Trauma and Atemporality in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and Vergil’s Aeneid

May 16, 2025

About

This paper was presented at the Classical Association of Canada meeting in at the University of Winnipeg in Winnipeg, MB, May 14–16, 2025.

Abstract

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (DS9) is both the first Star Trek series to take place at a fixed location and a turning point in the franchise’s development towards serialized rather than episodic plots; it is thus more oriented toward the past and its repercussions than earlier series. From its opening scenes, the show concerns itself with the lingering effects of previous injury—or, put another way, with trauma.

DS9 explores traumatic memories using the conventions of both science fiction and modern trauma narratives. Despite predating both traditions by nearly two millennia, Vergil’s Aeneid bears a striking resemblance to DS9 in its treatment of trauma. Both works manipulate timelines to compel their characters to confront trauma: DS9’s Benjamin Sisko and the Aeneid’s Aeneas both engage with past injury via retrospective narrativization and a variety of other atemporal experiences, such as Sisko’s encounter with the Prophets in “Emissary” and Aeneas’ encounter with Rome’s future dead in Aeneid 6.

Read together, each text clarifies the other. DS9 brings to light the Aeneid’s science-fiction-esque approach to temporality; the Aeneid helps to contextualize DS9’s use of time travel as another entry in a long tradition of texts that negotiate human suffering by bending the expectation of linear time.