoke to me on so many levels. Lost my dad a few years ago at age 18, and to keep seeing him periodically and not being able to gain any closure, well, it's worse.
And Jakes reaction and desire to help his dad is exactly what I would do, you feel like you owe them, they're your parent, and I can see exactly how it would consume his life in the way the episode portrayed.
Loved Tony Todd, love him as Kurn (I wish he'd become a member of the house of Martok, along with Worf), and thought he really nailed it.
Like I said, never posted on here, but this episode compelled me to.

I've just watched this episode for the very first time on an early Sat morning. It was such a surprise that it moved me to tears and sniffles, even as I write this. Never thought it can still happen to a 41-year married guy :D

Very well done, DS9! The most awesome tv series to have aired, even after so many years.

Nothing I write could do justice to this. Anyone who dissects the continuity or technology issues with this (and I'm sure there are some) is missing the significance of the episode so completely. You think you understand, but you can't. At some point it becomes not only distracting, but meaningless, to analyze the internal logic of a TV show--especially one like this.

What is meaningful is the emotion the show evokes in us and how it builds its characters, and few episodes are more fitting examples of this than 'The Visitor'. I was riveted and deeply moved from start to finish. I wish I'd had a father like Benjamin Sisko.

Great story.
A few added flaws related to time travel:


-The writer found out about Jake's plan to reset the button. I would kill Jake if I were her, before Sisco reappeared. Jake was going to delete her life (alter history).
-Sisco has no significant impact on the Dominion history. He died, nevertheless, the Founders did not manage to succeed.
-If Dominion did not succeed without Sisco, there was no guarrantee if would fail with him. Reckless decision to roll the dice once again when the stakes are so high.

1. How is that a flaw? Are we to think that Melanie was sufficiently violently unhinged as to premeditate Jake's murder? She probably is more of a multiverse person anyhow.

2. You can't criticize the episode retrospectively based on events later in the series that were, at best, semi-planned.

3. The Dominion War only started after a few significant events. First, Dukat had to be "disgraced" in "Indiscretion", and we might suppose that Kira never even went on that mission after Sisko's death (please note the spelling of his name, by the way). Dukat's subsequent "Return to Grace" also stemmed from Kira's involvement. Now we can debate the overall importance of Dukat to the Dominion's eventual takeover of Cardassia, but in the meantime Martok's changeling impostor may still have been unrevealed. As the "future" of "The Visitor" suggests, Sisko's "death" was instrumental to the undermining of relations with the Bajorans. Later - even if the Dominion took control of Cardassia - we could envisage an alliance between them and the Klingons against the Romulans or any other power.

In short, there are a lot of variables at play, and with the future history presented in this episode there is a lot of room to imagine a very different chain of events in the Alpha Quadrant. So, there you go.

Nitpicking is not uncovering "flaws".

I agree with Josh. There are enough flaws in the episode as it is. To criticise the episode because it doesn't fit neatly into some geeky grand continuity puzzle is the same kind of griping I find so annoying on the Voyager pages. Judge the show for its own merits and weaknesses, because they're both there.

In my opinion Elliot, nitpicking is the stuff u wrote above.
Riding on a feeling, married to a black bejoran etc.

When you deal with time travel on a sci-fi show, u have to do your homework.

a)Josh, erasing 70 years of history is dangerous. Rolls the dice again. Its not retrospective.
No matter what happens in the series, Jake didnt know. All he did know, is that Earth was standing, Dominion did not take over. Or anyone else.
You dont change history lightheartedly.

Let alone, its immoral (destroys lives).
Its an issue that deserves at least some consideration on Jakes part (although I can understand his dramatic perspective, as well as I can understand Janeways perspective when she decided to travel back and destroy some Borg).

b) The female writer was informed that her existence was going to be terminated. She was either too stupid to realise it, or too overwhelmed by the tragedy of Jake. Nevertheless, even a small complaint from her would increase the intellignece factor of the episode considerably.

Anyway, like I said, great dramatic story, great episode, 4 stars
but its scifi, and I'm tired of not addressing temporal issues when its the core of the episode.

I was under the impression that both timelines continued to exist.

A great episode. It was a bit strange that Tony Todd was the adult Jake when Cirroc Lofton is essentially already an adult (kind of like the absurdity of the already adult Josh Radnor somehow becoming Bob Saget in "How I Met Your Mother"), but that can be chalked up to Cirroc Lofton not having the acting chops that Tony Todd does.

This could be a standalone drama episode that could be recommended to a non-Trek viewer if not for the Nog scene about females chewing his food for him, which, if you don't know what that's about, screams for explanation.

Comparing this to The Inner Light is laughable. That story was a nice, well written tale. This is a cobbled together monstrosity that makes almost no sense whatsoever.

Just recently watched ds9 for the first time on netflix. I always heard this episode was so moving and awesome. This episode was blah. I feel like people are told this episode is one of the best so they just go along with that. I can't believe people cried. More power to you if you did though. Nog a captain? Yeah right. and this episode focuses on jakes love of his dad. I appreciate that but this is also the same Sisko who was willing to let his son die so the wormhole aliens could use his body. They aren't gods. They are beings in a wormhole who he had to teach what linear time was and he's willing to let his son die. He didn't even say goodbye to jake in the last episode

Can someone explain to me why old Jake has a Jamaican accent? I haven't read all the comments so maybe someone has addressed it. It would be like if stng had an episode where there was a old Wesley Crusher who had a Scottish accent

@BobMarleySisko:

It's not a Jamaican accent, it's just the way Tony Todd speaks. I can't blame Todd for not better imitating Lofton's vocal inflections because they are so awful, it would make Todd look foolish, but it does add to the strain on the suspension of disbelief that Jake Sisko ever turned into this guy.

Ultimately, I was bored by most of this episode. Nothing I cared about happened, and Cirroc Lofton's character was never interesting enough (or well enough acted) for me to care about him. The things that happened were all techno-babbly and boring. Despite a few good emotional moments, there's no real reason to watch this more than once.

For me, this is a fabulous episode. I remember the first time I saw it I was startled by how good it was (for me). Still moves me emotionally when I get a chance to view it.

I'm with dlpb, comparing The Visitor to The Inner Light is a joke. The Inner Light absolutely blew my mind. The Visitor had a thin, predictable, and far fetched plot that was poorly acted. Avery Brooks is an unmitigated disaster. Commenter above had it exactly right, instead of watching a character, I feel like I'm watching someone trying to act. I can't get over how bad it is. So distracting. I've seen TNG, and all of DS9 up to The Visitor, and I'm finding it harder and harder to keep watching this garbage. TNG was fantastic, DS9 makes me want to scissor kick the entire cast and writing staff. Sorry for yelling, and thanks for letting me vent. At least Worf just showed up, hopefully that'll help this dumpster fire along. Only reason I force myself to continue to watch is because I'm a trooper on a mission to watch the entire franchise. Please pick up during Season 4 DS9!!!

@ Elliot & everyone.

"Jake goes through life miserably and broken because of an accident which robbed him of his father."

I think everyone is missing the point here.

Jake doesn't go through life miserably because he lost his father, he goes through life miserably because he isn't allowed to lose his father. When he did lose his father he really didn't. Sisko kept appearing and THAT had to be the hardest thing ever! Can you imagine?

I hate to bring this up again, but Avery's acting all but ruins this episode. Damn... how many times does this happen in this show? It’s so damn frustrating!

Tony Todd. I always thought his delivery problems were because of the Klingon mouth-pieces, but I guess not. He has such a hard time pronouncing words clearly, vocalizing (whatever it's called)) I strain to understand him. His performance wasn't a bad one though.

I thought Andrew's daughter Rachel Robinson as Melenie was a bright acting part in this episode (although she wasn't given much, she does have a nice screen presence). Cirroc once again carries the scenes with Sisko. He and Kira together were wonderful in this one.

When they got "the gang" back together all I could think of was 'All Good Things'...

I don't think the "reset" thing here applies, we all knew Sisko wasn't going to leave the series, so we knew Jake would get him back. It was Jake’s journey that made this one special. Many, many wonderfully touching moments in this one.

I really enjoyed this episode, but I don't rate is as highly as most.

3.5 for me.

People often get on Ciroc Lofton's case about poor acting but when Sisco appears for the second time and they have him inside of sickbay, there is a moment where Jake and his father are alone and Jake can't even speak- he just drops his head and cries. Lofton portrayal of loss is so convincing in this scene that I want to cry with him. It was a simple, dialogue free moment that said it all.

Brilliant episode with far more of an emotional impact than the also brilliant "Inner Light"

@bhbor - I agree. Lofton may not be Tony Todd, but I think it's important to remember that he gets a lot of fluff/lighter comedy scenes too. When he gets heavy scenes (like here) I really DO think he can handle it.

I think when you look at episodes like "Shattered Mirror", "The Visitor", "Nor The Battle To The Strong" and "Rapture". Most of those deal with loss (the loss of his mother, father or potential loss of his father)... weighty topics and he handles it. I also think that as the star of "Nor The Battle" he really shines. I think they could have given him a lot more to do but considering their decision to not have him go to Starfleet it was probably hard sometimes.

And I'm not saying he can't pull off a light episode ("In the Cards" is a personal favorite), I'm just saying that it's easy to forget that he actually can pull off a weighty episode on the rare occasions they let him. Or at least I think he can. And his relationship with Ben Sisko was so dead on that it'd be impossible for me to believe they weren't close IRL.

I never get tired of this episode, and it's always in my list of best DS9 episodes for any new viewer.

Very powerful stuff. I didn't realize that the girl showing up at old Jake's house was Andrew Robinson's daughter in RL but upon a recent viewing you can totally tell.

After all of these years I watch this episode again and start bawling. I can't say this is the best episode of DS9, but it is one of the best written, the love between father and son and the impact of the loss just melted my heart. I just love the relationship between Jake and Ben.

I admit I did cry long ago, but now I found it kinda boring and unrealistic. Why would Jake ruin his whole life over ghost dad. and after so long apart, if he sees his dad reappear, why not just say hi and a quick conversation, rather then pine away. Its like seeing a friend you haven't seen in a long time, just say hi and get over it.

Still - its the best Jake episode, and the best part is, Cirroc Lofton is hardly in it. I guess that's why Jake "fans" love it.

@Dimpy Why would Jake ruin his whole life over ghost dad....

Love. and he could not let go, every time he tried to...Dad appeared. His father was not dead, but lost in time. It would have been easier if Ben had died, but he didn't.

@ MsV

He did ruin his life:

Stopped being a writer.
Lost his wife.
Years of study in advanced physics ( even though he doesn't come across as very bright )

... I admit its a sad circumstance. If someone close to me died, then reappeared after years apart, I would feel sad. But, possibly, mothing could be done.

... say hi, feel sad and mourn again, then leave it. Sisko himself wanted more for Jake.

mothing = nothing

Oops

A nonsense episode, shocking make up, some really dodgy overacting and not convincing. The Reset theme made all the "emotion" laughable.There are many better episodes of the father son thing done more subtly elsewhere on DS9 than this ununnecessary flood of tears.The writers should have obeyed the temporal prime directive and not engaged in plots with time loops, they are always aabsurd.DS9 does have some of the greatest episodes in the history of sci fi TV, but this isn't one of them.

I'm still kinda new to Star Trek, since I'm exploring it starting last year. I first saw the 2009 reboot and then got interested in the old TOS movies, watched them all and then finally the TNG movies and the TNG series. (and Into Darkness) I checked out the TOS series as well, but I only liked few of the episodes...(I love the Kirk crew, but most of the stories are really silly and stupid to me) Until now TNG is THE Star Trek to me and I like the series the most, and I'm also a huge fan of the "The Inner Light" episode, which is my favourite one of the whole series.

I now went on to DS9 and wanted to give this series a chance. Unfortunately most of the first three seasons was disappointing/average to me, as I always see much potential in the characters and many stories, but it rarely works for the whole episode imo. I still find TNG much superior in story telling than DS9 until now.
I just startet season 4 today and already liked the first two episodes, but damn, THIS third episode here...I think I've found my "The Inner Light" of DS9! What a brillant episode! I loved it from the start and I still can't stop thinking about it - it's the same as with "The Inner Light". I'm curious how the series will continue from now on - until now I really like the fourth season. ;-)

I couldn't agree more with this review, I was completely blown away by the magnitude of this episode. Many episodes of Star Trek knock blow me away, but by far this one brought me to tears almost immediately. I can't imagine how many times I've seen this episode, but every time I do, tissues surround me as soon as the credits begin. Beautiful piece of work.

I was putting my toddler son to bed tonight, and as he fell asleep, I decided sit beside him and watch this episode. As I watched this superb episode, I felt a strong bond with my son, just as Jake feels for Sisko. What a moving episode!!! I've watched all other ST series and DS9 is my last unseen series. I can definitely say this is one of the top 3 episodes of the ST franchise. What an episode!!!!

@ Dimpy He did ruin his life

I agree with you he did ruin his life. I wrote what I did because I thought you were asking why would Jake ruin his life.

Gotta give up my man card on this one. Made me all misty, not ashamed to say.
TNG has "Inner Light", DS9 has "The Visitor".
Both shows have the same wonderful message, that we all need to hear once in a while.

Don't take life for granted, especially when those you love are concerned.

"there is a moment where Jake and his father are alone and Jake can't even speak- he just drops his head and cries"

I also lost my father as a boy. Whenever I do encounter him in a dream again, that's the only thing I can do, too. Probably why the episode resonates with me so strongly, those moments in particular.

While it doesn't take away frome the episode at all for me, I have one small nitpick:

If they just discovered this wormhole at the beginning of the series, how do they know it's going to do this "inversion" thing? And even further, how do they know it only happens once every 50 years?

A strong episode, though I wouldn't rank it as high as most here (I would say the same thing about "Inner Light"). I do think the acting is strong from everyone involved.

We often have dramas where a parent is willing to give everything up for his child; here we have a child giving everything up for his parent.

One thing noone has brought up yet: Captain Sisko's recurring appearances in Jake's life plays into his characterization as a man out of time. From his problems getting over the death of his wife in the pilot, to his devotion to the "dead" sport of baseball, to events that happen later in the episode "Far Beyond the Stars", Sisko is consistently out of step with time.

What does he do when he gets possessed by an alien consciousness? Well in "Dramatis Personae" we find out he builds a cool-looking clock! Time is a recurring theme with Benjamin Sisko.

Cail Corishev above said "This story could have been told on any show with an established father/son pairing and a sci-fi/fantasy way to setup the situation". While that is true, I think it resonates more strongly when Ben Sisko is the one dislodged from time; it fits the DNA of the character.

Some (maybe all?) of the elder Sisko's ties to time trace back to the wormhole aliens. Junuxx above compared this episode to "Tapestry". I couldn't help but wonder if the wormhole aliens are playing a role here, just as Q did in that episode. The technobabble starts with the "inversion" of wormhole, so they're present, even if unseen.

If they are playing a role, I'm unsure what it is. They could be presenting the whole thing as a vision to the father, showing him how much his son still cares for him even as an 18 year old. Or perhaps they didn't cause the event, but they're somehow helping the son get his father back.

Ultimately, there's nothing here proving the wormhole aliens are involved, but it would fit them.

I wouldn't call it the "greatest episode in the history of tv", as some here have gushed, but it's a darn good one. Very emotional.

The acting of Tony Todd is a bit of a letdown. He has a certain je ne sais quoi about him and he probably made more money than Tom Hanks with his gazillion B roles, but it's evident why he's not a lead actor.

But Cirroc Lofton is shockingly good. Best scene is when Capt. Sisko appears for the second time, lying on the bed in the infirmary and asks Jake if he's doing alright .... the reaction of Lofton here is perfect - quiet desperation. Got the waterworks started here.

I cannot suspend my disbelief pertaining to the poison Jake took at the end. It's slow acting, as he has several hours to live. Slow acting poisons are the most difficult to predict. Seeing as his dad usually just hangs around for a few minutes, that gives him an insanely small window here.
He should have taken a fast-acting poison when Ben appears. That would have made for an even more dramatic scene in the end.

I didn't like Jake's phrase in the beginning: "The worst thing that can happen to a young man - to lose his father." Seeing as he's lost his mother only a few years prior, it seemed kinda insensitive, even after 100 years and given the super-close bond they had before and after the accident.

No offense to the actor playing Nog, but he's distracting. I'm not a tall man myself and because of this I object to heightism, but this guy lacks inches AND presence. The scene where he stands between Jake and his wife is ridiculous, he looks like a child.

PS: for the people who bemoan the "Reset Button" - this story can OBVIOUSLY not be told without one, so what are you harping on about?!

^^ True, only Sisko retains any memory of any of it. ^^

It would have awesome if they somehow worked that in to a future episode, I mean I don't know HOW they could have done it but it'd have been cool just the same.

In the final episode they needed a scene before the Defiant leaves where Jake is worried about the battle and Ben reassures him that he'll be back and that when he returns Jake should bring Korena to dinner. Jake protests, saying they only just started dating a week ago and Ben smiles and says he thinks she's a keeper.

^^ Yeah, see that's a great idea! ^^

Guess I'm in the minority, but this episode did nothing for me but make me cringe. People lose their parents and don't get to mope around their old apartment without paying rent. Why would any of Sisko's so-called friends let Jake just sit there and rot? He needed to either get a job or go to school or at least move in with his grandfather.

This is the type of episode I would make my kids watch to tell them what not to do if I die.

Also, Jake needed to slap some sense into the girl who wants to be a writer but doesn't write. Really?

Also, I found it really creepy that she walked into a strange man's house. I was sure one of them was going to murder the other.

Also, why wouldn't she have known his history? She said she read his biography, and everything that happened must have been a matter of public record. Does google not exist in the 24th century?

I will echo Keith DeCandido's comment on the tor.com rewatch: "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."

Every so often you will watch a piece of sci-fi that transcends the medium. It happened with The Inner Light and it happened here. And it happened on the strength of the performances - Tony Todd, Cirroc Lofton and yes, Avery Brooks - and not from what is actually a relatively weak plot. If you want to pick the plot apart then that's your privilege. For me, I will take the emotion and the depth and the bravery it takes to pull out an episode like this. Because that's where the richness is to be found here.

Wonderful score towards the end too. 4 stars, no question.

I've started writing a comment on this a half-dozen times and I've come up empty each time. At the moment, consider me neither a champion of the episode nor a full-on detractor.

Rather than a full review, I want to make a few comments, particularly on areas that are relevant to later episodes:

1. When Jake snaps Sisko back to the Defiant, does he believe that he is creating an alternate timeline, in the Abrams Trek model (or the model that is at least officially stated...), or does he believe that he is erasing the last several decades from existence entirely? The model where changing the past creates a new branching of the multiverse, or whatever, seems not to have been used at any point before this episode, and it's pretty essential to "Children of Time" coming up that there is only a single history. At the same time, purely pragmatically, why would Jake bother giving Melanie his stories and give her the "look around you!" if his plan would wipe her from existence? I think this has been a stumbling block for me for a long time to even talk about the episode, because the Jake-Melanie scenes take on *extremely* different meanings if Jake's actions are going to erase her life entirely, or if he is genuinely gifting her with the last remnants of his life before *he* dies.

2. SPOILER FOR ENTIRE SERIES FOR THE REST OF THIS POINT: Famously, "What You Leave Behind" refers back to this scene, when Sisko disappears to join the Prophets, doesn't talk to Jake, and then Jake stands looking out of the station with Kira at his side. It's a nice visual echo, and that moment somehow loads this episode with extra meaning. Sisko disappears from an electric blast while watching an exciting wormhole event; the wormhole is connected to the Prophets and Sisko's interest in the wormhole is part of his general attachment to the Prophets in particular and the Bajor mission in general. Sisko is the Emissary because he discovered the wormhole, after all, and so being killed because of the wormhole goes back to his Emissary status, if nothing else. I'll also note that an electric console blast is what gives Sisko the Prophet-visions which nearly kill him in "Rapture." So while it does not do so explicitly, Sisko's disappearance is to some degree related to his Emissary position.

And hey, what do you know -- the big Ben-Jake chasms that crop up in the next few years are mostly related to the Prophets and Sisko's role as Emissary: "Rapture" has Sisko trying to hold onto visions that are going to kill him and Jake has to go against Sisko's apparent wishes to save him; "The Reckoning" has the Pah-Wraiths inhabit Jake's body, and Sisko chooses to risk Jake's life in this mystical duel because of his big Prophets faith; and in "What You Leave Behind" Sisko disappears from Jake's life entirely to become one with the Prophets. Jake is supportive of Ben, to a point, on these Prophet journeys -- he goes with Sisko on his wacky vision quest thing at the beginning of season seven. But notice that Sisko is repeatedly asked to choose between his human connections, *Jake in particular*, and his devotion to the Prophets, and he chooses the Prophets in "Rapture" and "The Reckoning" and...well, maybe he "had no choice" in "WYLB" but he doesn't even go see Jake himself. Compare how Miles dealt with Keiko's Pah-Wraith possession in "The Assignment" to how Ben deals with Jake's in "The Reckoning." Admittedly, it's not always Prophets that divide them: there's Jake's war correspondent period, and Ben nearly abandoned Jake for the "Children of Time" colony.

Whether Sisko's devotion to the Prophets is justified is not really a good subject for this episode, but it does heighten the tragedy of this episode, and this episode makes the Ben-Jake material later on quite sad. Ben finds out in this episode how damaging it is for him to be half-in, half-out of Jake's life, and he also finds out that Jake basically gives up on everything in his life to reunite with Ben, even going as far as to kill himself to give his younger self a chance to be with his father. Jake wouldn't let go. In some ways, the story of this episode of Jake's restless inability to cope with his father's disappearance/quasi-death seems to me to be a possible story of what happens to Jake post-series, when Sisko really does go through this kind of half-death where he gets unstuck in time (becomes nonlinear). Those four years between "The Visitor" and "What You Leave Behind" may make a big difference, and Jake does grow up to some extent during that time, but will Jake be able to get over his father's sudden exit from his life? And even if Jake gets over it, will the new baby with Kasidy? Will he be able to make his own life? Meanwhile, Ben pretty clearly has other, higher priorities -- war, Bajor, Prophets....

That Ben will risk Jake for some greater good is not necessarily damning of him as a parent -- for instance, I think he is right not to go back to pick Jake up after Jake stays behind on the station, for one thing because, as Ben says, it's Jake's choice. I'm less convinced he did the right thing when it comes to "Rapture" and especially "The Reckoning," but let's say for the sake of argument that was the right thing. What does get to me, upon rewatching this episode, is that Ben sees how his "death," or his disappearing from his son's life, essentially destroys Jake, and seemingly does nothing about it in the present. Maybe his not visiting Jake in "What You Leave Behind" was his way of avoiding the "The Visitor" scenario -- if he doesn't visit Jake, Jake won't think to become a scientist! problem solved! -- or maybe he just forgets about it, or decides that there's nothing he can do. I'm not sure. But still. This episode lost something for me on this rewatch for various reasons (related to point #1), but what it gained is the recognition that this story really may be Jake's life after Sisko disappears, that despite it being an alternate future, it effectively represents the emotional turmoil that losing his father will give...along with a version of Ben who really does want to spend his rare few moments of existence with his son, which means that in some ways the "real" universe is actually worse for Jake.

A bit more on point #2: I actually didn't specifically mean Sisko should do much to prevent his possible death or whatever. He has a risky job, and an important one. The issue is that Sisko maybe could have told himself before this episode that Jake would be okay if Sisko died (he got over Jennifer's death), but now he has a vision of the future of Jake never getting over Ben's death, eventually killing himself over it, which Ben interprets as a tragedy. Does Ben try to incorporate this knowledge of a possible future and try to make life better in the present (ala Picard in "All Good Things")? Does he try to talk to Jake and let him know the risks, and make absolutely certain Jake understands that if Sisko dies, or if Sisko somehow gets weirdly unstuck in normal linear time, that Jake should move on with his life? Maybe -- but future episodes make me doubt it, which is very sad. I suppose Sisko did not want to think about it.

Watching this episode I felt that Jake would have gotten over his father's death...if he had actually been dead. It's when Jake realizes that if he does nothing his father will be lost to the void (not hell, but perhaps something like a hell) that Jake gives up everything to free him.

There is some emotional feedback in the episode. Jake fears his father is doomed not to death, but to a life of despair in nothingness, which causes Jake to despair. This motivates him to abandon everything else in his life to try and save his father, leading Ben to despair.

[The rest of this post has spoilers for the rest of the series, following William B's post, above]

The end of the series is similar in some ways, but completely different in others. Ben isn't alone, he's with the Wormhole aliens. It's certainly not hell; in fact, the Bajorans might call it heaven. Jake might not be able to talk to his father, but he knows his father could be watching his whole life. Jake also doesn't know that his father won't come out of the wormhole at any time.

Perhaps most importantly, Jake can't really do anything about it. I'd imagine at some point Jake takes a trip into the wormhole, says "hello", and sees if he gets a response. If he doesn't, there isn't really much more that he can do.

His father being in the wormhole might lead Jake to decide to stay in the Bajoran system, rather than moving somewhere else. Perhaps it will lead him to take up the Bajoran religion, or at least study it in detail. But I don't believe he will abandon writing, dating, or anything else we'd consider an essential part of living.

@methane,

[series spoilers]

I agree that it's very different in that Jake can't do anything about Sisko being in the wormhole...probably. On the other hand, Jake was given the choice in "Rapture" of whether or not to pull Sisko back from his apotheosis with the Prophets, and there he chose to do so. Ben is probably not rescue-able from being in the wormhole, but there is precedent that Jake does not fully trust the Prophets to guide Sisko. I guess maybe Jake became a convert after feeling the big evil of the Pah-Wraiths within him in "The Reckoning." Although also, there was that whole "you shall know nothing but sorrow" warning to Sisko, which, if he told that to Jake (or Kasidy or Dax or whoever and they told Jake) might not exactly reassure him. Jake might throw himself into reading the ancient Bajoran prophesies, stumble on something that sounds vaguely like the Emissary will return when the wormhole blinks and interpret that as meaning that the wormhole has to undergo a [tech] [tech] and.... I mean, of course, maybe not!

Now, I'll grant that it's not as bad as it was in "The Visitor" in terms of emotional feedback -- Sisko is (probably) not going to come back regularly and with no control over it as he did in "The Visitor." However, "I'll be back! Maybe tomorrow...maybe...yesterday" is, Ben should realize if he thinks back, a potential recipe for difficulty moving on in one's life. Paradoxically, there is some implicit "I'm a demigod now, it's complicated you wouldn't get it, but wait for me please" in his words to Kasidy, which are the opposite of his "I don't know what's going on, but please live a happy life" message to Jake here.

@ Quarkissnyder

"Also, I found it really creepy that she walked into a strange man's house. I was sure one of them was going to murder the other."

I've known lots of aspiring authors that have tracked down famous authors in order to conduct an interview.. usually they set something up in advance, but its really not THAT unusual.

Some of these reviews are worse than the episode. Why do you need to watch DS9 to have a good old cry? Just watch the evening news. Some "trekkies" are grist to the mill of the dodgiest ST writing and direction. This ep has all the depth and integrity of a Hallmark sympathy card.

Okay, let's just get this out of the way right up front - in an episode that is chocked full of emotional scenes, the three where Jake tears up (with his father in the Infirmary, later in his house in Louisiana and later on the Defiant after fifty years) equal true sucker-punches right to the feels! Holy Lord were those scenes effective! The last time I've cried over a TV show or movie was when I was a little kid (and it was a Benji movie of all things) but those scenes brought me as close to it as possible.

I really couldn't add much more praise to "The Visitor" than Jammer already has with his final two paragraphs, so I'm not going to try. That is, other than to point out how much I loved Quark's scene (which was his only one in the episode, I believe). It really shows that underneath everything else, Quark does genuinely have a heart. Letting Nog off early so he could spend time in the holosuites with Jake just to cheer him (Jake) up was a beautiful thing for Quark to do, especially since he didn't stand to gain anything from it.

However, I don't think "The Visitor" is a perfect episode. There is one major flaw in it that I cannot ignore. For years people have roundly criticized Future Janeway for what she did in VOY: "Endgame" - changing the timeline for selfish, personal reasons. And I think people are fairly in the right to criticize her for that. But, if I'm going to criticize Janeway for altering the timeline in such a fashion, then I have to (in the interests of consistency and fairness) criticize Future Jake for doing the exact same thing here. Judging solely on this episode, the changes to the timeline he creates are going to have a profound effect. Case in point - Melanie, the eponymous visitor, might not exist in the altered timeline. Old Jake may have just condemned this woman to a fate of non-existence. And judging from what we learn from later episodes - Old Jake has one hell of a lot of blood on his hands! The Dominion War did not happen in his timeline. In fact, his timeline, while kind of bleak due to the relations with the Klingons, actually looks like it might have been better off! Several billion people are dead who otherwise would not have been because of his actions - most notably Jadzia! The fact that he is so fundamentally altering history is never even once commented upon either by the characters or the episode itself in any way either. As moving and as heartfelt as the episode is (and it is that in spades!) I simply cannot ignore this and sadly have to dock a point from it's final score.

9/10

@Luke - My issue with Janeway altering the timeline is not that she's selfish, it's that the episode is a condemnation of the series and quite possibly all of Trek. It IS selfish, but that's secondary. The heart of Visitor is a boy who needs his Dad. That's Jake's story. And Jake is a flawed character and being selfish makes him interesting. Here's the problem with Janeway (and what ultimately soured me toward VOY even though I enjoyed it at the time).

Season 1
Caretaker - Janeway makes the decision for 2 crews worth of people that saving the Ocampa is worth a 70 year trip home.

"JANEWAY: We're alone in an uncharted part of the galaxy. We have already made some friends here, and some enemies. We have no idea of the dangers we're going to face, but one thing is clear. Both crews are going to have to work together if we're to survive. That's why Commander Chakotay and I have agreed that this should be one crew. A Starfleet crew. And as the only Starfleet vessel assigned to the Delta Quadrant, we'll continue to follow our directive to seek out new worlds and explore space. But our primary goal is clear. Even at maximum speeds, it would take seventy five years to reach the Federation, but I'm not willing to settle for that. There's another entity like the Caretaker out there somewhere who has the ability to get us there a lot faster. We'll be looking for her, and we'll be looking for wormholes, spatial rifts, or new technologies to help us. Somewhere along this journey, we'll find a way back. Mister Paris, set a course for home."

Though getting home is the primary goal, this echoes a lot of Picard's "Let's see what's out there" from "Encounter at Farpoint". And it's from the first ever scientist captain. She bring an edge of optimism, moral character and fascination to the Captain's Chair. Let's bodly go together Captain!


Season 2
The crew, her crew becomes a family. Ensign Kim (the most homesick one) bids his girlfriend and his life on Earth goodbye to fix the timeline and bring the family back together. We have a few bumpy episodes, but I am enjoying the show and the feeling of Janeway as more than a Captain, but as the head of this family, this community (it's a feeling I got from Sisko as well that I really liked).


Season 3
Uh oh... Janeway is going off the rails. Voyager accepts the birth of it's first child, it sticks together as they are stranded on a planet but Janeway shows signs of questioning her first decision. In Season 1's Caretaker "I’m aware everyone has families and loved ones at homes they want to get back to. So do I. But I’m not willing to trade the lives of the Ocampa for our convenience. We’ll have to find another way home."

But in "The Swarm" she violates another race's territory to avoid a 15 month detour. Even Tuvok is shocked. And in Scorpion....

"JANEWAY: What do you mean?
CHAKOTAY: We’d be giving an advantage to a race guilty of murdering billions. We’d be helping the Borg assimilate yet another species just to get ourselves back home. It’s wrong!
JANEWAY: Tell that to Harry Kim. He’s barely alive thanks to that species. Maybe helping to assimilate them isn’t such a bad idea. We could be doing the Delta Quadrant a favour."

This is not the same Captain that made the decision to save the Ocampa. But then she flat out admits that by Season 5....


Season 5
In "Night" - "CHAKOTAY: We're alive and well, and we've gathered enough data about this quadrant to keep Starfleet scientists busy for decades. Our mission's been a success.
JANEWAY: The very same words I've been telling myself for the past four years. But then we hit this Void, and I started to realise how empty those words sound.
CHAKOTAY: Kathryn.
JANEWAY: I made an error in judgment, Chakotay. It was short-sighted and it was selfish, and now all of us are paying for my mistake. So if you don't mind, Commander, I'll pass on that little game. And I'll leave shipboard morale in your capable hands. If the crew asks for me, tell them the Captain sends her regards. "

The crew, this family defies their Captain and stays together. But Janeway never really takes it back. She DOES think that it's all a mistake. She gets over her depression when there are stars again, but she no longer doubts that Caretaker was a mistake, she's SURE it was a mistake. By the end of S5

"CHAKOTAY: If it weren’t for O’Donnell, you never would have joined Starfleet.
JANEWAY: Yeah, and I would have never have got you all stuck here in the Delta quadrant.
TORRES: It gave us all time to get to know each other.
EMH: Time for a family portrait of our own. Everyone, gather around the Captain please. Face the camera.
JANEWAY: To family.
ALL: To family."

We're still worrying about getting stuck? What would you rather do Captain? Undo the last 5 years and every life you've touched.... oh, wait....


Season 7
I'll skip straight down to S7, because this is getting long and there's a lot to cover.

In "Friendship One" - "JANEWAY: I think about our ancestors. Thousands of years wondering if they were alone in the universe, finally discovering they weren’t. You can’t blame them for wanting to reach out, see how many other species were out there asking the same questions.
CHAKOTAY: The urge to explore is pretty powerful.
JANEWAY: But it can’t justify the loss of lives, whether it’s millions or just one."

We now not only think Voyager's voyage is a mistake, but that all of Trek, all of exploration is! I don't usually speak for other people but if I could teleport Gene over to whomever wrote that line he'd SLAP THEM. FFS!!!!

The risk of exploration no longer justifies the means. Everything in her life, the life of a scientist is wrong. It all leads up to a grand finale where she ERASES SIXTEEN YEARS of Voyager’s journey to save Chakotay, Seven and Tuvok… even as a mentally ill Tuvok fights to stop her. The nutty guy knows that's she'd gone nuts.

