People who haven’t watched Deep Space 9, tell me what you think is happening here

Not Linear!

Apparently many people on my timeline have watched DS9. Good for y'all

I think what's happening is that it isn't linear

It sure isn't, buddy

I don't remember this episode but I'm assuming some terrible time travel related feelings are happening and Sisko is showing off the fact that he's the first Star Trek captain who gets to be genuinely emotionally vulnerable.

I mean...DS9 was well after this

Captain Picard's emotional collapse.

I rewatch ds9 so much I knew I couldn't weigh in, since I immediately started quoting later parts of the scene, lol. Its the most rewatchable for me since its so character driven instead of incident driven storytelling. (Not that the others dont HAVE character driven storytelling, just the ratio tends to skew in the other direction)

Mixed up my timelines on what happened when out of universe, I guess

The pilot of DS9 (which is what the clip on top of the plurk is from) first aired immediately after TNG’s Chain of Command (aka the famous THERE ARE FOUR LIGHTS story), if that helps you.

Yep, never saw the pilot, that's my problem

Ah, you should, it's very good unlike every other Star Trek pilot episode