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

In the first bold move of what would prove to be one of many seven seasons, Deep Space Nine opens with Star TrekThe new hero staring at the horrifying image of the old: Jean-Luc Picard, corrupted and perverted into Locutus by the Borg. It sets a remarkable stage through which to meet the franchise’s newest hero, and more than three decades later, those opening scenes aboard the U.S.S. Saratoga remains one of Star Trekis the most intrusive and ccaptivating opening volleys.

32 years ago today, January 3, 1993. Deep space Ninethe emissary pilotopened not on the titular space station that would become home to then-Commander Sisko, but with a title card that took Trek back to the then largest and one of the lowest points of Starfleet: Battle of Wolf 359 c The next generationThe opening of the fourth season, ending one of the greatest Trek rockies of all time in “The Best of Both Worlds”. There, the series had kept the Wolf 359 massacre off-screen. now Star Trek was ready to show it and put his new hero right in the heart of this horror. It’s an amazing gambit that immediately tells the audience that this is new Star Trek the series wasn’t going to go where they expected.

The scenes on board the Saratoga as it prepares to be one of the many doomed ships gathering to stop the Borg at Wolf 359 hold a remarkable mirror to what Trek was at the moment. Star Trek is used to scenes of Starfleet officers thriving under pressure, facing impossible odds, but there is an absolute truth to how DS9 depicts the events of the battle which TNG never showed up. The Saratoga it stands no chance against Locutus, and the calm and composure of Starfleet is not given time to prevail in the face of the ship, which is immediately disabled, killing the bridge crew. It’s not a roll-the-bridge-and-get-up attack; most of them are simply dead as Sisko and the only surviving Bolian lieutenant realize the ship is lost.

The scenes outside the bridge are even worse: after years and years of depicting the Enterprise as a ship with a thriving civilian complement, always protected when flying into battle, the corridors of Saratoga— a Miranda-class ship, small compared to the scale of the Galactica-class — are filled with howling, wounded civilians struggling for escape pods. It all ends, of course, with a humiliating personal cost to Starfleet hubris for Cisco when he returns to his own quarters to find his wife Jennifer dead in the wreckage and his son Jake barely alive as he himself is dragged away , howling in anguish to shuttle like Saratoga explodes, the fireworks of its destruction reflected in Sisko’s view vengeful shines from. In just four and a half minutes, Star Trek fans had just watched their new star face a tragedy unlike anything they’d really seen before, and most importantly, they’d seen it through the eyes of a man who acted perhaps more like any of us, than the ideals of someone like Kirk or Picard would.

It’s this tragic, vulnerable humanity that informs the Sisko we meet throughout the rest of The Emissary—forming a central figure far from what we might assume to be typical. Star Trek protagonist. He’s petty in the way he deals with both the people he works with on his Deep Space Nine assignment and with Starfleet itself when he finds himself face to face with Picard (now back to his heroic self and doesn’t expect to be challenged in any way, let alone the way Cisco does). He is still very clearly shaped by the trauma of Wolf 359, not fully processing it or even compartmentalizing it – and it takes a literal act of God for him to even begin to do so when his encounter with the wormhole creatures that the Bajorans worship as their spiritual gods is almost entirely compromised by the fact that Sisko can’t go on after the loss of Jennifer.

It’s an unadulterated look at Starfleet in the shadows of what was, up to that point, one of its lowest points ever depicted on screen: a low point that can only be matched against what Deep Space Nine itself will come into later in its course during the the Dominion War. And that unvarnished view comes in the form of Sisko himself, a man allowed to be vulnerable and flawed in ways that defy what we’ve come to expect (and yet, for the most part, expect—just see the friction even all these years later how Discovery portrays Michael Burnham, who is billed as one of the Star Trek protagonists shaped mostly by Sisko’s legacy since). It is a form that is formed by the minute Deep Space Nine departs, and one that still defines the show all these years later.

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