I kept hoping that meeting Admiral Janeway, seeing where she ended up would FINALLY snap her out of this funk and cause her to toast alongside Kim "To the journey!" It's be amazingly satisfying if knowing that Seven/Chakotay die and that Tuvok is doomed she still decides to stay. What a refreshing reaffirmation of their journey that would be! Instead, nope.... 16 years gone! Is it supposed to hurt less that we didn't SEE those years? Did nothing happen during them? No children born that she held in her arms? No civilizations saved? Think of how many lives were saved in a random episode like "Warhead".

The first, and to date only, woman captain decided that we shouldn't explore because people might die. That is the legacy of the decision that Janeway makes. One might say that she did it for love (of Chakotay, Seven and Tuvok) and so does Jake (for his Dad), but I could never see Picard doing this. And furthermore, Jake has no reason of knowing his Dad is THAT important. He may feel, as Q once says "Please. Spare me your egotistical musings on your pivotal role in history. Nothing you do here will cause the Federation to collapse or galaxies to explode. To be blunt, you're not that important." Right or wrong nobody says Jake is the world's greatest philosopher. Janeway knows EXACTLY what WON'T happen in the next 16 years if she does this. It's kind of monstrous... on par with what Odo does in "Children of Time".

To be honest, I think Janeway deserves more criticism than Jake if only because she's a Starfleet Captain and is supposed to uphold certain principles (i.e. The Prime Directive). And Janeway is extremely inconsistent with her own supposed principles.

Jake, on the other hand, is not in Starfleet. He's got his own ideas of what's right. He may be disregarding the needs of his timeline for his own needs, but at least he's sticking to his principles while not breaking any he swore to uphold.

The morality of Old Jake's behaviour is, to me, a big sticking point within the episode. As I see it there are two main ways to interpret this:

1. The episode has the "Abrams Trek" philosophy wherein the time travel material creates an alternate universe, and does not erase the events that have happened so much as create a new one;
2. Jake knows that he's erasing the last several decades from existence.

(1) is possible, but I don't think is supported by any Trek stories previous to this one.

The problem with (2) then is not just that Jake is extremely selfish, but that it IMO contradicts the entire Jake/Melanie interaction, which is one of the major aspects of the story. Jake gives Melanie advice on being a writer, spends a night telling her his story, sends her off with a copy of his book, and gives her parting words of wisdom on how to appreciate life as a whole -- all of which he apparently *knows* will be erased entirely. And further, *she* seems to understand that he is going to do something major shortly, though I guess presumably she doesn't figure out that it will be some weird time thing that will erase her from existence. I think that the most generous interpretation is that Jake really does know that she is doomed, and that her existence is about to come to an end, but that she really *does* want very badly to spend time with him, and that he can find it existentially meaningful to have last conversation, and tell Melanie to *appreciate life* so that she manages to find meaning in her last moments, maybe with his stories. It is pretty hard to fathom the idea that he genuinely believes that Melanie would like to spend her last hours of existence hearing *his* life story and then reading his stories, if she truly knew that he was about to end her existence. (And yes, even if Melanie were still born in the new timeline, she would have no memory of this conversation or the gift of that book....) It really seems to read to me that Jake is giving her that book with the expectation that she will read it, and continue her life afterward, somehow, which does not fit with what Jake is doing. That Jake has become reclusive and has stopped feeling attached to the universe around him in preparation for resetting the last few decades of the timeline I could see, but for the episode to invest so much time in him interacting with someone whose existence his going to erase is...an odd choice.

Nicely put, William B. It is odd because I think the episode makes it very clear that Old Jake fully intends to reset the timeline - meaning that Melanie either might not be born at all (quite possible given how radically different the timeline becomes) or just won't remember the encounter (I doubt she'd have Guinan's extra-temporal sensibilities). So why is he giving her his new book? Obviously he intends for her to read it, but he also knows that she most likely won't be able to. I don't even know what to call this problem. A continuity error, sloppy writing - maybe? I usually don't like to engage in crit-fic but it really seems, at least to me, that the writers were trying to get us to ignore the wider moral implications of what Jake was about to do by giving us a sweet ending for the conversation.

Or maybe it is just an Abrams Trek situation. But, the less I think about Abrams Trek, the better my mental health will be. :-P

@Robert - I don't blame Present Janeway for what she does in "Endgame", just like I don't blame Present Jake here. In a lot of ways I see it as similar to what Picard said in "A Matter of Time" - "You know, Professor, perhaps I don't give a damn about your past, because your past is my future and as far as I'm concerned, it hasn't been written yet!".

Present Janeway is fully within her rights, in my opinion, to take advantage of her knowledge of the future. Altering a future timeline doesn't bother me that much, possibly not at all. As Doc Brown would say, "the future's not set." It's the deliberate altering of a past timeline that really rubs me the wrong way. Future Janeway is willing to massively alter the past for her own selfish reasons. Future Jake is willing to do the same thing. In other words, they're both doing what the ENT villains in the Temporal Cold War were attempting to do (something ENT actually got right with that storyline).

@Luke and William B.

I'm not sure we have enough material to fully judge Jake here. Sisko is obviously an important person. He can help make a fleet of ships disappear ("Sacrifice of Angels") and form alliances that the Federation was not able to make on its own ("In the Pale Moonlight").

It seems like Earth turned okay in this episode, but we don't have full story. For all we know, it's ruled by Dominion now and billions have suffered from Dominion rule. True, the writers didn't include that in the episode, but they did hint at how unstable Bajor and station were becoming so it's possible a deadly conflict broke out.

Also, you're both acting as if the temporal phenomenon that took Sisko out of existence was perfectly justified. Isn't that phenomenon too messing up how history should unfold? Is Jake so wrong to not want to stop or counteract the effects of the phenomenon?

@Luke, agree, and definitely agree about Picard/Present Janeway. There might be something sketchy about using Future Tech, I guess, though I'd have to think about it (and if there is something sketchy about it, they shouldn't have been using the holo-emitter for all those years...).

@Chrome, I get your point. And there are episodes like "Yesterday's Enterprise" where Picard messes with the current reality based on the hope that another reality is better. However:

1. While "The Visitor" spends some time establishing how badly Sisko's death impacts things in the short-term (losing DS9, etc.), most relations seem to have thawed by the present (Klingons allowing wormhole access) and most of the people we see seem to be doing well in the future (Nog, Julian, Jadzia etc.). I think that the latter material is there for dramatic reasons -- to emphasize that while *everyone* takes Sisko's death hard, it is only Jake for whom the wound is permanent, and life (eventually) goes on for the rest of the quadrant while for Jake things stand still.

2. As Robert says, I don't think we actually are necessarily meant to view Jake as heroic here, and as you said Jake doesn't seem to have a Starfleet oath. I get that argument and I'm almost fine with it as massive tragedy -- that Jake wipes out an entire future as the result of personal loss. However it is hard to understand his attitude with Melanie in that case. He does not *act* like he is about to wipe out her existence throughout the episode, and his gift of the book and his advice to look around, etc., don't fit with her never having a chance to read it or look around. So it's not just "Jake is ethically wrong" but that his behaviour doesn't seem to make sense given what he is doing, and also that the episode invests a lot of time and emotion in his interactions with this woman he's apparently about to wipe out.

Exactly Chrome. You've stolen my post! :-)

Jake should be commended for restoring the timeline (the ONE timeline, just like it all trek to include JJ's addition.)

@Luke - I don't TOTALLY blame present Janeway for Admiral Janeway's actions. That said, it's a little different when the thing from the future you are taking advantage of is your own knowledge and tech that you went back in time to give yourself.

Though I suppose one COULD make the case that Captain Janeway wanted to use the future advantage to hit the Borg, not get the crew home. That was an afterthought. That does make it less selfish I suppose. But they could have done both. Destroy the hub and not wipe out 16 years of Voyager's journey. I don't know. I come down very iffy about it.

This episode is pure perfection. Tears and shivers.

Although I love this episode and agree it is one of the best of DS9, it's since been surpassed by other singular episodes of other shows as what I would consider "The best hour of Television ever". For me they are "The Constant", from "Lost", and "Ozymandias" from "Breaking Bad". The latter was quite probably one of the singular most heart stopping Television outings I've ever had. I didn't sleep that night after watching it.

I rewatch "The Visitor" quite often. Probably the single elements that drag it down for me, are the elderly makeup on Dax and Bashir. Whilst their performances were fantastic, it was quite obvious they were wearing makeup. Maybe Westmore had a day off?

For all those dissing Jake for "resetting" the timeline, especially with regard to his wife and new found fan, I think you need to view this from possibly a "Tuvix" argument. Much like Janeway decision to "split" Tuvix to save Tuvok and Neelix, Jake is not just being selfish here, he's saving his dad as well.

Also, his new fan won't even know anything happened. ... and probably won't ever be his fan :-)

Pretty clear cut decision I think. I actually think it would have been selfish for Jake NOT to revert the timeline.

But why bother giving his fan a book of his she won't get a chance to read, and life advice she won't have time to implement before she ceases to exist? It's not just Jake's decision, it's the way his behavior toward Melanie doesn't seem to fit with what he's doing.

"But why bother giving his fan a book of his she won't get a chance to read, and life advice she won't have time to implement before she ceases to exist? It's not just Jake's decision, it's the way his behavior toward Melanie doesn't seem to fit with what he's doing."

Makes the episode kind of sardonic, right? He even says that if she had come on any other day he'd have refused to see her. And yet it's not like he only planned this the day before; it was years in the making. So why was that day in particular so special? Because it was the only day where if he told her everything she'd never have a chance to tell anyone. He knew for a fact she was going to cease to exist right after she left, and so it was like giving her a last request before her execution. This isn't how it comes across in Jake's energy and I don't think it was the script's intention, but damn, that's pretty much what it is.

I guess one could argue that he knew he'd be dead and so no one would be able to stop him at that point, in which case that timeline would continue and the reset timeline would branch off somewhere else. Meh.

"Makes the episode kind of sardonic, right? He even says that if she had come on any other day he'd have refused to see her. And yet it's not like he only planned this the day before; it was years in the making. So why was that day in particular so special? Because it was the only day where if he told her everything she'd never have a chance to tell anyone. He knew for a fact she was going to cease to exist right after she left, and so it was like giving her a last request before her execution. This isn't how it comes across in Jake's energy and I don't think it was the script's intention, but damn, that's pretty much what it is."

Right? That's the only read that I can understand. What's even more amazing is that Melanie goes along with this, which either indicates:

1) that she does not actually understand what he is telling her -- she seems to grasp that he is going to get his father back somehow, but has not been able to process what that means *for her*, or
2) she is so in awe of the story that Jake has spun for her -- which, being a fan of his, she would be -- and is so honoured that she is the one person who gets to know what fate lies in store (or, rather, doesn't lie in store) that she does not care that she is about to cease to exist.

The latter is particularly interesting in light of his "You should read more" (and not hold Jake in the esteem she does as an artist) comments. His life advice that she should stick her head around and look at the world is basically advice to live the next few hours as well as the ironic statement that her life is over, which she, whom we gather is something like a stalker essentially in love with her favourite author, maybe finds *romantic*. And maybe this is ultimately a parallel to Jake, who never takes his father's advice, or, when he does, it is only to write a set of stories which no one is expected to read while he waits for the day where he can burn himself on the altar of his attachment to his father. What is Anselem actually about, one wonders? Maybe it's about self-destruction for love -- love for father, love for art, love for the "nobility" of self-destruction for love.... Yeah, I think Melanie should have read more.

It's possible the writers considered there to be two timelines; one where Jake will pass away at an old age and leave behind a legacy. Then there's the main timeline which we all know and love where the future we see here never happens.

I know multiple timelines goes against the way time travel works in most Trek, but this story isn't using typical time travel, and it's not uncommon for writers to disagree on how time travel works.

You could also look at like the TNG episode "Parallels" where there are numerous realities, and making changes in one doesn't necessarily eliminate that reality.

Alright... I had to look up "sardonic" :-)

I think Jake was just being nice to her... and we needed her to tell the story you know.

First, I would say the fact Jake studied Quantum Mechanics presupposes his understanding of multiple "realities" existing. This reality is not tied directly to his existence or death - Melanie will continue to live, and Jake will be dead, but Sisko will be returned to "Normal" space and a separate tangent will continue.

Second, while this is an absolutely amazing episode for Star Trek and I would say in the Top Five, I find it interesting the reviewer says this is the first episode of Trek to move he/she to tears. The Inner Light precedes this episode by years, and is equally as amazing. I still remember watching it when it first aired (and right before Best of Both Worlds Pt 1). Picard's revelation at the end that he truly is living someone else's life; Picard playing his flute to honor a life and a civilization that both was and wasn't his, and the song echoing through the endless cold emptiness of space while the Enterprise flies along.... Yea.

I can't help but feel this episode draws a very split opinion and I wonder why that is. To me this is among the best episodes of anything I've ever watched because of the emotion it draws out and the amazing performances and writing.

But if the story doesn't draw emotion out of you, I can easily see why you wouldn't like this one. Maybe the father-son dynamic doesn't do anything for you.

I share Jammer's comment that to the best of my recollection, this is the first episode of anything that brought me to tears. This was especially notable given that for many years I was very stoic and even for a period of my childhood tried to deny my emotions not unlike the kid from Hero Worship.

This episode first aired (again, to the best of my recollection) a few months after my father had a heart attack (and thankfully survived). I don't recall connecting the two in my head at the time, but in retrospect, I believe that was a huge factor. Father-figure moments in media have always been very emotional to me, and I can't recall if that only started that year.

This episode made me cry in 1995 in the final act as a son, and now, 20(+) years later, makes me cry in the third or fourth acts during Ben's two visits with TonyTodd-Jake before the last one, it makes me cry as a father.

I can't agree with the person who said Brooks missed the mark in some points on this episode. Both his and Tood's performances are amazingly on point. Having just watched it again, Todd wowed me with how he even brought in elements of Lofton's Jake that I recognized. Maybe some of that was the writers doing a good job writing for old Jake consistently with how they write young jake, I don't know. Maybe even the director. But as for Brooks, his meeting with Jake and wife has great moments. His joy and seeing Jake has a wife. When the wife indicates she's going to leave and he silently communicates that he agrees... The eagerness of his plea - "TALK to me! I've missed so much!" and his comment about grandchildren. Jake has missed his father for 7 years. While for Sisko this is just moments after he last saw Jake. He hasn't suffered 7 years without a son. He isn't feeling a loss, so the way he smirks and says the grandchildren line is just like he would have half-joked with Jake as a child. He's happy to see his son is growing up and doing well for himself. He's proud, not sad. Just as he should be. Jake is sad because he's had 7 years of missing his father.

Todd does such an amazing job (knowing his range) of portraying Jake. In the aforementioned scene with Ben, Jake and wife, Todd has this amazing youthful joy and excitement and is so reminiscent of Lofton's young eager jake. It's far cry from his stern, angry and even haunting other characters. When Sisko disappears that time, Todd's face snaps from happy to shocked, to crushed in an instant and it's just so perfect.

This episode, to me is an example of how technobabble and reset buttons aren't the be all and end all of bad episodes. They are fine if they serve a good story and are done right. That said, watching the episode 20 years later, I do finally think it's a little sad that the whole story is effectively moot, and if I were going to change one thing about the episode, it would be how quickly we snap back to the present and go from the super sad future moment to "oh. Sisko avoided the blast and everything's fine." I don't recall having a problem with it in 1995, but now it takes me out of the sad moment too quickly, and while it's perhaps implied that it's not a true reset and that Ben Sisko may actually retain his memories of the events, we don't see any epilogue suggesting any lasting effects.

That said, the reason the reset button is fine in this episode (besides the aforementioned possibility it's not quite a full reset) is because the plot IS the reset. The plot is Jake seeking a way to make it so nothing ever happened. That's not a byproduct, that's the goal. Secondly, although what we see isn't "canon" of what happened, we still see what would presumably be a relatively accurate future of what Jake or Nog might accomplish in their careers and lives, and that's a nice glimpse into the future of all the characters that we don't get in the "real" timeline during the course of the series, even if it isn't "real".

And the technobabble isn't the solution to the episode. In fact, the solution to the episode is a non-technobabble analogy - the elastic band. So this isn't an episode where they "re-modulate the matter compensators" and the enemy ship explodes. They come with with a somewhat plausible laymen-explanation for the phenomenon.

Final off-topic note: To the person who commented (years ago now) about Jake's Bajoran wife being black and also all of the women Ben dated being black, I understand (I don't know that much about his personal life) that Avery Brooks is or was a very staunch black-rights advocate (e.g. being strongly behind the flash-back 1920s racism episode) and I wonder if he had any say in wanting Ben (or Jake) to find love with a strong black woman. Maybe I'm overthinking it, but I wonder if that had anything to do with it.

What a powerful, moving episode. I usually am disinclined to heap praise on episodes that show an alternate future we all know is going to be wiped out by the end of a Trek episode, but this is so well written and acted that it is even more than the sum of its parts (and its parts ain't that bad to begin with).

As for the commenter who says it's 'racist' to have a black Bajoran be Jake's wife, I really can't understand his or her complaint. We never saw a black Vulcan before Tuvok. Someone has to be the first. It's odd to hear someone say it's racist to be inclusive of other races...

I really enjoyed this episode the first time, but subsequent viewings leave me sort of cold.

I guess the first time, a small part of me thought there might be bigger consequences. Obviously, Ben is not going to be gone for good, but maybe some other consequences. Having seen the series through a couple times, one could argue that a lot is different in the "real" timeline that Jake restores.

Other commenters have mentioned some of my issues with the episode, such as Jake's lack of concern for altering decades of history. Of course, any time when our main character(s) encounter some temporal issue, we the viewers know that they will correct it (for the most part). I always get the impression that the timeline is meant as a single one (there can be only one!). Our main characters are almost always fully driven to "fix" the timeline to how it "should be" or was "meant to be." This episode is less about the time/subspace travel and more about the characters, and that is fine.

The other issue I have on subsequent viewings that no one mentioned exactly is the idea that Jake would be so driven to fix everything. Obviously losing his father is painful and the visits are not helpful to getting over it (though he seems to get by for a while - he writes, he's married, etc.). I am just not sure that Ben and Jake seem close enough to justify so much emotional plotting.

I feel like over the course of the series, we are TOLD Ben and Jake are super close more than we ever really see it. We are essentially told that because Ben's wife/Jake's mom is dead, they are closer. Maybe, but there are countless instances where they do not seem very close (some of which were mentioned in comments above).

Take the episode where Ben and Jake build the ship in space. They do not seem very close, but plot-plot-plot and they are so close at the end. Ironically, in this episode we are commenting on, Jake is busy writing and doesn't care much about his father's excitement in the wormhole phenomenon. Of course, this is part of what leads to the "put your head up" statement, but Jake cannot take that advice, as he never met his future self or lived to see his father disappear, after the timeline is restored (or the accident is prevented or whatever).

Of course there are other moments in the series, SPOILER like Jake staying on DS9 during Dominion occupation for example SPOILER, which only further the notion that they are not as close as the writers or this plot want us to believe. Ben and Jake are close when the plot wants it, and maybe more so in Ben's mind than Jake's usually.

This is why the scene with Jake weeping over his father in sickbay just seemed flat in the 2nd and later viewings. Sure, he is torn up over his father's death, but I just never bought that they had that kind of relationship. Maybe losing Ben made Jake realize how much his father meant to him (or should have). That feeds back into the "put your head up" notion. If only there had been lasting consequences from this, where they could remember and feel closer, but no.

I liked Todd's performance and Lofton is better than usual. Brooks is hammy in moments, but I have just accepted that is Ben Sisko. I know people in real life who always seem to be a little over-the-top like that. The writing is decent enough and it is a nice change-of-pace after TWOTW and given the stuff coming in later seasons.

Probably 4 stars on 1st viewing, 3 in subsequent ones.

I was doing my first rewatch of this series and got to this episode about a week after my father passed away. I thought I could deal, there were, afterall really good episodes to get to. It destroyed me. Now, my parents had been seperated, and I only saw my Dad every two weeks, and it had actually been less frequent the last six months. I was 2, distracted by other things. I woulda wiped out history to change things. As time goes on maybe I'd be less inclined, but if I had the kinda constant reminders that Jake did, I would probably still do it. As long as you love the person who was lost and it over rules any animosity, you're gonna want to change history to get them back.

I will never watch this objectively. I will bever not identify with this episode 100%, paradoxes, plot holes, lack of consequences be damned.

Tch, I was 21* not 2. Damn tiny phone keypad.

For those who have a problem with the timeline, quantum physics postulates the existence of every possible universe existing simultaneously

Very similar to "A'' Good Things", with the older version of the crew back on the Defiant/Enterprise in the future.

The original Star Wars was released when I was in school for a year in Europe. This was before the days when movies were released almost simultenously worldwide, so I didn't get to see it until several months later. By that time, every magazine I'd ever read, and every friend I talked to on the phone, made me think that finally seeing it was going to be an amazing, life-changing experience. And then I watched it and realized as I did that I was daring the movie to blow me away, but it really didn't. I expected too much.

I didn't watch DS9 on first run. I'm just bingewatching the series for the first time, and I love it. Intricate serial plots, multifaceted and deliciously flawed characters, and ambiguous endings. I love all that stuff. So I had read a lot about The Visitor before actually watching it, knowing that many reviewers believe it to be the finest DS9 episode ever, comparing it to The Inner Light, which I consider to be one of the finest television episodes of any series, ever.

So I was really disappointed to be disappointed. I thought maybe it was the Star Wars thing over again - maybe I was just expecting to much. So I rewatched it and just couldn't get past my dislike for so much of this. Leaden acting, unabashed attempts to jerk the tears out of the viewer... one of the reasons Inner Light was so good is that our emotions were stirred as the natural consequence of the way the plot developed - I never got the sense that as a viewer I was being manipulated. In comparison, the Visitor is a hokey schlockey oozing mountain of saccaharine goo.

Beyond that, although I know it's been debated and rationalized in the comments, I just can't feel much sympathy for a character who would intentionally wipe out the existence of events that he experienced and people he knew for nearly a lifetime because he has to get his dad back. Someone earlier mentioned that the episode is implausible because no writer would ever give an unpublished manuscript to another aspiring writer for fear of plagiarism. But there was no risk here. Once Jake got his dad back - Melanie would never exist.

I found this to be heavy-handed and trite. Just like Star Wars, Episode IV. Now, the Empire Strikes Back? - another story. :)

Watched this again last night. It's so good. Easily in the top 3 DS9 episodes for a reason.

However I never realized how kind of borderline psycho and pushy the girl kind of is in this:

1) She's out in the swamp, in the rain, to try and find Old Jake's house uninvited. By future standards this might be cool but if somebody did that today well it has STALKER written all over it haha.

2) Old Jake is trying to be nice and says he doesn't really have time to tell her his whole story, where she immediately responds with something like "OH I HAVE TIME!" It's like, Lady maybe he doesn't want to be bothered in the middle of the night right now?

3) Towards the end Old Jake offers her a copy of his new unpublished works- which would be a huge honor to any aspiring writer- but instead she grabs his handwritten copy and says she wants those instead. Well of course, they're only worth shitloads more haha.

@ JohnC:

"Melanie would never exist. "

Sure she would, she just wouldn't have Jake's manuscript in this timeline.

I am so sorry but I was bored to tears watching this. I couldn't get past the first 15-20 minutes. I decided I would watch Voyager instead.

Say I have bad taste, or I'm immature or whatever but this was absolutely boring and pointless and rather a waste.

How hypocritical Jammer critiques Voyager and Enterprise and even TNG for sci fi anomalies yet apparently this episode whose whole premise is based on an anomaly merits five stars.

The first scene was ridiculous the woman interviewer actually forgets Jake's books after she reads them to read them again? You can't be serious I mean really.

Character piece my a**.

I'm a little further than in the middle of a Complete Star Trek rewatch marathon with 3 to 5 episodes each day with my girlfriend, who I desperately wanted to get hooked. So far everything ok, she really enjoys it. The rewatch is in chronological stardate order, so right now we switch between VGR and DS9.

Always trying to be a little ahead of schedule, to be able to say to my loved one: tataaa, now watch THIS, I recently found this site. And the latest, sorry man: heartless entry by Caedus urged me to do my first comment on Jammer's.

The point I want to make is: we haven't even yet watched this episode together. It will happen in 3 days or so. But even just the mention of it, and reading the other comments, how it made you people cry, brought back the tears I remember crying when I first watched this back in the 90s. I cried like a baby, and always do when I just think about it. I just wanted to point out that this imho the most heartbreaking episode of any TV.show ever made. I am very curious how the rewatch will hit me.

Obviously this episode has something, because I wanted to comment on it right after watching it instead of after watching the whole series. But I was shocked to see the 4-star rating. I did not like this one at all.

I didn't think this was a reset button episode until we got to the point where they turn the station over to the Kligons, and even then it didn't really stick. At the start of the episode I felt like we were doing a flash forward episode to see how Jake had been a writer and to have him tell us a DS9 story from his perspective. He's a secondary cast member, so it made sense that they could show his life in old age without spoiling much else about the cast. His stinger about "the day my father died" didn't phase me. I figured it was going to be one of those fake out where Sisko died for a moment and then was brought back with magic powers or because of some alien influence on Jake.

When that theory was out of the way, I thought they were using the opportunity to skip us forward a year in the DS9 timeline. Sisko would be brought back in time when he reappears almost a year later, and the rest of the episode will show us how things have progressed with the Dominion, Cardassia, and the Klingons over the course of the year Sisko was missing. It also would allow Nog's Starfleet career thing to progress a bit. But then they left the station, so that definitely wasn't it.

At this point, I knew they were either going to snap us back to the beginning OR I had an alternate theory where the story we were seeing wasn't reality but rather Jake's story that he had written in universe. It'd end with the elder Jake wasting his life on obsession and then we'd cut away to young Jake and Sisko in their home with Sisko reading the book.

And I would have been more fine with all that. But no, it' s a pure reset button. And that's why I don't think you can compare it to "The Inner Light".

Everything that happened in TIL happened to the character who went back to the "old timeline". Even though those people were long dead and Picard was really just lying on the floor of the bridge the whole time, Picard lived through the whole 30+ years. He has those memories and experiences, as we see with the flute. It's
"reset" but still carries forward. The people accomplished their goal of telling their story, and Picard is left with a lifetime of memories to boot.

And that's probably why "The Visitor"s ending undermines it so much fro me. I think I'd think better of this if Jake was the one who retained those memories, at least partially. But he doesn't. Sisko is the one sent back in time, and while he has memories of the old timeline, they're meaningless

I think the problem that reset button episodes like this have is not just that what happens doesn't matter, it's that so often they play out in such radically different futures as to not even let us get insight into the characters involved. They act the way they do to further this one plot, because they're going to be undone by the end anyway, who care about furthering their characterization.

All that plus, it seems like the Galaxy fared way better with Sisko dead, all things considered. Not an implication I'm particularly fond of.

Tony Todd lived a somewhat-troubled young life (Wash DC poverty, unspecified familial trouble, transplanted from parents to live with his aunt in urban Connecticut) -- he was steered into church, Boy Scouts, cinema and theater by his surrogate mother figure (Clara), and returned to Connecticut post-grad-school to teach drama for a while.

When his aunt died, Todd went into a multi-month depression, and withdrew from acting. This DS9 role was the first post-hiatus job he considered taking; after reading the child-continuing-without-his-parent script, he said yes, and brought much of his emotion into the performance, as sort of grieving homage to the woman.

I guess that's what makes The Visitor resonate so strongly with me -- the wrenching pain and monomaniacal fixation of a boy growing up without (and unable to let go of) his father. I agree that these interludes occasionally verge on melodrama, and that Avery Brooks' interpretation is uneven (weaker early on, strongest in the episode's final moments), but it is no less powerful for those wavering notes. Becoming a father myself has only made the episode's gut-punch that much stronger in subsequent decades.

Some might make the (valid) observation that "the emotionally-wrenching transformative timeline that never was" is an overused Trek trope. But, for my money, this one does it just as well as Inner Light, and just possibly moreso. Belongs right up there with Duet, Family, Pale Moonlight, etc.

Definitely my favorite episode of DS9, and most of Trek in general. Loved it.

@Luke

>Sisko is the one sent back in time, and while he has memories of the old timeline, they're meaningless.

Meaningless? That he found out so much about his son, the kind of person he is and will likely become? The dreams he clearly has in him in his youth? Meaningless? Well, that seems to me to be a bit more problem with the interpretation than the source material; after all who are any of us (other than the original writer) to decide what is "meaningless" for another, even for a fictional story character?

>All that plus, it seems like the Galaxy fared way better with Sisko dead, all things considered. Not an implication I'm particularly fond of.

Meh. You can't say or know that. It's so completely chaotic and quantum that who knows how the next 100 years would have turned out, or the hundred after that. This is WMG and epileptic trees without even the thinnest of bases to jump off of.

> Definitely my favorite episode of DS9, and most of Trek in general. Loved it.

I concur.

> Becoming a father myself has only made the episode's gut-punch that much stronger in subsequent decades.

I know the sentiment. I missed DS9 during its original run and only watched it relatively recently, after having a son of my own.

It really moved me like no other Trek episode, in a very similar way to The Inner Light.

@K9T

Actually, I think Luke has a point about Sisko's retention of the memories of this episode being useless. In the finale, Sisko leaves Jake *again*, and it doesn't seem like Sisko has to deal with any consequences because of it because Sisko is living in nonlinear time with the Prophets.

If Jake had retained the memories of this episode somehow, it would've been much more powerful for the series' conclusion because Jake would already be mentally prepared for losing his father as well as the accompanying pitfalls he might fall into if he isn't careful.

The thing is, this episode isn't about Jake, it's about Benjamin's relationship with him. We're getting everything from Jake's POV but the important moments are the ones when he's reunited with his father and we see Sisko's reactions to his life. In the end Sisko does seem to retain the memories of what could have happened, but of course won't because in this timeline he doesn't get zapped. The takeaway isn't that none of it mattered; on the contrary, without this 'vision' (if you want to call it that) he wouldn't have likely ever known how much Jake really needed him. And more to the point, w wouldn't have gotten to see just how much this family needs each other. Not that much attention was given to Jake's perspective on losing his mother, and actually not all that much past "Emissary" was given to us to show Sisko's mental state about it. At a few major turning points we see Benjamin has progressed, but we don't see it as it goes along. In Jake's case we get more or less nothing, excepting the mirror universe stuff, so it's very good for us to see Jake in somewhat of a similar situation to what Benjamin was going through at the onset of the series after having lost Jennifer.

@Peter G.

"The takeaway isn't that none of it mattered; on the contrary, without this 'vision' (if you want to call it that) he wouldn't have likely ever known how much Jake really needed him. And more to the point, w wouldn't have gotten to see just how much this family needs each other. "

That just speaks to my point that it makes the finale weaker. If the family needed each other so much, aren't the Prophets/Sisko being incredibly selfish by leaving Jake alone? I'd like to think there's some sort of divine wisdom to the Prophet's actions, but episodes like this remind me just how bad Sisko is being manipulated by them.

Also, did Sisko really need this episode to be reminded how much he needed to be with Jake? He seemed like a great father up to this point.

Sorry, Chrome, but I guess that sounds like a bit of a sentimental nitpick to me. You're judging the strength of this episode on the grounds of whether you think the prophets were 'nice' by taking Benjamin away from Jake? We don't even know what kinds of interactions they'll be able to have anyhow once Sisko is with the prophets, and moreover, he now has Kasidy in the family to care for him. Those points aside, I don't even see why the prophets have to be held to a 2017 human standard of "unselfish" in order to be justified in their choice of outcomes. They can see the future, so whatever else you might suspect of their morals, you can't say they didn't care what happened to Jake; they have to care since the Emissary is one of them, and he cares. The finale seems to give an optimistic outlook for Jake, and I'd suggest not looking for reasons to decide he got screwed somehow when none are in evidence.

As for why Sisko 'needed' this episode - that is a strange question. You might ask why the audience needed it, which is a far more pertinent question, and even that supposes that all episodes are programmed based on audience need rather than simply the quality of script ideas turned in.

"As for why Sisko 'needed' this episode - that is a strange question. You might ask why the audience needed it, which is a far more pertinent question, and even that supposes that all episodes are programmed based on audience need rather than simply the quality of script ideas turned in."

But you're just rephrasing the question. The audience has seen Sisko to really care about his son make efforts to be close with him before this episode. If the message is simply that Ben and Jake are happier together, then we, the audience, already know that and have learned nothing from this outing.

Incidentally, no need to apologize to me unless you wrote this episode, in which case apology accepted.

I can't imagine what life must've been like for poor Jake, never knowing if his ghost dad was going to pop up when he's taking a dump or pleasuring himself. Stressful.

I knew "The Visitor" was a special episode after about 20 mins. into it. After seeing it in its entirety, it's easily the best DS9 episode I've seen and up there among the best in the Trek cannon.

I never thought much of Lofton as an actor but seeing him about to cry when Capt. Sisko reappeared and was on the bed in sickbay nearly brought a tear to my eye -- had not felt like that in years. Same thing again as Ben Sisko is holding Jake and saying "Promise me!"

The technobabble about why Ben Sisko is caught in time and how they manage to avoid the energy discharge in the end is a plot device and isn't meant for greater scrutiny. This is about the relationship between a father and his son and I can't think of a better show to illustrate the relationship.

How this episode managed to evoke these kinds of emotions in me is unbelievable. My dad is in his 80s and has health issues now and then and it made me think long and hard about our relationship.

Kind of hard to believe Nog became a StarFleet commander -- but he didn't grow an inch and still seemed like the annoying little kid.

"The Visitor" benefits from really guest actors -- it's like in "The City on the Edge of Forever" where Joan Collins and Shatner build up a romance very naturally. Here Todd and the actress playing the visitor really strike the right dynamic between an old man wanting to tell his story and the fascinated young lady eager to learn about his writing.

