The Homecoming (⭑⭑⭑⭑)

“The Homecoming” is both a classic episode and, in my opinion, pretty much exactly what DS9 needed to kick off its second season. It’s the sort of episode that, without actually retconning or undoing anything, effectively wipes the slate clean, permitting us to mostly forget about all the pointless, wheel-spinning nothing stories on which the show squandered too much of its first season and get excited about where it might take us now that its writers seem to have remembered what it was supposed to be about all along. It also innovates by following up the first season’s non-cliffhanger finale with the first installment of what ends up being Trek’s first-ever more-than-two-part episode (and the first series of connected, to-be-continued type episode runs wherein each individual segment nevertheless has its own unique title). This review, of course, is only about the actual season premier, but it bears mentioning here that DS9’s season one finale, followed by the three-part saga that opens its second season, see the show focusing in a more sustained and in-depth way on its core narrative and signature themes than at perhaps any other point in its entire run. This, then, is DS9 as I always wanted it to be!

The episode’s opening hook—Kira telling Sisko that she wants to borrow a runabout, but not wanting to tell him why—is just an utterly classic and unforgettable piece of the show’s early history. The scene is perfect, nailing the working relationship between the two characters as it exists at this point in the series in a way that glides right past the inconsistencies and missed opportunities from earlier episodes that got in the way of similar developments toward the end of season one. Sisko’s reaction to the request is not specifically suspicious or distrustful, but he does, naturally, insist on knowing what Kira intends to use the runabout for before he will consider her request. As for Kira, she obviously would like for Sisko to just agree to her request with no questions asked, but is realistic enough to know that this is not likely to happen, so has clearly come prepared to reveal what she’s up to when push comes to shove. Also, I appreciate the fact that Sisko already knows who Li Nalas is without needing to be told; given how famous and revered the episode establishes him to be, there’s no way that Sisko hasn’t heard all about him after being stationed here for a full year, and I like that the episode gets this right. Plus, the tone of the scene is just so much fun: Kira all nervous energy and restrained exuberance, Sisko initially cheery and relaxed, but pivoting to wary and contemplative as he takes in what Kira has to say…and then, when he starts to leave in response to a call from O’Brien, the slightly comical note of Kira’s teenager-asking-to-borrow-the-car urgency as she blurts out “Do I get the runabout?”, and Sisko’s classic parental punt of “I’ll have to think it over.”

Beyond the “opening hook” itself, too, something that really struck me on this watch is how skillfully the episode sets up, and gets us into, its story. Especially given that this is the season premier, you don’t want to just jump straight into the action—but neither, of course, do you want to piss away half the episode on setup. “The Homecoming” manages a perfect balance. The opening scene between Odo and Quark welcomes us back to the station following the season hiatus,¹ and then Quark’s meeting with the freighter captain sets off the sequence of events that leads to Kira’s request for a runabout—but along the way, the episode is also quietly reintroducing us to the show’s characters and their various relationships (including the Sisko/Jake relationship, via their conversation about Jake’s big date that Kira interrupts). The Kira/Sisko runabout request scene, in addition to what I’ve already said about it, also deftly works in some exposition about Bajor’s deteriorating political situation, which both provides Sisko with a reason to go along with Kira’s plan and does setup work for the next two episodes in this three-part arc—and the interruption that pulls Sisko away from his chat with Kira before he has come to any decision on the matter pushes that even further, introducing “The Circle” and its escalating agitation. Then there’s a nice Sisko/Dax scene in which the commander ruminates about “our mission here” and we get to hear where his mindset is at with respect to Kira’s request. We didn’t, by any means, need scene after scene of Sisko trying to decide whether to agree to it or not—but we did need to see him wrestle with it just a little, and the scene with Dax gives us exactly that.² When I got to the point at which Kira and O’Brien actually set off in the runabout on this watch, it felt to me like the episode had taken exactly the right amount of time to get us there, and done exactly the right amount of background exposition, tone-setting, character motivation, and establishing of stakes, to make me feel fully engaged with the story. (Similarly but later in the episode, bringing the political turmoil down on Bajor close to home for Sisko and the audience by having it impact Jake is a really nice touch; without actually ever going to Bajor, it makes the stakes of the story feel real in an effective way.)

