I was sixteen when I first saw this, at a convention shortly after its first broadcast. I found it boring and depressing, and felt it didn't have much to do with Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, with the regular actors absent for most of the runtime. I put it out of my mind as much as possible, until I heard it being hailed as one of the all-time Star Trek classics and thought "Really? That one?"
Many people talk about how it provides insight into Ben and Jake Sisko's relationship. I'm not sure why, because they're hardly in it. Avery Brooks' screentime probably doesn't amount to ten minutes, and Cirroc Lofton is in it even less. Yes, I know Tony Todd's character is meant to be Jake Sisko, but there's no connection to the Jake we know. You could turn this into an episode of The Outer Limits with Tony Todd playing any old man willing to change history to save his father without much in the way of rewrites, and it might even work better on a show like that.
And that's before we get onto Michael Dorn. It's only the second episode with Worf, but instead of learning how he fits into this show, he gets a one scene token appearance and gets used as an off screen plot device pinched from TNG's finale All Good Things. TNG fans encouraged to try DS9 out because Worf's in it now must have turned off in their droves.
But for me, the worst part is the framing sequence. The pre-credits sees Elderly Jake Sisko being visited by young writer Melanie and starting to tell her his life story beginning with "When I was eighteen, my father died." Cue credits. Shock horror, Ben Sisko's dead! Except he's obviously not, because he's the main character. So it's just a case of killing time until the characters find that out. And as it turns out, Jake already knows he isn't dead, he was just being melodramatic to create a cliffhanger.
And so it goes on and on, with Old Jake telling Melanie all this, but it's pretty clear none of it's going to matter. There's no way the show is going to continue with its main character dead or trapped in limbo, and everyone else old and infirm. Sooner or later, a reset button's going to be pressed. But no, the episode carries on expecting us not to realise that, ending with the rather sour-tasting beat of Old Jake giving Melanie an annotated manuscript of his latest novel and playing it as though he's given her a rare and special gift. Except he hasn't. None of this is going to have happened. She's never going to have this conversation with him. In fact, pretty soon she's never going to have existed.
And sure enough, Old Jake sacrifices himself, Ben Sisko gets catapulted back in time and stops the accident that stranded him in limbo from happening, and Melanie and trillions like her get erased from existence just so Jake can have his father around growing up. Yay?
If people found this a life-affirming treatise on the power of a son's love for his father, then fair play to them. Personally, I found the whole thing hollow and selfish.
