One Small Scene: “No, it’s Not Linear.”

“I was ready to die with her”, Benjamin Sisko opines during first contact with an alien race unbeholden to time and space. Again and again throughout Deep Space 9’s pilot, Sisko and the Prophet observers taking the form of those within his past and present seem to return to a fiery ship shortly before its destruction.

Again and again there is the sight of Sisko’s wife, buried under metal rubble, and it becomes clear that it is not so much torment or alien miscommunication that summons this memory. It is the grief of a widowed man, and the aliens at last understanding as he breaks down in tears what mortality is, that simultaneously Jennifer Sisko is alive in his memory, but dead beyond ever reuniting.

“So you choose to exist here. [Pauses] “It is not linear.”

“No, it’s not linear.”

This comment is the expression of linear time, understanding passing between human and alien, and an astonishing gut punch for an episode, let alone the pilot. For an authoritative officer, a man to cry beholding the death of his wife shows Sisko as by far the most human and sympathetic protagonist Trek had, his capacity for stoicism, curiosity, and anger also matched by sorrow.

This line, his scene, and the wormhole arc of the pilot is a combination of a science plot, diplomacy and the attempt to conceptualise time and humanity, and the self-discovery Sisko has beginning his role as Emissary, giving the Prophets -as well as the audience- insight into an open human being who opens the literal, as well as spiritual gates to discovery. In embracing his sorrow and allowing himself to weep, he confides his pain, shows who he is to himself and a particular moment consuming his life which the Prophets know.

Another potent and very short line repeated by both human and alien is the monotone, then weary and saddened: “I exist here”. Sisko never left the burning USS Saratoga in his heart, and the wreckage is his life. stating that he was “ready to die with her” in such a final, declarative statement and Avery Brooks absolutely conveys the heart of a stoic man being exposed, reliving a painful memory and passing from frustration into feigned calm and then acceptance. It eclipses the performance in my view of and pilot, and most male characters on television, let alone positive examples.

The best merit is that aside from entertaining cases of possession by alien, Sisko’s values and Brooks’s performance is not as subject to fluctuating as others. For example, the Picard of best of both worlds, measure of a man and tapestry is not the frankly arrogance ivory tower Picard of early seasons, whomever he was in Insurrection, and while I enjoy First Contact it spits in the face of all Picard’s idealism, temperament and role of the abstract cerebral Capitan. Sisko is the same character -albeit more experienced- from the first episode to the last, Avery Brooks’s performance was as sure as a recipe.

We all feel the pang of loss, the certainty of bereavement, and the unfortunate among us can see places and people that we will never see again. Through fiction and the fantastical, the communication of loss as a means to understand is a powerful way to develop empathy for sentience, for our species, and a detached look at time as we seldom consider it.

DS9 is not the darkest Trek series, merely the most distinct, the black sheep series and clearly written very differently. Enterprise, certainly the post reboot series are far, far darker in cynicism, violence, worldview etc. But I would start with watching this scene, and considering the themes of fatherhood, family, community and loss that the long-concluded series has to provide.