Day 73: DS9, The Visitor

Show: Star Trek; Deep Space Nine

Episode Particulars: S4EP2, “The Visitor”

Note: This is another moment where two episodes were swapped (the first of two times this would happen this season). We’ll see if the DS9 Companion explains this.

 Summary: An elderly Jake (Tony Todd) receives a visitor one night (her name is apparently Melanie, but I don’t remember ever hearing her name in the episode itself; at any rate, she’s played by Rachel Robinson). She wants to know why he stopped writing at such a young age, and he tells her the story. When he was eighteen, he went with the Defiant to watch a rare event in the wormhole, only for something to go wrong and his father to vanish before his eyes. Presuming him dead, the station mourned him, with Jake naturally being hit the hardest. But Sisko’s not dead yet; the beam he was zapped with has caused him to fade in and out of existence. Knowing that his father is alive makes Jake determined to save him, though the technobabble solutions they’ve tried don’t seem to work and it’s impacting Jake’s personal life. Jake can be as stubborn as his old man, though, and while it might come at a cost, the odds of him actually succeeding are very high indeed.

Standalone Thoughts: This episode is widely considered to be the best episode of DS9 ever. Personally, I don’t think it deserves that title. It’s not bad by any means—it would have made a good original short story—but it doesn’t seem like the best to me. Most of the characters aren’t involved, and it doesn’t have the clever writing or grey morality (mostly) that’s really indicative of the show. If you asked me right now what I’d pick for the best DS9 episode, I’d probably say either “The Circle” or “The Die is Cast”, because those really show off those characteristics to great effect.

If I had to guess why this episode is so highly regarded, I’d say it’s because people relate to it. At its core, it’s a story about grief, mourning, and being unable to move on from loss, something that we’ve all experienced. Therefore, it strikes a chord with people, and might therefore be more likely to stick in the memory. Obviously there’s nothing wrong with that, or with people who like it, but it’s just not a perspective I share at this point in time.

In fact, just looking at the episode on its own terms, I’m a little annoyed with it. Most of the episode is fine, like I said, but as we get closer to the climax, little problems start arising. How did Jake know that this was the right time to do what he did?  What sort of Admiral Plot Device medicine did he take that took so long to take effect, and then took effect at the exact right moment? Most importantly, this is messing with time and the lives of everyone Jake knows and cares about. Maybe it’s for the best in the long run, but it raises some uncomfortable questions if you think about it for too long. So in short, the episode has a good message and an interesting concept, but the ultimate execution of it was a little off. But at least it seems to have been effective for lots of people, and that’s a positive thing on the whole.

How it Relates to the Whole: This episode has no real relation to the rest of the show, other than reminding us of Sisko and Jake’s family bond and that Jake wants to be a writer. It does make me wonder, though, if the writers might not have drawn upon this for inspiration when they were planning the finale…

Other: *This is unrelated to anything in the episode, but I get a kick out of it anyway. I needed to check Memory Alpha to confirm something I’d once heard, but I was right; Rachel Robinson is, in fact, Andrew Robinson’s daughter. Her role in the episode doesn’t really allow us to see how many of her father’s habits she’s picked up, though she does a good job of playing an eager but respectful fan. I mostly wanted to mention it because I will find any excuse to stick a mention of Garak into a review, even if it’s oblique.

*I can’t help but notice that old Jake seems to have developed a Cajun accent in his old age, which is a noticeable difference from the Midwest American accent he has as a teenager. While it’s a little odd as the episode begins, I actually don’t think this is too much of a problem. It’s implied that Jake spent a lot of his adult life in Louisiana, which would probably have had an effect on his accent. I’m guessing if I spent over a decade living somewhere with a distinct accent (anywhere from New York to Britain), my voice would start sounding different too.

*This episode includes a tiny little detail that, with the benefit of high-quality electronics and good eyesight, becomes unintentionally funny. Old Jake tells his visitor that he was working on a short story at the time of the accident, and it was giving him trouble. Then we jump to a flashback, and this is what we see (screenshot increased slightly in an attempt to be more legible, though it probably still won’t be readable for a lot of people);

If you can’t read it, I’ll tell you what it is; it’s an excerpt from C. S. Forester’s Commodore Hornblower. It just so happens that I am a gigantic fan of the Horatio Hornblower miniseries from the early 2000’s, and when I was first watching DS9, I discovered that Hornblower has a Memory Alpha page, which mentioned this appearance. When I finally saw the episode, I pulled out my own copy of Commodore Hornblower and confirmed that this was the case (unfortunately, my copy is now in storage and difficult to get to, or I’d do it again here). While I’m happy to have two of my favorite fandoms cross over in such an unusual way, it does kind of mess with the illusion that Jake was working on an original story. Obviously, what happened was that the props/effects department threw that text in for some reason (a fan of the Hornblower book series may have done it as a joke), assuming most people wouldn’t be able to read it and just accept, as intended, that it’s Jake’s story. But thanks to the rapid development of technology, it’s become easier and easier to notice things like this, and that’s when the weird theories start to try to explain them. In this case, Jake developed the joking nickname of “the plagiarist” with one of my family members. Personally, I’ll just subscribe to the theory that he was writing fanfic. Maybe it was even published fanfic; after all, Forester’s almost certainly out of copyright in the 24^th century.

*This is the second time that Alexander Siddig has had to don old-age makeup and a crotchety old man voice for this show. He even uses similar cadences to the ones we heard in “Distant Voices”. It’s not massively odd or important, but something about the similarities just struck me for some reason, and I thought I’d mention it here.

Best Line/Exchange: There wasn’t a lot that stood out to me today. So the best I can do is this;

(Jake is trying to explain to Kira why he doesn’t want to leave the station.)

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…(his voice gets wobbly) I won’t have anything left of him.

Thankfully, I haven’t yet experienced this sensation (and hopefully won’t be experiencing it for a long while yet), but the fact that I can absolutely believe this is how a lot of people feel when a loved one dies tells me that a) it’s probably accurate, and b) that it’s good writing, since it allows people who haven’t gone through this to get a sense of what it feels like. I just hope the writer wasn’t speaking too much from personal experience on this one.