Star Trek: 10 Characters With The Most Appearances
Some of Star Trek's characters have had the longevity to stick around on screen for over 30 years.
Like it or love it, season three of Star Trek: Picard feels as though it's been constructed to round out the adventures of the TNG crew with more finesse than the coolant leak that was 2003's Nemesis.
It's been a chance to meet old friends and experience additional and unexpected character development while paying respect to a classic part of the franchise.
While there have been many returns, some unexpected, the return of these legacy characters has also increased the number of appearances they have made. But, just who has popped up the most times in Star Trek history?
To compile this list, each of the feature-length pilots and finales from TNG, DS9, and Voyager have been counted as two single-length installments. In that case for example TNG rocks in at 178 episodes, DS9 at 176, and Voyager at 172. There is also the assumption that the lead character in Picard will appear in all 30 episodes of his own show.
It might surprise fans however that not every one of the ten characters featured here appeared in every episode of their respective series and actually made the cut thanks to a cunning crossover or animated addition to another of Star Trek's multiple shows across many decades.
10. 176 - Ben Sisko
Father, Emissary of the Prophets, and all-round kick-ass Starfleet captain, Benjamin Lafayette Sisko is arguably the lead Trek character who received the most development across the length of his series.
Admittedly it does seem to have happened from the time that the beard and shaved head arrived on the scene. Sisko is also the only lead character to date to have not (technically!) survived the ending of his series and also the only one to make this list by appearing in just one show - Deep Space Nine.
Starting out as a commander, Sisko would manage to gain his captaincy by the end of the third season, The Adversary, which focused on uncovering a changeling infiltrator amongst the crew of the Defiant... that sounds oddly familiar...
With recent developments in Picard there are, as standard, the usual rumblings of a desired Sisko comeback. Whether or not this would lessen the legacy of both the show and the character is an interesting question to pose. It's one that the DS9 documentary What We Left Behind toyed with in its hypothetical eighth season of the show but as for live-action or even animated, The Sisko remains elusive as ever.