4x03 The Visitor

[9.8/10] There is no father-son relationship in Star Trek with the same depth and power as the one between Benjamin and Jake. Despite all the Deep Space Nine episodes where Jake is underserved or conspicuously absent, one of the throughlines of the series from the beginning has been the bond between parent and child, as the elder Sisko comes into his responsibilities on the station, and the younger one grows up and begins to find his own way. For years, the show has planted those seeds.

In “The Visitor”, they bear moving, transcendent fruit, at the prospect of father and son being separated by grief and time and loss in the way we all will one day or another. The brilliance of the episode is that it checks so many engrossing boxes. It is a strong sci-fi story, about someone blinking in and out of existence over time after a peculiar spatial phenomena, with the best scientific minds working to figure out how to bring them home. It is a beautiful father and son story, about how important that bond is, particularly for single parents and only children. It is an exhilarating “What if?” story, that uses the premise to imagine the fates of the DS9 faithful decades into the future. And it is a cautionary tale, to cherish our bonds with those who matter most to us, but to continue living our lives in their absence, since it’s what they would want.

Any one of these would have been enough to support a superb episode. All of them together create one of Deep Space Nine’s, and Star Trek’s, all time greatest.

So kudos to credited writer Michael Taylor and the creative team behind the series, for not only coming up with the idea of Jake Sisko seemingly losing his father in a mysterious warp core accident, and yet encountering him sporadically over the course of years to come, but also for having the conviction to play this as a poignant tale of a young man haunted by someone whose loss affected him in ways he might never have comprehended were it not for such a maddening and nigh-torturous tragedy.

And my god, the performances. Cirroc Lofton has been underserved by Deep Space Nine. If you check Memory Alpha for behind-the-scenes info on episodes like I do, you’ll be struck by how many of them say “Cirroc Lofton did not appear.” And yet, he more than shows his worth here. He conveys the numb sense of mourning in Jake when he believes his father is dead, listlessly drifting through the station, without the will or the energy to pick up his life where it left off before. Lofton goes beyond the tones of the sullen teenager, and finds someone rendered inert by loss, sanded down into a lost soul chasing ghosts in the last place they saw them.

But he also gives a gobsmacking performance when, out of nowhere, Benjamin reappears and disappears before his son’s eyes all over again. The near-wordless sense of relief at the realization that he wasn’t crazy in having a vision of his father before, his guilt at not believed his own senses and tried harder to rescue him, his gutting pain of losing another parent all over again, is Lofton’s signature performance through the series so far. And it’s one apt to draw blood from even the coldest of hearts to see a young man incapable of processing such grief forced to confront it anew.

The same goes for Tony Todd, who arguably has a taller task. He has to portray Jake as an adult, and an old man, without losing a sense of continuity with Lofton’s presence. He has to convey Jake’s emotional state across decades, communicating the warmth and hardship and psychological strain at different stages of the man’s life. He has to narrate these events in voiceover without it feeling like a cheat. And he has to carry the love, the guilt, the frustration, and the sacrifice, of a version of Jake Sisko who gave up half his life, and eventually all of it, to save his father.

That Todd not only meets the challenge, but arguably rises above it, is near miraculous. He is plausible (if a little muscular) as a grown up version of the younger Sisko. He sells the sense of a man who found his calling as a writer and a new family with his wife, Korena in the wake of his father’s death. He communicates the life-altering determination of someone still plagued with guilt over what more he could have done, who devoted the rest of his days to undoing the tragedy that directed the course of his days. He delivers the beleaguered frustration of someone who turned over decades of his life to righting that wrong and still came up short. He cuts the perfect image of the wistful old man willing to share his story with a willing listener. And in his final bow, he rips your heartstrings asunder as a grown son, lamenting the life he led in lieu of, and in the absence of, his father, ready to give it all up in order to set things right. Todd gives a tour de force performance through all of this, catapulting him into the pantheon of all-time great recurring Star Trek performers.

And through his, and by extension Jake’s, journey through the timeline, we get to see glimpses of a possible future for our heroes. The Federation ultimately abandons the station to the Klingons. The Dominion stays quiet despite the numerous threats. Quark gets that moon he’s long been angling for, and Morn takes over the bar, despite the new rock-ridged landlords. Dax and Bashir become charming and accomplished old coots (with the standard less-than-convincing old age makeup). Rom becomes a Starfleet captain! The nature of 1990s television is reversion to the status quo and not changing too much all at once. So there’s a particular thrill to seeing a vision of what the road ahead could hold for the main cast and the quadrant writ large, delivered en masse in forty minutes and change.

“The Visitor” never feels overstuffed though. Instead, like “The Inner Light”, the episode’s spiritual predecessor, it gives us just enough of the different phases of Jake’s life, and a sense of the developments in between, while remaining nimble as it moves through the ages.

My goodness, what a privilege it is to see Jake’s life wax and wane in sink with his father’s visits. A sad young man is given new hope, but also license to move on by one seemingly miraculous reappearance from his father aboard DS9. The trajectory of a successful writer and budding family man is upended when his dad pops out of thin air once more. An aging soul determined to undo the accident he blames himself for gives himself over to frustration and self-flagellation when his chancey attempt to retrieve his dad once more goes awry. And an elderly man gives his life as a last ditch effort to bring his father back from whence he came, and to demonstrate his love in the most profound and heart-rending terms one can imagine.