Great review by Jammer - this episode is "true magic" - and hard to write a review to do it justice. One has to see it to experience it. It takes the perfect direction and writing to incorporate the flashbacks well and evoke the emotions it did.

"The VIsitor" easily deserves a 4-star rating. Great to see DS9 try something very different and pull it off. Fantastic episode -- these ones don't come along very often.

In regards to much earlier comments near the top from Elliott, I find it suspect that when a black character has a black girlfriend, some people find this "racial casting", yet even though Picard only got with white women, it's just seen as normal.

Jammer nailed it. "The Visitor" is a four star show, and one of the most moving pieces of television I've ever seen. It uses technobabble to tell a human story, with human emotions. Episodes like these are why I keep re-watching Star Trek even with prestige dramas like The Wire. They're remarkable, but very few have moved me the way "The Visitor" does.

"It's completely absorbing from beginning to end"

It's just awful. Slow, terrible acting from Tony Todd, no reason to be emotionally invested, as you know none of it is going to matter. This is one I skip.

@deelab-Why watch Star Trek then? The vast majority of episodes are standalones, with no impact on the status quo or characters at large. Does "The City on the Edge of Forever" have any tension just because you know Kirk's not going to get stranded in the 30s?

Thank God Elliott is back for this one. It doesn't come close to Inner Light. There is just too much goofiness to take this episode serious. Pretty Girl wanders through rain to meet old man who immediately let's her in and starts telling his life story? The random comebacks conveniently timed in Jake's life? The elastic theory? It's all written too get this story where it must be, but it never makes sense on its own. Nice to see an alternate timeline, but this one is mediocre at best. 1.5 stars.

Am I the only one seeing similarities to Enterprise "Twilight" episode?
I like both but Visitor is the better. It is good storytelling good acting, good editing. Tragic and happy. Did Sisko remember whats happened? It a little bit open.

Even if I am not overwhelmed , one of the better Episodes worth to be reviewed a couple of times.

I don’t understand all the negative comments about Nog becoming a Captain. It’s been well established that he’s exceptionally smart and desires to persue a Starfleet career. So... 30/40 years later, why would this not be possible? Oh, because he looks different or because he’s short. What does that say about you? Think about that.

I have nothing to add from my previous comment, except for the fact that this episode manages to maintain the emotional impact every time, just like "The Inner Light". While it's not quite as good, it's still one of the best Trek episodes ever produced.

4 stars.

Look at the edgelords pretending they didn't like this episode lol.

Edgelords? Has the internet become Highlander? If you don’t agree with someone, please go ahead and give them a counterargument before busting out the Urban Dictionary on us.

Teaser : ***, 5%

A stormy evening in the bayou, a table full of familiar Ben Sisko artefacts, a mysterious gadget and an aged Tony Todd who, like all old people, takes his medicine. There's a chime at the door and a young woman appears. She tells the old man (“Jake Sisko, the writer”) that she *too* would like to wear horrible vests, I mean be a writer. She's a fan Jake's, having read all TWO of his published books with gusto. Jake wants to make sure we know he's old, so he says a lot of things like “when you get to be my age...” and drinks tea by the fire. Little Miss Exposition fills in some of the blanks, indicating that Jake stopped writing when he was 40, and she wants to know what it was that happened.

JAKE SR: If you had shown up yesterday or the day before, or a week ago, I would have said no and sent you on your way. But here you are, today of all days, and somehow it seems like the right time for me to finally tell this story.

He explains that when he was 18 (in other words, during the “present” of DS9), the “worst thing that could happen to a young man” happened—his father died. … You'll forgive me, dear readers, for raising an eyebrow at this assertion. Losing a father as a young adult is tragic, don't get me wrong—my father disappeared when I was 23. A good friend of mine lost his to cancer when he was a teenager. My step-father saw his father die of a heart-attack when he was only 25. So please don't accuse me of lacking empathy if you take exception to what I write here: there are FAR worse things that can happen to a young person than losing a parent. Eighteen-year-old men have their bodies and minds destroyed fighting in unjust wars all the time. Eighteen-year-old men all over the world are actually parents themselves—and lose their own children to disease and famine. Eighteen-year-old men live with AIDS, with cancer, with extreme poverty, under the yoke of despotic governments, are dragged to death for being gay or transgender— I am willing to go on this little journey with you Jake, but hyperbole is not a writer's ally.

Act 1 : ***, 17%

Jake explains to the young woman, Melanie, that he and Sisko were very close. She already knows this, being a dutiful fangirl, and has read his biography (twice in one night?!).

We flash back to the present, where young Jake is working on a short story. In keeping with his penchant for field trips, Sisko decides they need a little break. Instead of camping with Ferengi or building wooden space ships, this time Sisko wants to take Jake to the GQ to watch the wormhole do some science. You know Sisko, it's possible to take a family holiday without bringing your son into the domain of shapeshifting lunatics.

SISKO: Jake, this only happens once every fifty years. You will never forgive yourself if you miss it.

Erm...didn't the wormhole appear only three years ago? Did I miss something? What this scene is actually about is repeating that fatherly advice from “Explorers.” In that episode, Jake said, “Well, I've heard that you can only write about what you've experienced. And you've got to admit, Deep Space Nine is a pretty good place to get experience.” And here, Sisko says, “I'm no writer, but if I were, it seems to me I'd want to poke my head up once in a while and take a look around, see what's going on.” Yes. How in the world is Jake going to write his short stories about Maquis love triangles if he doesn't see the wormhole undergo a subspace inversion? How could he LIVE with himself? … I am being slightly unfair. There is definitely something to be said for having a sense of place and a feel for reality when trying to create worlds in writing. If city-boy Tolkien hadn't bothered giving the Shire a genuine air of rurality, or if Sagan didn't pour his intricate knowledge of physics into his writing, something wonderful would lost. But those elements are not the *life*, to borrow Sisko's word, of the stories. The hard part of getting art out of your mind and soul and onto a page, or a canvas, or an instrument is exactly what Jake is doing! Sitting alone, frustrated, crossing out the bad parts, pulling out your hair and agonising over the details. This Hollywood notion that a writer just needs to go out into the world and smell the rivers is so trite. It trivialises the truly exhausting labour that goes into be a successful artist.

Anyway, the plot gods do not approve of these events as technobabble is happening to the Defiant. Sisko heads to the Engine room to see what's going on and Tony Todd's narration tells us that “something” compelled Jake to follow his father there. Okay... Anyway, Dax calls to tell him that he has to do an emergency science thing or the warp core will explode. And they can't eject the thing because...erm...quantum? Well, the story attempts to justify Jake's presence in this scene by having Sisko stand at a console screaming while the untrained teenager rifles through the equipment to find a metal rod of some kind. He hands it to Sisko who explains how he's going to techno solve this crisis. He succeeds, but the plot gods are angered by this insolence and punish them by having the warp core shock both Siskos (at the moment Ben is handing the rod back to Jake). Jake is seemingly fine, but Ben has a little spasm and vanishes.

Time passes, we see a memorial service on the Promenade. The flashback narration is serviced by some effective scenes, especially Dax look after Jake and Quark be uncharacteristically kind. Jake tells Nog that he has decided to head to New Zealand after all, which means the boys will be on earth together while Nog is at the Academy (apparently, he passed the entrance exam which...okay). Jake is trying to sleep in his quarters, when there's a flash of light and Sisko appears there for a couple moments, before vanishing again.

Act 2 : ***.5, 17%

Old Jake tells Melanie that Dax and co. humoured him in searching his quarters for signs of ghosts to no avail. Apparently, he decided not to go to school, choosing instead to putter about the station gambling. In the meantime, fallout from “The Way of the Warrior” is leading to further problems. Bajor—I guess we are to accept that literally *every* Bajoran except Kira had the same thought—Bajor “took it as a sign” that the death of the Emissary meant that the Federation wouldn't be able to protect them from the Klingons. I realise this is Jake's story, but if you're going to raise political issues like this, please think them through. If an American rabbi suddenly died, would Israel feel that the US couldn't protect them from Iran? Stop making the Bajorans look like fucking idiots, please. Thanks. The senior staff want Jake to leave the station along with the many other civilians resettling to other places.

There is a wonderfully-shot scene of Jake and Kira by a window in one of the upper pylons.

JAKE: Please don't make me leave. Not yet. This is my home. When my Dad and I came here this place was just an abandoned shell. He turned it into something. Everywhere I look it's like I see a part of him. If I leave, I won't have anything left of him.

Lofton is doing a decent job with this material, so I won't quibble. On his way back, Sisko appears again—and Jake is actually able to touch him. So, he's taken to the infirmary. It turns out that Sisko has been quantum tech phased or whatever and hasn't experienced the passage of time. He was on the Defiant, then he was in Jake's quarters, and now he's here, despite a year having passed in our world. The smart people try and tech the tech to keep Sisko here, but it's hopeless. Before he vanishes again, Sisko pleads with his son, “I need to know that you're going to be alright.”

In the bayou, Jake tells Melanie that he's dying. I believe this is intended to be tragic, except...so far, we have seen that Jake grew up to be a very old man living in a beautiful house and admired for his brief but exceptional career as a writer. It's sad when anyone dies, but...we are talking about a man who has had a long and meaningful life, right? Maybe he didn't accomplish everything he had hoped. Maybe things could have been a bit better in some ways, but why should I be torn up that a charmed man's life, however imperfect, is going to end soon?

Act 3 : ***.5, 17%

JAKE SR: You must understand, when person my age says he's dying, he's only admitting to the inevitable. Besides, we old people need to remind everyone to pay special attention to us.

Are you kidding me? So, that whole silly line closing out act 2 was just a contrived cut-to-commercial hook? Melanie gets a couple of sentences to explain that she's doing a lot of reading and listening, preparing herself to be a writer. One might even say she's trying to take it all in, have experiences, etc. We'll come back to her.

Jake resumes his story. Eventually, the Klingons were given control over DS9 and we see Jake leaving in a runabout, in a shot reminiscent of his and Sisko's arrival in “Emissary,” but with Ben notably absent. After a few years, Jake finally went to school in New Zealand before moving to the bayou to be near his grandfather (retconned into no longer being dead...except of course, now he's dead). He wrote a successful novel, Anslem, met a Bajoran woman painter (who again has to be a black actress, but we don't need to get into all that again) and married her. Nog has become a Starfleet commander, god help us all, and is visiting Jake for dinner. Apparently, the Klingons taking over the Bajoran sector has kept the Dominion at bay. Hmmm. What's sort of fun about this timeline is that it echoes what we saw in “All Good Things...” when a neutral zone had been established between the Klingons and the Federation. The implication is that whatever cold war resumed after WotW eventually led to the future we saw on TNG.

In the future-future, Jake is dropping teacups and looking not so great. He explains that his younger self continued writing and living his life, until Sisko appeared a third time in his home in the bayou.

Act 4 : ***.5, 17%

Jake introduces Sisko to his wife, taking advantage of what will inevitably be a brief visit, shows off his novels...Jake is very emotional, which is understandable. And he feels guilty...which is kind of ridiculous. Sisko tries to impress upon him that giving up his own life to search for a way to bring Sisko back from this vague tech purgatory would be a waste, then disappears again.

Well, Jake ignored his father, explaining to Melanie how he consulted with Dax, who figured that the wormhole did quantum flux whatever to the two of them, tethering Sisko to Jake via subspace. So, a thirty-seven-year-old Jake went back to school to study subspace mechanics and figure out how to bring Sisko out of purgatory. Okay...he explains that over the course of his returning to school, his wife left him. Mhm. Why? Did Jake's studies in quantum bullshit really take up more of his time than his late-night writing? Was it impossible for Jake and Korena to have kids while he went to school? We are talking about a period of years. People DO go to school, they DO have careers and passions, while still managing to start families, especially in post-scarcity societies. Are we going to get an explanation about what happened? No. We are just supposed to accept that sad things happened.

Well, 50 years into the future of DS9's fourth season, Jake manages to re-assemble the wrinkly old Defiant crew and the Defiant herself, now captained by Nog, dear god. Worf managed to get them access to the wormhole (I guess he reclaimed his honour or something). Jake has set up a tech thingy in Engineering while old-Dax and old-Bashir bicker in the background (I was very surprised they weren't married by this point). Anyway, the tech tech seems to be working, but something goes wrong and Jake is pulled into the milky void of nothingness along with his father. Sisko wants to know what he's missed...where is grand children are, what happened to his son's career. Obviously, he's unhappy with the answers. He begs his son to let the fuck go, to promise and make a better life for himself. Dax is able to pull Jake back to the Defiant, but Sisko is still in purgatory.

Act 5 : ***.5, 17%

I guess Jake explained every last detail of tech tech to Melanie because, when we resume, morning has broken in the bayou. He has her retrieve a collection of new stories from his desk. He honoured Sisko's request by returning to his art. Melanie wants to know why he hasn't published, but he evades, saying once again that there just isn't enough time. He explains the technobabble of his and Ben's subspace link. Sisko is FROZEN in time at the point of the accident. In other words, he only experiences the passage of time when Jake's quantum stuff pulls him into our universe. Jake reasons that when he dies, the connection will be severed and Sisko will be lost in subspace for ever (again, not experiencing the passage of time). Why the techno-magic has anything to do with Jake being alive and not just a rotting corpse isn't explained, but at any rate, he figures that if he “cuts the cord” while Sisko and Jake are physically together, it will hit the reset button. Sure.

Melanie seems horrified that this ancient and successful man will commit suicide at the tender age of 118 or whatever in order to save his father. He repeats his father's dubious advice from the first act, and sends her out to a bright future that he's about to erase from history. Touching. But hey, people are crying and 'cellos are playing, it must be DRAMA.

Jake keeps his vigil, eventually falling asleep. Sisko finally re-appears to greet his elderly son. Sisko is thrilled to see that Jake has written more. He tells his father that he has taken his hemlock. The two Siskos weep together over old Jake's sacrifice...which is effective until you think about it for five seconds. The moment Jake dies, his younger self and Ben will be re-united on the Defiant. So, what is the great tragedy here? So Jakes dies, and Sisko avoids the plot gods' wrath, carrying his memories back to the present.

Episode as Functionary : ***, 10%

Tony Todd is an excellent actor and puts in a splendid performance. Unfortunately, this only brings into sharper relief the fact that it is impossible to accept that he is playing and older Jake Sisko. Jake's character is so thinly-sketched that the only way to try and convince us that Lofton and Todd are portraying the same person is by playing up the superficial elements; they're both writers, they both like Bajoran ladies, they're both tall strapping men, etc. But there's so little substance to the character of Jake, that there isn't any depth to mine, aside from the fact that Jake is Ben's son.

I have read several reviews of this episode to try and discern whence the outpouring of enthusiasm. All cite the fact that this story “explores the relationship between father and son.” Yes...the central relationship of this story is obviously that between parent and child. But what precisely is being explored? What dimension of that relationship is being commented on? What lesson are we to absorb and take with us to our own fathers and sons?

Sisko should have died in the Engine room, but instead he was blessed with the chance to see his son's life unfold in brief flashes. He even got to meet Jake as an elderly man. In the prime of his life, Jake learns that there might be a way to restore his father to a natural existence. Now this is the crux of the whole tragedy. His decision to pursue science and rescue Sisko ends up arresting his entire life and we are NEVER shown why this happened. WHY couldn't Jake get a degree in quantum nonsense and still have a wife? Why couldn't he use his influence as a successful artist and ward of so many Starfleet heroes to task people who were ALREADY scientists to work on the tech tech to save Sisko, and continue his writing? There is simply no reason for this melodramatic choice between living a full, rich life and rescuing Sisko from purgatory.

Moreover, the message is extremely contradictory. The implication from the ending is that old Jake realises that his younger self NEEDS Sisko in his life in order to avoid tragedy. Ignoring for the moment what an insult this is to people who manage to live happy healthy lives despite their parents' deaths, the episode also seems to be saying that the only reason Jake's life was such a waste was because of the subspace ghost-dad issue. This along with the conversation with Melanie seems to suggest that the moral is not to let oneself be weighed down by the past, to pull your nose out from your concerns and smell the roses, to live. But the ending only happens because Jake DIDN'T let his father go. He refused to let go of the past, killing himself to reset the timeline.

And then there's Melanie. Yes, she's our POV character; the lesson for her isn't for her it's for us. But even this aspect to the story is confused. Jake was chastised (gently) in the beginning for spending too much time writing and not enough time living...so that he could be a better man, so that he could be a better writer. Melanie is chastised (gently) for spending too much time listening and experiencing the life of her mentor...so that she will be a better writer? I think? If the lesson is that young people need to let go of their ghosts (Ben for Jake, and Jake for Melanie) and live their own lives, then why does the lesson originate with Sisko, who's trying to pull Jake away from his passion?

I don't want to create the impression that I don't like this episode. I do! The performances are wonderful, the music is lovely, the story has some poignant material and the peak into the future is well-handled. But there are some glaring flaws with the central tragedy which pull me out of the story.

Final Score : ***.5

"peak into the future"

God damn it. You know what I meant.

I may address a few technical points later, but I just had a crazy thought:
SPOILER

What if what happened to Sisko is the shock activated part of his self that is prophet, sending him out of linear time despite being tied to Jake all the while? Maybe he wasn't trapped, exactly, but was in some sort of natural state for an entity of the sort he was born from? I'm reminded of Odo, who while basically human still had some Founder trait activated by a shock.

@Elliott, So first off, I agree about many of the problems with this episode. On some specifics:

Re: Old Jake's claim that the worst thing that can happen to a young man is his father dying: on the one hand, not only do I agree with you, but it's particularly strange given that he lived through his mother dying a 7 years earlier. On the other hand...well, look: Old Jake is a wreck, and is about to tear apart the fabric of reality to fix what happened to Ben. Hyperbole may not be a writer's friend, but it may be the only way Jake can live with himself for the scale of his inability to get over Ben's death, and the lengths he'll go to restore it.

"Maybe things could have been a bit better in some ways, but why should I be torn up that a charmed man's life, however imperfect, is going to end soon?"

But there's the rub. Why should Jake spend his whole existence caring about saving his father rather than moving on with his life? Granted, Ben was younger than Jake is in the bayou. But Jake puts aside not only his own life, but possibly many other lives, because of his devotion to this one figure, and his tragedy. And Melanie is similarly obsessed with Jake -- wherein she has attached to him as a writer, to the point where the successful end to his stories/y is all she cares about in the universe. They need perspective, of course, but --

Of course, the act 2/act 3 commercial hook was actually Jake revealing the truth and then foksily claiming that it was a red herring, since he is planning on dying this very night. It's annoying on first watch, but it's actually clever playing with structure, in a way.

---

OK, those are some thoughts along the way. I think the most glaring flaw in the episode is that it seems to not commit fully to what its obvious implication is -- that Jake is erasing the whole future out of existence, *including Melanie*, who might not even be born in the new timeline (given her apparent age). Melanie even walks away from Old Jake understanding that this is what he's doing, and she's so taken with his story that she seems to accept it -- even though she's also, contradictorily, given life advice she won't get to take, and given a book she won't have time to read.

The other interpretation of this is that there is actually a timeline split that happens, so that Melanie will continue her life AND in another timeline Ben will be saved. But this interpretation somewhat blunts the tragedy, because what, then, is being sacrificed? Well, Jake's life, but he's an old man, as you say. But moreover, there's nothing in this episode to suggest this interpretation. I don't really think that there are any instances in past episodes which suggest that time travel creates a branching off and splitting off into distinct timelines -- though I think it comes up in SF sometimes.

But no matter what, we're not supposed to over-invest in this timeline when the Klingons and the Federation are at war, which suggests that we know it's not going to be the "real one." We make of that what we will.

---

All right. So what is this episode about?

Jake loses his father, and after a very painful mourning process, filled with all sorts of reminders of his father's role in his life and in the world, starts to move on. But his father keeps coming back. His father is in purgatory, and he cannot stop getting reminders of him. He cannot let him go. So this is a story about being haunted by grief -- and also haunted by the question of whether there is anything he could have done differently. His father is "gone," but he's not fully gone. If Jake can figure out what he should have done years ago, his father will come back.

So the tragedy is specifically about an inability to move on. So then the question comes up of what it is that is tragic about what we see. One is that Jake ends up prioritizing saving Ben over everything else. That's a big factor, and his obsession with this one aspect of his life ends up overshadowing everything else. I think that the idea that Jake could have a full, rich life even while studying quantum wormhole bullshit stuff is completely true. But it's also clear why the Jake we see in this episode couldn't do this. This is a guy who (probably) is going to erase the whole world, including the young woman who worships him, to save his father, and to additionally wipe out the pain of his passing. It's not hard to imagine why this marriage would fail, if that is his attitude; at some point his wife probably realized that Jake really will prioritize Ben over everything else in his life. Not just focus on Ben, but actually allow it all to wipe it out.

So Jake manages to superficially maintain an outwardly successful life, but inside he basically gets hollowed out with concern for his father, in an inversion of what is supposed to be the parent-child relationship. And that's why his dying an old man is tragic. It's true that his life was outwardly charmed, but inwardly something broke and he ceased living for himself, entirely. He gave up on his own life. He managed to maintain friendships apparently and has a comfortable living space, but none of that seems to fully matter to him.

And the thing is, *this is also about Jake being a writer*. Now you may call bullshit on this as an actual description of being a writer, and I certainly understand if you do, and I don't claim to any greater knowledge of it. But the basic problem of Jake's life is that the story of Jake and Ben *didn't have an ending*. Jake absolutely cannot move past it until he figures out the ending to this central story of his life, and he eventually drops absolutely every other element to his life until he figures it out. It's only once he realizes the necessary end -- that once the son is older than the father, having hollowed out his life for him, he sacrifices himself for his father, in a completed inverse of the traditional parent/child relationship, and also gives his younger self another change in the process -- that he is able to live his own life again. He starts writing his own stories, and he entertains a young visitor. He lives his life as if it were going to continue, because he finally can set down his masterwork, the novel of the devoted son whose love for his father would not stop nagging him. And only then can he actually follow the advice of his father, once he knows that it's too late to follow it in the long-term. He passes on himself as a cautionary tale, and gives Melanie a few hours of appreciating life (or his stories, which are maybe the same thing) before her existence gets wiped away at the altar of the story of Jake's obsessive love for his father.

I'm not wild about (spoiler) The Muse or anything, but what episodes like that and other future episodes do tend to portray is that Jake is very obsessive, has a romanticized idea of story structure and what is required for a satisfying ending, and will absolutely sacrifice almost everything else at the foot of his muse. He's so underdeveloped at this point in the series that this flaw/trait is not really visible in episodes previous to this one, but I think it comes up in The Muse, in Nor the Battle to the Strong, in In the Cards, and in his staying on the station after the Dominion invasion.

Now is this read wholly what we see on screen? I don't know. I think it's closer than generic "the father-son bond is strong," and plays into what Jake's characterization is/becomes. It's maybe a narrow view of a writer, but I don't think it's a wholly incongruous one. And it makes the tragedy of Jake's actions clearer. It's not just that he dies an old man, but that he crosses huge ethical lines, in order to find the ending that will finally put to bed his own grief, and the only time he can even begin living past his grief again (again after the first time he saw Ben off the station) is once he's made the decision to die and take the whole future with him.

---

I guess this read is still incomplete because it's specifically about Jake as writer/Jake as obsessive, but not Jake as son. I think though that the key thing is not that Ben is dead, but that he's gone -- he's out there -- and it's not Ben's choice. It's a child becoming a doctor to save their parent from a coma. It's a child becoming a psychiatrist to save their psychotic parent from delusions which are tearing the parent apart. It's reading obsessively about Parkinson's and spending years of one's life arguing with the nurses who keep administering the wrong drugs and watching as the parent slips away, the hope of recover ever dwindling. It's all this happening while *knowing* that it's not what the parent would want, but being somehow unable to stop. It's knowing that the parent is continuing to suffer, and knowing on some level that there is something one can do to save them, even if the world gradually falls away and gives up. And it's also someone who really has lost their parent, whose parent is dead, but who for whatever reason cannot get past ruminating on what they could have done instead.

This is very real and very human, I think. In terms of Jake and Ben specifically, I wonder if the various scenes we've already had of Ben trying to push Jake into field trips when Jake is really content to live a small and sheltered life suggests that Ben is *also* where Jake has already stored his "seize the day" mentality, that Jake really has been on some level arrested by his mother's death (and possibly the cushy post-scarcity world of Federation life, in which it is possible to live one's life without being kicked out of the nest so to speak) all those years ago, and that it's only his father continually pushing him that made him try to take initiative at all. With his father alive, he could be reminded to take a look and live his life. With his fully dead, Jake would be able to integrate the lessons from his father into himself. With his father alive but lost, Jake never completes the separation required to become his father, and he also is not able to have his father standing beside him, reminding him he needs to walk away.

---

So IMO, the episode basically succeeds in its goals of presenting a credible and relatable tragedy, with high emotional stakes. The main problem is that the scale of Jake's actions -- erasing the whole of the future -- is only indirectly commented on, if at all. I actually do think Melanie's willingness to go along with Jake's sacrifice so that Jake can get the ending he needs is a commentary on the Jake and Ben, where she hero-worships Jake enough to be blind to the importance of her own life (story), but it is still a hell of a thing for her to be so blase about being wiped out of existence. So I think that viewing the episode as flawless or even close is really wrong, but I think its central story does have some real meat to it. (For what it's worth, I'd give it 3.5 stars as well.)

In case it's not obvious, I am talking about people I know, at least some of the time, in the "it's a child who ..." children-saving-parents section. However, I want to emphasize, I'm not really trying to either valorize or demonize it. It's not really healthy, but sometimes a child saving their lost parent is a good thing -- if it actually is possible, and they succeed. And even if they don't, it may be that it's worth the personal cost to keep trying, to a point. I don't know what it is that makes some people be unable to let go when others do, so I don't really know how to evaluate if Jake should be one of those people.

In a mythic sense, it's maybe definitely a good thing to be able to rescue one's parent. Anakin sure was lost -- arguably even dead -- when Luke decided in RotJ that he was going to save him. Everyone had written Jean-Luc Picard off as truly dead and gone when Will Riker decided that he was still in there somewhere in Locutus--and, importantly, would be able to *help*. The irony is that the very trait of Ben that Jake is most trying to rescue so that he can have it again is Ben's admonition to embrace life, which Jake is unable to do until he figures out how to rescue Ben.

(I'll add: if Jake made the call that Ben was genuinely good for the galaxy -- that maybe they could have averted this war with the Klingons, etc. -- then his decision may have been hubristic, but it wouldn't be the same kind of trouble. That is part of why Luke and Riker are not fully tragic figures in trying to rescue their lost fathers, because their lost fathers actually stand to help more than just them as individuals if they are recovered. But it's made very clear that Jake's concerns are personal, and even that conventional wisdom is that by later in Jake's life everything has found a new post-Ben Sisko balance.)

"I have read several reviews of this episode to try and discern whence the outpouring of enthusiasm. All cite the fact that this story “explores the relationship between father and son.” Yes...the central relationship of this story is obviously that between parent and child. But what precisely is being explored? What dimension of that relationship is being commented on? What lesson are we to absorb and take with us to our own fathers and sons? "

As trite as it sounds, it just highlights the lengths Jake will go to save his father. Like I said, on paper-trite. But the way it's executed just isn't.

"So IMO, the episode basically succeeds in its goals of presenting a credible and relatable tragedy, with high emotional stakes. The main problem is that the scale of Jake's actions -- erasing the whole of the future -- is only indirectly commented on, if at all. I actually do think Melanie's willingness to go along with Jake's sacrifice so that Jake can get the ending he needs is a commentary on the Jake and Ben, where she hero-worships Jake enough to be blind to the importance of her own life (story), but it is still a hell of a thing for her to be so blase about being wiped out of existence. So I think that viewing the episode as flawless or even close is really wrong, but I think its central story does have some real meat to it. (For what it's worth, I'd give it 3.5 stars as well.) "

Perhaps. But that would be devoting a significant chunk of the episode to time travel sci-fi jargon, which I think would have been a mistake. The reason "The Visitor" resonates for me and for many others is because it's a Trek episode where the core of the episode *isn't* technobabble. So while I agree they could have addressed it, it doesn't really matter that much in the long run to me, nor does it stop it from being one of the best Trek episodes ever produced.

@Iceman,

"Perhaps. But that would be devoting a significant chunk of the episode to time travel sci-fi jargon, which I think would have been a mistake. The reason "The Visitor" resonates for me and for many others is because it's a Trek episode where the core of the episode *isn't* technobabble. So while I agree they could have addressed it, it doesn't really matter that much in the long run to me, nor does it stop it from being one of the best Trek episodes ever produced."

I think I see what you mean, but my problem isn't that the episode's technical holes aren't sewn up, it's that to me the episode strongly gives the impression that he is erasing the entire existence of everyone around him, including Melanie whom he is sending off with advice to go live a life that she literally will not be able to follow for more than a few hours. I don't think this issue has much to do with technobabble at all. I don't think the episode earns the sweetness of him sending Melanie off to Live Life when he's basically about to kill her, in a sense, and I don't get the sense the episode is fully committed to this tragic irony.

I think it also depends on how you read the episode. For some, Melanie does continue her life in a split-off timeline, and the episode just doesn't spend the time making this clear, which can seem like a sort of technical flaw. I don't know that I think this is what is intended, and to me the story's tragedy is stronger if that future really does get erased, which necessarily means Melanie's toast. Maybe she'll be born anyway, but her life is going to be pretty significantly rewritten even if she is, and she certainly won't get to enjoy Jake's advice for very long. To me, that she is sent away wistful knowing she's about to be erased is not the result of a technical glitch, but part of the fabric of the episode, and I think it's a big characterization problem that she is *so* fine with it.

To be clear, I find this episode very moving. At one point it was one of my favourite episodes of the franchise. I've cooled on it (though I still like it a lot) for this very specific reason, and I disagree that it's about technobabble. However, that doesn't mean everyone else has to care about this issue.

@William B

“I'll add: if Jake made the call that Ben was genuinely good for the galaxy -- that maybe they could have averted this war with the Klingons, etc. -- then his decision may have been hubristic, but it wouldn't be the same kind of trouble.”

I tend to agree because my reading of this episode is more along the lines that Ben and Jake’s field trip inadvertently disrupted the timeline so Jake has a personal stake in correcting it for the good of the quadrant. There were a few points stressed like DS9 falling out as galactic hub - and Jake associating DS9 with his father. So, maybe in some way Jake restoring his father, in his mind, was connected to a greater good of the galaxy. But yes, the episode does seem to hit most heavily on Jake’s loss of his father and his future as a personal loss.

@Peter G.

“What if what happened to Sisko is the shock activated part of his self that is prophet, sending him out of linear time despite being tied to Jake all the while? Maybe he wasn't trapped, exactly, but was in some sort of natural state for an entity of the sort he was born from? I'm reminded of Odo, who while basically human still had some Founder trait activated by a shock”

I can get behind this, and I think if the writers knew what they’d be doing with Sisko in the finale they might have hinted at a Prophet connection here. At least you can safely draw this sort of interpretation on your own because the accident happened in proximity to the wormhole.

@Peter,

That's an interesting interpretation, and (spoiler) fits with my feeling, at times, that this episode basically accurately portrays what happens to Jake after What You Leave Behind (as hinted at by the ending shot with Kira) -- that his father being gone-but-not-gone, and outside of time, will eat away at him. I'm not wild about the lack of Ben/Jake scene after Ben is Prophet-ized, but it is an interesting structure if they basically use a reference to a previous episode to suggest a large-scale tragic story for one of the main (if underwritten) characters, which there is not really time for within the finale itself.

I don't want to go point by point on Elliott's review as I think you guys did some good discussion of some key elements. My main comment about it is that the style of the episode is that of storytelling; and not just any kind of storytelling, but the kind that happens in front of the fireplace on a rainy day. It's a style piece, and a romantically sentimental one at that. Even though part of the literal script shows Jake in the third person speaking to someone, even those scenes seem to be almost first person narrative anyhow. It's Jake's story from start to finish, with Jake as the storyteller, and this is crucial to the structure of the entire piece. It affects why certain things are told and others aren't, and it affects whether things should or shouldn't have the weight they do: they do because Jake feels they should. There is no objective criterion to say that someone should have been given more prominence or less, because it's the tale of what's important *to him*. Jake isn't interested in the repercussions of his choice, and so they are glossed over. Maybe he's deceiving himself; maybe he just doesn't know and won't guess. We can say that wiping out a timeline is a big deal, but if he's buried that fact in his mind then his story won't reflect its importance, and it's the state of his mind that the entire story is about.

Or why does Jake go to pieces when going back to school to study physics, and loses his family? Because he does! That's the story, that's what happens. It doesn't matter if *someone else* could have led a normal life while learning a new field: Jake couldn't. Naysaying that is like hearing a person in real life say they couldn't beat heroin and curtly replying with "Oh yes, it is entirely possible to do so and you are a bad representation of what people can achieve." Can you imagine??

He says that losing his father was the worst thing that a young man could experience. True or false? Doesn't matter! It's true to him. At worst you could accuse him or romanticizing or even idealizing his own pain, and indeed I would agree that this is a character flaw; but we already knew that Jake was a flawed and even broken character. He has no drive in life, doesn't want Starfleet, doesn't want much of anything other than to hang with his friend. It's sad, and here we see just how sad: without his father to define the context of his life he basically has nothing. We can mourn him, pity him, condemn him, or anything else: but we can't negate his statement about his own life. He's saying that when his father died he lost all reason for anything: that's just how it was. It's not a statement about Elliott, or about anyone else, but just about Jake, and stated by himself no less, and in context of him creating a romantic idyll about his own suffering to explain why he now wants to die.

My own conclusions about the episode are mainly to do with how it affects me: a lot. I know it's a 4 star episode because even reading Elliott's sarcastic recounting of the story I felt myself tearing up just being made to recollect the story. And it's not just maudlin tearjerking, either, because I don't go in for emotionally manipulative material in general. What Jake went through and what he's been reduced to is really just incredibly sad to me. And it shouldn't be forgotten that when losing his mother his still had his dad; it's losing both of them that led to this. Maybe the episode could have mentioned that, but - again - that's not what's on Jake's mind. Or at least, it's not *how* he wants to tell the story. Maybe that's a writer's weakness, to want to make a story neat and all about one thing. It would certain fit within a story of someone who's obsessed almost to the point of madness.

