Star Trek: 10 Greatest Captain Sisko Speeches

Benjamin Sisko is one of the greatest orators in Star Trek history, thanks in no small part to Avery Brooks' commanding performance. He guided the audience through some of the most difficult storylines the franchise had ever tackled, deftly balancing gravitas with a lighter touch, when the situation arose.

We say when the situation arose because Deep Space Nine routinely tackled heady themes, taking on isolationism, xenophobia, religious intolerance, and the horrors of war. Our earlier lists for both Kirk and Picard often showed those captains discussing the hot-button topics of the day, which was often amplified in this newest series.

Sisko would calmly talk us through a topic, or rise from his chair as he laid down the law to a traitorous former security chief - it really depends on the week.

While the show has been off the air for more than twenty years, many of the topics remain depressingly relevant, so it is with both resignation and a fierce sense of duty that the words of Sisko ring in our ears across the decades. With a little luck, some of them may even take root in our own fandom and beyond.

The problem is Earth. By the time Deep Space Nine was entering its second season, the audience had frequently been shown the quasi-utopia that was Earth of the 24th century. Though this stretched back to Kirk's time as well, it was truly the most perfect planet in the quadrant by the 2360s and 70s, so the people living there were becoming a bit of an issue.

The issue, in a nutshell, was the ambivalence, or perhaps simple ignorance, to the struggles that other worlds in the quadrant were facing. A human from Earth may enter the Academy and find themselves deployed in a region of space utterly alien to them - yet still containing mostly humans. One such region was the Demilitarised Zone near the Cardassian border.

Well, it's easy to be a saint in paradise, but the Maquis do not live in paradise. Out there in the Demilitarised Zone, all the problems haven't been solved yet. Out there, there are no saints — just people.

Sisko was tasked with bringing in Calvin Hudson, a man he had known since the Academy, who had gone over to the Maquis. Rather than finding Hudson to be a madman, he understood the man's position, even if he didn't agree with it. In The Maquis Parts 1 and 2, the audience were given an example of a Starfleet commander facing an almost impossible position: stop a band of people with whom he sympathised. It was not be the last time Sisko was tested like this.