At the same time, “Series Acclimation Mil’s” is also an episode about moving Sam’s story forward.
“It was so important because Sam herself is an Emissary,” Newsome says. “She is a bridge between worlds, as Jake Sisko puts it, written by my incredible co-writer, Kirsten Beyer. She is the bridge between the Kasquians and the organics. And she didn’t necessarily choose that, but we’re seeing her rise to the challenge, and that to me so clearly mirrored what Mr. Brooks did as Sisko. He didn’t necessarily choose to be the Emissary to the Prophets, but he sure did an incredible job for them and for the Bajoran people and for his crew. It was a no-brainer that as soon as we started calling Sam an Emissary in the writer’s room, I was raising my hand like, “Ooh, oh, oh, oh, I know who we need to talk about.”
The hour’s Sisko-focused subplot doesn’t exist simply for nostalgia’s sake. It’s through her research into the captain’s life that Sam begins to understand her own agency and purpose — something that’s both true and valuable whether or not she ever truly figures out what happened to him.
“I say it in my last monologue to Sisko: I have to learn how to do things my own way,” Kerrice Brooks, who plays Sam, says. “You did things your own way. You found your own way to be an Emissary, so I guess I have to find my own way to do it too. And I think that’s what I took away from [her] trying to reach out to him.”
For Brooks, Sam’s search for Sisko is as internal a process as it is an external one. And, for her, the question of what happened to him isn’t as important as what knowing him, even in this roundabout way, has done for her own story.
“I think he responds in his own way, even though I don’t know how conscious she is of it, but in that search for him and in talking to him on her own, it’s kind of like you’re talking to the spirit. You download whatever you can receive,” Brooks says. “For Sam, it’s a matter of her opening up to receive. And the only way to open herself up is to find herself. And to find herself, she’s got to explore.”
