10 Times Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Went Woke
1. Far Beyond The Stars
When considering the topic of 'woke' in Star Trek, Far Beyond The Stars must immediately be discussed. For Deep Space Nine, and for the wider franchise, it reminded the audience that for the positive future that Trek offers, it was conceived and created in much darker times.
Benny Russell's struggles as a black man in the 1950s, portrayed with a tour-de-force delivery by Avery Brooks, who also directs the episode, are painful to watch, though unsurprising. Science Fiction may offer these writers a chance to depict a better tomorrow, though reality reminds them that they lived in a worse today.
Though Russell's censorship, dismissal, and eventual breakdown are the key focus points of the episode, Nana Visitor's K.C. Hunter also faces discrimination for being a woman with a typewriter. Michael Dorn's Willie Hawkins is a celebrated baseball player, though he is barred from living alongside his white teammates. Cirroc Lofton's Jimmy is shot dead by racist policemen during an attempted robbery, leading to the brutal beating of Benny.
Brooks considered Far Beyond The Stars his favourite episode of Trek that he worked on. He would even have preferred it to have been a two-parter, as per the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Companion.
However, the main point that Brooks wished to make about the setting of the episode was this:
If we had changed the people's clothes, this story could be about right now. What's insidious about racism is that it is unconscious. Even among these very bright and enlightened characters - a group that includes a woman writer who has to use a man's name to get her work published, and who is married to a brown man with a British accent in 1953 - it's perfectly reasonable to coexist with someone like Pabst. It's in the culture; it's the way people think. So that was the approach we took. I never talked about racism. I just showed how these intelligent people think, and it all came out of them.