"I think I see what you mean, but my problem isn't that the episode's technical holes aren't sewn up, it's that to me the episode strongly gives the impression that he is erasing the entire existence of everyone around him, including Melanie whom he is sending off with advice to go live a life that she literally will not be able to follow for more than a few hours. I don't think this issue has much to do with technobabble at all. I don't think the episode earns the sweetness of him sending Melanie off to Live Life when he's basically about to kill her, in a sense, and I don't get the sense the episode is fully committed to this tragic irony. "

I basically agree with what you said. But I think you may have misunderstood me-I wasn't saying that your criticism of the episode was related to technobabble. What I meant was that had they focused on the valid point you brought up, it might have taken time away from the elements I personally feel make the episode so successful-its human parts. I love that it shows so many real things that happen to people-loss of family, an inability to move on, having regrets, etc. I feel that focusing on the ethics of changing/erasing the timeline would have taken away from that focus. But, as stated before, it's a valid point and I see why it brings the episode down in your estimation slightly (and it is slightly! Elliott and you only docked half a star each-that would still probably place it in both of your top 30/40 DS9 episodes).

@Peter G

I agree. To me, it's a 4-star episode because it's one of the few Trek episodes that genuinely tears me up. It pretty much *has* to get 4 stars based on that alone. Aside from that, this is one of the rare Trek episodes without dull setup-for me, I'm completely transfixed for 43 minutes no matter how much I watch it.

@Iceman -- ah, gotcha.

@Peter, I agree-ish -- but I think it's still a huge buy to introduce Melanie as an audience surrogate and have her both take Jake's advice and also accept her doom. Possibly the strong first-person POV means that Melanie isn't even real, and that Jake is deluding himself in allowing himself even one night of passing something on to a world that doesn't exist. I can probably get behind that, it's just that I can't really make up my mind on how damaging Jake's choice is supposed to be, or whether or not his giving her advice on how to live her life that he's about to end is *meant* to be wildly hypocritical and even cruel in its thoughtlessness. I can't escape the feeling that the episode is unwilling to own how dark it is being, in the way Jake actually treats Melanie, who still receives him with such sweetness. Possibly I could still go to 4 stars if I could figure out how to resolve this question, but I get snagged on it. I guess the best way to look at it is that she's not really a character at all, but a tragic representation of the life he could have had, and what he would have liked to tell a younger version of himself, had he not committed his whole life to the course he took, but I also think we're meant to see his superficial kindness to her as a meaningful about who Jake is. I guess it still can be -- he's someone who can be kind and thoughtful, but his tragic flaw is that his obsession about his father has overwhelmed all other concerns, and maybe he doesn't even see it. Still....

OTOH, I agree very much about the character set-up, the storytelling medium stuff (which I also talked about -- Jake-as-storyteller), the first-person perspective, that it's very meaningful to Jake himself that Sisko died and how that broke him, etc. I can see the argument that what I'm focusing on is not important. I don't know, I don't *want* it to be important, but....

On Jake himself, another underrated part of his post-Sisko misery is that he really is very isolated. His mother's dead, his father's dead. He has lived on DS9 with mostly non-humans, which is already a relatively tiny community, and then that gets tanked. He restarts his life in New Zealand eventually, but by that point he's basically restarting with almost no one he's close to nearby, except for Nog -- and, okay, Joseph Sisko, presumably, but we don't really know the full story in this version of events IIRC. He does mange to build a new life, but it's probably very difficult to fully inhabit his new life when so many things in his life have been taken away. It's not that he has nothing to live for, or that others don't have it worse, but there may be some missing ingredient that would allow him to really fully move on, particularly after his father started returning.

Hi again all (Chrome, Peter G, William B, Iceman)

Before I jump back in, I just want to say that I'm well-aware that this is one of those episodes which creates such intimacy with many viewers that makes it magical to them--and far be it for be to attempt to rob anyone of that feeling. Such things are rare and precious. And believe it or not, I actually do not have it out for DS9, there are just certain elements in the show which bother me (although I think it's the way the fans receive(d) the show that bothers me more). What's interesting is that none of those "DS9 sins" is present in this episode (well aside from the thing with the Bajorans abandoning the station). I'm also not going to talk about the Sisko's mom stuff, because that's a headache I'm happy to postpone until S7.

***

I don't have any problem ignoring the temporal paradox stuff. Those kinds of questions plague every Trek time-travel story, from "City on the Edge" through...whatever the hell they're doing on Discovery.

William B made the point that, even though it may not make logical sense, what makes Jake a tragic figure is that he prioritises Ben over everything else, Melanie, his wife, his writing, his grandchildren that never were, the integrity of the timeline... Okay, I totally buy that. So then, how does old Jake make certain that the new life he's purchasing for himself doesn't have the same tragic flaw? Ben is going to die *eventually* (and yes I know, spoilers and all that). The last thing old Jake told Sisko was that Jake needs him "more than he knows"--this doesn't seem like a recipe for distancing himself from his son so that he doesn't become the pathetic man-child we saw. The episode never addresses what it is about their relationship that made it impossible for Jake to let go. And remember, it's not like Sisko was suffering! He didn't experience the passage of time in the land of cream of wheat. So, Jake had the opportunity to share glimpses of his life with his father in ways a normal lifespan wouldn't allow. Sisko could have met his great-great-grandkids.

Peter, you repeated the point about the fact that Jake is who he is, tragically flawed, maybe even doomed to have this kind of obsessive personality. Okay. So, does old Jake realise this? Does he give his father a message that will them, as a family, overcome this flaw? That's my major gripe with the story.

I haven't reviewed "Endgame" yet--and I don't bring this up to compare the entirety of these episodes side by side, because "The Visitor" certainly wins--but one of the few things that worked about that story was that future Janeway's interference in history *prevented* present Janeway from becoming a full-blown cynic. She erased herself from history intentionally, because she hated what she had become. Again, not trying to talk in detail about that episode here, but Jake's story needed something similar. *What* is the change moving forward?

Because as it stands, the message seems to be that Jake *cannot* function without Ben. And that's not a sweet father/son dynamic to me, that's crippling dependency.

@Elliott

“I haven't reviewed "Endgame" yet--and I don't bring this up to compare the entirety of these episodes side by side, because "The Visitor" certainly wins--but one of the few things that worked about that story was that future Janeway's interference in history *prevented* present Janeway from becoming a full-blown cynic. She erased herself from history intentionally, because she hated what she had become. Again, not trying to talk in detail about that episode here, but Jake's story needed something similar. *What* is the change moving forward?”

Yeah, this is my problem with episode and what’s keeping it back half a star. Everything that the protagonist Jake learns is eliminated by his actions which reset the timeline. At most, Sisko has retention of some of Jake’s life and a message that his son needs him more than he knows. This might have worked better if Sisko had been neglecting Jake with his role in Starfleet or as The Emissary, but instead Ben Sisko is depicted as already being a proactive and loving parent. So it’s really Jake, who’s obsessed with his writing, who needs to learn the story’s lesson.

And then we have the lesson: Old Jake is apparently based on J.D. Salinger who was also a recluse who wrote only few, albeit epic books. Appropos to Jake’s story, Salinger’s “Catcher in the Rye” was a story about a young man who held his friends back in hopes of saving their innocence, but in the end he realized he was holding on too hard and it ruined his own life. I think “The Visitor” catches most of the message but unfortunately denies the Jake we know, Prime Jake, the same crucial character development Holden Caulfiend underwent. We have a moving story with the epilogue leaving us wanting.

I dunno, why does it have to be logical? Jake saw losing his dad as the problem, and his solution is to give his younger self back his dad. I guess he doesn't know how that will work, and indeed he doesn't take steps to alter the past any more than by restoring Ben to the timeline. Maybe that's enough, though, because if Jake had more time to develop his own life he could outgrow the utter dependency on Ben. Or maybe the same thing will eventually happen if Ben were to die shortly thereafter in some other circumstance. I'm not sure why the completion of the episode requires this point to be closed neatly; this isn't Cause and Effect where the point is for him to know exactly how the outcome of the new timeline will go. He just knows that he needs to release Ben from wherever he is. And I agree with William (I think this was his point) that there's a bit of a feeling here that something *went wrong* back then that shouldn't have happened; that it wasn't just Jake who couldn't get over it, but that it was the wrongness of it that made him obsessed. Maybe this is a sci-fi thing that shouldn't matter in the meta-story analysis, but imagining for instance of Jennifer had been assimilated instead of killed under a bulkhead, I could see how knowing a Borg mom was out there somewhere could be way harder to get over than knowing she died in a fire. Maybe this isn't the point of the episode; I don't know. But somehow the way he lost his dad seems relevant to me at least. If Ben had just been shot by a Jem'Hadar maybe it would have been easier to get over. But anyhow, I don't have any problem with Jake's plan not having a time-travel plan packed into it where he sends himself a note or something. The episode just didn't need that, and frankly the more sci-fi detailing they had added the more it would feel like a plot episode with Voyager-esque technobabble as its resolution. It's about Jake wanting this existence to die in order to save Ben, and that's what it tells. Like I said, it's Jake's story. Maybe he *did* pass a message through Ben to his younger self; but it's not part of what Jake needs us to know when he tells it, and that's good enough for me.

@Peter G.

“I dunno, why does it have to be logical? Jake saw losing his dad as the problem, and his solution is to give his younger self back his dad. I guess he doesn't know how that will work, and indeed he doesn't take steps to alter the past any more than by restoring Ben to the timeline.”

I don’t think it needs to all be logical or to even wrap in a neat little package. But what’s been going around in this discussion is we have this Old Jake whose life is supposedly some sort of Aesop. Jake Sisko has a character flaw of being obsessive and unable to “poke his head up every once in a while and take a look around, see what's going on” and that flaw apparently plagues his future existence leading to a lonely life. But then then it turns out that the flaw is actually not a flaw at all and he saves his dad and his past because of it. I mean, alls well that ends well I suppose, but if that’s all that was at stake here it’s a little confusing about what problem Jake had - if any. Others have been analyzing the alternate timeline for lasting meaning but it’s a little frustrating when that timeline and all its characters are eliminated from existence. Yet, I don’t think this makes episode bad per se, it’s a small quandary in what’s part of an otherwise very compelling narrative. I brought up Salinger because this really does evoke his work in writing and that’s no small feat.

Eliott mentioned “Endgame” but this one actually reminds me a lot of VOY’s “Timeless” where future Kim tries to break his past self’s recklessness at wanting to go home. That one worked a lot better for me because we get a feeling that past Kim learned that he failed from evidence of the future and that directly shapes his present actions. His growth in the episode helps him find a solution to the present in the episode and theorhetcally shapes his thinking of future events.

I thought of Timeless also, but that one is about correcting mistakes of the past. This one is about being stuck making new ones, in a way. But as you mention, it does actually save Ben. So...does that mean it's a flaw after all? Or not a flaw since it works out? I don't think it matters, is sort of my point, because the piece isn't about dissecting whether Jake is flawed or not, but just shows how much he needs his father. It's not about how he can change, or how to fix it, and actually I think Trek is sometimes too obsesses with fixing everything. Yes, we hope to do better. But sometimes in order to do that we need to be able to say how things really are without jumping to try to fix it right away like just another tech problem to solve.

What we really see here is that Jake's trait, that Ben suggest may be bad for Jake, actually probably is bad for him, *except* that doesn't mean it's bad. It makes Jake suffer, perhaps, to be down under, subsumed by his father's story, but his father's importance, and to sort of be nobody. He should stick his head up, no? Make a story for himself? But then he'd be taking away from his father's story; or at least that's a meta way of looking at it. I see this one as fundamentally about Jake occupying a self-sacrificial role, and knowingly accepting that Ben is more important that he is. This is literal, in terms of the series narrative, but also figurative in the sense that Jake wants his role to be that of helping his father accomplish his role (as we late see in In the Cards). We can agree or disagree that it's proper for a person to sacrifice themself so another can have their life; especially so when the one being sacrificed is young. However my point is that this isn't about judgement, it's about Jake's "weakness" actually being the expression of a value: Ben must live. Right or wrong, it's his value to have.

A few typos there, but one sentence ended up really unclear:

*...to be down under, subsumed by his father's story, by his father's importance, and to sort of be nobody."

You know, I don't mind if Old Jake is genuinely in the wrong, and has no way to even self-correct his younger self, exactly. I don't know that I agree with Chrome that there's an Aesop exactly...and yet, I sort of do, because I think that something about the episode does tend to give Jake credit for wisdom.

I'm going to stop here trying to evaluate where the episode lies on the "very good" to "perfect" spectrum and just think "out loud" (in writing) a bit....

So anyway, the thing is, Jake not only defies some of our views on what he "should" do in this situation, but also Ben's. Ben is very clear that he thinks Jake should move on with his life, and that he absolutely should not stand still. He doesn't *want* Jake to sacrifice himself, and tries to stop him. When Ben is sent back in time, it's true, Ben does dodge the blast (which no one has objected to, of course), but that doesn't mean he thinks Jake was *right*. He's partly respecting Old Jake's wishes, and partly Old Jake is dead anyway, so it's not as if there is any point in saving himself. The moral issues of altering the timeline don't really affect Ben either, because to some extent he was always stuck at that moment on the Defiant anyway. So once Old Jake is done sacrificing himself, Ben agrees to go along with his plan, but that isn't to say that Ben approves.

So again -- why does Jake defy not only the "natural" (children general get over their parents' death) inclination but also his father's explicit instructions?

It was actually @Chrome's suggestion (not mine) that on some level, Jake thought (or the episode implies) that the new timeline was "wrong" and that he was correcting it. And I think this idea has merit. Is it the case? I don't know. The thing is, the episode is very clear that while people mourn Ben, eventually people move on. This is part of Jake's isolation -- that initially everyone shares his grief, but eventually he is the only griever left. War between the Klingons and the Federation heats up, but it eventually cools off and peace starts to open up again, including the possibility of accessing the wormhole -- which seems to me to be part of the story, too. It's as if Ben's death leads to all sorts of bad things, but that those things don't last forever, because no matter how important one man is, the whole universe generally doesn't revolve around him, *EXCEPT* possibly to some individuals. This is I think a mirror of what it means to be the sole remaining griever; initially you are not alone, and the world mourns with you, and seems to be broken, but then gradually lives right themselves and adjust. Life moves on.

So I think that the episode suggests, to me, that no one besides Jake would really see Ben's death as being so wrong that it needs correcting, by the time Jake actually erases him, and that this is actually important to the emotional resonance (for me!) of the story. That doesn't necessarily mean that the idea that Ben's death was so "wrong" that it needed to be corrected is thrown out entirely, though. It may be that we're in a Yesterday's Enterprise-type situation, where there was a significant damage done by some "mistake" in the timeline (the Enterprise-C's disappearance into the future) that everyone is unaware of, and that because they are trapped in this reality they can't see it, and it takes a mystic like Guinan to be able to see what's missing. This is possible, and may be part of the subtext of Jake's mission. Everyone else eventually "abandons" Sisko, from Jake's perspective, and when they do, they become unable to see the damage that has been wrought on their lives by Ben's absence.

I think this read is interesting and kind of works with the larger-scale material. I mean, things are getting better, but they still aren't great, in the galaxy as a whole. But I still sort of think that it's not really what's going on. I think Jake's prioritizing his father really is about Jake and Ben, not about the galaxy, and I think that the Alpha Quadrant's gradually righting itself is legit -- that it's not a Yesterday's Enterprise dystopia of something that was not "meant" to happen, but a universe which ultimately can heal, in a way that Jake personally doesn't.

---

But anyway, the other question is: is Jake really doing something good for his father? He is giving his father another chance at life, but what Ben explicitly wants is for Jake's life to continue. Ben doesn't even spend his few precious moments with Jake asking about Bajor, or the Dominion or the Klingons, or Kassidy or Dax. That's not to say those aren't important to him, and of course it's Jake he's in front of, but the message that Ben keeps sending out when he sees Jake is: "Your life is what is important. I am happy to be able to see you. Don't worry about me." And I really, really don't think this is Ben just "being nice" or self-effacing. This episode contains IMO one of Brooks' very best performances in the series, and he really sells, to me, the deep love and intensity of a father trying to convince his son to live his life, even if that (superficially) negatively impacts the father, because the father's existence is enriched by his son's success. This is basically the same message Sisko gave at the outset of the story -- Jake should live his life rather than obsessing, whether it's about stories, or about Ben. I guess what I mean is, if Jake had a full, mature love for his father, he shouldn't prioritize his father's life over his own, because this would give his father misery. And while I think Jake is obsessive, I get the impression that we are meant to see Old Jake as wise, as having figured something out, in his final years.

So while Jake clearly loves Ben, I don't think he is *quite* doing this for Ben, because if he listens to Ben, he should know that it's not what Ben wants. So the idea that maybe Jake is recognizing Ben's importance to the galaxy is a way to resolve this here, where Ben is so important that it genuinely doesn't matter whether Ben wants Jake to live his life or not, because Ben's centrality to the fate of Bajor, the wormhole, the AQ etc. is more important than what Ben himself wants. I like this idea and I think Peter's observation of how this ties in with the meta of the show, and also with In the Cards and the like, is right-on. But -- I don't really think it's what I see in this episode, ultimately. I don't read this as being Jake's motivation by the end of the story, even if I think it could plausibly have been part of his motivation in earlier years as the political situation gradually went downhill.

I think, then, this: Jake doesn't consciously sacrifice his whole life for his father. It's only clear in retrospect that this is what he's doing, that he's failed to understand his father's advice, until it's "too late." So I think maybe, based on his advice to Melanie and the steps he has taken to live his own life, that he understands by this point. So why sacrifice himself now? The thing that I think makes the most sense is that he wants to give his younger self another chance -- a chance to live, not necessarily with Sisko, but without the gnawing uncertainty that the particular manner of Sisko's "death" brought to him. Not only that, but it's also a gift to Ben, though Ben maybe doesn't realize it, that Old Jake is finding a way to fix Young Jake's life, to prevent Young Jake from having to undergo the ordeal that Old Jake has done.

As Elliott sort of suggests, he doesn't communicate this (or anything else) to Sisko that would be able to make SIsko definitely able to make Jake's life better, this time around, besides the mere fact of his not having become a plasma wormhole quantum ghost. Maybe, though, that's enough -- I mean, maybe it really is not that likely that Ben would become a plasma wormhole quantum ghost inadvertently haunting his son for years, and maybe preventing that is sufficient to make Jake's life better.

Nice write-up, William. I do more or less agree that Jake seems to be doing this for Jake, not for Ben, even though satisfying Jake's desires means saving Ben. I don't really agree (to whatever extent this is still being contested) that Jake needed to insert some plot point about how he would alter the past to improve it; I think the intent of the sacrifice itself, even if to save himself, is enough to show the conviction of it, so I don't really need the details.

Regarding the meta-plot, I think I would add that it's not just an issue of Jake knowing that Ben is the center of it all (in the show, and in his life), but that Jake's happiness involves knowing he's doing something for a reason. One impression I get from the episode is that his life may have been superficially ok, but that it maybe lacked any direction or meaning beyond just getting on with it. By hatching this plan his actions take on a purpose that goes beyond him - even though we might argue that his intentions aren't entirely noble as such. One thing the meta-story shows is that Ben is viewed as important enough that people will sacrifice themselves for him, whether or not he wants it. His importance isn't his own to decide, and even people who he doesn't want to will prefer to die than let him be lost. Although this isn't Ben's story, it does involve him being forced to recognize that it's out of his hands whether others will lay down their lives, and he's going to have to live with that if he's going to be a war-time leader. He lost his wife helplessly to the Borg, but now he's going to have to own the possibility of sacrificing those dear to him if need be. This theme is touched upon again in SPOILER The Reckoning, and in Tears of the Prophets. What's at stake in this episode isn't the AQ, but to Jake it's just as big as that.

There's another angle I hadn't thought of before, which may tie in with Nor the Battle to the Strong which happens later in the series: Jake isn't much of a hero, or much of anything, but what writing allows is to create heroism in imagination where it doesn't exist in life. So perhaps Jake's story as he's telling it, is his version of self-sacrificial heroism, the only kind he can have since he can't live it out. Except by dying he does get to live it out, and to finish his last story, as it were, by ending the life of a writer and becoming a doer. It's a literal death, but for the rebirth of a new Jake. So I think this does accord with William's idea that Jake is only now at the end realizing Ben's lesson, and must let himself (his identity) die if he's going to raise his head up and live. There's a phoenix metaphor in here, and certainly along these lines it undercuts the need for a technical explanation of how the past will be repaired.

One other point: the episode is called The Visitor, which on its face seems to refer to Melanie. But going with the "this timeline is wrong" concept, it may also be implied that Old Jake is the visitor; that he doesn't belong and is only temporarily meeting us to let us know he'll be leaving again.

@William B, Peter G & Chrome:

I'm not going to get into the weeds about the timeline stuff because that is not what this episode is about. Trying to justify Old Jake's actions by making Sisko some sort of galactic lynch-pin has absolutely nothing to do with the emotional heart of this story. In that respect, I totally agree with Peter.

Put yourselves in Ben's shoes. Over the course of Jake's life, he sees that the odd side-effect of Sisko's accident has caused his son to lead a somewhat arrested life (I say somewhat, because the portrait of Old Jake isn't full-blown tragic. He did have a wife, dedicated friends and 2 careers). Anyway, Ben bears witness to the fact that this subspace umbilical cord thing keeps throwing Jake off "the path" or whatever you want to call it. As a father, I would think Ben would return to the present with 18yo Jake and conclude that the two of them had better see a therapist. Clearly the way Ben has been parenting Jake has left him vulnerable to major co-dependency issues. So yeah, this story needed a dose of "Timeless" or "Endgame" to fully-gel. Otherwise, the story has no heart--it's just a tech plot that happens to take a lifetime to complete.

Oh, and I'm pretty sure the titular visitors are Ben and Melanie.

I agree with Elliott that it would have been interesting and worthwhile to see Ben take a look at whether there's anything he can do to prevent Jake from going down the same path of obsession in this lifetime. To be clear, this isn't the same as saying Old Jake needed to send "a message" back, because in a sense Ben *is* his message.

That said -- I don't know, I'm not sure if it's clear what Ben should do. I don't think it takes the heart out of the story if there's no unambiguous action Ben can take to prevent what happens to Jake, besides not getting hit with that blast. Again, the problem is specifically about Ben being in limbo -- of Jake both knowing that Ben is out there, and also him being lost. Ben probably figures that this is not going to happen again.

Jake was also absolutely clear that when he felt sure that his father was permanently lost, he moved on with his life, got married, etc. Maybe there was something missing, and certainly his new life wasn't enough to stop obsessing when he saw his father again. But I think the implication of the story is that if his father would stop "visiting," Jake would be able to let him go.

I don't think this makes the episode strictly a tech plot, because it actually is incredibly painful to have a loved one who is somewhere between here and gone -- in a coma, for example, or gradually declining in health, or with serious mental health problems that prevent them from fully living and which one can do something about, but not enough, etc. I guess my take in that case is that Old Jake tragically was unable to deal with this situation, and so sacrificed himself to avoid it.

[SPOILERS

The irony, as I've said, is that it *does* end up happening that Ben neither lives nor dies outright, but is in a kind of limbo post-series. At least this limbo (being a Prophet) is a little different. This is sort of a problem I have with Ben in the finale, which is that Ben, having seen what became of Jake, should know better than to keep his loved ones hanging indefinitely. Not that he shouldn't be "honest" about the "maybe a year, maybe yesterday" thing, but I feel like he should have said something like, "I will be back, but you and Jake, and the new child, should also live your lives in the interim." I guess if he was really positive he'd be back in 1 year or less, then what he said was fine, but I got the impression there was much more uncertainty.]

It is interesting that Elliott and I, while having some overlap, are still kind of different in our ultimate problem with the episode. I sympathize but don't entirely agree about the problem of whether Jake really accomplishes anything. The Melanie thing doesn't seem to bother him much, whereas it is kind of my beef with the ep.

Not to be a contrarian but I couldn't stand this episode and it is among the worst IMO. The music was excellent as was the camera work, but... The pacing, dialog and energy were very bad. The two guest stars were flat, two-dimensional and talked waaay to slow. The main story was simplistic and backwards looking. Roddenberry trek is about discovery and new ideas...this was emotional indulgence that put character egos ahead of good story. I'm somewhat stunned that this is so popular of an episode.

Watching and commenting:

--Old, old Jake. Living in Louisiana. He wrote "Anslem." That's an odd name. Old Jake sounds vaguely like Sisko, nice touch.

--First time, last time, the right time, no more time. Time.

--Yikes! Ben dies when Jake's 18? Are we heading for time-paradoxes and technonabble and reset buttons? Fine by me. Let's go.

--Umm . . . what has happened to Ben? Where did he disappear to? Even Quark feels sorry for Jake. OMG, poor Jake. I can see where we're going with this. Ben not dead, occasionally reappearing. What a horror.

--Nog! Great scene.

--Huh. Jake really does use a pen to write.

--Yeeeee on Siddig's portrayal of old Bashir. Old Jake not a very good physical match for young Jake, but the actor makes it work.

--This show is nicely lit. Noticeably beautiful lighting.

--Lovely story. Creative idea, nicely realized. A winner.

After reading commentary:

--Getting over a loss is so very hard, one like this - with the person occasionally making an appearance - is a killer. And it literally kills Jake.

--It makes me think of something like Alzheimer's or schizophrenia. How the "person you once knew" is there but not there, reappears for a few minutes, or for a short while, sometimes. It's what makes those diseases so hard on family. You lose your loved one. But you don't. But you do. I wonder if the writer experienced something of that nature, that helplessness, that desperation, that feeling that you'd do anything, anything to turn back time.

--It's really good, but it's not "The Inner Light" good. Brooks' acting is still awful, but I don't know how else to enjoy DS9, than to look past Brooks' acting as best I can. But it's there, it's awful, and it means this ep cannot be The Inner Light.

--I didn't cry. It was moving, but no tears.

@Springy,

Yeah, or another mental illness -- even possibly a "milder" one, like severe depression, or alcoholism -- that renders a parent both present and not present, in need of "saving" but where the saving might not be possible.

Well I just watched this early on Christmas morning and either I’m the grinch or I’m missing something. This is a good episode but seeing everyone saying they were moved to tears is surprising. To me it seems like the writer of this episode watched TNG’s The Inner Light and thought “hmm I could tinker with that”. It’s a little bit of a stolen idea imo. Side note, the only Star Trek episode I teared up while watching was The Tholian Web.

I don’t even think “The Visitor” and “The Inner Light” are going for the same message. Like Springy and William B and were discussing, “The Visitor” is more about the importance of family and how it can impact you both in positive and negative ways. “The Inner Light”, on the other hand, is more like having a second chance at living life through the eyes of an ancient civilization. The only thing I see in common with the two is a great passage of time offscreen and an (inevitable) reset.

I also think Brooks’ performance is less relevant here because the big emotional punch scenes are delivered by Tony Todd.

I can see the similarities between "The Visitor" and "The Inner Light" in terms of living an alternate reality but I do think the father/son dynamic is truly noteworthy here. The first time I saw it, I was nearly moved to tears and I can't think of too many other Trek episodes that have managed to do that. So even if it achieves its emotional impact with some smoke & mirrors and suffers from the big reset, it still deserves a ton of credit.

The acting performance that really takes this episode to the 4* level for me is Lofton's. Never thought much of him as an actor until "The Visitor". He really captured so well the loss of a father to a son. This is really a story about him (Jake) mainly and Sisko secondarily as far as what perspective to examine the father/son relationship from. Todd and Robinson also put in solid guest performances, which is essential to an episode like this.

As for "The Inner Light" -- I'd say 2 episodes that are more similar to it are "The Paradise Syndrome" and "Far Beyond the Stars".

@William B

Agree, it's a like those "more minor" mental illnesses as well. And it is like them not just because you lose your loved one "sort of," but because the loved one's progress stops relative to your own. Unlike Sisko, they age physically, but most other growth is stopped or severely slowed. Your life goes on, they can't get the spot where the disease took over.

@Chrome

I was comparing this ep to Inner Light only as "candidates for best ever ST ep." I would rate Inner Light significantly above this one, though I thought The Visitor was a very good ep.

I agree they are different, though they share an "importance of family vs career" theme, presented in nearly opposite ways. Lonely, reserved Picard loses "his family." He's a man who (in his real life) has sacrificed family for his career. Old Jake is vice versa.

@Springy-
"--It's really good, but it's not "The Inner Light" good. Brooks' acting is still awful, but I don't know how else to enjoy DS9, than to look past Brooks' acting as best I can. But it's there, it's awful, and it means this ep cannot be The Inner Light."

I agree that it's not quite as good as "The Inner Light", but I'd say it's pretty close. It's odd to criticize this for Brooks' performance (which I still don't understand-to me, he's fine in this episode and most of the time). He's not in it that much. The community of Ressika in "The Inner Light" was pretty schmaltzy, but it didn't matter due to Stewart's performance, which was the most important part of the episode. The most important performance in this one is Tony Todd, and he smashes it out of the park in my opinion.

@Springy --

The parent "staying the same age" can also make sense if the parent's condition renders them oblivious, most of the time, to their own situation...so that the child "ages prematurely," with worry. In his moments of "lucidity" (i.e. not being in limbo), Ben still has the wisdom that Jake "ages past" without ever acquiring, of knowing that life is precious.

The parent reached adulthood before whatever happened to them (illness, coma, traumatic event) so that in their better moments, they understand what the child is missing. The child passes from teenager to old man without ever truly passing through mature young(er) man.

The "seize the time" message and the sense of...apocalyptic doom, even (Melanie comes on the last night of this particular future) also link The Inner Light and The Visitor. There are lots of reasons for the comparison, I think.

@William B

As much as people bring up Jake destroying his timeline on this board, I don’t think that’s really addressed in “The Visitor”. Melanie hears Jakes plan on his last night, sure, but she seems more concerned for Jake’s life than for her own (let alone her timeline). In fact, I’m not fully convinced the timeline is erased by Jake’s actions. In contrast, the Kataan seriously examine and are aware of their certain doom and various measures to preserve themselves are discussed leading to the ending solution.

I grant there are some surfacey similarities between the shows, but the discussions of “which did it better” here come off a bit disingenuinous to me. (Note, Springy I’m not criticizing your comment per se, as there are dozens of comments comparing the two. I just wanted to chime in here because it keeps coming up :) ).

@Chrome --

I'm still not sure how to read whether Jake creates a new timeline or erases the future. I feel like the scale of the tragedy is lessened if Jake "only" dies, as an old man, but at the same time Melanie's reaction really doesn't make sense of someone who knows she's about to be erased (and Jake's giving her a book when he's about to erase her plays out as vaguely sociopathic). It feels like either way the story has a big hole. It still bothers me, though I know that's mostly an issue I have that not many others share.

Question for @William B, @Chrome, our any other commenter wanting top come in:

I saw all the comments on Melanie being erased, but didn't understand them. Did I miss something? Why should she believe that if Ben survives the incident on DS9, she'll be erased her mom and dad won't meet?)?

Maybe I missed something as I was very briefly interrupted a few times during viewing. Why would she be erased? If Jake had had descendents, they might be, sure . . . but Melanie? Why?

@Springy,

I'd sort of assume that anyone born after the "present day" time of Sisko's death would have their life altered. The probabilities are so small of a specific egg and sperm encountering each other, etc.

But more than that, without spoiling too much, the events of what happens after Sisko's death are VERY different from the events which happen within the series proper. Sisko dying/not dying completely alters the Alpha Quadrant, in ways that will affect all sorts of lives.

But even if we assume Melanie will be alive...I don't understand how Melanie would be able to make much use of the book Jake gives her. Maybe a new timeline will split off. But if Jake does change the time since his father died, the whole conversation with Melanie, her getting the book from him, her obsession with Jake's work, etc., would seem to be hugely altered, by the different course Jake was taking. She wouldn't be able to take in and appreciate the warm advice he gives her, because her encounter with him would be erased (or at least significantly altered). It's strange to me because it plays it as if Jake uses his last night to do some good before passing, but that whatever lessons he imparts seemingly will never have happened.

I maybe am being pedantic about this. I feel like maybe just accepting that Melanie is a narrative device more than a character in her own right would help me along.

@William B

I see, yes, I certainly agree Melanie life would be different, and the book world be useless. I was confused by people commenting that she would be erased, and how could she accept that so calmly.

I try to put myself in her shoes. Why would she think that Jake going back top save his father on faraway DS9 would erase her existence? You say been had a huge, fast ranging impact on Alpha quadrant . . . Ok. But how would she know that?

It made no sense for Jake to give her his annotated manuscript, or for her to think it would be useful to her, though I can see her hoping it might be, somehow. It would be hard for her to be certain what would happen next . . . i.e., would her timeline continue, as is? "Maybe" is certainly a sensible answer for her to come to.

But I can see her not worrying a whit about her very existence. Unless my recent ancestors had some connection to DS9, I wouldn't be worried, if I were her.

Also, I disagree with people who say that this is a rip-off of "The Inner Light". From a plot perspective, it's much more similar to "Future Imperfect". "Far Beyond the Stars" is DS9's interpretation of that.

@Springy,

I think I forgot exactly what my objection was some of the time when typing about it. I do think it's possible that Melanie's existence would be erased, due to Sisko's overall significance. But you're right that she shouldn't think that...except arguably through the "butterfly effect" aspects.

I think my main problem is still that the Jake and Melanie conversation feels weird to me, in that it plays like he is giving her something (the book, and the life lessons) that she will take with her, even though those lessons seem to be about to be erased.

It *is* possible to read it in a more existential sense -- where she learns that she only has a few hours to hold onto her new lessons, but those will be fantastic, meaningful hours.

