Star Trek: 10 Things You Didn't Know About Benjamin Sisko

10. Significant Sixth

Sisko's turning points can be narrowed down to several key episodes; Far Beyond The Stars, In the Pale Moonlight and the preceding season's For the Uniform.

Regarding the latter, writer Ronald D Moore noted that Sisko took a step that "Picard probably wouldn't have" but maybe one that Kirk would. It got results to ensure a greater good, no matter the cost. The story for In the Pale Moonlight was proposed by Peter Allan Fields, the writer responsible for Sisko's gear change against Eddington. 

For Far Beyond the Stars, Brooks took double duty as director and lead. What started as a Jake story morphed into a tale that focused on Ben himself as both "the dreamer and the dream" with the topic of 1950s racism front and centre. In the Pale Moonlight also started life as a Jake Sisko story before a substantial rewrite. 

In The Fifty Year Mission, Brooks was quoted as saying:

It talked about who we are or who we were, at least. I thought it was incredibly clever.