Like “Star Wars”, “Doctor Who”, the “Marvel Cinematic Universe”, and pretty much any long-running franchise in pop culture, the modern iteration of “Star Trek” is never afraid to point its tractor beam at nostalgia.
Jean-Luc Picard made it so once again across three seasons of “Star Trek: Picard“, while Kathryn Janeway took a bunch of kids on a tour of the final frontier in “Star Trek: Prodigy“. But there’s been one major absentee from that 24th century era of Starfleet storytelling, as the ultimate fate of long-serving “Deep Space Nine” commanding officer Benjamin Sisko has spent a few decades filed away in a Federation databank marked “unknown”.
The latest episode of “Starfleet Academy”, “Series Acclimation Mil”, attempts to fill that (worm?)hole, however, and while it doesn’t provide many answers, it’s a welcome — if unexpected — sequel to one of the most fondly remembered “Star Trek” TV shows of all time.
The current generation of “Trek” TV shows hasn’t entirely shied away from references to “DS9”. The shapeshifting Founders of the Dominion were the antagonists in “Picard”‘s majestic third season, before the warmongering Breen were unmasked in “Discovery”‘s final run. “Lower Decks”, meanwhile, unveiled a statue of Chief Miles O’Brien, declaring the DS9 engineer as “perhaps the most important person in Starfleet history”. But “Deep Space Nine”‘s finale, “What You Leave Behind”, gave its crew such satisfactory send-offs that there’s been little sense of unfinished business during the quarter-century that’s passed since its TV debut.
Even so, Captain Sisko’s character arc was left in a tantalisingly ambiguous state. He spent the entirety of his posting to DS9 coming to terms with fulfilling his destiny as the Emissary prophesized by Bajoran scripture. With the Dominion War finally won at the end of the show, he had one final face-off against the evil Pah-wraiths, before heading off to live in the wormhole with the so-called Prophets, non-corporeal lifeforms with no concept of linear time.
He subsequently paid his wife, Kasidy Yates-Sisko, a visit from the Celestial Temple to tell her that he was going away to learn from the Prophets, as “They still have a great deal for me to do”. He also promised to return: “Maybe [in] a year. Maybe yesterday. But I will be back.”
Those words remain unfulfilled, however, because some 800 years later in “Starfleet Academy”, he’s still missing in action, and the subject of one of the biggest mysteries in Federation history. Did he die with the Pah-wraiths in the Fire Caves of Bajor? Or did he genuinely take up residence in the Celestial Temple with the Prophets?
The holographic SAM (Series Acclimation Mil) — attending Starfleet Academy as a fact-finding representative for her “photonic” species — sees a kindred spirit in the Federation’s most famous emissary, but finds little concrete intel on the fate of “the Sisko”.
Sure, he’s something of a celebrity in Starfleet circles (his name is on the roll of honor at the Academy), and he even has a museum dedicated to his life. But when it comes to stone-cold facts… well, let’s just say the Prophets (ambiguous entities at the best of times) have spent the last eight centuries playing their cards extremely close to their chests.
And that’s exactly how it should be. Because, although “Deep Space Nine” tried to keep its more religious aspects grounded in sci-fi, the show’s stories of gods, prophecies, and chosen ones always took detours to the more fantastical corners of the “Star Trek” universe. As with prankster deity Q or the psychic abilities of the Vulcans, some storylines work best when you resist the temptation to over-analyze. Besides, how could Sisko have possibly explained to mere mortals like us what he’d got up to with the Prophets, beings who’ve turned being mysterious into an art form.
On a practical level, Sisko star Avery Brooks has long since retired from acting, making his return to the Alpha Quadrant somewhat unlikely. (The Sisko voiceover we hear at the end of the episode is, co-showrunner Noga Landau has confirmed, neither new dialogue nor lines lifted from “Deep Space Nine”. “With Avery’s very generous permission, we were able to use a piece of spoken-word poetry that he recorded himself.” This explains the “Thank you, Avery” credit at the end of the episode.)
But in Brooks’ absence, writers Kirsten Beyer and Tawny Newsome (the voice of Beckett Mariner in “Lower Decks”) continue Sisko’s story in the most elegant and appropriate way — indeed, it turns out that the notion of “What You Leave Behind” is more than just the title of that “DS9” finale.
Nobody would have felt Sisko’s departure more keenly than his son, Jake, so having Cirroc Lofton return to the role 26 years after he last looked out at the Bajoran wormhole feels entirely right. Whether Jake’s a hologram explaining how he came to terms with his father’s disappearance, or a voice from “Anslem” (the unpublished book he wrote to help him deal with losing his dad), it’s hard to imagine a more perfect vehicle for exploring the legacy of an iconic character.
And then comes the episode’s big reveal, when Academy faculty member Illa (played by the multi-tasking Newsome) reveals her Trill markings and that she’s actually the latest host for the Dax symbiote, which, in its various previous incarnations, was Sisko’s mentor and friend. She’s a living, breathing connection to Sisko, his world, and his legendary tomato sauce.
For SAM, going back through Sisko’s life (whether it’s his love of baseball or his quest to cook the perfect gumbo) provides the ideal manual for her mission as Kasq’s emissary to the organic world, while also giving her the confidence to talk back to her holographic paymasters — as Dax so eloquently puts it, “[Benjamin] loved people who got into trouble for the right reasons.”
For the rest of us, it’s the continuation of a 26-year-old story that never needed continuing, but is, nonetheless, a load of fun to revisit — sci-fi nostalgia for all the right reasons.
New episodes of “Star Trek: Starfleet Academy” debut on Paramount+ on Thursdays.