I think though that the intent is maybe that Jake is sharing with Melanie because he knows he's going to die, as if he plans for his advice to her to outlive him. That still seems weird to me.

@William B

Agree old Jake's attitude toward giving Melanie the manuscript is just plain weird. I mean, you can tell yourself that maybe Jake thought there was a chance the current timeline would continue as is, that he'd be creating an alternative, co-existing timeline. But the scene really isn't written that way. It's written as if it doesn't even occur to old Jake that his gesture may be completely meaningless.

In that scene, he talks as if he will soon be drastically altering his future, but then he also talks as if things will remain so exactly the same, so completely unchanged, that it's important to pass that manuscript on to Melanie.

It is weird and it seems more sloppy than anything else.

If there's a likeness with "The Inner Light," it's that they're both decidedly off-format episodes that focus almost exclusively around a single member of the ensemble. They're also both decidedly melodramatic pieces where soaring emotion is prioritized (and logic consequently takes a back seat). The level of taste people have for such episodes is, I suspect, directly related to their tolerance for melodrama.

I Loved this episode and definitely would rank it 4 stars. It always makes me think about my relationship with my father and living life to my fullest.

Random Thoughts:
Jake’s Tragedy vs Picard’s Inner Light:
I always saw this story as a tragedy that focused on the familial/loving relationships we all have (i.e. the parental relationships that define us as people) and the sudden loss of it. This is why it always hit me much harder than “The Inner Light”. Picard doesn’t experience loss from the outset of that episode, he gradually experiences gain and then loss. He gets to live a fully realized life with a family and then he loses it slowly over time, in fact he is well aware that his family on Kataan and the planet will come to an end and yet has time to live his life to its fullest, encourage others to do so, find meaning in everything, etc. The only real tragedy of this episode is that it seems to suggest that Picard, in the real world, has specifically chosen not to have this kind of life due to his commitment to his career in Starfleet and that he may never experience the “inner light” that these relationships gave him. But it is actively Picard’s choice to choose career over a family and he has plenty of time to still find one; in fact, if we are to believe the Star Trek novelizations, Picard will one day marry Beverley Crusher and may have this kind of family sometime. So, although it was neat to see Picard with a family, I was never as emotionally invested by the story, especially as someone who has yet to experience a spouse and kids. Perhaps when I am a 100 year old man who has seen friends and spouses die to old age and prepare to face my own death it will resonate with me more.

On the other hand, Jake was still a yet-to-mature boy of 18, and is at that time in his life was most strongly defined by his relationship with Ben. This relationship is ripped away suddenly and he does not have the experience or support structure to adapt. Anyone who has lost a parent can relate to his pain, as opposed to Picard’s drama in TIL (if you haven’t experienced a full life with a spouse, kids, and grand kids), but more importantly, Jake cannot get past Ben (because he keeps visiting), but also discovers that Ben didn’t simply die, he is trapped in limbo and will likely be there for all eternity. Imagine if you find out your parent was being held in a prison beyond your reach and that long after you died they would be still be suffering (of some sorts) for all time. This fuels Jake’s already obsession-prone behavior to sacrifice everything to reset time…in fact, Jake sacrifices the same familial relationship that Picard earned in TIL, in order to save Ben.

The Time-Reset:
While many people scoff at Jake resetting the timeline immorally to serve his own ends, I say that the risks and rewards are too undefined to claim that it was wrong. Some say that his future was rosy since the Dominion war never occurred in a timeline where Sisko died in season 4 (which also suggests that Sisko really wasn’t all that pivotal to history), but one only has bits-and-pieces of information. True, the worst-case-scenario where the Dominion invade and take over is not realized, but that only means this future is better than that one, it does not suggest that this future is ideal. Think about what is known about this future and see how it compares to the one we know happens at the end of DS9. For this comparison, one has to have watched the series to conclusion:
1. Without Sisko, the Klingons remain an aggressive force in the AQ with their military might to the point that they even assume control over the station and the wormhole. Why doesn’t the Dominion invade in this future? Because maybe they already got what they wanted. Changeling Martok is in a position of power in the Klingon Empire when Sisko dies and probably at some point takes over the Klingon Empire because Sisko/Odo never expose him in Season 5. So, the Dominion never invades because they have already taken over the AQ at this point and nobody even knows it. The Klingon Empire (ruled secretly by the Founders) has essential dominance over the wormhole sector of the AQ (maybe more, perhaps even Cardassia and Bajor at this point) and therefore controls any access to/from the Gamma Quadrant. The Founders never invade because they are never at risk of being conquered so long as they control the wormhole and can slowly continue to destabilize the AQ with their Klingon puppets over the course of the next few decades. Doesn’t sound like great future to me.
2. With the death of the Emissary, the Bajorans lose hope and retreat from the joining the Federation. So we have a future where they are ruled by the Shakaar government and Kai Winn. Compare that to the true future in season 7 where Winn is removed from power and Bajor is on the cusp of joining (which they do eventually do in the Star trek novels). Just look at how much damage Winn causes in Season 4 Accession when Akorem comes out of the wormhole and brings the Bajoran state back to its religiously-conservative caste system that would have ousted Shakaar at the next election and probably put Kai Winn (or her religiously-conservative equivalent) at the head of the State. This future for Bajor with no Emissary to oppose it also sounds not too great.

Also, I agree that one cannot call this a “reset button” episode since the audience knew all along that it was going to be “undone” in some fashion, that the character arc development for Old Jake reached its concussion (and in doing so conveyed the tragedy to the audience), and that Ben retained knowledge of it all (therefore impacting his future father-son relationship which was the whole point of the episode).

Jake-Ben Relationship Progression to End-of-Series:
As pointed out above, the father/son Ben/Jake relationship is one of the best and most endearing in the series and as the show progresses, we see that relationship strained more and more. Mentioned above, the major character conflicts that drive Jake and Ben apart are the Sisko-Prophet episodes where Ben has to choose between his son and his destiny as Emissary/Prophet. As the series progresses, Sisko moves toward accepting his role/destiny as Emissary and Prophet knowing all along that it distances himself from Jake…and the tragedy of it all being that The Visitor showed him how much their relationship meant to them both. But one cannot fight destiny and Ben joins the Prophets in the end, mirroring this scenario in The Visitor. Is the ending of the series tragic since Ben abandons Jake to be with the Prophets just like how he "left" him in The Visitor? Let’s thing about that.

I would argue that Jake matures a great deal since the start of Season 4 and is much better prepared to handle losing Ben by the end of Season 7:

-Season 4 “Paradise Lost/Crossfire”: Jake spends time with his Grandfather as blooming adult and can even stand up to him to the point where he insists that Grandpa take a blood sampling test. Compare this to his prior relationship of always acquiescing and being forced to peel potatoes in the restaurant all day; we see that he has grown-up a little relative to his Grandpa.

-Season 4 “The Muse”: Jake continues to distance himself from his father in pursuit of his own goals. He refuses a father-son trip with Ben in order to focus on a story he is writing and even keeps secret from him the fact that he is meeting with a strange women in an intimate setting (she is massaging his head in her quarters…while eating his creativity?).

-Season 4 “Shattered Mirror”: Jake meets his mirror mother in mirror Jenifer Sisko and then has to watch her die right in front of him. Even though this brings Jake and Ben closer to each other as they both grieve over the re-death of a Jennifer Sisko, he now (sort of) has experience watching a loved parent-like figure die and apparently gets over it emotionally.

-Season 5 “Nor the Battle to the Strong”: Jake experiences the real world, war, and life & death away from his father and takes a hard look inside himself to determine if he is courageous or a coward. Then he exposes that in his writing and shares it with the world. He has become more self-aware, courageous, and takes steps toward his future career in writing.

-Season 5 “The Ascent”: Jake moves out of his father’s quarters and begins to have a fully realized life on his own where he doesn’t even see Ben every day…perhaps only once or twice a week to score a free dinner meal.

-Season 6 “Rapture”: Sisko chooses to have life-threatening visions that may kill him in order to embrace his destiny as Emissary. Although Jake overrides comatose Ben’s wishes in the end, he learns that the Emissary/Prophet destiny means enough to Ben to risk a life with Cassidy and him. This also brings Cassidy back into the picture and strengthens the bond between her and Jake. As both stand by while Sisko faces death, you get the sense that they are already a family unit.

-Season 5 “In The Cards”: Jake realizes his father is depressed due to larger-than-life circumstances beyond his control (i.e. looming threat of Dominion war) and embarks on a quest to correct the situation not by ending the threat of the Dominion way, but rather by focusing on the little things. A token gift of a baseball card changes nothing about the Dominion war scenario but can be seen as a healthy form of dealing with negative feelings by focusing on what makes one happy instead of what makes one sad.

Season 5/6 “Call to Arms” to “Sacrifice of Angels”: Jake risks life-and-limb and goes against Ben’s known orders to abandon the station in order to be an investigate journalist under Dominion rule thereby furthering his future writing career and removing his dependence on his father (although he is dependent on his father’s reputation as Emissary).

Season 6 “The Reckoning”: Sisko sides with the Prophets when both Kira and Jake are possessed by a Prophet and a Paighwraith, respectively. Jake learns and accepts that Ben’s destiny as Emissary and faith in the Prophets means he is willing to sacrifice is own son for a greater good. Jake has therefore accepted a reality where he and Ben are separated for a noble cause.

Season 6 “Valiant”: While along-for-the ride with Nog and a bunch of overzealous Red Squad Cadets, Jake has the courage to go against the grain, stand up to “Captain" Waters and tell everybody that they are foolish for embarking on a suicide mission. A weaker personality would have been swayed by Waters bull crap and even Nog was swayed into obedience (and Nog typically has a stronger personality than Jake).

Season 7/8 “Tears of the Prophets” – “Shadows and Symbols”: Ben Sisko becomes a broken man after failing in his duty as Emissary and allowing Jadzia to die. Jake acts as the support structure this time and holds Ben up: despite already living on his own, he moves back to Earth with Ben to help him recover emotionally or spiritually or whatever. Then he goes as far as to save Ben from the cult-of-the-paighwraith assassin and then accompany him to Tyree. Instead of Jake being dependent on Ben and seeing him as larger-than-life, Jake experiences his father as a “human being”. Jake no longer puts Ben up on a pedestal the way most children see their parents and is now adult enough to be the one who Ben needs to depend on. This can be seen as a reversal of roles rather than the crippling dependence Jake had on Ben at the end of Season 4.

Season 7 “What You Leave Behind” - In the end, Sisko goes off to join the Prophets in the wormhole. While this seems to mirror what happened in The Visitor, there are major differences that completely change the scenario. This time, he is not a prisoner in limbo, alone and with no purpose, but rather accompanied by his own people (his own prophet mother in fact), to serve a higher mission, and with the possibility of return. He also communicates to Cassidy that he is at peace with this fate. Jake, instead of being alone (save for his Grandfather whom he was a child to in Season 4), Jake is now left with new familial bonds. He is become a man is his Grandfather’s eyes and stands on higher footing with him, he has a new mother in the form of Cassidy and she is pregnant, making Jake a future brother to watch over. Lastly, Jake has matured professionally and emotionally to be independent and have a more defined purpose in life with his writing career.

Overall, Jake is in much better circumstance to move on with his life despite Ben being in the Wormhole.

Melanie and Erasing the current Timeline:
I dismiss the idea that Melanie should have acted more aggressively to either stop old Jake from altering the timeline or said something to try to convince him not to. Most likely she comprehended everything he was saying (including the concept that he was going to erase her existence) but simply did not believe it enough to act. If someone, even someone you respected and admired, told you such a fantastic story, would you really act to stop it or would you dismiss it as the rambling dementia of an old man with little probability of being real? Melanie did what most of us would do in that situation, nod her head respectfully, get what she wanted out of the encounter (i.e. writing advice and a copy of his book), and excuse herself from the room.

Finally, when Old Jake tells the story to Melanie in the first place and even gives her the copy of his book, one asks why if he was just going to erase the timeline? Perhaps Old Jake believed there was 0.0001% probability that he was wrong and about to commit suicide for no reason. In that case, he at least wanted someone to know why he was about to die and even benefit from his story. Even if he believed there was a 100% chance of success, I would suggest existence in the moment is meaningful in itself. By telling Melanie his story, even if the timeline gets erased later, at that moment in time and reality, his encounter had meaning to both himself and Melanie. Similarly with the gifting of the book.

That's my long drawn-out random take!

I've been rewatching DS9 weekly over the last couple of years along with "The Greatest Generation" podcast, and just reached this episode. I have nothing particularly new to say about it, but I'm laying here in a mess in a motel room on a road trip and can confirm:

It's lost none of its power after 24 (!) years and still has me choking up from Jake's breakdown in the infirmary onwards. It's just magic. Utterly timeless TV that pushes some universal buttons in the human soul.

And commenters are right, this isn't "The Inner Light". This is so much better! TIL is one of the franchise's most overrated episodes of all time. There, I said it.

It's certainly not a bad episode by any means. It was fine. But I just don't get what I'm missing here. It was cliche and predictable, the old-age makeup was hilariously crappy, and the alternate future (the only reason I personally watched the episode in the first place) wasn't very interesting.

That said, if most people find this episode moving, I'd say that's a good thing. It's not like there's anything bad writing or bad messages in this episode. This episode had good goals IMO, and if those goals succeeded on most people, then that's also good.

Wow! Do none of the commenters here have parents?

I’ll say this, I know that my mom is going to die eventually and I’ll have no choice but to accept this and hope that I’ll see her again one day in heaven. However, if I did have a choice to either stop her from dying or undo her death, even if it meant destroying the whole universe in the process, it wouldn’t even be a question, I would do everything I could do to bring her back without a second thought to the universe. That’s what love is.

"However, if I did have a choice to either stop her from dying or undo her death, even if it meant destroying the whole universe in the process, it wouldn’t even be a question, I would do everything I could do to bring her back without a second thought to the universe. That’s what love is."

I take it you don't gave kids :)

@Jason


I don’t, I have a baby nephew, nonetheless the same thing applies. If God forbid something happened to him and I could bring him back by destroying the universe it wouldn’t even be a question. The nature of real love is such that nothing else really matters but those that you love.

@ Mike,

So...the nature of real love is to let the world burn so that you can have the one thing you want?

@Peter G.

YES! Yes it is, real love is single minded and essentially selfish, it is a beautiful insanity. When you really love someone, nobody and nothing else matters, if you wouldn’t happily let the world burn for someone you love then you don’t love them, you might be very fond of them, but love is more than fondness.


Johnny Cash wasn’t exaggerating when he wrote Ring of Fire...

"YES! Yes it is, real love is single minded and essentially selfish, it is a beautiful insanity. "

While I get where you are coming from on an emotional level I can tell you as a father I wouldn't blow up the world to save my daughter - especially since she also kind of lives here.....

@ Mike,

"YES! Yes it is, real love is single minded and essentially selfish, it is a beautiful insanity. When you really love someone, nobody and nothing else matters, if you wouldn’t happily let the world burn for someone you love then you don’t love them, you might be very fond of them, but love is more than fondness."

I would agree with this on one point: that what you describe is indeed insanity. This is perhaps a point too involved to debate here, but I would personally argue that any definition of love that involves sacrificing others for what you want can't be called love, but perhaps should have some other name. Obsession? Fixation? I guess we could just call it what you did: selfishness.

But rather than push this point further, I would only encourage you to consider what sorts of actions might be justifiable using your definition of love. What courses of action and political movements could result from people adopting exactly that basis of value? If the lives of many are merely a means to serve some "higher" goal, does it really matter what that goal is? And does it really matter whether you call it "love", or "ambition", or "despotism"?

Great episode, and love the 11-year-long discussion in this thread.

While this is undoubtedly Trek at its best, I always wished that the end scene would have revealed that this whole series of events never really happened. Instead, what if it was revealed that this whole episode was really a story that young Jake wrote? Not only would that avoid the reset issue, but it would truly make us believe in Jake as a writer. Imagine the look on Ben's face as he finished reading this story by his son. It wouldn't take away from the character development, either. Instead, it would show that Jake really internalized the lessons this episode stresses. What self-realization this would be!

Thoughts?

I too love the 11-year discussion in this thread about an episode that first aired 24 years ago. I was about Jake's age when I first saw it and I'm probably Sisko's age as I write this - how quickly time passes.

It felt like a good episode then but it's a gut-wrenching, tear-inducing piece of Trek goodness now. DS9's writing team handled time travel the best among the Trek series. Instead of using it as a technobabble crutch, they used it to set up dramatic situations that TNG and Voyager rarely ventured into. DS9 wasn't as serialized as something like Discovery today, so it's left in viewers' minds and memories to remember things that characters seemingly forgot in later episodes.

Tony Todd's performance was amazing. I was also surprised by the excellent performance by Rachel Robinson / Melanie. She looked so very familiar and it was only recently that I found out she was Andrew Robinson's / Garak's daughter. The eyes (and the nose) have it.

Started off annoyed at the break from the Dominion War, ended up blubbing. It was a manly blubbing though, and I watched football afterwards and drove a nail into some wood.

@Bobbington Mc Bob

Heh, I liked how you put that, at the end. And two manly things I can still do, as well. :D

Regards... RT

@RandomThoughts

Haha thanks! Yeap manly compensations are also very productive. The amount of times DS9 makes me feel that way, I will have an entire bookshelf by the end of season 7 :)

Watched this episode just now.
I'd seen it once before, years ago, but I'd forgot its emotional punch.

Damn it all, if I haven't now found an episode to rival my adoration for "The Inner Light."

Well done, DS9. Well done.

I'm generally actively critical of most DS9 episodes (and most media in general, to be fair), since they tend to have a lot of weaknesses.

And indeed, even this episode has a lot of shortfalls, ranging from the technobabble around the accident to the conveniently timed arrival of the Number One Fan and the way that Jake is able to have a conversation in subspace with Sisco, despite the fact that Sisco is meant to be frozen in time.

But for once, the emotional elements of the plot are strong enough to overcome the limitations of the writing.


So all I'm going to do is echo the sentiment of the last comment. Well done, DS9. Well done.

Yeah, I'm gonna echo what seems to be the prevailing sentiment here.

I've had a few happy cries at Star Trek episodes (it's odd, but "happy" seems to get me easier than "sad"). I've had the occasional tear from sad ones, too.

This is the first time Star Trek's left me sobbing uncontrollably, even after the credits have rolled.

I have nothing more to say. Top notch.

When I watched this episode when it first age at the age of 15, I though it was a good episode, but not great. I have watched this episode periodically over the last 24 years but not since I became a father i 2020. As a father 25 years later I have just watched this episode. WOW! I never quite got why it was such an amazing episode before, but now as a father I totally have a new point of view. I cried no less than 3 times through the episode. The acting was spectacular. Cirroc lofton I pulled a performance for the ages out of thin air. The pain in his eyes each time Sisko shifted away was palpable. The fact that we are talking about this episode 25 years later is a testament to the greatness of this episode. The writing, pacing, music and acting just clicked. I totally understand where some people believe this was overrated or they just didn’t get it. I didn’t “get it” for 25 years. I just “got
It” today. Bravo! A true classic and literally the best episode of Star Trek among all 7 series. And a classic TV episode in all aspects.

"No writer would hand over his original manuscript to a
complete stranger! "

Just like Captain Kirk pawning his glasses. Weren't those a gift from Dr. McCoy? Yes, and they will be again, that's the beauty of it. Jake knows that none of "this" is going to be real within a few hours.

I dont know if anyone has asked this q before, but here goes. Is old James universe now separate from the timeliness we are currently on? If so that makes this all the more tragic, it means one version of Jake actually died for his father.

Oh and by the way I had tears in my eyes because of this episode and I never ever get any tears watching anything. Stellar bit of tv/cinema.

Can we get some moderation in here to delete this ugly, ugly comment by Elliott?

"I also wanted to point out an element in the production of this episode that really ticked me off : we have never seen a black Bajoran before--which simply implies that their species evolved differently and their skin colouring is effected by different phenomena than humans, vulcans or klingons--but because Jake has married a Bajoran woman, she must be black. This, especially in the context of Star Trek, is offensive. I'm sure it wasn't written into the story, but someone's decision behind the scenes to cast racially in the 1990s is damned frustrating."

@Michael

I would appreciate if you’d clarify what you’re trying to say before I respond to such an incendiary remark. In my opinion, some of the casting on DS9, especially for the Siskos’ love interests, was racist. That’s the entirety of what I was trying to express with that comment. If you took it to mean something else, something ugly, then I would like to know.

@Elliott

I have no idea why your post would be deemed "ugly" either. Some people are really touchy these days.

The craziest thing here is that I can't tell which side Michael is on. Was your post too PC or not PC enough? It's funny when reality is so insane that we can't even be sure which side we are offending with our alleged terrible thought crimes.

That said, I completely disagree with your claim that the casting here was racist in any way. Why shouldn't Jake's wife be black? And why should the matter of race even be an issue in an episode that has absolutely nothing to do with race?

Besides, if you hold this kind of casting choices against DS9, then I'd argue that the rest of Trek is equally "guilty", including Voyager.

Indeed, let's look at the Voyager crew. Where are all the Chinese and (asian) Indians who make up almost half of the current population of our planet? Where are all the North Africans and Arabs? Should we start knocking off points for random Voyager episodes, just because the major guest star was a white European?

This way, madness lies.
(and if you don't believe me, look out a window)

"That said, I completely disagree with your claim that the casting here was racist in any way. Why shouldn't Jake's wife be black?"

In the scifi context of Star Trek, there is no reason whatsoever for Jake to be compelled to be with a black skinned person and indeed, keep in mind that he is with a female of a *different species* (!!!) so of all people he's unlikely to be hung up on seeking someone who looks like him aesthetically. But of course of all the Bajorans we have ever seen she just has to be the one with dark skin. Gee what are the odds?

In universe I guess we can call it a co-incidence or mayne even suppose that Jake just happens to enjoy dark skin aesthetically or whatever but we all know full well what was behind the casting choice in the real world- some executive was afraid if blowback for depicting a black man with a white woman, even one in alien makeup. I suspect in TOS era that kind of casting choice would have started a riot (BIG difference between white man kissing black woman and black man kissing white woman) but the 90s were kind of a transitional time for this sort of thing.

I would have probably endorsed the executive theory, but I seem to remember something in the recent DS9 documentary where Avery Brooks mentioned he was responsible for those casting choices.

@Omicron

My point wasn’t about overall diversity in casting (which is important, but also something one can concern troll about ad nauseum), but, as Jason R said, that we hadn’t seen or at least featured any non-white Bajorans before. The powers that be for some reason thought it necessary to change that *only* when it meant pairing one up with one of the black leads. To me, that feels like a motivated choice, and not a progressive one. And I complained about the same thing when they cast Tuvok’s wife.

@Jason R

Brooks indeed insisted that his love interests be played black women on the show. He was motivated by politics that I don’t feel qualified to talk about at the moment, but I don’t see how that would affect choices for actors playing alternative versions of his character’s son.

Sorry, the second part was meant for John, not Jason.

"but we all know full well what was behind the casting choice in the real world- some executive was afraid if blowback for depicting a black man with a white woman, even one in alien makeup."

We "know" that? No we don't.

I agree with you that, from a production perspective, this casting choice wasn't a coincidence. So what? That executive you're talking about may have simply defaulted to what he personally found natural.

If the first image that comes to my mind for "the wife of a guy of ethnicity X" is a gal of ethnicity X, does that make me a racist?

You could argue that it doesn't make much sense in-universe.

You could also argue that since this is Star Trek we are talking about, we should expect the people in charge to make a conscious positive effort to avoid this kind of thing - if only to emphasize the point.

And these arguments have some merit.

But calling it a racist decision? Or in Elliott's own words: an "offensive" one? I think that's taking things way too far.

@Elliott

Oh, I could see how Brooks might have an influence over casting choices. Let's not forget he was also a director on the show, and seems very outspoken about his views. I'm not an expert about how casting works in the industry, but if he had a choice over his own relationships it's not a stretch to think he had an influence over Jake's.

@Elliott
"but, as Jason R said, that we hadn’t seen or at least featured any non-white Bajorans before."

I'm not sure this is true.

But if even if it is, why would the person who made the casting choices be aware of this tidbit? Does the DS9 writer Bible says "All Bajorans are to be light-skinned"?

Come to think of it, was he even aware of the character being Bajoran? It had zero implication on the story. If it weren't for
the makeup on her nose, she could have been human.

In short, I really think you're reading way too much into this.

Also, I think that John's point *is* relevant here, albeit indirectly. If Avery Brooks, who is black himself, specifically asked for Sisko's girlfriend to be black as well, this sets a precedent. When we have this example, I find the notion of such a decision to be "offensive" quite hard to swallow.

I don't have the numbers right now but it is well documented that significant parts of the white audience in the 90s had problems seeing black men kissing white women, somwhat similar to two men kissing. And buckling to that racist view and making all the black men seek out only black women is then in itself affirming that racism. I guess they cautiously approched the racist line with worf and dax.

"If the first image that comes to my mind for "the wife of a guy of ethnicity X" is a gal of ethnicity X, does that make me a racist?"

As Booming intimates, the issue isn't that some executive may have thought the choice more intuitive or natural but that the choice may have been made out of fear of backlash by racists who react strongly to the taboo against black men with white women.

But that said I am not surprised at Avery Brooks's desire to have his love interest be a black woman, which is in keeping with what I have guessed about his political bent. If it turns out that Brooks extended this view to Jake's character and actually influenced things in that direction, that wouldn't shock me either.

So I guess we could call that a non racist alternative explanation for the casting choice.

"I guess they cautiously approched the racist line with worf and dax."

Good point although because of all the Klingon makeup it's alot easier to slip it in there. I know that growing up watching TNG I never even realized Michael Dorn was black until I played a scifi adventure game starring him as the lead.

Sisko kissed and slept with mirror Dax in “Through the Looking Glass.” That was deemed okay because it wasn’t a serious relationship, just a fling.

Again, I don’t want to get too deep into Brooks’ ethnopolitical persuasions, but I do want to clarify that it wasn’t about appeasing a white audience’s racism against seeing people of different races together, it was about a segment of the black audience that didn’t want to see black people erased in the future. The idea is that if races intermarry and produce mixed race children, blackness will be diluted. I’m wary of saying much more about this, but I don’t find this particular sociological view compatible with Trek’s vision of the future.

Where did Brooks say that he only wanted black women for himself and Jake?

"The Visitor" is one of my favorite Trek episodes ever and I was curious as to why it was creating a buzz here this morning. Unfortunately it comes down to Elliott employing a typical tactic of the far left to call something racist because he doesn't agree with it and then getting called out on it. I see this type of nonsense as political correctness taken to the nth degree -- it's almost gaslighting. It happens all the time these days.

And then there's the part about Elliott's implication of not seeing black Bajorans, skin, and evolution etc. -- just beyond ridiculous.

So I agree with Michael who is right to call out Elliott for, as I see it, trying to stir up something out of nothing for what must be some warped beliefs. Keep getting confirmation that it is best to just ignore Elliott.

😂 "far left"

Yikes, dude.

@Booming

I'm looking for the original article. If memory serves, it came up when discussing "What You Leave Behind," as Brooks also insisted on changing the story to avoid allegorisations about black men abandoning their children. And it led to Behr's characterisation of Sisko in "Badda-Bing, Badda-Bang" having historical objections to the fictional portrayal of Las Vegas.

But just to clarify, I have never seen any indication that Brooks insisted that both he and Jake only be paired with black women, only that he was very cognisant of how black culture was to be depicted in the future. The rest is speculation based on what he said and what we saw on screen.

What article? From the Pravda?!! You SJW Pinko

Sorry I love people like Rahul. Probably never discriminated, apart from women not wanting him, but he stays vigilant and sniffs out those commie SJW.

Seriously though I notced even back then that there was never a black guy with a white lady. While Riker and Kirk were working there way through the entire female color palette, Geordie and friends were not so lucky.

Now now Booming. Geordie had white love interests err at least women he was interested in. And he did marry Dr. Brahms in an alternate reality. Not sure how progressive this was haha.

I like to think implying Geordi ended up with Leah was Braga's and Moore's way of apologising for turning such a likeable character into something of an incel. Burton deserved better.

So true. Geordie literally could only get a white woman in an alternate reality plus we never saw them kiss. Oh the 90s.

Burton did deserve better, but I think there is something interesting about having Geordi struggle with connecting with people except when mediated through technology -- which is what the original Booby Trap episode was about, and which is related to his closeness with Data. It's tied in with his engineering work, his disability and VISOR, his unique way of seeing the world, it's part of what makes him exploited (The Mind's Eye) etc. Galaxy's Child, Aquiel, Interface, and Force of Nature were also on this theme but were not exactly good at it. Maybe The Next Phase (which I generally like) can be added to the list. To be clear, I'm not saying that engineers or people with disabilities in general always struggle with the same things as Geordi, but I guess the ways in which he was somewhat alienated felt believable to me most of the time, even if most of the episodes about it didn't work. I often feel like the writers were on the verge of a breakthrough with Geordi in terms of his relationship with technology, friendliness but slight alienation from others, VISOR as "seeing" differently from most and the pros/cons of that, maybe connected with both mild ASD and disability, but only sort of danced around it. Interesting still but incomplete.

@William B

In my view, "Insurrection" provided the best opportunity to break through with this, as you say. He should have had the romantic subplot with a Bak'u and that relationship should have presented a conflict for him, given that his sight was restored by the magic radiation.

I also had taken it as a given that Brooks requested to have black love interests on the show. Assuming this is so, there's nothing to see here on the front of his character. For Jake we don't know whether it was spillover from Brooks' influence (he was like a father to Lofton), whether it came from Lofton himself, or from the producers. Arguments on this front based on speculation seem spurious to me since we don't know.

Now as Elliott and Jason R point out, it's probably not a *coincidence* that the pairing here was made as it was. But that alone says nothing; all it says is the show wasn't color blind. The kneejerk response is to call racism, because hey, why not, it's a non-falsifiable charge that makes a vague accusation while not quite actually saying anything specific. Except for one thing: the entire color blind vs not color blind debate isn't even much of a debate these days: most people calling for a color blind politics or social landscape would themselves be called racists in the present climate in the States. I'm not taking a position on this (certainly not here), but intend only to point out that it seems to be treading on dangerous ground to look at two black actors playing a scene and to object that they cast a black person. In Hollywood. I don't care whether there is a chance it was based on fearful optics, which I would agree would be unfortunate, but in and of itself the notion of saying "the role given to that black actress should have gone to a white lady" is over the line by any liberal standard these days. Now we could perhaps infer that Elliott means it could have been anyone at all other than a black person - for instance Jake could have had an Asian wife. And actually that particular argument (if he were making it) would be reasonable because the battle is always black vs white and no one thinks to include other ethnicities. DS9 and TNG both lacked Asian-descent bridge crew, although Keiko was on both in a smaller recurring role, so there is something to be said for that if that's the argument. I'm re-watching Heroes right now (no criticisms!) and it always strikes me how incredibly diverse this show was, even to the point of being happy to employ subtitles for a significant potion of the storylines.

But I guess to the extent that Michael seems to have been focusing on an objection to casting a black person in a role on a TV show, this is not a trivial issue to be swept aside. Yes, it might have been "interesting" to have a mixed relationship. Of course there are already some those on Trek and on DS9 in particular so it's not like a mixed relationship was banned or something. But put aside the coulda been, and you're left with two black actors on camera and someone objecting to that. I can see how that would give someone ideas. I typically try to avoid engaging on points like that but if we wanted to give benefit of doubt to Michael perhaps this is the basis of the complaint.

@Peter G

That's why I've asked Michael to explain what he's objecting to, because you're absolutely right. The fact that it is noticeable that the only Bajorans of colour we see with speaking roles are black women involved romantically with our black male leads speaks to the fact that there was insufficient representation on the shows. And I include all the series in that assessment. One could have made a flimsy argument (and boy have I seen them) that Bajorans or Vulcans or Romulans are only played by white actors (*) because their alien physiology blah blah blah. As we saw in, of all things, "Code of Honour," you can absolutely find a large number of black people to fill roles in 1980s/90s Hollywood if you try. It's a crime that they only seemed to have bothered for that atrocity of an episode.

(*) Of course, eventually, black actors did play Romulans and Vulcans and Cardassians. What needs to be kept in mind here is that the race of the actors playing aliens shouldn't matter at all *in-Universe.* We have no reason to believe, for example, that Vulcans would place any emphasis on skin colour or that their planet's history would be anything like ours. BUT out-of-Universe, casting actors of colour is very important. So when you don't do it most of the time that's a problem. When you chose to finally do it only because your lead actor has conditions about how his character is portrayed, then you've compounded the problem.

When you cast primarily white people to fill the roles of aliens, you imply that white is the "default," the "blank canvass" on which to apply your prosthetics. So to be absolutely clear, casting black actors to play Bajorans is not the problem. Casting black actors to play Bajorans *exclusively* when they are to be romantically paired up with black humans is, well I'm sorry, but that is racist.

"When you cast primarily white people to fill the roles of aliens, you imply that white is the "default," the "blank canvass" on which to apply your prosthetics. "

While in universe it may make sense to show such diversity in the human citizens of the Federation or alien societies, in reality this was an American TV show where only 12% of the US population at the time was black.

From that standpoint DS9 was not only quite diverse, but far more so than it arguably needed to be.

If DS9 had been produced in China for Chinese consumption nobody would have wondered why "Chinese" was the default so-called blank canvass.

@Jason R

12% is a lot of people. I would have been happy if 6% of the Bajorans we saw were black. But virtually none of the various Vedeks or alt-Emissaries or resistance heroes or Odo's deputies we see get to be played by non-white actors.

I agree with Rahul. And I think Booming's reply to him is abhorrent. Telling someone (who clearly isn't white) that they've "probably never [been] discriminated [against] apart from women not wanting him" - give it a break, dude. Lass es doch. Why does every major argument on this site in the past year or two always involve the same person?

And again, this isn't a DS9 problem exclusively--TNG, Enterprise and Voyager definitely had this problem, too (TOS I can sort of forgive as being limited in what it could get away with in the 60s). It's just that DS9 drew attention to this problem with their casting of the love interests. At least Tuvok had a relationship with Laura Petty.

