10 Bizarre Star Trek Theories (That Might Be True)

If your heart wasn't broken during seminal Deep Space Nine episode Far Beyond The Stars, then you frankly don't have one. To recap this episode, Captain Sisko is considering leaving Starfleet and ends up hallucinating about a man named Benny Russell, a science fiction writer in the 1950's. As a black man, he wasn't allowed to be photographed for the magazine that he worked at, he was harassed by the police and disparaged from having ambition.

The soul-wrenching story sees Benny's work turned down because the publishers at the time won't entertain a story about a black man. He's beaten by the police, he sees black people dragged down and killed and is swallowed up by despair, being taken to an asylum. When Sisko wakes from this dream, he wonders if somewhere, Benny Russell is somewhere far beyond the stars, dreaming of Deep Space Nine.

But what if he was?

In the second episode of DS9's seventh season, we again see a flash of Benny Russel in an asylum, endlessly scrawling on the walls. What if part of him realised that he would never get to write a story about a black man leading others to the stars, it would have to be white men who went first, given the time that he lived in. What if he reordered his ideas to create Kirk and Picard and Archer before he allowed Sisko and Janeway and Burnham to come to life.

What if all of Star Trek is simply the hopes and dreams scrawled on the walls of a single man, kept in a cell, alone and desolate.

Of course, all of Star Trek can also be linked to the Tommy Westphall Multiverse theory, so perhaps Tommy just dreamed of Benny.