This past weekend brought with it the sad news of the passing of Tony Todd, a beloved actor with a career that spanned a litany of iconic roles across film and TV. While many will look to everything from his history as one of horror’s greatest foes in Candyman all the way up to his delightful performance last year as Spider-Man 2‘s Venom, there will always be a special place in our hearts for Todd’s connection to Star Trek—and in particular the part he played in crafting one of Deep Space Nine‘s greatest episodes.
Todd had several Trek appearances in his storied career—a slight but fun role as the Alpha Hirogen in Voyager‘s “Prey,” examining the ethics of the series’ newly introduced Discount Predator species, or perhaps most famously his guest role in TNG and eventually DS9 as Kurn, Worf’s tragic brother. But by far and away his best turn is anchored in one of the all time greats of the latter, and perhaps one of the finest hours of Star Trek there’s ever been, “The Visitor.”
The third episode of Deep Space Nine‘s fourth season (as the series was beginning to pivot its examination of Starfleet and its saints in paradise with the oncoming storm that would be the Dominion War arc), “The Visitor” follows a heartbreaking what-if timeline centered around Todd as an older Jake Sisko. Acting as a framing device where the elderly Jake is visited by a young woman with dreams of being a writer like he was—and dismayed that Jake gave up his writing career after just a handful of published stories—”The Visitor” follows Jake as he attempts to navigate life without his father after an accident aboard the Defiant on a routine science mission seemingly kills Captain Sisko.
Much of the episode is a push and pull between the tragedy of Jake being completely unrooted by the loss of his father, and the mystery around the eventual revelation that the older Sisko wasn’t killed in the accident, but stuck out of time in subspace, becoming the titular visitor as he occasionally is pulled back into Jake’s life as he grows old and becomes obsessed with finding a way to save him.
It’s one of the best acted pieces of Star Trek history—Avery Brooks is on fire as Ben Sisko, with an emotionality on display that would only eventually be rivaled by his turn in “Far Beyond the Stars,” and Cirroc Lofton, Jake’s regular actor, gives a series-best performance navigating the initial grief of losing Sisko in its flashbacks. But even shoulder-to-shoulder with show-defining displays, it’s Todd’s older Jake that really cements the emotional arc of “The Visitor.” We meet Todd’s version of Jake in two forms in the episode: initially and primarily as an old man, in the twilight of his life, and briefly as a younger adult bookending a last-ditch attempt to pull Captain Sisko out of subspace, and what’s fascinating about Todd’s performance as these different forms of Jake is how radically he is able to make himself feel in lockstep with Lofton’s embodiment of the character—until he very much doesn’t.
When we are introduced to the older Jake, initially there’s a kind of discomfort that Todd quietly revels in. He doesn’t feel like the same character, not just because of age, but because there is a spark that is all but gone from the man that Todd conveys brilliantly. When he begins recounting the story of how he lost his father to his own visitor, Melanie, you begin to see a twinkle in Todd’s eyes at times, the storyteller within Jake getting to weave a narrative worthy of primetime TV—but it also quickly vanishes, as the older Jake and the episode alike begin to get wrapped up in flashing back and establishing the truth behind Captain Sisko’s “death.” Todd’s Jake, when we meet him, has lost so much of himself in his dogged pursuit of his father’s memory that the tragedy becomes just how little of him we can see in Todd, and the tragedy behind that, and it’s all relayed in the mannerisms we see Todd take on for his version of Jake.
It’s only when the flashbacks begin to catch up with an older Jake that everything begins to click into place. Eventually Sisko returns briefly from subspace to find his son living his life beyond the sorrow of loss. He’s married a young Bajoran woman, Korena, his latest (and ultimately final) published work has been awarded a prestigious prize. But it’s Jake himself that is the most joyful of things to his father, and to us as the audience: Todd switches a flip as he plays the adult Jake in these scenes, picking up on Lofton’s tics and intonation a little more clearly for the audience, but also adopting a few mannerisms of Brooks to meld father and child together. The spark that was buried deep in his performance as Old Jake is brought to the fore, a lightness and playfulness that hits the audience like an emotional truck—because as soon as it’s there, it’s gone again.
Just as quickly as we see this version of Jake that has managed to move on from his father’s tragedy, the cycle of grief brings him back to the obsession—and Todd just as deftly portrays that decline as he does any other moment of Jake’s life in the episode. Abandoning his career and eventually even his wife to pursue the knowhow to bring his father out of subspace for good, the final act of “The Visitor” climaxes as Jake, having rounded up most of the old DS9 crew, attempts to recreate the accident that took his father from him all those years ago.
Again, this Jake is Todd in another form, the bridge between the older man we were first introduced to and then that brief, bright moment of the adult Jake. He fails, bringing himself briefly into subspace with Captain Sisko, but this time Jake wells up not for seeing his father again, but for obsessing in that failure, as the “older” Sisko (who reflects that is son is now older than he ever was) has whiled away a wonderful life chasing his father’s footsteps. The bitterness, the anger, the frustration, Todd navigates it all while crafting a distinctly unique version of Jake for the third time in the episode, hammering home the hurt of Jake’s generational trauma in the process.
And again, it’s when “The Visitor” brings it back to the older Jake we first met in its final moments that Todd ties all these forms of Jake together. His mercuriality glimmers in the final twisting scene he has with Brooks, explaining the last gambit he’s made to bring his father and the “true” timeline of DS9 back, ending his own life while Sisko is in realspace to breath the “elastic” tether that has kept father and son connected across the years. Todd leans on it all: that bitter regret, that joy in weaving together a story, that undying love between child and parent: the audience doesn’t just mourn this form of death for the character, even if it’s one undone, but the very idea that Jake had to cost himself so much, across decades of hurt, to undo that life and restore DS9 to normalcy. That’s an incredible thing to have to convey as a guest star, in just a single episode, taking on a legacy character role. But Todd’s masterful performance manages to do it, and is such a huge part of what makes “The Visitor” one of Star Trek‘s greatest episodes.
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