But at the end of the day, any efforts to bring Sisko back would have been… disappointing at best. Insulting to the character of Benjamin Sisko and the legacy of DS9 at worst. The mystery is the more important part here. Bringing him back for some epic battle or just to be there for Kass, Jake and the baby just would have seemed somewhat hollow. Like Jake said, Ben was always there. It follows through with one of the key points of DS9 about faith.
I think it's a bigger insult to the character that they did not honor the wish of the actor who brought him to life. Much bigger insult. It would be honoring the character and the actor to have said he returned - even if they kept it ambiguous on the how or what he did upon returning.
The mystery of his fate isn't important at all considering what kicked this off. SAM is looking to understand what it means to be an emissary to another group and the burden that comes with that role. She still could have explored Sisko's life and tried to understand what he went through as an Emissary to the Prophets. Even the ending of understanding that being an emissary is a life of self-sacrifice could have been pulled from what he went through in his life and what he did at the Fire Caves. Him not returning wasn't really needed to advance her plot.
This also goes
beyond the plot. The issue is that they went out of their way to ensure Sisko will return to his family per Avery's insistence. This "reveal" just spat all over that. Avery Brooks did not want Sisko to be with his family "in spirit" but to actually return and be there for them. If DS9 ended with the original dialogue of Sisko saying he is ascending to be with the Prophets and would never return - I would have been fine with the reveal in this episode, if not a tinge disappointed.
The episode makes clear anyway that the Sisko has become so central to the Bajorans that proving he came back to live a quiet life on Bajor would be like proving Jesus didn't exist. He is a religious metaphor, and religion doesn't offer concrete answers.
Sisko isn't just a religious metaphor. He's an actual concrete being in this universe forced into a religious role. The Bajorans revered Sisko, not
because he died (they revered him long before that), but because of his connection to the Prophets. He is their conduit to speak to them and he in turn conveying their words to them. Him returning would not have changed that. Even if I granted this is purely metaphorical and Sisko was a Christ-like metaphor from the Bajoran's POV, him dying and returning would reinforce that - not diminish it.
Also, as I said above, this isn't about the
internal plot of Trek. It's about the
external reasoning behind Sisko returning for a particular reason. His return was not meant to be some "cool - we get him for some more battles!" but a very personal story about a man and his family - something CENTRAL to his character from the pilot to the finale.
I expected Illa to turn out to be a Sisko descendant. The Dax reveal was a welcome surprise.
I thought they were going to reveal that she is his descendent too and that she may have been the descendent of his second child (as a way to include her in the plot).
I understand why Avery Brooks asked for that change in the finale, but even without that, I never saw him sacrificing himself to stop Dukat and the Pah-Wraiths as becoming an absentee father. He did that to end a threat to everyone, which includes his unborn child. That's not an act of being an absentee father. That's an act of love.
It's no different than a father serving in the military getting killed in the line of duty. Or a father who is a firefighter that walks into a burning or collapsing building to save other lives. Or a father who is a police officer and is killed while protecting someone from a criminal.
I agree that he wouldn't be an absentee father in the way one typically thinks of one, but Brooks wanted Sisko to be a very healthy depiction of an African-American family on television in the 90s. So any narratives that skirts into negative depictions or tropes, even if it could be explained away via sci-fi plots, was something he did not want for the character.
But I get that they send SAM to maybe do a deeper investigation into organics but they seem super impatient. They send SAM to Starfleet Academy and within weeks are demanding an answer and threatening to recall her and call her a failure. It would take more time thant that to determine if organics can be trusted. Additionally, surely the Makers know that organics are very diverse. Maybe some organics can be trusted and some can't. It is not all or nothing. So to demand SAM go to SFA and within weeks determine if all organics can be trusted does not make sense to me.
I agree. I feel like the "threat" was very artificially inflated by having her makers be so irrationally impatient. The writing on that was a bit wonky just so we'd feel a time crunch threat on the plot. I don't understand why every story nowadays has to be so high-stakes and cannot simply be a personal journey for growth and understanding. If any show would allow for that type of story telling - it would be Star Trek.
They could have had SAM want to better understand her role there as an emissary to her people and the plot could have continued unchanged. She could still feel frustration as she struggled to understand Sisko's journey and if she is following a similar trajectory, she could still learn the lesson of self-sacrifice and the burden the role carries, she could still retrace his footsteps on Earth, she could still need to learn from Dax and Jake, etc. The plot could have remained largely the same without this looming threat she'd be forced to return home as a failure.
