Synopsis: After coming in contact with an energy discharge from the warp core of the Defiant, Captain Sisko is trapped in subspace.
This episode can be seen as a physical representation of some of David Bohm’s theories from modern physics – explicate order, implicate order, and holomovement, and how they relate to some of Carl (C. G.) Jung’s later writings on synchronicity and the collective unconscious. The explicate order is the material world as it appears to us at any moment, the implicate order is the background reality that cannot be perceived, and together they form the holomovement.
“The Visitor” is told from the point of view of a future elderly Jake Sisko who receives a visit from a young woman, Melanie. She arrives to tell him that he is her favorite author and that she wants to be a writer, and she asks him why he stopped writing before he was even forty. He decides to tell her why and explains that his father, Captain Benjamin Sisko, died when he was eighteen, when they were on the Defiant in the Gamma Quadrant to witness the subspace inversion of a wormhole that occurs once every fifty years. There was an accident in engineering and his father was struck by an energy discharge from the vessel’s warp core and disappeared. Then, years later, Captain Sisko appeared to his son on Deep Space Nine, was brought to the Infirmary, and Dr. Julian Bashir ascertained that Sisko’s temporal signature was out of phase and that he would be pulled back into subspace. Which does happen. Decades went by, Jake Sisko returned to Earth, became an author, got married, and one night Captain Sisko appears at his son’s house. Jake Sisko then decides to give up writing to try to figure out a way to bring his father back to his reality, and on the next subspace inversion of the wormhole he brings the Defiant and the now elderly crew back to where Captain Sisko first disappeared. Again, Captain Sisko is caught in subspace and disappears. After this Jake Sisko eventually realizes that it is his attachment to his father that is keeping Captain Sisko trapped in subspace. Jake Sisko is also able to predict when his father will appear next, and as he is now an old man, decides that the next time he is in his father’s presence he will die, and that this will release his father from him and they will both get a second chance to begin again from the time of the accident.
When Captain Sisko appears to his son is an example of the unfolding of the explicate order, that can be perceived, the time that he is trapped in subspace, still there but unable to be accessed is an example of the enfolding of the implicate order. Combined the space we see and subspace that we cannot, make up the two halves of the total flow which is the holomovement. This can be compared to Jung’s concept of the conscious ego as being that part of the psyche that it is aware of, and the vast collective unconscious, in which we are all part of, but that the conscious ego cannot perceive, as the other part of the whole psyche.
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