The episode’s central twist, wherein the story of Li’s heroism turns out to be less than entirely accurate, serves the story well enough. One’s fear would be that the episode would end up revealing him to be nefarious in some way, or explicitly a fraud, but thankfully it steers clear of anything like that; he’s just a regular guy (though still genuinely a resistance fighter!) who, through happenstance and misunderstanding, got turned into the hero that Bajor needed to believe it had. It’s perhaps a bit disappointing that we don’t learn a little more of his story; did his reputation truly rest entirely on this one incident? Did he not, subsequent to it, actually serve as any kind of leader in the resistance? Still, what it speaks to is the idea that Bajor didn’t rid itself of its Cardassian occupiers due to the larger-than-life heroics of some great leader; it was a broader and more decentralized struggle in which lots of ordinary people each played a part, and their collective strength, not some savior, was what made victory possible. What Sisko says of Bajor’s current situation, in other words, also applied during the occupation: it didn’t need a single amazing leader to follow, but rather a symbol to believe in and rally around—someone in whom they can see “the best in themselves.” This rings true, and is an empowering idea. Now, Sisko’s line did also remind me of TNG’s “Rightful Heir,” wherein some Klingon clerics clone Kahless (there’s a nice alliterative phrase!) and try to pass the clone off as a mystical/foretold second coming, in a bid to restore glory to the empire (or whatever) by similarly giving the people a symbol to believe in. In my review of that episode, I expressed my approval of how Worf, after learning the truth, insists on making it public, so that Klingons generally can choose to rally around him if they want—but in full knowledge of what he is, in contrast to the clerics’ scheme of deception. So, should I now be condemning Sisko for not acting similarly here? And do I think that this episode falls into the trap that I said “Rightful Heir” avoided, of “conveying [the] deeply problematic message . . . that it’s okay to mislead the public with inspiring lies in order to achieve a unity of purpose…and shore up a governing regime”? Well…true to its reputation, DS9 presents us with moral ambiguity and shades of grey. On one hand, the legend of Li Nalas is not a lie that someone manufactured deliberately, unlike the faked second coming of Kahless; it’s a misunderstanding that spread far and wide before the man at its center could manage to correct it, try though he seemingly did. On the other hand, once Sisko learns the truth, he could make any number of different choices about what to do with it, but the one that he immediately seizes on it to use the popular image of Li Nalas to promote unity among the Bajoran people, not to correct the historical record about Li’s encounter with Gul Zarale. As far as I can tell, in fact, he doesn’t even let Kira in on the truth! Sisko still differs from the Klingon clerics in that his actions don’t reek of hypocrisy like theirs do, and also in that his role in the whole affair is that of an interested outsider who wants what’s best for Bajor (as he sees it, of course), rather than that of someone with a direct stake who hopes to gain personally by associating himself with a revered figure. (Relatedly, the goal of helping a struggling, divided people recover their strength and stability in the aftermath of a brutal foreign occupation feels very different from the Klingons’ obsession with returning their warlike empire to its traditional values, or whatever the hell it was that they were on about.) Still, Sisko’s idea that Bajor still “needs” what Nalas symbolizes to its people, even if it’s essentially based on a fiction, doesn’t exactly jibe with what someone once famously called “the first duty of every Starfleet officer,” and I’m not arguing for letting him entirely off the hook on this point. It’s a choice that tells us things about who Sisko is, for good or ill—and future episodes, I think, will continue to run with this characterization. At the same time, I think the show is implicitly suggesting that this aspect of Sisko is part of what makes him the right man for the job, in a way that gets at its overarching themes about how a troubled society (like our own) could progress toward becoming something more like Trek’s 24th-century ideal, and about the compromises that might need to be made along the way. These are tricky issues, and the episode succeeds at engaging with them meaningfully and providing food for thought—and that is what, in my view, DS9 was dreamed up to do.

Of course, in the episode’s final moments, everything that Kira and Sisko have managed to set in motion suddenly seems to veer off course. The reluctant hero, after a brief trip planetside during which he was welcomed home by cheering crowds, is given a meaningless title by the provisional government and then promptly shipped back to the station, where Kira finds herself abruptly replaced and put out of a job as “thanks” for her daring rescue. What’s going on, here!? Springing this turn of events on both the characters and the audience right before going to “To be continued…” provides a delicious “wrong note” to whet our appetite for the following episode!

1. Quark’s “every once in a while, declare peace” bit is something that I’ve always remembered fondly, but I absolutely did not remember that it occurs in this, of all episodes! I would have thought that it came much later in the series. ↩︎
2. Several of these scenes also just sparkle with a sense of energy, life, and fun, in a way that feels somewhat different from a lot of what we got in the show’s first season. Sisko’s conversation with Jake is one example; another is him tossing around his baseball at the beginning of the scene with Dax. I don’t know; I guess it just strikes me as the writers remembering, more fully than they often did last season, that the pilot set up characters with passion and quirks, and letting those characters take on life in ways that transcend immediate plot. “The Homecoming,” in short, feels in some respects like a moment of arrival (or, sure, homecoming) for the show that DS9 was becoming as it grew past its first-season birth pangs. ↩︎