10 Star Trek Episodes That Completely Ignored Convention
5. Far Beyond The Stars
Far Beyond The Stars is quintessential Star Trek, even if it seems to be an insert from a completely different show. Depicting the main cast out of makeup and prosthetics invites your audience in on the joke right away. Underneath the gnashing teeth and ample lobes, these are all human beings at the end of the day.
That's one of the main themes of this episode. Sisko has begun to sink into doubt as the Dominion War rages on, even considering throwing in the towel. The Prophets send him a vision to remind him of the struggles that laid the path for him to get where he ended up. Stepping back for a moment, the writers of the episode could easily have used an in-universe vision to help him get back on track.
Instead, the main cast play a group of struggling science-fiction writers from the 1950s. This was Star Trek dealing with one thing head-on: racism. Much of Trek works on allegory, using its SciFi backdrop to tell morality plays. This episode is very different. There is no subtext here - everything is text. It remains as challenging an episode today as it was on initial release, showing a man broken by systemic racism, told in the context of a show with phasers and transporters.