@Elliott:

Sisko*
Odo
O'Brien
Kira
Bashir*
Dax
Worf*
Jake*
Nog
Quark
Garek
Dukat
Kaiko*
Cassidy*
Weyoun
D'Mar
Female changeling

Of 17 regular characters (including second stringers) we have 4 black comprising 23% (including the lead), 1 Asian comprising 6%.

The black representation is way over the actual representation in the US based on 1990 census figures, as is the Asian representation.

So racially, DS9 was over-diverse in its main cast in terms of both primary and secondary regulars.

You've asserted that the representation for extras isn't there but provided no evidence in support of this.

That said at just 29% the female representation is glaringly light for the regulars. That much is admitted.

I should add that lumping people into crude so-called racial categories like "black" and "asian" is a fool's game but I am responding in kind to claims of under-representation. I mean I guess you could say that Latinos aren't represented or you could argue maybe that south Asians should have their own category? But forget it I made my point - a US show is far more diverse than it gets credit for.

Uggh I forgot Rom and Leta. But that doesn't change much.

@Wolfstar
Thanks for sharing. You think my post was abhorrent but agree with some guy who made wild accussations and personal attacks without provocation.

"Telling someone (who clearly isn't white)"
I don't know the guy. That's why I wrote probably because people complaining about people complaining about intolerance are seldom people who have experienced much inolerance.
And if he is not white then that doesn't mean that he has experienced inolerance. There are countries on this planet where very few white people live...

Happy Pride month wolfstar.

@Jason R

I didn't mean to malign the diversity of the main cast. Every Trek series except Enterprise did this pretty well and DS9 is no exception. I was referring specifically to Bajoran characters. Here's a mostly complete list of named Bajorans on DS9.

Kira
Winn
Bareil
Leeta
Shakkar
Mora
Akorem
Li Nalas
Jaro Essa
Krim
(Ziyal)
Solbor
Tahna Los
Opaka
Darhe'el
Lupaza
Kalem
Mardah/Marta
Luma
Anara
Mullibok
Ibudan
Baltrim
Tromac
Neela
Okala*
Mobara
Brilgar
Borum
Porta
Ches'sarro
Aroya
Migdal
Pelin
Kannu
Deela
Dekon
Razka
Eblan
Renora
Fala
Furel
Kag
Roana
Rota
Rozhan
Galis
Gantt
Gettor
Gia
Girani
Saghi
Rez
Halb Daier
Korena (Jake's wife)*
Solbor
Hovath
Heler
Sorad
Ren
Tagana
Ishan
Jabra
Tekoa (engineer)*
Gueta
Landi
Vedek Tonsa*
Polus
Toran
Trazko
Kaval
Keeve Falor
Fala
Kesha (Jake's other 3rd Bajoran love interest)*
Meru and the rest of the Kira family
Kubus
Sul
Varani
Ram
Woban
Latara
Y'Pora
Yarka
Yassim
Mabrin
Yeln

That's, what, 85 Bajorans, five of which were anything besides white. That would be 0.6%

@wolfstar

"Why does every major argument on this site in the past year or two always involve the same person?"

You've noticed that too huh?

This forum is a free-for-all so to try to optimize my enjoyment of it, I stopped paying attention to certain people a long while ago. But I happened to read Elliott quoted this morning because it's this episode and here we are...

@Rahul

If you would like to have a conversation, we can have a conversation. I was obliquely called a racist (although I still don't actually know what Michael's complaint is) based on a comment from NINE years ago. I'm a regular poster on this site. I try to be respectful of other people's opinions on here, but am I actually expected to let something like that go unchallenged? wolfstar decided a number of years ago they didn't have time for my comments which is obviously their business. You are free to join them in that practice, but please don't mention me in your comments if your intention is just to ignore me. That's rude.

Elliott I don't know if you personally compiled that list but damn. I bow to your superior nerdery.

Uggh I forgot Martok and Wynn :)

Elliott is right, but for the record, when I said "Why does every major argument on this site in the past year or two always involve the same person?", I didn't mean him.

As to the discussion, I don't think casting black actresses as future Jake's wife and Tuvok's wife is offensive or racist. Neither were ever paired exclusively with black characters - Jake dated a white Bajoran dabo girl in season 2/3 then is shown as married to a mixed-race Bajoran woman in The Visitor. I don't read anything into either of those things. And as Elliott also points out, Tuvok was later paired with Lori Petty in one episode.

Jason said: ""but we all know full well what was behind the casting choice in the real world- some executive was afraid if blowback for depicting a black man with a white woman, even one in alien makeup."

It's the other way around. The taboo up until recently was pairing black actors with black love interests. When DS9 was made, the African American actor usually "got" the white girl, or (in the early 2000s) the latina girl, not another African American girl. The former tests better with more audience members, and probably "comfortably" kowtowed to old racist notions (black women aren't sexy, white beauty is superior etc).

In the context of the mid 1990s, pairing Sisko with a black actress would have been mildly more trailblazing. It was part of a new Afro-American/black-culture/pride/body positivity wave. In the context of a real-life far-future Space Federation, it's racist and weird, but the intention (pushed by Brooks) at the time was the opposite.

I can't read Brook's mind, but it seems pretty evident to me how it might be important to a black person in Hollywood to make a stand about "if you're gonna hire mostly white guest stars then fine, but I'm drawing a line." The uproar about mostly-white casting reached a fever pitch even within the last couple of years, so if that was what Brooks was on about then it's not only not racist but ahead of its time in the business. I could see Brooks, or others like him, finding it galling to have a white female love interest yet again, 'Snow White syndrome'.

Now where I think this grates in Elliott is perhaps badly indicated in his review (sorry Elliott). His complaints about DS9 tend to be based on anachronistic elements pushed into the show that portray a more modern sensibility rather than a Trek one such as shown on TNG or VOY. Elliott has remarked on this in the 'shades of grey' approach to morality, which is a modern area of interest but not something TNG at any rate was interested in; he's remarked on it in his recent review of The Ascent in scenes which he feels are barely different from what we'd see in a modern non-space show; and he's remarked on it in even character details such as (especially) Sisko's character which he feels is out of tone for what Trek should portray. So I'm doing a little 'mind reading' here, but I don't think this is about black-black pairing, so much perhaps as a modern social movement being pasted into the Trek universe. It makes *complete* sense to fight for more diverse casting *now*, and in-universe doesn't make sense in Trek to have contemporary things shown as special, when they shouldn't be special there, and in fact in the future the converse would be the case (i.e. that no special concern would be present for color or race). Elliott, is my read on this correct?

If so, then I'll take a page from Trent's line of argument, that fundamentally Trek has to be seen as allegorical and even mythic, and to a certain extent not every single literal detail will map on a 1-to-1 basis smoothly. Some of what we need to show on Trek will necessarily be a bit illogical in the future sense, in order to hammer home what it means to us now, and I think we have to accept that. I'll give an example from a typically praised episode:

In Rejoined we have an allegory towards, presumably, same-sex relationships and the taboo involved. I suppose mixed in there somewhere might be the issue of having a man's memories/feelings in a woman's body, but that's not front and center in any case. Now IRL we know what they're doing, and we applaud it, let's say. But in-universe it doesn't really make sense, for a few reasons. For one thing, making it woman-woman was apparently a 'coincidence' because the re-association rules would apply to man/woman as well, so it's surely deliberate that they showed it as man/woman and portrayed that as a public scandal. Also, the manner in which Dax goes through the arguments (with Sisko for example) isn't really sensible in its own right within the context of Trill society. You're telling me we should applaud someone seeing to it that Dax never has any more hosts? Sounds pretty selfish to me, and it's not like she was crusading against this Trill rule before. It's only now that she's feeling the heat that she wants to suddenly buck convention and doom her symbiont. But whatever, that's not really what the episode is intended to be about, I personally never focus on those details because I know what they're after. But that requires some active 'forgetting' on my part, and to ignore how in-universe the logic isn't quite there. So modern need to portray this issue does not map into the DS9 universe perfectly, but it doesn't matter because this is allegory and high art about life. It's not kitchen drama attempting to portray realism in the 24th century. These are adventures, not documentaries.

And I think the same needs to apply to the black casting issue. Brooks wants to fight for more equitable casting, more power to him. As the star we might even suggest it's responsibility to set an example, and I believe he felt that was the case. You have to be a sort of leader when you're the star, and too many celebrities aren't. So to me calling this out as racists isn't offensive, but it is weird from a progressive standpoint. Artistically the material does give way a bit to make room for it, but barely enough to be relevant unless one wants to make a federal case out of it.

Without wading too deep here, Elliott you seem to have put the decimal in the wrong place: 5/85 *is* (approx) 6%.

Regardless of Brooks's specific role, this was a real phenomenon of the era, Black actors insisting on Black love interests (e.g. Eriq Lasalle on ER): https://www.salon.com/2000/02/14/interracial_movies/. So it is a trend worth observing, at a minimum. But I really don't follow where it intersects with the issue of casting in Bajoran diversity, or how it can be the casting of Black actors, rather than the failure to cast Black actors, that is the racist part.

@Valinor

Yes, that is the racist part. My point is that the only non-white Bajorans besides bit parts (few if any speaking lines) in the entire series were 2 of Jake's love interests. It draws attention to the fact that they weren't hiring nearly enough non-white actors by making the exception specifically to avoid interracial relationships.

@William B

YEP! Mea Culpa

@Peter G & Trent

That's a mostly fair synthesis, although you'll forgive me if I stand by my overall review of the episode. What I'll say is that a better (IMO) solution to concerns of Brooks, La Salle and others would be to have more diverse casting overall. The fact that the non-white alien casting was so limited means that instances when it isn't draw attention to themselves. And, as you say, for me, it encroaches on the Trek messaging.

@wolfstar

Lori, sorry.

@elliot
you say sorry to that guy? rahul still attacked you without provocation and wolfstar agreed with that and both are completely unaplogetic. You certainly have lost my respect.

@Booming

Huh? I'm not apologising for my opinion. I misspelled Petty's name.

Relax, man.

@Jason R

"The black representation is way over the actual representation in the US based on 1990 census figures, as is the Asian representation.

So racially, DS9 was over-diverse in its main cast in terms of both primary and secondary regulars. "

I'm not sure it makes sense to compare current US census figures against demographics in DS9. For a start, DS9 isn't a vision of a future United States. It's not a NASA outpost. In a future where the world is supposed to be united, is it realistic that the vast majority of people on a station are white? I mean, if we're going to take depiction of race seriously, which is something I think DS9 aspires to, shouldn't the number of Chinese we see outnumber the whites 2:1?

@elliot
"Relax, man."
When wolfstar and rahul attack you again for your "far left" oppinions I will do just that.

@Booming

I appreciate your comments, and you and I obviously agree on a lot of points, but I don’t think it’s a good idea to take these things so personally. Just my opinion.

@Rahul
"So I agree with Michael who is right to call out Elliott for, as I see it, trying to stir up something out of nothing for what must be some warped beliefs."

Shall I remind you that it was Michael who dug up this 9-year old post by Elliott and used it as an excuse to start a fight?

It indeed seems like somebody here is trying to stir up trouble, but it ain't Elliott (nor is it any other of the regulars). Let's not give them the satisfaction, alright?

@Elliot
I just noticed that rahul attacked you with alt right talking points and in Germany we tend to take the far right a little bit more serious. We know where it leads if you let these people have their way.

"I just noticed that rahul attacked you with alt right talking points and in Germany we tend to take the far right a little bit more serious. We know where it leads if you let these people have their way."

Whaddya think, struggle session time for Rahul?

Here we have a Michael who apparently went trough elliots posts or was really bored, found a decade old one and insults elliot. Then rahul who said that he ignores certain people jumps in and accuses elliot of using "typical tactic of the far left to call something racist because he doesn't agree with " and then states " I see this type of nonsense as political correctness taken to the nth degree -- it's almost gaslighting. It happens all the time these days." Just as a reminder this is about an almost decade old post. After that he insults elliot three more times (warped beliefs, beyond ridiculous, Keep getting confirmation that it is best to just ignore Elliott). So starting a debate about possible racism is not that, oh no, it is tactic to silence people.

This means gaslighting by the way: "the action of tricking or controlling someone by making them believe things that are not true, especially by suggesting that they may be mentally ill."
Clearly starting a debate about racism is gaslighting.

@Booming

"I just noticed that rahul attacked you with alt right talking points and in Germany we tend to take the far right a little bit more serious. We know where it leads if you let these people have their way."

Oh yeah... They start rioting and vandalizing and bullying innocent people (both physically and otherwise) just because of the color of their skin. They campaign for firing those whose opinions they don't like, and hold entire neighborhoods hostage.

You are right. We can't have that, can we? As you said: We know where it leads, if you let such people have their way, don't we?

Oh wait... you said "the far *right*"? Sorry. Never mind then.

[/sarcasm]

Just to be clear: I'm left-leaning myself. Doesn't change the fact the current situation is BATSHIT INSANE and it is - sadly - my "side" who is doing most of the crazy stuff right now. Seriously, Booming, you've chosen the worst possible time in history to make the bold generalization you just made.

And believe me, I understand the touchiness of this subject in Germany. I also understand why. But not every right-oriented person is a potential Hitler.

Besides, Rahul didn't post anything worse then the stuff you sometimes post when you want to knock other people down. From gross generalizations to accusations of mental illness, you have accumulated quite an "impressive" record here.

So drop the act of being shocked by Rahul's actions. Yes, his comment to Elliott was pretty nasty, but if we didn't forgive such behavior (to a certain degree, at least) then nobody would have talked to you either.

(why is it, again, that every major argument on this site in the past year or two always involve the same person?)

@Jason
"Whaddya think, struggle session time for Rahul?"

Maybe he should do an apology tour, like they did in that Orville episode. Let the mob judge him. If he gets ten million downvotes... ZAP!

(Scary how relevant that episode is becoming right now)

I'm not so sure that the leftist terror is as dominating as you might think.
- right wing terror in the us kills between ten and twenty times as many people as left wing terror
- the current right wing government banned trans people from the military, the biggest employer for trans people. Around 5000 lost their jobs.
- the current government is rolling back workplace protections for lgbt people. Try to be openly gay or trans in the bible belt and get a job, maybe left wing intolerance won't seem so threatening anymore.
- several states have introduced abortion laws that would send women to prison for up to 30 years.

and that is just from the top of my head. I have no problem with actual conservatives but the right in the US is so extreme these days. They would not be allowed to participate in the political process in Germany because they would be labeled right wing extremists

And I did not make generalizations about rahul. He just used pretty common alt right talking points. It is my field of study. rahul's post had only one aim: silence elliot. And when I defended elliot wolfstar stated his SSupport for rahul and attacked me.

I thought until that point the debate was pretty fruitful but then these three (Michael, rahul, wolfstar) jumped in and spread their poison. Only wolfstar at the end made one actual comment about the debate. the other two only attacked and insulted people.
As we say in germany: viel Feind, viel Ehr.

"rahul's post had only one aim: silence elliot."

Ridiculous. Rahul has never done anything like that here. Motive speculation is already bad, but this is a dubious speculation on top of it.

You know Booming I see precious little evidence that you and others like you bother with any coherent distinction between "alt right" and just garden variety conservatives. I've been alarmed at how rapidly just in the past 5 years the rhetoric has overheated to the point that mere conservatism morphs into "alt right" and finally into "Nazi". Your own post against Rahul illustrates this pretty well.

As a member of the group you Germans set out to exterminate I never cease to be shocked at how my own views, which I once considered small "c" conservative a few years back or even "liberal", now make me one step removed from the Third Reich.

Alot of previously self described liberals I know feel the same way - although most of us are too afraid to speak up publicly outside of quasi anonymous venues like this one.

Anyway you seem like a decent person despite your extreme rhetoric, but that is the scary thing. It used to be this kind of radicalism was confined to academic venues but now it really is mainstream, isn't it?

Oh boy this is going off the rails isn't it?

To the self-described conservatives on this thread, it is essential to understand that the overton window is all over the place. Economically, much of the developed world, especially the US, but definitely most European countries, have been drifting rightward for about 40 years. What would, in the 1970s be called a relatively centrist economic position, like tax-funded universal healthcare, is now called "fringe" left, communist-adjacent, etc. And not just by rabble-rousers in political bubbles, but in the mainstream media.

On the other hand, social issues have continued to move left because that's been the natural drift since the end of the Victorian era. These two opposing forces together create the perception of an ever widening rift. People on the right and the left don't want to see themselves as extreme, so they position themselves roughly in the centre and judge other politics from that vantage point.

@Jason R

I don't know what country you live in, but in the US, the Democratic Party, which calls itself "liberal" (and is in the classical sense, but not in the sense people use the word), is by and large a conservative party. Progress is meted out at a snail's pace, regulations to the market are met with skepticism, every aspect of the economy gives preference to the private sector, etc. But the so-called "conservative" part, the Republicans, are well to the right of the Democrats, both on economics and especially on social issues. There are active, high-ranking members who still believe in gay conversion therapy, state religion, and that climate change is a hoax. The Republican Party also has actual neo-Nazis amongst its ranks and the leaders of the party do little to discourage their involvement. You can understand why one would see a person who describes himself as a conservative as being a stone's throw from Nazism, since that has literally become the situation.

Now to be clear, this political labelling started with Rahul's comment to me:

"Unfortunately it comes down to Elliott employing a typical tactic of the far left to call something racist because he doesn't agree with it and then getting called out on it."

It escalated from there. I don't have a photographic memory of people's self-identified politics on this forum. Too much space reserved remember every on-screen Bajoran. So, I would suggest engaging with the actual ideas being discussed instead of making assumptions or being defensive.

Elliot for the record I thought Rahul's response to you was off base but then Booming implied he was a nazi and I got triggered lol.

Rahul's point is, to whit, not an attack on Elliott but rather a statement on the scenario of someone making a 'striking' claim, stating it as a moral fact, which then of course triggers responses from parties that find the claim extreme. To the extent that he was identifying this as one of those scenarios, he is almost certainly correct, putting aside entirely the validity of Elliott's opinion (which I am personally happy to debate). I'm reminded of an early version of what Rahul describes, which was the famous "if you dress like Pocahontas for Halloween you are a racist" type posts seen almost ten years ago. People would post this on social media, of course triggering a firestorm, and this can easily degenerate into "you're a racist" "no, YOU'RE the racist!" Obvious we want to do better here, and Elliott, to the extent that your post was making an analytical point, which is excellent to do, I would only caution you that offering an explanation of how American conservatives are by definition close to being Nazis is throwing fuel into the fire in terms of the Trek discussion being washed away and turning into a political turf war. And if someone, right or wrong, finds a post ugly, maybe that's something to explore *in a Trek discussion*. You did ask him what he meant so I think that's fine, maybe he'll answer. But I think you got conned a bit into joining the fray of a bad news sidetrack into politics.

I appreciate Peter G.’s characterization of the discourse — he is somebody I’ve come to respect for consistently well-reasoned, well-written analysis. I admit, I was quite irritated with Elliott’s comments that Michael rightly vilified. And even if the “ugly” comments are 9 years old, has Elliott walked them back? If not, then the 9 years is irrelevant.

Over the years, I’ve seen other “random” people take offence to Elliott’s comments and I also recall Elliott claiming he’s a socialist (another reason for saying “far left”, aside from the tactic itself). Just so everybody knows, I am firmly against these extreme ideologies (communism, socialism, fascism, etc.) as they are detrimental to society.

Here’s an analogy which is somewhat why I was also disgusted with Elliott’s comments. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has been correctly accused of covering up COVID-19 and mismanaging it such that it became a pandemic. When democratic governments want to take it to task, it strikes back and says those governments are racist and xenophobic -- they are not. And then the CCP claims to be the victim and doesn’t take responsibility for its idiocy. This is a typical tactic the CCP uses and I see Elliott largely doing the same bullshit. I just think it’s vile and so I also felt compelled to call him out.

Sigh.

Socialism is not an extreme ideology. Communism certainly is, but you’ve never seen me defending any real or fictional communist parties on this site.

The rest of this little diatribe is a pitiful strawman.

1. Elliott is a communist
2. The CCP fucked up containing the corona virus
3. Elliott won’t apologise for being a communist
4. Elliott is just like the Chinese

It would help this conversation, Rahul, if you explained what you mean by “tactic,” because that’s very unclear.

Elliott,

Rahul is referring to the tactic of doing or saying something offensive, and when people naturally react badly to that calling them out for being the thing they're accusing you of. The form would be something like:

Person A: XYZ
Person B: XYZ is outragous, how could you say that!
Person A: Now you are behaving like XYZ, just as I said!

So self-fulfilling prophecy, aka trigger the very response you will then accuse.

The other, slightly modified form is:

Person A: XYZ is guilty
Person B: That is outreageous!
Person A: That proves you're part of the problem.

So the kafka trap, where you are guilty if you don't object, and guilty if you do.

Final form is:

Person A: XYZ is guilty
Person B: Are you really saying that?!
Person A: What? No, I didn't mean that at all (when they clearly did).

This is the chicken-hawk scenario.

Now Rahul, I don't think Elliott has been doing any of these things. He does make some claims that could be offensive to some people, but he always stands by them and will defend them with argument. That's not the behavior you're describing, which is that of evasive trickery in order to win face in public and brainwash people. I don't disagree that some of Elliott's comments over the years are...well, aggressive to my sensibilities, but I try to discipline myself to engage with the content and see where we might see eye to eye on Trek terms. Lashing out doesn't help, I think.

Yeah, Elliott has not espoused literal communism here, and "socialist" is a very open term that can include things like social democracy. It's not useful to pigeon-hole someone or assume a specific set of motives because they described themselves using this general term on a totally different comment thread. As to "if not, then the 9 years is irrelevant" - that depends how worthwhile or incisive we consider offence archaeology to be. I think most of us had opinions in the past that we might now either disavow or express in a milder or more balanced form today.

I think a lot of people's feelings are heightened at the moment (mine certainly are) and it's almost like people are keen to form themselves into tribes and assume the worst of those they see as being on the opposing side. I think this whole issue was dredged up unnecessarily, but as Peter G outlines, I can understand how Michael and Rahul found Elliott's old post provocative, particularly if they've had previous experience regarding inflationary "Thing X is racist" discourse (as Peter touches on with the Pocahontas example). I don't think Elliott either now or then was trying to deliberately push people's buttons on this thread or being disingenious, but just expressing his own perspective, and I think Michael misinterpreted the place his views were coming from. I'd decided I was going to ignore the whole debate and just scroll past it in the comments stream until petrol was poured on the flames and I didn't want those kind of below-the-belt comments being made to Rahul without anyone drawing a line, which is why I briefly stepped in. I apologise if my responding to Booming's comment made things worse. I think most of us agree this is a great episode.

Somewhere in the midst of this there's probably a whole debate to be had on how modern Trek (presumably as part of a diverse casting approach) handles Earth ethnicities in relation to alien species, especially since Picard gave us white, black, Asian and Irish(!) Romulans...

For the record I didn't think either Rahul or Elliott said anything extreme. As usual it was Booming who brought up the Nazis and the "alt right". She is often escalating these threads.

And for the record Elliott, comparing contemporary Republicans to the Third Reich is about as fatuous as Anti-fa's claims to be the inheritors of the Allies of WW2 because they oppose "fascists".

Even actual self-described "Nazis" have no serious comparison with WW2 era Nazi Germany and it's frankly being generous to them to even take seriously such a claim.

Sorry I don't want to drag this discussion on anymore as I've already stated my position and I stand by it but I do want to clear up the communism thing -- as I said, I recall Elliott saying he's a socialist. I take that at face value and so why would I call him a communist?

The confusion must be coming from the comparison with the Chinese Communist Party -- they are communist in name only now. In reality, they practice socialism with Chinese characteristics, as I understand them describing themselves. The CCP has also been characterized as fascist by a scholar I know.

And I welcome wolfstar's input -- another cogent, thoughtful voice. Certainly didn't make things worse, at least from my perspective.

@Jason R

I am interested in continuing the discussion comparing neoNazism and ANTIFA--I think there's some misinformation in the mix--but like Rahul, I think I'm happier to let this discussion fall away for now.

@Peter G

Thanks for clearing that up and for mediating. I'm familiar with the scenario, but I'm really amazed anyone could think it applicable here. But that's done.

@wolfstar

I hope you feel that you can engage with me on this forum in the future in a healthy way. While my opinions, like anyone's, have evolved over the years, I've found a typically insightful and friendly discourse on this site. I'm certainly a lot less angry about what are, to me, baffling consensuses regarding certain topics, and for what it's worth, I still enjoy reading your comments.

lol Booming, why are you always making people angry? Just because western conservatism hinges on property rights which are inherently exclusionary, were won through massive levels of genocide and forced expulsion, and which propagate ideas of hierarchy which are justified by covert and overt racism, and which deflect from these issues by scapegoating lefties and minorities, and just because the Nazis got their race based laws from the US, attended meetings at US bar associations to help them draft up these laws, and got tips on concentration camps from American Indian reserves, doesn't mean western conservatism has anything to do with Hitler.

I know these are tense and heated times, but Trump is an anomaly, and western conservatism will return to its normal, moderate ways (Bush, Nixon, Reagan, King Edward etc) soon, just as Roddenberry's Trek (a normal, stable, moderate space future, with a nice moderate stance on gay conversation therapy, corporate monopolies and climate change) urges us to work toward.

Wow, this turned into a somewhat reasoned debate. I'm impressed people.
For the record I didn't call rahul a nazi, I called him out on using far right/alt right patterns which he repeated with his china example and chairman elliot again reacted reasonable to this lunacy.
To clarify. the alt right is a little hard to pin down: right wing extremist, right wing radical, right wing populist.

What I find weird in the debate about the leftist terror where you hear these examples like people or worse children taking shit for dressing up like native americans. That is overreach. There is a reason for this overreach but it still is overreach but is this really a bigger threat then the 12 states in the USA that allow discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity. In other words if you are gay in Texas and your employer finds out then you can get fired for that and fairly often will be. In Virginia a republican congressman will probably lose his post because he officiated a gay wedding.
.
To summarize: every indicator let it be violence, work place discrimination, reproductive rights and so on clearly shows that right wing ideologies are a far bigger threat then left win ideologies. But the reporting about this is so loop sided (you never hear of the huge amount of people getting fired for example being trans or gay because that is so normal) even in Germany for several weeks we had numerous articles about James Damore and if you listen to people like Joe Rogan who talks about the "leftist threat" all the time (he has 300 million in the bank, go figure) then you can get the impression that leftist hate mobs are roaming the streets. While in actuality we see a significant uptick in right wing terror in the US since Trump took office.

And Jason, I found you reasonable even though we differ in a lot of places but it is true the right of the republican party would probably not be allowed to participate in Germany because they would be deemed a threat to the democratic order.

@Trent
I don't know. It really doesn't make me happy. Right wing radical narratives are often so dominant these days that activates me. I will tune it down in the near future.

By the way, Trent is right. Nazi Germany copied the US race laws but concentration camps were, I believe, invented by the British during the Boer wars.

@Booming

For us here in the United States, we love hearing almost daily from you telling us what life is like in the United States direct from your command post all the way on the other side of the world nowhere near the United States. Maybe some day you can actually come to the United States and then tell us what it’s like to live in the United States while you’re visiting the United States.

Cody B - I'm personally learning a lot from Booming's learned discourses. For example, I've just learned today that losing my job is a big threat to me. I mean, I haven't had a job for years and in that time have never been hungry or homeless, but now I know my experience must be wrong. I'm going to make sure to try and feel more fearful and threatened starting tomorrow. Some things you just really need to be an academic to know.

Booming I am in Canada not the USA.

As for Nazis in the USA I consider them a pathetic spent force that has power to do not much now other than serve as a rhetorical (and sometimes physical) punching bag for an ascendant left and as a useful straw man for conservatives generally.

Their supposed "rise" is a joke. In Charlottsville a tiny 30 or so far right protesters were utterly swamped by hundreds of counter protesters and have been similarly vastly outnumbered consistently in every example I have seen reported, assuming they have a presence at all, which is rare.

The truck attack in Charlottsville was a pathetic act of desperation by a loser, in both a figurative and literal sense, because the far right has been doing nothing but losing in the USA (and Canada) for 40 years and is now having its dying gasps.

I'll tell you honestly as a Jew this alleged nazi rise doesn't scare me in the slightest.

By the way Booming I am a little suspicious of some of the stats you alluded to earlier. I have gotten the impression that any time a skinhead kills his girlfriend in a domestic dispute or a Nazi kills a rival gang member that gets lumped into "far right violence" or even "terrorism".

@Jason R

Booming is completely correct about the rise of right-wing violence. Whether or not you want to categorise this rise as "neoNazism" or "alt-right" or something else is a distinction without a difference.

https://www.businessinsider.com/extremist-killings-links-right-wing-extremism-report-2019-1

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/interpol-official-warns-of-dramatic-rise-in-extremist-right-wing-violence/2020/02/24/174a8394-5725-11ea-9b35-def5a027d470_story.html

https://www.cbsnews.com/video/us-sees-rise-in-right-wing-extremism/

@Cody and John

Hey, I live in the United States. But I also only live in the place that I live. The daily lives of rural Alaskans are as foreign to me--actually, probably *more* foreign to me, culturally, than people living in Germany. Living in a place does not magically give one insight into trends; we are myopic creatures and must rely on data, which everyone has access to, to make reasonable generalisations.

@Trent

I hope I'm picking up on the sarcasm. It's hard to tell these days.

@Elliott you'd better not try writing about Riker then!

@Jason
It is somewhat ironic that nazis or far right people are trying to get away from a negative label.
And about violence from the radical/extreme right being 10 to 20 times as numerous, that is just a fact. It is easily verifiable.

Or that the government banned transpeople from the military, against the wishes of the military no less. These things aren't secret. People just don't care. Who gives a shit if a few thousand trannies lose their jobs. Nobody.

"By the way Booming I am a little suspicious of some of the stats you alluded to earlier. I have gotten the impression that any time a skinhead kills his girlfriend in a domestic dispute or a Nazi kills a rival gang member that gets lumped into "far right violence" or even "terrorism"."
I haven't looked into the methodology.

Here a few sources
https://www.adl.org/media/12480/download
https://www.hsdl.org/?view&did=800028

Knock yourself out.
Or to quote:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IuwLrXX63UY

As a side note
Just today this happened
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/06/12/trump-lgbtq-patient-protections-315819

I somewhat get wolfstar's point about me participating in too many debates especially the ones that deviate from Star Trek.

Farewell.

@Elliott

There’s all kinds of data. People tend to find and quote the data that backs up the narrative they want. I actually live in a big city in the United States and have done a fair deal of traveling including the south. The picture Booming regularly attempts to paint is not what I personally would call accurate.

@Cody

The fact that people will sometimes cherry-pick facts in order to make their point doesn't give one license to ignore data trends. The fact that right-wing violence is on the rise is as indisputable as anthropocentric climate change. Whether this constitutes a resurgence of neoNazism specifically is debatable, but broadly speaking, the picture Booming paints is accurate, no matter how much your anecdotes may make things appear different.

I have already expressed skepticism of this rise in "right wing violence" and questioned whether this is lumping any violence by a right wing person or group into a black box and calling it right wing violence. If a Muslim gang kills a rival in a turf war it's not "Islamic violence" at least not in my mind.

Meanwhile I am perplexed by the suggestion that the radical right is supposedly on the rise yet their numbers at demonstrations and marches in the past 4 years have been pathetic, Charlottsville being a good example where there were a paltry 30 bodies on the Nazi side who were positively mobbed by the opposition.

If the radical right is so on the rise, where are these individuals and why aren't they defending the statues and monuments under attack? Where are they when BLM protesters and rioters are rampaging through the streets? Wouldn't they be marching in equal and greater numbers brawling with their enemies? Not one news story, not one really, not a single lynching, cross burning - zero as far as the media has reported recently.

You'd think this huge force in American society would be up in arms, literally. So where are they?

@Jason R

"On the rise" is an ambiguous standard. What is happening is that more acts of violence are taking place linked to right-wing ideology, not just by individuals who happen to hold right wing views, but *in service to* that ideology. That doesn't mean that there are more right-wing activists now than there used to be, it means more violence is taking place. That could mean that they're simply more active or empowered. It could possibly mean that instances of this kind of violence are simply being better-reported, but there's no direct evidence for this either.

Again, it's very dangerous to draw broad conclusions based on anecdotes or personal observations. Saying that there should be such and such sign of their "rise" is a logical fallacy, a strawman.

Elliott I have been watching news story after news story showing thousands, tens of thousands marching, statues being torn down and defaced, cops literally kneeling to black protesters.

Any Nazi or white supremacist should be going bonkers watching this news. They should see this as the end of the world and running into the streets for Ragnarok.

So where the F are they? If not now, then when?

And to add, even if marching in the streets isn't their thing, then surely we should be seeing lynchings, cross burnings, churches being burned, mass shootings...

@Jason R

You can't make those kinds of assumptions. That's you imposing your own expectations on the situation. That's no different from asking why there are still freezing cold temperatures even though the climate is warming. It's a logical fallacy. The data is quite clear.

Alright I'll bite Elliott. In 2020 how many:

Lynchings
Cross burnings
Murders of blacks by known Nazi / white supremacist groups

Let's start with that data.

@Jason R

We don't have comprehensive data from 2020. The most recent study was done in 2018 and shows a very clear trend. Feel free to check it out:

https://www.adl.org/media/12480/download

But I need to caution, once again, against this strawman approach to the data, as if to imply that right wing violence in 2020 must take the exact same form (cross burning, eg) as it did in the 1950s.

Elliott thanks for the article. It does reinforce my overall skepticism of these stats because when you dig down into the actual incidents (I have only scanned them) you get the sense that they're casting a heck of a wide net. So a white supremacist kills a cop who is enforcing an arrest warrant and that gets counted, or somebody with known views shoots up a supermarket and that gets counted. To its credit the article acknowledges that not all the incidents are "ideologically motivated" but to me it's a huge problem with this data.

