Star Trek: 10 Things You Didn’t Know About Wolf 359

"You exist here," insisted the wormhole aliens. The Battle of Wolf 359 was a focal point for Commander Sisko. He'd lost the Saratoga; he'd lost his wife. Memory, as much as trauma and grief, makes a mockery of linear time. Without Emissary, without THE Emissary, it is unlikely Wolf 359 would be quite so ingrained in our collective consciousness (pun intended).

"[We] couldn't afford to do it then, so we just made as huge a fight as we could make in our time frame," noted VFX co-ordinator Robert Legato on the DVD extra Deep Space Nine Scrapbook Year One. Just part of the Battle of Wolf 359 became one of the "biggest scenes [they'd] ever done," requiring about 13 to 14 days to film, compared to the average four.

What made it to screen was significantly less than what was put to camera, however. As Legato reported in The Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Companion:

The script said that they were right in the middle of this big fierce, ugly battle, and I had tons of debris in all the shots. Ships that were burning, on fire, flying past the camera.

Legato had even gone to great lengths to ensure that the names on the models matched those given by Commander Shelby in The Best of Both Worlds, Part II. The result was "much bigger than anything seen on a TNG show".

In the end, a change to the as-yet-un-filmed live action sequences meant that Legato "had to go back and take all the extraneous ships out". There was one "distinct consolation," however,as Emissary won the 1993 Emmy for Outstanding Special Visual Effects.