Something I love about DS9βs framing of Jake Sisko is how heβs consistently positioned as someone worthy of protection, whose survival and flourishing and emotional well-being are of tantamount importance, and whose innocence and vulnerability are precious.
Itβs present from all directions in The Visitor. Everybody protectively closes ranks around Jake upon Benβs disappearance, with those little moments of Dax and Kira and Bashir giving him physical affection and reassurance and Quark going out of his way to be nice to him. Jakeβs older selfβs protective impulses towards his younger self, as well as his desire to save his father, are the basis for the timeline reset. And then after the spacetime continuum gets wrenched back in line purely to save Jake from the emotional trauma of losing his father, the episode ends with Ben, whoβs borne witness to everything and is the only one who remembers it all, continuing that work of shielding Jake from that knowledge.
And then Nor the Battle to the Strong carries on the thread of protectiveness towards Jake, in that case as part of the episodeβs deconstruction of military heroism. As heβs marinating in shame over bailing on the mission to retrieve the generator, Bashir apologizes to him and says he was wrong to put Jake in harmβs way in the first place. And then at the end, he wakes up after sealing the cave entranceway and both Bashir and his father are tenderly looking after him, with similar imagery to The Visitor in terms of him being symbolically cradled by the other cast membersβ concern for him. He never needs to toughen up or grow out of that need to be rescued - in fact, his fear and panic and feelings of being out of his depth prove to be immensely valuable, as his last conversation with his father emphasizes, because heβs able to bear witness to the experience of the soldiers through his writing.
That comes through in a really interesting way in Valiant as well, with Jakeβs emphatic concern for his own survival in the midst of all the culty militaristic weirdness of the Valiant crew:
Nog: You donβt understand, because youβve never put on one of these uniforms. You donβt know anything about sacrifice, or honor, or duty, or any other things that make up a soldierβs life. Iβm part of something larger than myself. All you care about is you.
Jake: Thatβs right. All I care about is Jake Sisko and whether or not heβs going to be killed by a bunch of delusional fanatics looking for martyrdom.
And I love that exchange not only because itβs a rare articulation of how I would actually feel in a situation like that in a franchise full of characters who are all prepared to sacrifice themselves in the line of duty, but also because in the context of the episode, Jakeβs position is actually the heroic one! Itβs his sense of self-preservation, and the fact that he hasnβt romanticized the notion of heroic sacrifice, that enables him to see through the dogmatic ideology of the Valiant cadets and recognize how dangerously out of their depth they are. And itβs just a nice articulation of his own worth.
(And of course the Defiant rescues them at the end, because Jakeβs grown up now, but he hasnβt outgrown needing his father to save him. And thatβs never a shameful thing, but a really beautiful thing, and necessary to the fabric of the show.)
