Emissary

If the wormhole aliens do not experience linear time and so know the past and future, why don't they understand about Humans and linear time? Why do they need to ask Sisko any questions? They should already know the answers!

During his Orb experience, Sisko refers to his father in the past tense, saying he "was a gourmet chef." Later we will see that Pappa Sisko is neither dead nor retired.

Berman and Piller initially thought about calling the station a Starbase, with a standard Starbase number. It was decided to go with a 'Deep Space' station instead.

Piller originally wanted to have the show open with the DS9 crew all in place. However, after watching the TNG episode 'Encounter at Farpoint', he liked the way several main characters were introduced during the show, and went with that idea instead.

The Major Kira character was originally going to be Ensign Ro, but Michelle Forbes wasn't interested in doing the role.

At time of writing, none of the writers or producers had any long term ideas for the show - the Cardassian/Dominion conflict, Sisko's role as Emissary, all were for the future.

One aspect of the script that Terry Farrel hated was the technobabble. She tried relating it to a car in her head, but it didn't really help. She would become very frustrated with the dialogue, yelling that she "didn't get it!"

The first line of the pilot were spoken by Patrick Stewart, as Locutus. He also spoke the first lines of the TNG pilot, of course.

This episode had a huge budget, one of the most expensive pilots ever filmed at the time. Herman Zimmerman would later say that the set construction budget for this episode was larger than it was in Star Trek VI.

Quark's prosthetic nose wasn't ready in time for the filming of this episode, so Armin Shimerman had to wear the nose made for Rom, Max Grodénchik.

Because of the difficulties in casting and the last-minute script revisions, as well as frequent revision of the production schedule, the DS9 production staffers began to refer to the show as "Deep Shit Nine."

In the middle of a difficult evening's shooting, Patrick Stewart, Jonathan Frakes and Brent Spiner burst onto the set and began to sing, dance and perform vaudeville routines. When they finished they departed as quickly as they had arrived.

Terry Farrell didn't begin to shoot her scenes until eleven days into principal photography. Most of the other cast had gotten to know one another by then; she was an isolated newcomer who had little to no time to practice her lines. She struggled to get her dialogue right, sometimes requiring fifteen takes for a bit of technobabble. At one point, she even began to hope she would be fired. After a few weeks she settled into the show, and began to thoroughly enjoy it.

Two hundred and fifty special effects shots were created for this episode, including eighty-one visual effects.

The effects included a six second shot of the wormhole opening - this shot took 14 weeks to create.

Sisko was thought to come across as too angry and intimidating in this episode, so reshoots were done to soften him.

Twenty four minutes of footage were cut from the episode, many of them scenes on the USS Saratoga at Wolf 359.

Another cut scene was between Sisko and Kai Opaka, in which he tells her that he believed the Prophets to be wormhole aliens. She responds that she doesn't want to hear it, but then adds "That is why a disbeliever was destined to seek them - one should never look into the eyes of his own gods." The line would later be used by Vedek Winn.

Ronald D. Moore said that he'd wished that DS9 had an intro monologue as TOS and TNG did.

When aired, 'Emissary' scored an 18.8 percentage of the syndicated television market, making it one of the most-watched television episodes in syndicated television history.

Some British fans were so eager to see "Emissary" that they had American friends record the show and post tapes to them.

Ira Steven Behr remarked that the pilot had such a strong arc for Sisko that "after the pilot was over, we didn't know what else to do with him!"

This episode marks the only appearance of the Borg on Deep Space Nine.