Good God. There is such poetry and tragedy in all of this. And the secret weapon that makes it all land is Ben Sisko himself. After three seasons, it’s easy to take Avery Brooks’ outstanding performances for granted. Unlike Todd and even Lofton, by comparison Brooks is a known quantity. And yet, he outdoes himself here. His earnestness at trying to grant Jake absolution and catharsis when he reappears after the accident; his joy and wonder when he sees the man his son has grown up to become; his earnest effort at imploring Jake to move on with his life and not devote to reviving him; and his shock and desperation when he realizes that his child has sacrificed his own life to save Ben’s -- Brooks sells it all like nobody’s business.

Therein lies the meddling of poetry, pathos, and science-fiction-y irony in all of this. Jake worked so hard to bring his father back through science, because of the bond he could not let go of, when what was holding his father in this loop was a more literal subspace bond between them. Severing that bond is the only way to solve the problem and it’s the end of Jake’s life that proves the only thing which can restore his father’s, and give them a second chance. Saving the day hurts, and requires doing the opposite of all Jake’s strived for spiritually, practically, and emotionally through all of this.

And strangely enough, it goes against the ostensible theme of the episode -- a noble idea that the loss of those we care about is tremendously difficult, but that they themselves would want us to be spurred by their memory to live lives of meaning and purpose, rather than running around in circles trying to chase their tails.

Few of us know what it’s like to have a loved one appear to perish in a warp core accident, only to have them conjured before us at regular but all too evanescent intervals. But most of us, sadly, know what it’s like to lose someone we care for deeply, and maybe even feel lost without. There is such power in Benjamin himself urging his son to let go of that pain and continue on in the worthwhile life of passion and new family bonds he began, until he was sidetracked by this crusade from the past. And there is such pathos and compounding tragedy in Jake’s inability to let go, letting his own life run aground on his pursuit of his father’s.

The moral seems to be not to fall into the same traps that Jake does, however understandable they may be. I lost someone dear to me last year, and I’d be lying if I said I wouldn’t consider extraordinary lengths to bring them back if I thought I had half a chance to. In a more prosaic way, the pain of the loss still lingers, in ways that cast a pall over certain things that once brought me joy. “The Visitor” is a clarion call to anyone who’s grieved, both to treat the time with those we love as precious, and to spend our time honoring those we’ve lost by living lives they’d be proud of, rather than miring our days in futile efforts to conjure a past that will never return.

Ostensibly, Jake making his last act one of self-immolation to bring his father back once and for all runs against that theme. And yet, it is at once a tribute to the bond Benjamin and Jake shared, the one that Jake almost went mad trying to regain, but also an acknowledgement that the life he led up to that point had gone astray, to where a chance to reset the timeline was for both of them, a way to give not just his father, but himself, their lives back after lo these many years.

This is a high water mark, something built on years of narrative progression, an imaginative science-fiction premise, and the richly-drawn, painfully relatable love between two family members who care deeply for one another, and lose one another. In the end, Benjamin finds his way back to his boy and embraces him with a father’s love, an act to acknowledge what was lost and what was gained in the effort to bring him home. And in that, Deep Space Nine sets a standard of storytelling, meaning, and feeling that few episodes of television, Star Trek or otherwise, can hope to meet.

Bah, humbug!

Seems like this is an absolute darling of an episode, and yet I found myself bored to death not being able to care much at all for any of it, and not able to wait for it to end. From the random girl that just randomly shows up to what's- not even Benjamin but Jake, himself an old man now, to investigate why her favourite author stopped writing, like a teenage fan stalking her idol to their home, with said idol yoloing it and just going along to Tell The Tale:tm: to her because why not - all the way to where the whole story, predictably, is undone at the figurative snap of a finger, making none of it matter at all. Coming hot on the heels of that particular season opener that saw significant aspects of the whole universe upended, but also bringing in a rather major sort of "returner".

I'm sorry, I'm sure. I love this particular father-son relationship as much as the next person, and I've always loved any episode, any minor scene that served to portray it. But this episode jumps so far from what precedes it in the series, as well as jumping so far ahead in time, supposing so many things to have just happened this way or that. And we just have to roll with it, we have to accept all those details as facts, in a way yeah, plausible, but at the same time not at all certain. While at the same time knowing that it's only a "what if?" anyway, that this isn't how things will be, it's not how anything will go down. So many changes regarding the cast (complete with ever-awful aging makeup), and yet the important people are still in important enough positions to be able to pull a few major strings, offscreen ofc, and everyone can get back together just like that. At the same time, the station itself remains the exact same. The Defiant remains the exact same, because apparently that doesn't need upgrades either over decades (2D control panel, right, Doctor?). And nobody, save for Jake himself, seems to be able to figure out anything about the incident? Jake, who has to give up his passion because he still has to go through school, even, to have a better understanding on the subject? Not the Chief, not even oh-so-wise Dax with so much experience Benjamin means oh-so-much to? Give me a break.

And then - yeah, it does all come apart. A swish of a magic wand, old man Jake dying (despite Benjamin's insistence, it's a little hard to believe he's just so much ahead of his time with that, which is, fair is fair, kudos to the acting), and BAM! For less then a whole minute at the very end, we just get to see both Benjamin and Jake safe, back where they were on the Defiant, having successfully avoided the incident that started the entire mess. (What was that very much in-sync line, I think the Doctor and Chief, just a few episodes back? "I hate temporal dynamics!" or some such? Indeed...)

All in all, I do love these two characters. And the amount of time we get to spend with them - usually. This particular episode, though, just falls really flat, as far as I'm concerned. Not because the acting or the emotional upset isn't there, but because literally everything else around it is so flimsy. It's asking too much to be believed and taken for granted, just to drive home... a single point? Maybe? Not even sure. When it only ends up doing what episodes like this always do eventually: undo it all.