The reason I ask about lynchings and that sort of thing is because it's pretty much the archetypal hate crime and if there were that many Nazis just bursting at the seams of American society, you wouldn't need to speculate whether something is "ideologically motivated" - it would be pretty well obvious.

Elliott,

2018 is 2018. 2020 is 2020. In case you haven't noticed, the entire world has been completely transformed in the past few weeks.

And you gotta be completely blind to not realize what's going on right now. Just open the news, for God's sake. The entire nation is on fire, and it is OUR SIDE who are doing most of the burning.

Are you denying this is happening? Or perhaps you are claiming that the far right are doing even more monstrous things?

Look... This entire competition of which side has the worse villains is pointless. It does nothing except spread more hate, which is the last thing the world needs right now.

The sad truth is that both the left and the right have proven that they are capable of really despicable things. So perhaps we should speak up against the despicable acts themselves, instead of blaming a specific political camp?

Can we agree that what happened in Seattle is a thousand times of wrong, regardless of the ideology that sparked it?

Can we agree that bullying people due to the color of their skins is wrong, regardless of whether that color is black or white?

Can we agree that cancel culture is a terrible terrible thing, regardless of which side of the political spectrum is doing it?

Can we agree that the current attempts by certain groups to erase and rewrite history 1984-style is a terrifying prospect?

Can we agree that when such serious unprecedented things are happening, we need to put our political differences aside and collectively speak up against them?

Stop and think for a moment: What would Captain Picard say about this situation? What would Captain Sisko say?

2020 sure seems like the year that censorship got its seal of approval from those on the LEFT ... you know, the people looting and burning and creating segregated "Autonomous Zones" where whites have to pay 10 dollars cash to any person of color and whites cannot garden with others.

And, of course, we now have active campaigns to get people fired from their jobs for having an opinion that an online mob doesn't approve of.

We've started down the slippery slope .... when will the book burnings begin?

Look, it might be amusing when people deplatformed and disemployed are those you vehemently disagree with .... but it won't stop with that. We already see it when a renown liberal like JK Rowling gets "cancelled" for daring to express her experience on what it means to be a biological female.

Eventually, the online mob will come for you too (if an actual literal mob doesn't). This is the true fascism, not those on the right.

@Elliott

"Hey, I live in the United States. But I also only live in the place that I live. The daily lives of rural Alaskans are as foreign to me--actually, probably *more* foreign to me, culturally, than people living in Germany. Living in a place does not magically give one insight into trends; we are myopic creatures and must rely on data, which everyone has access to, to make reasonable generalisations."

Well, I've seen enough examples of the way data is used to know that it's often anything but reasonable. Like how governments have been forever using GDP as a marker of a nation's happiness, and an excuse to pollute rivers and bulldoze indigenous caves so they can build a mine which will "create jobs". And not surprisingly, it's the people living there that are affected, and not the data analysts sitting in an office somewhere. Could you get any more myopic than that?

So, let's say I'm happy to assume your data is accurate. What now? What do we do with it? Any suggestions?

@Dave in MN
Do you have articles or anything about that? Could you provide those?

And J.K. Rowling didn't get cancelled, or did she? She said some things that could be seen as transphobic and people reacted angrily to that. What does that have to do with leftism?

And to mention another form of cancel culture:
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-49966287

Wow.

A lot to unpack here. I actually don't love having to talk about these things on this forum. Trek is a highly political show and invites us to think and talk about political issues...but it becomes extraordinarily difficult when we descend to the level of arguing over current events--not about what they mean, but about whether they're even happening. My heart is heavy.

@Jason R

"The reason I ask about lynchings and that sort of thing is because it's pretty much the archetypal hate crime and if there were that many Nazis just bursting at the seams of American society, you wouldn't need to speculate whether something is 'ideologically motivated' - it would be pretty well obvious."

I'm sorry the information isn't available in a neat little package that would eschew all ambiguities, but that's not really the way the world works. But if you're looking for further corroborating evidence, this NYT article outlines the steady growth of right wing hate groups.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/20/us/hate-groups-rise.html

The bigger question for me is what, other than a reflexive defensiveness about conservatism in general, would motivate your skepticism about this issue? What possible concern could you have in guarding against the rise of violent hate groups. If we are chasing shadows, whom have we harmed?

@Omicron

"And you gotta be completely blind to not realize what's going on right now. Just open the news, for God's sake. The entire nation is on fire, and it is OUR SIDE who are doing most of the burning."

What "side" are you referring to?

"Are you denying this is happening? Or perhaps you are claiming that the far right are doing even more monstrous things?"

Again, what are you referring to? The monstrous things that I am seeing are police officers abusing citizens. Are you a police officer? Is that the side?

"Can we agree that what happened in Seattle is a thousand times of wrong, regardless of the ideology that sparked it?"

Yes. But that ideology is important in analysing the situation and fighting for change.

"Can we agree that bullying people due to the color of their skins is wrong, regardless of whether that color is black or white?"

Yes. But bullying is not the issue at moment, systemic racism is.

"Can we agree that cancel culture is a terrible terrible thing, regardless of which side of the political spectrum is doing it?"

Sure.

"Can we agree that when such serious unprecedented things are happening, we need to put our political differences aside and collectively speak up against them?"

How does one set aside politics to resolve a political issue? Maybe you should clarify what you mean by "politics."

"Stop and think for a moment: What would Captain Picard say about this situation? What would Captain Sisko say?"

Captain Picard would probably say "Now you are asking me...to send them back into the dark ages of superstition and ignorance and fear? NO."

Sisko would say, "I'm tired of being calm. Calm never gotten me a damn thing."

@Dave in MN

"2020 sure seems like the year that censorship got its seal of approval from those on the LEFT ... you know, the people looting and burning and creating segregated 'Autonomous Zones' where whites have to pay 10 dollars cash to any person of color and whites cannot garden with others."

I'm sorry, but this is batshit crazy. Nobody "looting" has identified themselves with a political ideology. As for the Seattle conspiracy garbage, all I have to say is GET OFF THE DARKWEB.

"We already see it when a renown liberal like JK Rowling gets 'cancelled' for daring to express her experience on what it means to be a biological female."

For someone who has claimed to have been cancelled at least 5 times already, it sure seems like Rowling is doing just fine. Transphobia isn't acceptable from anybody, regardless of whether they call themselves liberal or feminist or whatever. If you would like some elaboration, this is pretty concise: https://youtu.be/m-rh-N4eFDU

@John

"So, let's say I'm happy to assume your data is accurate. What now? What do we do with it? Any suggestions?"

Well our goal is to decrease violence against marginalised communities. Some of that is a cultural battle which will take generations, and all we can do on that front is continue to talk openly and honestly about these issues, as well as not allow our own privileges to blind us to the suffering of others. But a big part of what can be done *immediately* is about the distribution of material power. We spend SO MUCH MONEY on our military and our militarised police. While we can't seem to guarantee decent healthcare, housing or clean water to our people, our military is so bloated with excess spending that there are state-of-the-art weapons and vehicles (which cost billions in some cases) that serve no function. The military did not ask for them, they just exist to fulfil contracts with weapons manufacturers. At the same time, absurd neoliberal laws like the 1033 Programme and the Patriot Act funnel weapons and equipment allegedly designed to fight terrorist cells overseas into local police precincts. It is absurd and it is deadly. I would suggest that we use the levers of collective power, whether that's by public uprising, lobbying lawmakers, or democratic participation, to force the repeal of these absurd policies. That would be a start.


And now, back to my coffee and First Contact review.

"The bigger question for me is what, other than a reflexive defensiveness about conservatism in general, would motivate your skepticism about this issue? "

Elliott I won't continue this debate further out of respect for the forum but the answer to the question is simple: I feel this "rise of the nazis" narrative is propaganda designed to justify left wing totalitarianism as an antidote and to vilify conservatives like me and to call everyone like me a Nazi.

@Jason R

I will keep my response equally concise. If you can find an example of a single left wing politician in western democracies even hinting at something akin to totalitarian policies, I could at least understand your fear. But the left is seeking, above all else, equality and plurality. That movement directly counters totalitarian ideals.

@ Elliott,

"If you can find an example of a single left wing politician in western democracies even hinting at something akin to totalitarian policies, I could at least understand your fear."

Since we were just discussing 1984 in another thread this can count as being about Trek: one common misconception about the novel is that it's the government forcing this system on everyone against their will. It doesn't occur to people that it might have been the reverse: the citizens forcing it into the government. De Tocqueville argued in the 1830's (admittedly, prior to WWII) that law and policy invariably follow from the popular culture, and not the other way around, despite occasional appearances to the contrary.

That's the trick Elliott. The politicians don't have to. They just have to agree with the people who do.

So reviews of terrorism in independent studies, from homeland security and several universities are trying to push a false narrative about the increase of far right violence to convince the general public that left wing totalitarianism is needed which is then done by leftist politicians who either go along with public sentiment or secretly want totalitarianism.

I have no words. But yeah that is a conspiracy theory. By the way, 1984 was written by a socialist.

You all seem to willfully ignore facts like the homeland security source I posted above,the report was done under the current government (april 2017). Homeland security has a very narrow definition for terrorism and with that you have between 9/12 2001 to 12/31 2016: 106 right wing killings and 0 ... ,yes that is a zero, killings from the far left.

Here (from Georgetown University's Center for Strategic and International Studies) and there is an abundance of this stuff and it is all very clear.
https://www.csis.org/analysis/rise-far-right-extremism-united-states

There's another trick though, which is using the fear of authority for mistrust of everyone and everything in the name of freedom.

"By the way, 1984 was written by a socialist"

You say that word like it means anything. Words like socialist and liberal are useless in this context because even 1990's "liberal" would be considered a "white supremacist" or "fascist" today, to say nothing of earlier years.

Incidentally the sign posted on the street outside my door says "silence is violence" or something to that effect (I try not to look at it). So not only would I be considered a nazi by the people posting such signs but they'd tell you in earnest that I am a "violent" one. Who needs lynchings anyway when you can attack people just by not obeying their every whim?

The fact that that sign makes you uncomfortable is entirely the point.

"The fact that that sign makes you uncomfortable is entirely the point"

Oh for sure. Message received loud and clear. I can't vote in the US election but if I could I'd vote for Trump, just to spit in their faces.

I mean, if you want us all to know that being petulant is important to you, then I think you’ve exposed conservatism for exactly what it is.

@OmicronThetaDeltaPhi
>If the first image that comes to my mind for "the wife of a guy of ethnicity X" is a gal of ethnicity X, does that make me a racist?
No but I can understand why someone would want Jake to be married to a white Bajoran given that most Bajorans were white. It's like saying he can't marry outside his race. I have to admit I never noticed it before but now that it's been pointed out I can understand why someone would object.
@John
>I mean, if we're going to take depiction of race seriously, which is something I think DS9 aspires to, shouldn't the number of Chinese we see outnumber the whites 2:1?

How come we don't see more Indians on Star Trek? (not native Americans)

@Elliott
What does the percent mean on your reviews? Like Act 1 : ***, 17%

At first I thought it meant the fraction of the overall score that the act contributes to but the numbers don't add up.

@EventualZen

5% for the teaser
17% per act (x5 = 85)
10% for the episode function

Jason, reading your posts worries me. I hope you have a stable social circle, that supports you. You sound unbalanced.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iu1qa8N2ID0

Thanks Booming I do. Peace and long life.

But I am cancelling my newspaper subscriptions and will not be voting or engaging politically anymore. I hope this is my last political debate. It's just not worth it. If silence is violence I plan to drop an atom bomb on my enemies lol.

@Jason R

I couldn’t agree more and I feel exactly what you mean about the silence thing. The far left nutjobs are scaring people who are in the sane “classical liberal” left into kowtowing. I’ve always considered myself more liberal but the way things are if it has to be one or the other I’ll go right if it means letting these far left wackos not get more power. Democrats badly need someone who isn’t afraid to tell 20 year olds they are not going to force their will and nutjob ideas onto the country by using fear of “cancelling”.

@Booming

You don’t understand how a sign placed outside his door saying “silence is violence” can be seen as a problem? The next step is they know for sure he’s been “silent”, consider him “part of the problem”, get his personal info and release it to their cronies. “Cancel” him in best case scenario, physically harm him in the worst. This isn’t exaggeration it’s the next step. Literally right outside the door in his case. All because he lived his life quietly

@Booming @Elliott

Booming I apologize it was Elliott who specifically talked about the sign. You only said Jason’s posts worry you so my last post may or may not apply to you but was meant for Elliott

@Cody B

1. I may have misunderstood, but I think Jason R was saying his neighbour has put up a sign on their home which he has to see whenever he steps out of his, not that the neighbour had vandalised Jason R's home.

2. Cancel culture is pernicious on every side of the political spectrum. Right-wingers do it all the time (remember Nike?).

The signs are posted on public land along the street fronting my townhouse complex. I did not mean to suggest that they were targeting me specifically.

It's ironic that folk here are crying about cancel culture on the day American conservatives lost a Supreme Court attempt to sanction LGBTQ workplace discrimination.

Note that conservatives are quick to frame this Supreme Court loss as an "attack on freedom"; requiring churches to recognize same-sex marriages is, in their eyes, an attack on tradition, individual freedoms and divine law. They don't see such Supreme Court losses as an "expansion of their culture" - the beauty of marriage for all! God's blessings expanded to incorporate everyone! - but an attack on the rights of a privileged few.

Because that's what conservatism has historically always done; attempted to preserve the power and exclusivity of a minority.

And it's worth remembering where the "bemoaning of cancel culture" as an ideological tactic, originated. It started as an explicit tactic to frame civil rights as a violation of individual rights in order to justify the perpetuation of exploitation and discrimination. Desegregation, women's rights, worker's rights, gay rights, gay marriage, miscegenation, transgender rights etc were all framed as attacks on free speech and individual rights.

Conservatives moaned about their "heritage being cancelled" when they were forced to hire gays, women or blacks, and moaned about their "individual rights" and "freedoms" being broken when they were forced to give women the vote, or kowtow to labor laws. Now issues of climate change and corporate personhood are enfolded within the same game.

Historically, the people uppity about being "cancelled" are on the wrong side of history. And, contrary to Cody's claim, are the ones investing billions of dollars into collecting the names of the people and organizations - and outright infiltrating these organizations - who shame them. There's a reason the Snowden leaks revealed that the Five Eyes Spying Programs spent much of their time collecting data on journalists and environmentalists, and there's a reason the CIA and FBI spent hundreds of millions of dollars and man hours infiltrating universities, activist groups, taking names, making lists, engaging in "bad jacket" tactics and setting up fake newspapers to spy on people. Similarly, there's a reason Antifa is classified as a "terrorist organization" but the KKK isn't, that the Rodney King beatings were done by policemen now promoted up the ranks, and that the police historically collaborated with the KKK to murder black activists.

To pretend that "leftist cancel culture" is remotely similar to the ways in which entrenched power cancels it, and has cancelled it throughout history, globally, is laughable, immoral and ahistorical. Purple haired university teens cancelling and deplatforming you on twitter might be annoying, but its conservatives running platforms to cancel the EPA, Planned Parenthood, Social Security, the United Postal Service etc etc. And we have much leaked literature by the latter explaining that its their tactic to whip up frenzies about the former, to help slide by such policies; identity politics is how power distracts from class politics.

More importantly, conservatives must cry about cancel culture because history in general, slowly cancels conservatism. These cancellations occur quickly in the cultural sphere - conservatives tend to lose every generation's cultural battles - but slowly when it comes to actual power; there are currently no meaningful threats to capitalism and its blocs of power, which conservatism, in its defense of privilege and/or hierarchies of exploitation, clings to as it once did divine rights, theocracy and monarchy.

The irony is, conservatism has always been the cause of the symptoms it decries. It brings over slaves and cheap labor and then moans about the darkies. It exalts the All Knowing Invisible Hand of the Market then moans about the weakening of religion. It cries about the death of white cultures, but relies on a brand of ultra deregulated globalization that dissolves all borders. It creates a work culture, then moans about the collapse of family life. It uses women to lower wages, then cries about the loss of "traditional gender roles". It bends over backwards for megacorporations, then wonders why village life or family stores shut down. It creates a global debt ponzi beholden to consumerism, then berates people for their permissiveness. It deregulates environmental laws and jails conservationists, then wonders why the forests are on fire. It rabidly exploits minority groups, then cries when they start fishing for rights.

In the 1980s, this very same conversation was being had about lead paint. Seriously. Conservatives and Reaganites were moaning about being cancelled on lead paint. Lead paint isn't toxic! Free speech! We must preserve our right to lead paint and prevent the fascist creep of anti-paint policies!

Today's argument will be similarly forgotten, and be seen to be similarly ridiculous, within a generation.

And there's a reason the western conservative ideal is a kind of fantastical image of the 1950s - the poor and marginalized out of sight behind the white picket fences - just prior to collapse of the Soviet Union*, and just prior to when laissez faire capitalism ramped up at home, and went global abroad. Conservative values kills conservative values. And then it goes killing everyone who tells it that to its face.

*there's also a reason conservatives in the UK and US are now infatuated with Russia. Late to enter the game of neoliberal capitalism, and so mercifully free of low paid "minorities" and "darkies" (and the concomitant civil rights movements that fought for things like gay rights and secularism), Russia is now seen as a bastion of White Pride, White Conservative Values, and Orthodox Christianity. The current conservative party in the UK, and Republican party in the US aren't just awash in Russian oligarch cash, but have members who increasingly idolize Russia as their new "American Ideal".

@ Trent,

I don't want to engage too much by taking sides on this particular topic, but I do want to mention that in my view almost every statement in your last post has factual errors in it, including what you say the recent SC ruling means and how it applies. I tend to enjoy when you wax poetic about Trek and generalized metaphor, but I feel like you're doing it here in regard to actual history, and that doesn't work. These vast sweeping statements do not correspond to "what happened" or what it meant.

Not liking censorship or racial discrimination has nothing to do with the Supreme Court ruling.

I think some liberals build up their own mythical strawman of a bad conservative and then assign traits based on their stereotype just so they can summarily dismiss any opposing viewpoint.

The only one here bemoaning that decision is you. Apples and oranges.

@Trent

That’s a whole lot of history talk but I’m concerned with today. I can’t get behind down to my soul what the far leftists want. If you want to stick me in a box called “conservatism” because of that so be it. That doesn’t mean I took part in or support things in the past and quite frankly it’s a silly argument. Because I don’t support someone being fired for calling someone ma’am instead of xyr on accident one time or an angsty teenager being able to wake up and decide he/she doesn’t like a certain (almost certainly well intentioned) aspect of an artists work and “apologize right now and change it or youre thanos’d!”. Sorry that’s an extremely slippery slope and you’re absolutely wrong I’m not on the wrong side of history

@Dave in MN

Well said and I was thinking of saying something similar which I’ll go ahead and say. I think a lot of liberals get so used to defending anything LGBT related (which is fine I myself do) and have fought “the conservatives” (of which the vast majority are not the stereotypes of which those liberals assign to them) that they instantly view anything considered conservative as the enemy. Different issues are different issues.

The most ironic thing here, is that the first person to explicitly mention cancel culture here was me, and I'm not a conservative at all.

I always was a proud liberal. And you know why? Because liberalism *used* to be about fighting for human rights and for freedom and against prejudice.

Unfortunately this is no longer the case. I'm reading Trent's last comment, and it chills my blood.

Same with Booming, and - to a lesser extent - with Elliott. WTF? When did *my* side become this hateful and close-minded? We are supposed to represent the enlightened good guys!

It's downright amazing, how far people are willing to go to justify/trivialize rotten behavior just because it comes from their side. It's even more amazing to see Star Trek fans doing it. Seriously, guys, what the heck is wrong with you? Can't you see that what's our side is doing right now is WRONG?

All I'm going to say is "they" canceled "Paw Patrol".

My grandkids are safe now.

@Dave in MN

"We've started down the slippery slope .... when will the book burnings begin?"

I'll say we're already past the point.

Censoring classic films and TV shows online is the 21st century analogue of burning books. It's downright scary, what's going on in the world today... all in the name of freedom and equality and fighting prejudice, of-course.

@Yanks

Paw Patrol wasn't actually cancelled. The world is not *that* crazy... yet.

"Paw Patrol wasn't actually cancelled. The world is not *that* crazy... yet."

That was the one thing I wanted cancelled :(

What has been canceled? Gone with the Wind and
Fawlty Towers are readily accessible. Cops? Can’t say I care about that.

https://screencrush.com/fawlty-towers-racial-slurs/

A single episode, which has been removed, on one or two of many platforms, temporarily. It has played in a bowdlerized fashion before, which Cleese's management signed off on. I once watched it on a plane, more than a decade ago, and guess what -- the Major's slurs weren't there either. I've got the DVD set, and the BBC has yet to pop up in my basement to repossess it.

I'm not saying it's a great decision, but it's not a lot to hang your "everything's being censored!" hat on, either.

OmicronThetaDeltaPhi,

"Paw Patrol wasn't actually cancelled. The world is not *that* crazy... yet."

Thank you. My bad.

Just coming for it...

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/10/arts/television/protests-fictional-cops.html

The irony is the "police" dog isn't even really a cop despite his uniform. As prior critics have pointed out, Ryder's outfit is private, not public. So the dog isn't so much police as private security. Which I guess makes the Paw Patrol mercenaries like Blackwater?

I'm just tickled by this idea that the limousine liberals in Hollywood and elsewhere censoring TV shows and rebranding syrup and butter are considered "the left." These assholes are capitalists trying to market their products. They could give a fuck about racism, history, sensitivity, heritage, slipper slopes...they care about making as much money as fucking possible at all times.

The left doesn't care if you watch "Gone With the Wind," the left wants black people to paid paid reparations for the economic devastation of slavery.

The left doesn't care if you read Harry Potter; the left wants to ensure that the trans community is given equal protection under the law.

The left doesn't care if Land-O-Lakes butter has a picture of an Indian on it; the left wants the Dakota Access Pipeline shut down.

The left doesn't care about Aunt Jemima; the left wants the police to be demilitarised and defunded.

There are bushels of straw men on this thread.

"There are bushels of straw men on this thread."

Respectfully Elliott, there is mountainous evidence that the left cares about all these and similar things quite deeply and aggressively.

You are certainly entitled to an opinion, but not to your own facts. You are unequivocally wrong.

Calls for boycotts and the like come from all over the political spectrum these days, and I would agree that they're mostly a distraction, borne of and fodder for the Selective Outrage Machine (TM).

@Jason R

There are certainly people who care about these things, but labels have meanings. Identifying what motivates these people is important. When you lump it all together as "the left," you've completely lost the ability to debate the issues.

Left-wing economics are a distinct set of values that like to see wealth distributed more equally.

Left-wing social policies are a distinct set of values that like to see people treated fairly and respected for their personal autonomy.

"there is mountainous evidence that the left cares about all these and similar things quite deeply and aggressively."

1. Please define "mountainous evidence"
2. Please show how said evidence constitutes "the left"
3. Please explain what "aggressively caring about something" means

Elliott I am not going to go down the No True Scotsman rabbithole with you.

It is abundantly clear to anyone who reads the news, follows social media, or has stepped foot on a university campus, that there are legions of left leaning individuals who certainly care about corporate logos appropriating native images, tv shows with racist messages and other similar things.

But as I said I have no interest in pointing out examples to you so you can declare them not the true "left" or dismiss them as all being disingenuous opportunists or fake news or whatever.

You are moving the goalposts.

If a "legion" of people on the streets, in the news, or on a campus gather together and protest for "black lives matter," for example, is that "the left"? Is everyone in said legion a Marxist? Is every one of them looking to get "Cops" off the air? What?

My point is that positioning yourself against a political ideology because you find the priorities of a group you've decided represents that ideology annoying or problematic or dangerous or whatever exactly the complaint is is incoherent. You're tilting against windmills here.

If your position is that cancelling tv programmes or changing sports logos is wrong, either at all or in specific cases, then make that claim and we can talk about it.

If your position is that redistributive economics is a bad idea, then we can talk about it.

If your position is that the police should not be defunded, then let's talk about it.

But lumping all these things together gets us absolutely no where. It just provides you with an excuse to dismiss any argument you disagree with. I'll ask you again, what does it mean to "aggressively care about something"? I sincerely have no idea what that is supposed to mean.

Elliott you need to read carefully what I am writing because my point is exceedingly narrow.

You made a series of "the left doesn't care about x, it cares about y" assertions. You didn't bother to define "the left" so I presumed you were using a fairly colloquial understanding of the word.

I made the very narrow point that clearly a very significant number of people who are most certainly "left" do care about the things you described, such as corporate logos, racist films etc... and that the media is replete with such examples.

I am not interested in debating the merits of such beliefs in of themselves. I am simply pointing out that while BLM, for example, certainly cares about police violence, they *also* clearly, unequivocally, care about a host of issues including ones similar to what you dismissed as not being the concern of "the left". The same is true of many similar groups.

That you may personally not consider something like a corporate logo to be as important as police reform, for example, may be true but is also irrelevant.

Elliott,

One thing that is abundantly clear to me, to the point of it being startling, is that on both the right and the left in America you will find massive alignment on seemingly disparate issues that correspond to one "team" or the other. You are simply not going to run into many liberals, for example, who are supporters of BLM and also pro-life. And anyone who took such a position would be ostracized and probably threatened. And you are not going to find many conservatives who believe in limited government and supply side economics, and who also believe strongly in gay/trans rights.

I can make a quite extensive list of policies, beliefs, and causes, and I can all but guarantee that the majority of 'activist' types will support every single one of them, and will be opposed to zero of them. That's not a stereotype; in fact learning this fact quite surprised me because I would have expected more divergence. But it's on both sides of the spectrum, as I think we can find this on the other side as well. There are of course variations, as no two people are the same, but we're not talking temperament but rather causes that someone would check off as "support" or "don't support". The boxes will line up pretty darn closely, and I don't think you need a fancy definition of "the left" or "the right" to speak about these things intelligibly.

That being said we're also probably talking about those further to the left and right than would have been normal 30 years ago. Centrists get little attention these days, and there are of course centrist liberals and centrist conservatives. But their voice is minimal, I think in part because the media creates narratives around those further out and ignores the center. So I suspect, at least, that Jason R is not talking about centrists as he says these things, but about those who are more vocal and covered in media.

@Jason R

As I said, words have meaning. To call something "left," one has to examine its origins and accurately pinpoint how it falls on the spectrum of a given issue or movement.

You have a spectrum on economics. On the far right, you've got laissez faire capitalism, monopolies, trickle-down. On the far left, you've got collective ownership and the dissolution of wealth. You can pinpoint an economic proposal, such as tax brackets, as left right or centre based on which of these extremes most closely and to what degree align with said proposal.

You have a spectrum on social issues. On the far left, you've got full secular humanism. On the far right, you've got theocracy.

You have a spectrum on political issues. On the far left, you've got non-hierarchical direct democracy bordering on anarchism. On the far right, you've got military dictatorship.

The items I listed as being part of the left can be labelled as such because you can chart them on the political spectrum based on their *intrinsic nature,* NOT because they are causes taken up by any particular people or groups. If George Bush came out in favour of Universal Basic Income, that would not make UBI a conservative policy. If Noam Chomsky claimed support for Sharia Law, that would not make Sharia Law a progressive policy.

You are ascribing a left/right dichotomy without examining the intrinsic nature of the issues you're complaining about. You are also abusing the word "care" here. I used it ironically to make a point that I don't think worked as I intended. What I am saying is that there are specific policy goals that individuals or groups propose. One can determine whether those policies are left or right through analysis. I still have absolutely no idea what "aggressive caring" means.

Now, as Peter G sort of alludes to, groups can and do (especially in a politically polarised environment) sometimes align many of their policy proposals along the same political axis. So if you have a group that makes diverse policy proposals (diverse meaning that pertain to economics, social policy, political policy and more), it can sometimes be the case that *all* of those policies align with the left end of the spectrum. And in such cases, it would be fair to call said group a "leftist" group, because an analysis of the policy stands up to such a description.

I will counter Peter G's assessment "on both the right and the left in America you will find massive alignment on seemingly disparate issues that correspond to one 'team' or the other." The self-description as economically conservative but socially liberal is one of the most American political tropes there is. This is quintessential neoliberalism on the individual level. There are also a large number of religious socialists. It's very common in the Catholic Church for example. These folks vehemently oppose abortion and in some cases LGBTQ+ rights but advocate for aggressively redistributive economic policies.

However, I do agree that the media tends to be unhelpfully (IMO intentionally) reductive about these labels, especially when it comes to political parties.

Elliott you are the one who asserted that "the left" believed in x and not y.

I will leave it to you to define "left" in the context of your own positive assertions and respond if warranted.

@Jason R

Now you're being obtuse. I can back up what I say about the left. I can demonstrate why certain principles and policies are left-wing. That's my point. Unless you can do the same, it isn't fair or accurate to accuse "the left" of being or doing something it isn't.

I think this conversation has run out of usefulness a while back, but I do think it rather ironic that the person who evokes "the left" as some kind of boogeyman is insisting other people define it.

Valinor since Elliott made the claim we were discussing and then seemed to suggest that I was using an incorrect definition, I asked him to provide the correct one.

But I agree this is played out. Just when I thought I was out they pulled me back in.

Frankly I was hoping I'd get more pushback on my Voyager rankings from Elliott since he's such an apologist for that series.

@ Elliott

re: your comments about films/ shows being banned and longtime brands being shut down

Actually, Elliott, people on the left (or at least the vocal minority that uses social media) in general DOES view Gone With The Wind and Fawlty Towers and Blazing Saddles and Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben etc etc as "problematic" and emblematic of the "system" that must be dismantled. Most of the left-leaning folks I know seem to view these as necessary battles/ important victories, as do all the media cognoscenti penning thought-pieces on what should be cancelled next and the Democrats clucking their approval.

My evidence is mostly anecdotal, but at least I'm basing my opinion on the reality from my own experiences.

You are making a blanket statement we KNOW isn't true.

OBVIOUSLY these issues are at the forefront of the culture wars because enough people (on both sides of the aisle) care about it. You're just being obtuse because you don't want to concede that point.

To address your point on CEO's:

We've seem recently how companies have sacrificed their own profits to push a political philosophy , even if it was contrary to the goal of making money. Case in point: Gillette tanked their #1 product by attacking their customer base and pandering to a very tiny minority. Or if you want a conservative example: Hobby Lobby.

Ditching a brand name with near universal recognition because the mascot/name offends the easily offended is completely contrary to how a company should function. It's HORRIBLE business practice. (At some point, there hopefully will be pushback from shareholders in these companies. )

Tropicana nearly bankrupted their brand by ditching the orange-with-a-straw. What do you think will happen to Aunt Jemima's or Land o'Lakes butter after their product is rendered unrecognizable and unfindable?! Do you think all those factories making these products will still be open in a couple years? What'll happen to those factory workers or the shareholders (most of whom aren't rich?)

A little critical thinking goes a long way.

@Dave in MN

"My evidence is mostly anecdotal, but at least I'm basing my opinion on the reality from my own experiences."

"A little critical thinking goes a long way."

I don't have anything to add.

Well, you could actually defend the point you asserted with some kind of evidence, but what do I know?

Too bad we didn't have this conversation a week ago, I would have loved to see if you bought the media narrative that the riots were caused by white supremacist agitators....

@Elliott
"I'm just tickled by this idea that the limousine liberals in Hollywood and elsewhere censoring TV shows and rebranding syrup and butter are considered 'the left.' "

Yes, I agree that this madness has nothing to do with traditional left ideals.

But that's exactly the problem: There's a considerable mass of people who hold very twisted (and very unliberal) beliefs and call themselves "liberals". From Hollywood to Silicon Valley to the mobs on the streets who vandalize statues.

Whether we like it or not, these people have decided to wear the colors of our political team. They also vote accordingly.

Most people - both on the left and the right - accepts them these guys as liberals. Both the Democrat and the Republican politicians treat them as being liberals.

And these guys are not a minority. We've reached the point where these crazies outnumber people like you and me in our own camp.

Pretending that this isn't happening isn't going to solve anything. Saying "but these aren't true liberals!" may be technically true, but it doesn't change the reality of the situation: It is these guys who are setting the tone for the "left" nowadays.

This, of-course, puts a traditional liberal like myself in a heck of bind. It's one of the reasons I'm no longer willing to "play" for either "team".

I'm hesitant to wade too deeply into this, but I think a few points are worth mentioning.

1. The way Elliott is using "left" is not the same as "liberal." Liberalism and leftism are distinct traditions. In some areas they overlap but they are sufficiently distinct that they can't be treated as synonymous. Now this is a controversial point but I guess it's clear to me anyway that Elliott is specifically not talking about liberals, particularly given his (largely justified IMO) attacks on neoliberalism.

2. Along similar lines, the Democratic Party in the US is not a "Left" party in the way he is using left. They are left of the Republicans, to be sure. Within many self-described Left circles the Democrats are viewed as at best a necessary evil. Even Bernie Sanders is not a member of the party but runs as one due to the US' two-party system.

3. My impression is that many self-described liberals and leftists "support" cancel culture in various forms, whether it be deplatforming or whatever. I don't have a good sense on what the percentages are here.

4. Along those lines, when it comes to the protests, I have seen from left or liberals both the arguments that the *looting* within the protests are 1) not really representative of the core message of the protests or 2) justified because peaceful protests don't achieve anything. Of course these two points contradict each other, and I think the explanation is simple: the left and liberals are not monolithic.

5. Re CEOs. I could change my mind if evidence were offered to the contrary, but I cannot believe that highers up at Procter and Gamble were showing their own radical left agenda with that Gillette ad. I think that they believed that there was a lot about #MeToo or bullying or whatever in the zeitgeist, particularly among young people, and then put out an ad with the aim of saying they're against "bad models of masculinity," in the hopes of getting credit for being on a social vanguard, in order to win support and get brand loyalty, especially from young people. I thought the ad was not intended to be anti-men but to try to be "pro-good men" so that men would buy their products. The ad was incompetent and didn't say anything, but IMO the motivation was still profit. And Procter and Gamble's stock has still gone up even if Gillette sales have gone down. Similarly for Hobby Lobby, I think those in charge of the brand recognized that there is a loyal audience in people who support its politics.

