The first episode of Deep Space Nine's first season, "Emissary," aired on January 3, 1993 and was a show with a lot to prove. After The Next Generation rejuvenated the franchise, Star Trek could push boundaries in terms of itself as a saga and for sci-fi television as a whole. It was eager to prove that Star Trek could be more complex, more challenging, more willing to poke at the holes in its idealized future than it had ever considered before.
During the events of The Best of Both Worlds, an assimilated Captain Picard leads the Borg offensive at Wolf 358, one of the deadliest. The heroes of the franchise lost their lives immediately. No matter how prepared the crew is or how calm they are, the Borg is almost immediately able to take over. Sisko, barely standing after the ship's bridge is blasted apart, went through darkened, burning hallways full of bleeding, terrified civilians, too traumatised to do anything but wail, a stark contrast to the dangers the enterprise faced. Sisko was forced to confront the horror of his wife's dead body, buried in the rubble of their former home, as he watched the Saratoga explode from his quarters.
Everything else about "Emissary" is defined by this opening scene. We are presented with an unromanticized view of the universe in a way that the original Trek could only dream of. The Bajorans and other species that called DS9 home during the Cardassian occupation, know-it-all gadabouts who are here for their interests, do not like Sisko and his Federation crew. From his attempts to flirt with Dax to the way Major Kira dresses him down, Dr. Bashir was skewered throughout the episode.
Sisko is presented as a different kind of Trek commander, from the underhanded way he kept his bar open, to his willingness to disprove Kira's view of him as someone who won't. This potent mix of a man who is capable of doing so much but is still too haunted by the trauma of his previous assignment to be willing to care is what Sisko excelled at here.
Sisko's reluctance to do his duty quietly comes bubbling over when he is put face to face with both the idealized hero of the Star Trek franchise and who he sees as the architect of his grief, Patrick Stewart's Jean-Luc Picard. Sisko, still so lost from the death of his wife three years after Wolf , cannot help but needle Picard for his part in the battle, and similarly Picard's amiable, polite persona falls away immediately. The disdain the two have for each other, our new hero and our old one, is an example of everything Deep Space Nine would go on to champion thematically. These are people from an organization that we have been given a fantasized view of perfect, and then have to deal with it.
The story that emerges in the lower half of "Emissary" is relatively perfunctory, but it is not the main focus of the film. As Sisko is forced to navigate first contact with the omnipotent wormhole aliens, and undergoes a pseudo religious experience that ties him to the Bajoran spiritual belief system for the rest of the show, this imperfect man is put to the task so often asked of Star Trek's heroes, to be His attempts to explain the mortal experience to these godlike beings is driven by his inability to let go of his past and his grief over the death of his girlfriend.
It's important that Sisko's personality doesn't change when he emerges from the wormhole and contacts these beings. He isn't "solved" by the end of the show, even as he tries to move on from his past. He is still the same man who had a vendetta against Picard and he is still the same officer who held that vendetta. He will deal with it throughout Deep Space Nine's run. Thirty years on, with the series now as rightfully re-evaluated and revered as one of Star Trek's most dramatically fascinating entries, "Emissary" remains as strong an opening shot as any Trek show has delivered.
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