Thoughts on DS9: The Visitor

I always say, there are no bad stories, only badly written ones. And conversely, if a story is good, it's good because it's well written. DS9's "The Visitor" is a prime example of this rule. There's so much that could have gone wrong -- and in lesser hands, often does -- but that here goes very right.

I just rewatched this lovely episode, which, to be honest, I'd all but forgotten. This tear-jerker could have been embarrassingly cheesy. It could have been deadly dull, focusing as it does on a version of a character we don't really know (adult Jake Sisko) and featuring the regulars very little. The technobabble-based premise of Jake dragging his temporally shifted father through time could have stretched credulity to the breaking point. The framing story of old Jake's tale to a stranger is hardly original ("The Wedding-Guest sat on a stone/He cannot choose but hear/And thus spake on that ancient man/The bright-eyed Mariner"). And yet the episode manages to be authentically touching. By crafting a plot that's not killingly obvious, and by striking emotional notes that ring true, the writing walks a thin line, avoiding (sometimes barely) veering into the maudlin or the melodramatic, keeping us nailed to our seats and emotionally invested. (For comparison, check out "Facets," the Dax-centric story just a couple of episodes earlier. It's so thinly written, you can't get past the flawed premise that, if Dax has all the memories of her previous hosts, she ought to already know that Curzon had been in love with Jadzia. But I digress.)

Of course, the acting has to be up to the writing, and it is. Tony Todd as adult Jake is spot on, but the story also owes an awful lot to Cirroc Lofton, who sells bereaved young Jake for all he's worth. I mean, that scene in sick bay...wow. The kid delivered.

On the downside, if an episode makes me cry, but it doesn't have an impact on the characters and the series as a whole, I just feel so ripped off. Having grown up on the highly stylized, episodic storytelling of American television, I never used to hope for more. But now, when I see something like "The Visitor," where there's a climax with great emotional impact, and then the whole denouement is maybe two minutes, tops, it's so unsatisfying. What's more, because I'm binge-watching, I'm quickly on to the next episode, and it's like the whole thing never happened. That's why I'm so grateful ST is getting a chance to do fully serialized storytelling in Disco. But "The Visitor" also makes me realize that I hope Disco takes some time in its second season to slow down a little bit and give its characters room to breathe. All through season 1, it's been driving hard to pack a ton of plot into every hour, to deliver the kind of breathless pace that's become the norm for big-budget action film and TV, and to keep the audience guessing about the characters' secrets and motives. But once we get on a firmer footing and resolve some of that, I hope there'll be more (non-cheesy, believable) character pieces. We got a taste of that with Saru in “Si Vis Pacem, Para Bellum,” and even better, with Stamets in "Magic to the Make the Sanest Man Go Mad," where the character development was an organic part of an entertaining twist on a vintage plot (talk about "no such thing as a bad story..."). I want a whole lot more.