10 Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Episodes That Were Almost Completely Different
4. Far Beyond The Stars (Season 6 Episode 13)
Continuing Star Trek’s history of taking real world issues and bringing them to a sci-fi world, the sixth season’s ‘Far Beyond The Stars’ started its life as just another tiresome ‘hallucination/time travel episode’, but some tinkering behind the scenes turned it into one of DS9’s most celebrated and important moments.
Despondent at the increasingly hopeless Dominion War, Sisko begins hallucinating before waking up as a completely different man. Now living in 1950s New York, sci-fi writer Benny Russell struggles against racial discrimination as he tries to publish a story about a black commander of a space station: Captain Benjamin Sisko.
The episode originally starred Sisko’s son Jake, and saw him travelling back to the 1950s in a hallucination, created by aliens wishing to discover something about humanity. Feeling that the story was too gimmicky, but enjoying the 1950s premise, the producers reframed the episode as a vision from The Bajoran Prophets, god like extra-dimensional beings, and included the racial themes to turn this into an episode rich in meaning and depth.
Sisko’s time in the past reaffirms his resolve to win the war, and Avery Brooks would later reprise the role of Benny in future visions, turning what could’ve been a throwaway episode into a narrative necessity.