DS9: Why Benjamin Sisko Is Star Trek’s Most Underrated Captain

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine’s Benjamin Sisko was a revolutionary character that brought nuance and moral complication to the captain’s chair. Deep Space Nine began its run in 1993 in the shadow of the wildly popular Star Trek: The Next Generation. Paramount had high hopes they could expand the franchise’s popularity even further with DS9, but that didn’t happen, at least contemporarily. Deep Space Nine was always something of a little brother to The Next Generation and always played a secondary role to TNG and Star Trek: Voyager.

That’s a shame because Deep Space Nine is arguably the most consistently great Star Trek show ever produced. It took darker turns than most other Trek series, dealing with issues like religious persecution and the grim price of war. It also featured an absolutely loaded cast which was centered around Avery Brooks’ powerful performance as Captain Benjamin Sisko. Unlike Kirk and Picard before him, Sisko was a deeply flawed man, still consumed with rage over the death of his wife as the series begins, desperately trying to do right by his son Jake (Cirroc Lofton).

Deep Space Nine has been re-evaluated in the streaming age to much acclaim, and Sisko enjoyed one of the best character arcs in all of Star Trek, setting the stage for much of what would come in 21st century Star Trek productions.

Sisko Was A Groundbreaking Character

Avery Brooks was the first Black actor cast as the highest-ranking lead in a Star Trek project. Both The Original Series and The Next Generation featured BIPOC in lead roles — but these characters were always secondary to the main command roles on the bridge. It was somewhat unusual for big-budget science fiction franchises to feature Black leads in the early ’90s, but Brooks brought all of his charm and gravitas to the role. And while Sisko’s skin color never defined him — human racism was a thing of the past by the 24th century — the show never shied away from addressing race in other ways.

The show sometimes even handled race head on, like in the classic season 6 episode “Far Beyond The Stars,” which saw Sisko living out the life of Benny Russell, an African American sci-fi writer in 1950s America. It’s one of the single best episodes of Star Trek ever, and it’s a career-defining performance for Brooks. The final scene as Russell is heartbreaking: no longer able to carry the weight of society’s racism on his shoulders, he collapses in an emotional coda — a haunting end that refuses to provide a resolution, and thus challenges audiences to consider systemic racism in contemporary society.

Sisko Had The Biggest Arc of Any Star Trek Captain

There are more popular captains in Star Trek, but none of them had a character arc quite like Ben Sisko. At the beginning of Deep Space Nine, Sisko was an angry man who wasn’t sure he even still had a place in Starfleet. But Sisko would find his purpose again on the deep-space station, helping the Bajoran people after the end of the years-long, violent Cardassian occupation of their planet. Through his ability to communicate with the aliens that lived inside a stable wormhole near Bajor — which the Bajorans referred to as the Celestial Temple, home of the Prophets — Sisko became known as the Emissary, an important religious figure in Bajoran culture. Sisko was understandably uncomfortable with this status at first, but eventually came to think of Bajor as his home, and its people were extremely important to him.

Sisko also eventually moved past the rage that swallowed him whole after the death of his wife at the Battle of Wolf 359, the Borg attack that leveled dozens of Starfleet ships. He would find love again with freighter captain Cassidy Yates, and raised Jake with empathy and compassion. The angry young man would eventually mature into a sage source of wisdom.

That’s not to say Sisko was a perfect man. With the possible exception of Star Trek: Discovery’s Michael Burnham, no other Star Trek lead has indulged in morally gray actions as much as Sisko. Perhaps the most shocking of these offenses came in the episode “In The Pale Moonlight,” which took place at the height of the Dominion War, with the Federation taking heavy losses and running low on allies. With the assistance of the former Cardassian intelligence officer Garak, Sisko manipulated the Romulans into entering the war as a Federation ally. He lied, cheated, and even became an accomplice to murder in order to get the win for the Federation. Perhaps most shocking of all, Sisko swallowed hard and decided he could live with his actions. It’s a choice one could never imagine Picard or Kirk making, but Sisko was a very different man from those two paragons of virtue, a more complicated man with a different set of values.

Why Sisko Is Underrated

Sisko’s legacy isn’t quite what it should be for a simple reason — not that many people saw Star Trek: Deep Space Nine in the first-run syndication, and those who did were sometimes lost or confused by its storytelling style. Both Star Trek: The Original Series and Star Trek: The Next Generation produced self-contained episodes so that audiences wouldn’t have to have much previous knowledge of the series and its plots to drop in and enjoy a random episode. DS9 was not only darker and more morally complicated, but it also leaned heavily into serialization, which simply wasn’t done much in non-soap opera American television in that era. Worse still, there was no easy way to catch up on a show in that era, as streaming and DVD releases were still years away. If a viewer missed an important development in the Dominion War one week, they’d be lost the next week with no real way of getting up to speed beyond the nascent corners of internet message boards.

The show’s stature — as well as Sisko’s in the pantheon of great Star Trek captains — has grown considerably since the show has been available on streaming services in recent years. Fans were finally able to take the show in at their own pace and appreciate the ongoing storylines and genuine character development that blossomed over the show’s seven seasons. Star Trek: Deep SpaceNine is now rightly considered a crucially important part of the Star Trek mythos, and a huge part of that legacy is down to the rich, complex story of its main character.

About The Author

Dusty Stowe
(587 Articles Published)

Dusty Stowe has been writing for Screen Rant since 2016. A native of Yorktown, Virginia, he moved to Los Angeles in 2010 to pursue a career in the entertainment industry. He currently writes lists, features, and news articles covering movies, comics, and television. He is a devoted fan of Doctor Who, DC Comics, and whatever David Lynch deems us worthy of viewing. Star Trek: The Next Generation lit up his five year-old brain like a firework, ensuring he’d be a progressive nerd for the rest of his life. His current focuses are on covering the Arrowverse, Star Trek: Discovery, and the DC Cinematic Universe. He is also a trained audio engineer with a degree from the Los Angeles Film School, and manages multiple corporate social media accounts. He really, really wants a new Green Lantern movie. You can talk to him about football, politics, and his weird nerd takes on Twitter @dustystowe.

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