Star Trek: 10 Characters Who Must Return (2023)

Life must be pretty grand with the wormhole aliens, sorry, blasphemy — the Prophets! We've not heard a peep out of the Celestial Temple since Ben 'The Emissary' Lafayette Sisko went full-on God Mode. He did say he would eventually return to the land of us mere mortals, "maybe [in] a year… maybe yesterday," but the Temporal Integrity Commission might have some questions for him first!

Thanks in large part to streaming services, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine has had its own, much-deserved renaissance of late. We did get that glorious episode of Star Trek: Lower Decks set aboard the Station — "Tacky Cardassian fascist eyesore" — and Star Trek: Picard's season three had a nod to the Dominion War with the return of a rogue faction of the Changelings, but that's been mostly it.

In an earlier episode of Lower Decks season three, Sisko is directly referenced when the 'conspiracy truthers' question his real whereabouts, to which Ensign Mariner simply replies that "he's working hard in the Celestial Temple". In the DS9 documentary What We Left Behind, for which Avery Brooks sadly declined to appear, the writers and producers mapped out a hypothetical first episode for an eighth season of the show that saw Sisko descend to the lower plains only after 20 years.

In expanded canon, Sisko has featured most recently in the 'Star Trek' series of comics from October 2022 onwards, and there is an autobiography on its way for late 2023. Brooks did play the role again in a voiceover for Star Trek: Legacy, the 2006 VIDEO GAME, so let's hope that now omnipresent title is as prophetic as the good commander/captain himself.