Okay that's my thoughts for now.

@Omicron

You are not in a bind.

"There's a considerable mass of people"

"Most people - both on the left and the right - accepts them these guys as liberals."

'We've reached the point where these crazies outnumber people like you and me in our own camp."

You seem to be worried about which faction of which subgroup outnumbers whichever other group. Don't. Ignore the media. Focus upon policies. Do you want to see the police defunded? I do. Are the protests affecting policy. It seems like they are. Does that mean you have to support them to call yourself a leftist. No, but I would ask yourself why a little property destruction is of such grave concern when we're talking about stoping institutional murder and disenfranchisement.

Now if we're talking about political parties, forget about it. Both major parties in the US are completely purchased. There are good candidates here and there, and if you care to be involved, I would suggest supporting them individually.

Finally, the word "liberal" is difficult to pin down. It's not a leftwing or rightwing ideology per sae, and it means pretty different things depending on what country or year you're talking about. I would just not use the word at all unless it's in an academic context. Politically, it has lost all meaning. There's social democrat, there's neoliberal, there's neoconservative, there's conservative, there's libertarian and there's anarchist. Those six are roughly enough to pin down where a typical American's politics lie.

"3. My impression is that many self-described liberals and leftists "support" cancel culture in various forms, whether it be deplatforming or whatever. I don't have a good sense on what the percentages are here."

In Canada it is pretty well mainstream, or if it isn't almost nobody speaks out against it. At this point I couldn't care less what label you choose for it. It is what it is.

Suffice it to say, defeating these people is literally the only political objective I care about anymore. They're to me what Trump is to that NYT commenter who said she'd vote for Joe Biden if he raped her.

I oppose any cause they support on principle.

Elliott may call this petulant (and he's not wrong) but I don't waste time finding common ground with people who think I don't have the right to speak my mind.

I will make one additional point. Elliott claims that the recent protests are "affecting policy". I challenge strenuously that assertion. Moreover, I put it to him that there's very little evidence that BLM is even interested in "policy" in the sense of actual reform of the police. The vast majority of the political messaging I have seen appears to focus on "systemic racism" in the most general terms and I'm sorry, "defund the police" is a slogan not a policy.

So even if you agree that I'm petulant it doesn't change the fact that there's little evidence that this movement has any real plan for serious reform. Intelligent people like Elliott can ascribe to them whatever rational policies he thinks they ought to support, but people like Elliott aren't behind the wheel or if they are they are grappling with about 100 others for control and they are going to lose that struggle.

I'm in Canada too.

FWIW I don't think it's exclusively a left/liberal thing at all. A right wing friend of mine (with whom I disagree politically on nearly every point) opposes *peaceful* protests he disagrees with, for instance.

(By opposes I means he thinks they should be criminalized, I mean.)

It's pretty common for a intellectual conversation that's reached an impasse to get bogged down by linguistics.

My personal feeling is that we all know what sides people generally fall on (left or right).... but no one wants to use terminology that lumps them in with the reactionaries in their political wing.

Liberal = left. Conservative = right.

Can we at least agree about the obvious stuff?

@ William B,

"A right wing friend of mine (with whom I disagree politically on nearly every point) opposes *peaceful* protests he disagrees with, for instance."

If you believe Jordan Peterson about it, this may be due to people who are 'naturally conservative' having a predisposition towards order and hierarchies, and that they inherently feel threatened by any attack on either structure or order. So a protest may come across as simultaneously disorderly (on an aesthetic and communal level) as well as designed by its nature to undo systems (so disorderly in the sense of trying to release fixed systems). Your anecdote sounds actually quite typical, but is not the same phenomenon as cancel culture. The right-winger you describe most likely also believes strongly in free speech, but just doesn't like protests (if I'm guessing), and so the issue may boil down there (if I'm right) to chaotic forms of civil disorder and disobedience as being seen as unacceptable. But the left-winger cancel-culture type comes from a different place, where they do not in fact believe in the inherent right to free speech; or if they do it might be formulated as "you can say what you want, and I can punish you for it", which is a sidestep but still effectively is a non-belief in the value of opposing ideas. Fundamentally the right and left winger here are diametrically opposed, even though as you point out "I want a stop to things I don't like" may well be common to both sides as you head out towards the fringes. The issue I think Jason R is bringing up is that the fringes have bled into the mainstream, so that even major media publications are supporting - or even fomenting - belief in what would have been seen as radical partisanship 30 years ago.

Dianne Feinstein.

Predatory capitalist. Major proponent of surveillance state. Supporter of the death penalty. Democrat. Is she liberal or conservative?

Elon Musk? JK Rowling? Ron Paul? The labels aren’t important in and of themselves but we do need to be clear about what we mean.

Feinstein also had a Chinese foreign national spy as her personal valet for decades and she was so clueless, she never suspected a thing (or did and just didn't say anything in the hopes of her foolishness not coming to light). She's incompetent.

She's also one of the last of the Blue Dog Democrats left in Congress: she's a political fossil and I wouldn't use her as a baseline for evaluating liberalism.

I think what some of you aren't seeing is how many of those on the right are seeing a double standard with Covid Shaming.

Apparently, a pandemic doesn't matter when people are looting and burning businesses whilst calling it a protest, but it's totally fine to shame people for protesting peacefully about teopening the country or for wanting to attend a political rally that isn't about leftist politics.

Why isn't "you're killing grandma" being used by the media, politicans and the talking heads in reference to the rioters? Just because the cause is viewed as noble by some is apparently enough for them to get a free Get-Out-Of-Covid-Shaming Pass.

To me, it's an egregious double standard.

@Mostly because the protests are only superficially similar. BLM protestors are wearing masks. And as a result, there has been no observable spike in cases related to them. The lockdown protests were quite literally spitting in the face of science and risking people’s health.

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/06/protests-covid-outdoor-masks.html

Elliott your focus on economics as the central axis of the conservative versus liberal paradigms in the USA is obsolete and not really relevant anymore. The fact is both sides are generally corporatist excepting a few outliers like the Sanders faction.

At a minimum it is irrelevent to this debate. Reminds me of the scifi author Orson Scott Card who claimed to be the real Democrat despite his opposition to gay rights and other highly conservative viewpoints. His playbook was dated as is yours.

And I forgot to add there are plenty of anti corporatists on the right side as well. It might skew a little left but that's pretty well irrelevant to the "cancel culture" debate and becomes nothing but obfuscation in this context.

@Peter,

I don't really think my friend is a passionate advocate of free speech. He's argued that suggesting defunding the military is treasonous and emphasized that the penalty for treason should be death, for instance. I think he was being hyperbolic there but he largely seems to favour quite authoritarian means of control including on the issue of speech when it comes to military.

"BLM protestors are wearing masks."

Reaaaaly. So mass gatherings of thousands of people are a-ok as long as people wear masks?

You should have a word with the Provincial and Federal governments here in Canada cause they don't concur. Indeed until recently our own health authorities were discouraging mask use claiming they are not useful.

In Ontario any gatherings are still capped at 10. How about baseball games? Maybe they should open Yankee stadium as long as people are given masks at the door?

And a week before the mass protests there was a huge uproar against people lounging in a park in Toronto. There was no mention of lack of mask use as being the big issue - it was all about the gathering period full stop.

How a pandemic can radically change in a week ayy?

@ Elliott

Setting aside the fact that you're drawing a conclusion that isn't really supported by photographic evidence of previous protests, you are drawing a very broad-based conclusion based on .... well, I'm not sure what.

The ones that ARE wearing masks at the riots do so becauset hey can get away with crime, not for altruistic reasons. If they cared in a rational way about strangers's well-being, they wouldn't be breaking into homes, stealing and murdering people.

Besides, didn't the media already establish masks aren't good enough of a disease deterrent to reopen the country? Why is it good enough for rioters but not for a Trump rally or a Corona protest?

You are doing what the media does: using a personal value judgement of someone's motivation to apply a different standard.

You seem like a logical guy, Elliot. I'm kind of surprised you'd let your own personal prejudices blind you to the kind of black-and- white/all-or- nothing thought process you're espousing.

@Dave in MN

Exactly. What he’s actually doing is trying to justify the “protests” (powder kegs seem like the better term) as altruistic, safe and well thought out while the Trump rallies are stupid hillbillies refusing to wear masks. A large majority of the people wearing masks at the protests are covering a lot more than just their mouths. Hmm I don’t think they are doing so for safety. Seems like they are more worried about not being able to be identified. They don’t social distance very well when running out with merchandise or when they smell blood and swarm up for someone’s beating. To try and pander a narrative that the majority of protestors are taking great care to minimize the spread of covid and that they are looking out for the greater good of public health is silly

BTW, I'm rewatching DS9 and I had to skip this episode. My father died in November and I know it'll make me cry and mess up my contact lenses.

A 4 star episode for sure.

@Dave in MN,

Dude, I know that feel all too well. I've probably posted it here already, but my Dad died in my mid-20s, and this episode hit on my rewatch the WEEK after his funeral. I dunno why I did that to myself, I guess I was going for a complete Trek run and thought I could handle it, but I was a mess. I've teared up at some stuff (more than I'd care to admit probably) but this just made me bawl buckets.

I dunno what I'm gonna do when the friend I'm taking through on a watchlist and I get to this. I might just send him on his way with this as homework. I've seen it a couple times since and it still gets me. Always will, I suspect.

@Dave in MN

Aw frell, forgot to say; my condolences on your loss. Losing your Dad sucks.

@Dave in MN
"It's pretty common for a intellectual conversation that's reached an impasse to get bogged down by linguistics."

The silliest thing about these semantic debates is that this left/right blame game is completely irrelevant. I mean, of-course, it is relevant when it comes to election day, but it isn't relevant when we're talking about the big picture.

The big picture is that the western world (Europe as well as the USA) is slowly transitioning into a 1984-style dystopia where people's lives are destroyed just because they are thinking "wrong" thoughts.

The combination of cancel culture and present day technology is downright terrifying, and it's getting worse every year.

This is no longer an issue of left vs right. This is *very* serious business, and every thinking person - regardless of which side of the political map they are on - should fight against these trends in any way they can.

The fact that some people still think this is some political game, or a minor quibble about economic systems, astounds me.

@Jason B.
"Elliott your focus on economics as the central axis of the conservative versus liberal paradigms in the USA is obsolete and not really relevant anymore."

Yeah.

When the biggest advocates of modern "liberalism" are the most greedy cooperations on the planet (hollywood, most TV networks, google, facebook, etc), that tells you how much the traditional definitions are worth...

@Cody B

"They don’t social distance very well when running out with merchandise or when they smell blood and swarm up for someone’s beating."

I actually LOL'ed at that.

Maybe we should give these thugs bigger sticks, so they can do social distancing properly when they beat a guy up?

What a mad world we live in...

There is even already a precursor to the 2-minute hate, it just doesn't happen all in the same two minutes for everyone; it's more of a tune-in-when-you-can 2 minute hate.

@ Nolan

Thanks for saying that.

He'd had several strokes over the last couple years and his quality of life was terrible.

Personally, I'm mad at myself that Chris Cornell's death devastated me for days, but I've yet to shed tears about my father. I mean, I've thought about him everyday since his passing, but nothing seems to be able to provoke the waterworks or emotional turmoil. Why does a total stranger's death effect me more than his?

I know I'd be a bawling basket case if I watch this .... so maybe I should?

I'll think about it: maybe that'll make me grieve like a normal person.

@Dave in MN

There's no "normal" way to grieve. Trust me, I've long given up wondering why some fictional character deaths hit me more than the deaths of people close to me. I cried once really hard over my dad while he was still alive and even before we got the diagnosis and his appointment at the hospital was the next day. He was scared and in pain and I had to be really strong for him that night - but I could only be so up to a point before I got overwhelmed. What got me was the idea of all the things from my life he'd miss, that all our jokes about him someday being a grandfather and torturing me by spoiling my eventual kids wouldn't bear out. Sometimes those thoughts still get me, and they're probably why I'm more weepy as a person at pop culture than I was before, but it's never been like it was that night.

Given the description of events, it's possible you haven't really cried because your dad's health gave you time to adjust to the idea of losing him. A lot of my grief came from having to rapidly accept my life was going to be different, and that he wasn't gonna be in it.

My Grandma passed away recently and because of Covid restrictions and the fact we lived in a different province, my mom and I couldn't visit her, but other family mrmbers were updating us on her deteriation. I still haven't really cried about that, but I suspect it's because of a combination of having to deal with death of other extended family members several times since my dad, that not being able to be there has made it seem less "real" to me, and that, as a weakened 95 year old, the possibility of this loss was more and more likely everyday.

Just because there are no tears doesn't mean you're grieving "wrong," just that you've been hit by this death differently. It's a process and you're working through it. Even the wondering of why you haven't cried shows you cared, so it's not like you're an unfeeling monster. Just that you're dealing with it differently. And who knows, you might being going about your business one day and some innocouos thing'll set you off. You may not. Either way is okay.

For what it's worth, I'm glad you shared. And I'm happy to offer perspective, I hope it helps.

Thanks for the thoughtful reply, Nolan.

I did think this episode was just OK when I first watched it (on video, and having mostly just watched the last two seasons), I think because I thought it just crammed in/rushed through too much story and concepts in one episode and maybe tried a little too hard to pull on heartstrings and otherwise wasn't that different or more impressive than other look-at-possible-future and/or reset episodes.

Rewatching and in the concept of the whole series, it is one of the best episodes (although 3.5 stars, and barely that, rather than 4), I think mainly because it effectively combines the sentimentality and also being pretty dark in themes and implications, it acknowledges that Jake Sisko becomes obsessive, even arguably wasting his life, Benjamin Sisko sees and is unnerved by that and yet doesn't condemn him, understands it. I don't think altering the timeline/history is necessarily a monstrous thing but it is a big thing and the episode realizes that without harshly condemning it.

I do think the episode acknowledges its darkness, Jake's obsessiveness, while combining it with sweetness. Sisko saying that he is OK now is also him believing, hoping, having to believe that Jake will be OK now, that it was losing him at that time and way that was wrong and that he can be a better father so that Jake would not be so distraught at losing him later.

I re-watched this just now, at age 34, for the first time in oh, at least 5 years.

I viewed it quite differently than I did before.

Yes, the episode pulls at your heartstrings. Yes, it makes you cry, over and over again. It's sad watching someone's life get destroyed by the loss of a loved one. It's sad watching them fail to achieve their goals. It's sad watching them die alone.

I am not sure there is much more to the episode than that. I'm not sure what the point of it is. Should Jake not have spent his life working out how to save his father? Sisko seems to wish that he had. Granted, that's super interesting from a science fiction perspective, but I'm not sure how much it reveals about us.

In some ways this episode reminds me of a terrible trend in modern television, of dramas that do little more than languish in horrifying, depressing situations: Think Handmaid's Tale or 13 Reasons Why.

I'm glad this is a rare episode in DS9's run. I understand the value in reflecting on the possibility of living a life that you're not happy with, and dying alone; I recognize the poignancy of a story about losing someone you love. But I'm glad that Star Trek usually doesn't have too many of those stories, and suspect that's why it's still incredibly popular as a whole today.

As others have said, this episode is great for people who don't like Star Trek. For me, for the first time on this rewatch, I found myself thinking it's not for me.

I found this episode pretty boring and couldn't get into it. I hate any episode where everything just resets at the end. Tony Todd was good I thought, but I just find it hard getting into episodes like these where you know everything will be put back to normal at the end.

Like anyone would answer the door late at night and just let some total stranger in. Loved when she said "I have time" to hear his story. Like ummm you are the one that just showed up unannounced, how about respecting Jake's time??

I’ve only seen this episode once, but it was incredibly moving and touching. There are a lot of subtle things going on here - it feels like the kind of episode that someone could rewatch a decade or so later, and get more out of the viewing because of what they’ve learned from growing older. The actors and crew and writers also perfectly portrayed the stages in Jake’s life.

I would give this a gazillion stars if I could.

With "The City on the Edge of Forever", "Inner Light" and "The Visitor", TOS, TNG and DS9 seem to have crafted that one special episode that all fans cherish.

And interestingly, they're all tragedies. Kirk loses a loved one in "City", Picard loses a family and witnesses the death of a whole civilization in "Light", and Jake repeatedly loses his father and family in "Visitor". There's a special weight to these episodes, and a tragic sombreness that Trek rarely hits.

Secondly, they're all formally inventive and/or experimental. "City" has characters jumping hundreds of years back in time, arriving at different points, has characters erasing the future, and has characters fighting to restore various historical time-lines. It's a daring piece of writing, especially in the context of 1960s TV.

"Inner Light" meanwhile has Picard living out an entire lifetime in the space of 40 minutes, and paints a portrait of a life on a microcosmic level (several generations of a family) and a macrocosmic level (the withering of a village and the death of a planet).

And of course "Visitor" charts Jake's life from kid to old man, and watches as he attempts to resurrect his father, who periodically appears in his life, whilst otherwise existing in a kind of "subspace stasis", a stasis which echoes Jake's own life, which Jake puts on hold to rescue his father. So there's a double motion in "Visitor", Jake's life rushing forward toward death, but staying put, Sisko dead and in limbo, but always reaching back toward life.

The three episodes are also emotional in ways Trek rarely is. "Visitor" is basically the mother's death scene in "Bambi", over and over again. It's big, broad button pushing. Daddy dies, Jake cries. Lather rinse repeat.

"Inner Light", meanwhile, softens "Picard" in ways we'd never before seen. He gets close to women and children. He loves. He builds a family. And Kirk is similarly softened in "City", falling in love with a woman he ultimately loses, though in Kirk's case this wasn't quite as rare.

Finally, the episodes do something similar with time and space. Picard in "Inner Life" turns his back on his family (the Enterprise and its crew) to build a new life and a new family over the course of many decades. He trades space exploration for a kind of stagnation - he's stuck on a planet - which nevertheless allows him to explore life as a husband and father.

Jake does something similar in "Visitor". He turns his back on exploration (novel writing and fatherhood), and embraces a kind of stagnation (he gives up a writing career) for many decades, which leads to him losing his family (wife and kids), but gaining his father.

Meanwhile "City" finds Kirk stuck on Earth for a month, stagnant in a dingy apartment, torn between a conventional romantic life with a local woman, or a resumption of his life of exploration with the arrival of McCoy, who intrudes upon the episode like Sisko's yanked about in "Visitor".

Incidentally, "Visitor" works as well as it does specifically because it was tweaked by Ira Behr. Behr turned a sequential script into a more chopped-up thing, and inserted a framing device in which a knocking upon a door on a wet and windy night leads a young writer to a dying novelist. There's something almost preternatural about this framing device; like something out of Lovecraft or Edgar Allan Poe.

One could quibble about minor flaws in "Visitor" - Sisko's death looks a bit corny - but they don't detract from the big moments. Fathers die and sons cry. Fathers watch sons lose their wives and whole futures, and fathers cry. Themes of loss, parental abandonment, sacrifice, sustained love, and even divorce, imbue almost every moment with a special weight.

Scenes in which Kira comforts Jake on the station are similarly powerful, as is Jakes departure from DS9, which echoes a receding shot of him leaving his dead mom behind in the escape-shuttle in "Emissisary". Then there's that moment in which Sisko quietly watches an old and grey Jake as he sleeps, which leads to an even better moment in which Jake gives his life so that his father may live.

Kirk makes a similar sacrifice in "City", a woman dying so millions more may live. And in "Inner Light" it is Picard who lives, who is allowed to go on so a whole civilization may live within him.

Incidentally, this episode's future shows no Dominion war with the Federation. Sisko dies and the war seems called off. I've been saying for years that Sisko triggered or exasperated the conflict, and this episode hilariously demonstrates just that. With no Sisko ticking them off, the Dominion turn into chill dudes.

Just saw this episode for the first time. I found it quite moving and touching. So nice to see such love between father and son. What keeps it from being in the same league as City on the Edge of Forever and The Inner Light is the Reset Button. It all winds up never having happened.

Would have been good if it hadn't just 'all been a dream'.....

I posted on this back in 2015.
Recently rewatching DS9 on Netflix. This EP is even worse on a repeat watch. They do fab stuff with prosthetics make up with Cardassians, the Jem' Hadar and other assorted aliens, but they can't do an aged human to save their face, awful pun thoroughly intended! TOS Spock's Brain is the kind of bad that becomes a classic cult thing with time. Bad as in great bad. This EP is just bad. As in unbelievably bad. Just awful. Do we really watch DS9 to see a "weepie"? Good Lord, when the series reaches such heights most of the time, these bad EPs just stick out even more.

When someone says that they don't like The Visitor, The Inner Light, City on the Edge of Forever, or Blink of an eye, I pretty much stop taking their opinions seriously.

This is great Trek. It's great tv. It's great sci-fi. You can nitpick anything, nothing's perfect, but to say it's bad is either reflexive contrarianism or pure foolishness.

Except it wasn’t “just a dream.” It was a real-life problem that caused Jake to become a scientist and devote his entire life to solving. And he did.

Complaining that you don’t like them getting a second chance is the same as saying that you have no regrets about your life with your father and/or kids (congratulations on that, because you’re the only human ever to experience it) and also that you think the series would have been better without Sisko from this point forward. So ... okay on that front.

what can be said about this episode, it's 2021 and pretty much all that needed to be said about is self evident on these boards.

I actually watched this episode with someone who's not well versed in star trek, and just watches it when I happen to have the tv , true story they were low key crying towards the end.

Tony Todd just knocked it out of the ballpark when he said '' we're getting a second chance'' . I guess the real tragedy here is Benjamin wanting his son to live out a happy and fulfilling life while Jake goes into this obsession on bringing him back at the expense of wasting it away.

There was a scene where Terry Farrell was comforting Jake and she had a blank stare on her face. Someone I know committed suicide and one of his closest friends had the same stare on her face and I will never forget it. I hadn't thought about this for years but TF's expression in that scene brought it back. I think this just one example of the fine acting and directing in this episode.

I thought it was just me excreting tears during this ep because my only kid is graduating high school and will move out of state this summer...which is odd because I haven't been emotional about it (yet). But then I read the reviews and realized nope....it's just THAT great of an episode. Cirroc did great but Tony Todd's real tears during this ep pushed me over the edge.

2nd time watching after a few years; and even more impactful...amazing.

This one just came up again in a rewatch. I’ve always liked it, but this time it feels especially poignant as I’m separated from my own father due to this accursed virus. I don’t know if I will get to see him again in his lifetime.

The dedication hits me like a punch to the gut every time. “For my father, who’s coming home”.

I can't say enough good things about The Visitor. It's a tremendously moving hour of television, certainly one of the very best Trek episodes across the entire franchise. I wasn't completely sold on Avery Brooks before this episode; this pushed me over the edge into being a diehard DS9 fan. I had watched DS9 sporadically before, as TNG was still on during DS9's first two seasons, and Voyager premiered halfway through DS9's third season. Why would I want to watch a show on a space station when I could watch shows set on starships?

You don't necessarily need to watch other DS9 episodes for The Visitor to affect you, but man, does it help. Knowing the kind of relationship that Ben and Jake had as father and son, that makes this episode all the more devastating.

For all the complaints about the reset button or whatever, everyone "except" Ben Sisko were reset. Does it really take away from the story that there was a reset at the end? Does it minimize anything? Kirk went through a similar reset in The City on the Edge of Forever, and that episode is still rightfully celebrated. Why shouldn't The Visitor continue to be celebrated?

Four stars, easily.

This is my second time watching Deep Space 9 and this episode and it effected me even stronger than my first time viewing it. I cried pretty much throughout the entire episode.

One thing I always loved about this episode is when Sisko reappears through Jake's life, his immediately thoughts are to catch up with his son and find out what he had been doing. Sisko doesn't look sad, but he's beaming with joy and pride finding out what Jake has done with his life. I've always loved that, since Sisko could have been written disappointed/sad that he missed 20-40+ years of Jake's life, but instead only had excitement and interest in him.

This ep pulls on your heartstrings and i've always liked it. Only slight negative thing is the actor playing older Jake doesn't really look like him, if you look at what Cirroc Lofton looks like now (when he's the age Jake was as an adult), they don't look anything alike. But other than that the older actor also hit the emotional moments well.

I've seen this episode a few times over the years, and I agree it's excellent, though I normally don't like overly emotionally manipulative plots.

One thing that struck me in this episode, and which I realize holds true for the whole series, is that although Avery Brooks' acting is awkward and strange sometimes, it's always excellent and moving in his father/son scenes with Cirroc Lofton.

And I only realized upon this rewatching that Melanie is played by Andrew Robinson's real life daughter. So the frame tail is Garak's daughter and Sisko's son hanging out together.

The only thing I didn't like about this episode was Nog; why in the name of the prophets didn't they get an adult actor to play adult Nog? At first I assumed he was still a child because of how long Ferengi live compared to humans but as the episode went on they started changing his makeup to age him and I realized that he was in fact supposed to not only be an adult but an old man. I suppose he could have had one of those disorders where a person stops growing but if felt more like they just didn't want to hire another actor and thought no one would notice. It looked so ridiculous and really brought the episode down.

Wanted to add something to my previous post. I recently learned about the actor who played Nog, Aron Eisenberg. It turns out that his height was severely limited because of a birth defect with his kidneys, so he was actually much older than he appeared to be playing Nog. In fact he was 26 years old in this episode. All this time I thought that Nog was played by a child actor. It's probably why they didn't have a different actor play his character during the scenes in the future, out of respect for him. Sadly he passed away in 2019.

Interesting way of telling a story but not as good as everyone says.

Over all score: 7/10

It would seem that if Ben had died here, Jadzia would have ended up living a full life, rather than dying 33 months later...

It is an interesting feature of episodes like this one, "All Good Things" and "Endgame" is that the WRONG timeline, the one where the wrong person died, is in other respects preferable (there doesn't seem to have been a war with the Dominion in this one).

I had to drink a lot of water through this episode because of extreme tear duct leakage. I have never watched anything, anywhere, or at 'anytime' that has evoked so much emotion. This episode destroyed me, in a good way.
This was my 3rd time watching this episode... I knew what was coming, but it wrecked me more than previous 2 times. Maybe because I'm getting older too; most of my children are of adult age now.

Just re-watched this for probably the third or fourth time. Now that I'm older--a grandmother and a widow--it just seems so much more poignant and emotional to me. After slogging through all the seasons of Star Trek Discovery and ST: Picard, I wanted to give myself a break and go back and cherry-pick some of the great classics from the earlier Star Trek shows. I've always liked The Inner Light the best, but this one, as I've aged, has plucked the heartstrings more and more. Definitely a keeper.

I think I'll give my emotions and my handkerchiefs a rest, and watch The Trouble with Tribbles next!

Clever concept but there are no mulligans in life. If you piss your life away, it’s gone. And was all the crying really necessary? One star.

Not sure if I need my ears syringed but I'm sure, when Jake talks to Captain Nog in his home, the good Nog makes a comment that the Klingons are allowing the Federation to use the wormhole to explore the DELTA quadrant?

I think it's a great episode - especially if we take it as an allegory for dealing with obsession and reacting to loss. The point is, I think, that when tragedy strikes, life moves on and so must we -- lest we be lost in a loop of grief. We are here, now, in each moment. Yesterday is gone. What do we do with that?

Michael Taylor's story is compelling. David Livingston's direction is superb. And Tony Todd's performance couldn't be better.

"The Visitor" is an echo of "The Emissary" (the very first DS9 episode) in which the wormhole beings challenge Sisko on "Why do you live here?" (at the point of his wife's death). Life is short. It's important to poke my our heads up every once in a while and take a look around; see what's going on. Otherwise if we get lost in nostalgia we can miss what's important if we don't open our eyes.

This is one of the very best offerings of the entire Trek franchise from September 8, 1966 to now.

I found this episode very difficult to watch. I lost my Dad almost five years ago and the pain is still every bit as bad as it was that day. It didn't help matters that the emotional scenes in this ep. were not only done very well but were accompanied by outstanding soundtrack.

I guess if you never experienced the loss of a close loved one and/or weren't close to your father, this episode is just plain boring. I know I would have while my Dad was still alive. Otherwise though, it's impossible to not be deeply moved.

The "Old Jake" actor bore an uncanny resemblance to the young Jake. They really COULD be the same person.

Yes, four stars. Definitely.

Spoiler Alert for anyone watching the series for the first time.

After watching this episode (on DVD) for maybe the 3rd time over the years, it suddenly occurred to me: How does the situation with Sisko in this episode fit in with what happens in the future? Perhaps I've missed something.

Ok, maybe the basic idea and story line were sort-of moving but the horrifically horrible dialogue and even worse acting by the 2 guest star "story tellers", combined with the fact that they look like they are constantly about to start a love scene, makes this episode almost totally unwatchable to me. And actually I found the whole thing over the top and emotionally manipulative and unsuccessfully at that. And 90% of the plot is described by old Jake rather than actually portrayed. Comparing it to "The Inner Light"? Best Trek ever??? Sorry, but I respectfully disagree and am almost the other end of the spectrum. I give it 1 star. I can't be the only one.

Mathias is right. What crazy person allowed Tony Todd to be a part of DS9? He has no credentials.

Since only Sisco traveled through time did he ever tell his son Jake what happened during those episodes. If not, definitely a hole in the plot.

So I’m watching all of Star Trek as a way of working through my grief over losing my partner/husband of 45 years last May. Star Trek was part of my life long before I began dating my husband at 19 and has been an interest throughout. Through episodes like The Visitor, I have an opportunity to see my grief and loss through a more universal lens, which makes it more accessible and also less overwhelming.

The grief here revolves around where Jake’s choices interact with conditions beyond his control. Ultimately, though, his choices that seem so sad—the decision to stop writing, to take up uncongenial work, to let his wife go, to die via suicide—give both Jake and Benjamin a second chance. This use of the reset button reflects a generational view of time… something that we need to recapture.

How this mawkish nonsense consistently gets voted as the "Best episode of DS9" is beyond me. Emotions...yuck. Keep the saccharine out of my Sci-Fi please. This isn't "Thirtysomething" or "Picket Fences" or "insert overly sentimental primetime drama here"

I guess that I don't like it as much as other people. I like my dramas simple and with consequences. From the beginning it was clear to me that this was just going to go full circle at the end, undercutting the most important part of a plot (IMHO), the consequences. At least when Picard was going through his fake new life, he actually lived it and developed relationships with the people around him, more than Jake ever does in this episode. It's a "Tell, don't show" kind of an episode. I did appreciate that BSG didn't have any of these types of episodes (well, almost I guess) and everything on that show advanced the overall plot of the series in some way.
Also, why does Jake's accent changes over time?

I saw this episode when it was first broadcast. I'm was 42, I'm now 71. As I write this in 2023, I note:

* Avery Brooks is 74. He seems to be retired but I gather he lives with his wife of 47 years in Princeton, NJ.

* Nana Visitor is 66. She's still working and remains married to her third husband. Her son with Siddig (born during production of "The Assignment" in Season 5) is now 26.

* Rene Auberjonois is no longer with us. He died of lung cancer at the end of 2019 via voluntary selftermination of his life.

* Cirroc Lofton is now 44. He has a DS9 podcast ("The 7th Rule") that he started years ago with Aron Eisenberg. The latest episode was 7/24/23.

* Aron Eisenberg is no longer with us. Born with but one kidney, he died of renal complications in 2019.

* Terry Farrell is now 59. She retired from acting to concentrate on family, but her marriage to Brian Baker ended in 2015. She was married to Adam Nimoy (Leonard's son) from 2018 to 2022 when it ended in divorce.

* Alexander Siddig is 57. In recent years, he had a prominent role as Doran Martell in Game of Thrones. He has a son with Nana Visitor. He's been married to Shana Collier for the past seven years.

* Colm Meaney is 70. His huge film & TV resume has new entries for 2022 and 2023. He's been married twice.

* Michael Dorn is 70. In recent years, he has done a great deal of voice work. An accomplished pilot, he flies jets. He's flown with both the Blue Angels and the Thunderbirds.

* Tony Todd is 68. He continues to add to his huge acting resume that spans Broadway, Hollywood, and Television.

The point of all this is that "Life goes on." Time only moves one direction. The overarching question for anyone and everyone is "You are here. You are manifest in the universe. What are you going to do about that? What will you do with your time?"

We can follow our dreams and passions. Jake might have continued as a writer. Or we can divert ourselves into addictions and nostalgia. Jake can abandon his dreams, his family, and his destiny and become obsessed with finding some way to bring his father back. (A bit more honest episode would have left Jake dying having failed to complete his quest, but then that would have killed the series.)

How we deal with loss, how we overcome tragedies and setbacks is as much a part of life as that which we achieve. Jake is as trapped in the past as Benjamin Sisko was when the Prophets challenged him with "Why do you exist here?" (at the moment of Jennifer's death).

The episode is about life and meaning. It's as powerful as they come. Yes, there needs to be a reset button, but in the meantime, we can mourn along with Benjamin Sisko as he sees his son's life trickling away like sands through the hourglass (so are the days of our lives).

How we live is not a new theme:

"Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death." --- "Macbeth" (Shakespeare)

There's only one other episode in another series that brings home for me the poignancy of the bittersweet nature of mortal existence. That's "The Body" in "Buffy, the Vampire Slayer." Be present to the moment, live each day as if it were your last. Avoid the trap that looms for so many that life "Is a tale // Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury // Signifying nothing." ("Macbeth" again).

@Jim
>life trickling away like sands through the hourglass (so are the days of our lives).

That's very poetic. I never thought of the episode that way, I did however appreciate TNG's The Inner Light. What it symbolizes, loss of a civilization and most of it's culture. Eventually it will all be gone. View my post upon the episode for more.

Lost in the sands of time.

The first time I watched this episode was when it first aired. I had lost my father by that time. I couldn’t bring myself to watch it again. I finally watched it recently—but, my mother has been gone for six years. I can relate to Jake’s struggle to move on. I think I was better able to do that because I was older by the time I lost each of them. That’s one one the painful aspects of getting older—losing the people you love and having to move forward with your life without them.