Star Trek: Deep Space Nine - 10 Best Episodes

2. "Far Beyond The Stars" (Season 6)

Summary: In a decidedly off-format episode, Sisko experiences a vision from the prophets, which recasts him as Benny Russell, a science fiction writer in the 1950s, who struggles with civil rights and inequality as he writes the story of Captain Benjamin Sisko, a black commander of a futuristic space station known as Deep Space Nine. Why It's Great: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine is still the only Star Trek television series with a non-white lead. In the 1990s, it was one of only a few shows on television starring a black man. For the most part, this was unremarked upon, a silent but important truth, and one that Avery Brooks has said convinced him to stick with the series early on, when the writers were still trying to figure out the character of Sisko. "Far Beyond the Stars," however, deals with race head on by recasting Brooks as Benny Russell, a science fiction writer living New York in 1953. In various roles, and out of make-up, the rest of the cast appears as different characters as well, many of them Russell's co-workers at a science fiction pulp magazine. When the magazine does their annual staff photograph, Russell (as well as Kay Eaton, who writes under the gender-neutral pseudonym "K.C. Hunter") are gently reminded to sleep in that day. You see, the readers don't know that the magazine has black and women writers, and the editor would like to keep it that way. In lesser hands, this episode could become a polemic, or a two-dimensional melodrama, but in the hands of writers Ira Steven Behr, Hans Beimler, and Marc Scott Zicree, not to mention Avery Brooks, who directed, it avoids those pitfalls and becomes something greater. The episode's final shot, in which Sisko sees Benny Russell as his reflection, marks the perfect ending to a terrific hour.