That pissed me off enormously, especially since it flew in the face of Avery Brooks' specific request. Fuck that. Seriously.
The rest of the episode was dopey. I tried to get on board. I did. I only watched the pilot of SFA so far, but I dug it well enough. SAM, unfortunately, is only 33.3 percent charming and 66.6 percent annoying and she leaned too hard into the latter this episode.
Her "quest" made no sense. She visited a museum. She got drunk. And then she was like, "Man, I did all this work looking into Sisko." Um, did you??
Whatever she learned about Sisko (still unclear about that!) really had no direct relevance to her own situation whatsoever except for the very forced way she (and the episode) tried to make forced parallels to the two characters both being "emissaries", although it completey different circumstances and contexts.
It wasn't really "about" anything, except fan service. And fan service for Sisko I can get behind, but this was just frustrating and ultimately empty and the fact that they made Sisko never return is seriously insulting to the character and actor alike.
And I also hated that Anslem was never published. Uh, why??
Oh, and the B story was absolutely unwatchable. Bleh.
This episode kinda dulled (if not outright killed) my desire to continue with the show. Which I did have after the pilot. Now.....hmmm....maybe I'll just skip it entirely.
SAM's "quest" is about finding meaning in the life planned for her. She is an undifferentiated, immature person, like most teenagers, who not only has no purpose to her life, she suffers under the weight of the expectations society places on her. She found someone who found himself in difficult crossroads as well, albeit on a far grander scale.
She found a role model.
She struggles with the complexities of Sisko's life: don't we, the fans, always celebrate how complex, how complete Sisko is?
The fact that SAM is young and inexperienced and Sisko was mature and heroic is not really relevant to how role models shape people's lives. How many young kids learned about perseverance and humility from Lou Gehrig, but never played professional baseball? SAM learned that she could not reduce Benjamin Sisko to a few facts. He was burdened with the expectations placed on him by Starfleet, Bajor, and the Prophets, all of which worked against his personal happiness. Yet that happiness was real, and that private life was the strength of that allowed him to be a hero, to play the part others wanted him to play.
These ideas were rife in DS9: The Homecoming, The Siege, The Collaborator, Defiant, Destiny, Way of the Warrior, Accession, Rapture, For the Uniform, Blaze of Glory, Sacrifice of Angels, Tears of the Prophets, Shadows and Symbols, and the final ten.
Yes, we will quibble about the details of "Series Acclimation Mil," but this episode got right a lot of things about how Deep Space Nine told stories.
