The Visitor
- Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
- Season 4, Episode 3
If you want to truly fall in love with Deep Space Nine, this is the episode for you. Within this episode, we find out that Captain Sisko had taken his son Jake to observe an inversion of the Bajoran wormhole. Yet the inversion causes a malfunction in the USS Defiant’s warp drive. Suddenly a bolt of energy strikes the Captain, causing him to vanish into subspace. Jake refuses to believe his father is really gone, especially after seeing him randomly throughout his life. Jake eventually goes on to get into his writing career and both marries and settles down. Next time his father appears, Jake shows off his books and family.
When his father disappears again, Jake leaves this all behind to go to school to study subspace mechanics to save his father. Decades pass and another inversion comes. Jake believes sacrificing his own life will allow them both to return before the warp incident and injects himself with a lethal hypospray. Jake dies in his father’s arms and both he and Jake end up back on the Defiant. This time, Sisko knows an energy discharge is coming and dodges it. Jake is back to being a teenager again and asks his father what happened. Sisko, with tears in his eyes, responds: “I guess we got lucky this time.”