In the nearly 30 years since Deep Space Nine ended, Star Trek fans have had plenty of time to commit what made the show work to a kind of fandom canon, part of an even longer process of relitigating the show’s wider reputation over the years from the initially controversial upstart to the mature and challenging iconoclast of the franchise. Part of that has been the canonization of Captain Sisko and what he came to represent about Star Trek as he took his place among the legacy of the series’ various captains.
For the most part, that canonization has reflected Deep Space Nine‘s broader, reestablished reputation. If the show itself was the exploration of the dark heart of Star Trek, then so too was Sisko: he was the man willing to sacrifice his soul to save trillions of lives; he was the deal done in shadow contrasted to the heightened ideals of someone like Jean-Luc Picard. When what made Sisko work is brought up, time and time again it’s episodes like “In the Pale Moonlight” or “Far Beyond the Stars,” or moments like his musing on the ease of being a saint in paradise in episodes like “The Maquis.”
Starfleet Academy, set another 800 years after Sisko and DS9 exited the picture, could’ve easily taken a similar track in its revisitation of Sisko and Deep Space Nine‘s finale. It is, after all, in some ways, the Deep Space Nine of its own era of Star Trek, not in darkened tone but in the relationship it has with Discovery mirroring Deep Space Nine‘s relationship with The Next Generation. It’s a show about challenging what Star Trek is and what its institutions are in the face of an existential crisis akin to that which the Dominion War represented. The symbol of a man who was willing to challenge the status quo and make great sacrifices in the name of the people that came after him is as fitting to DS9‘s legacy as it is to Starfleet Academy‘s charting of Star Trek‘s current furthest future.
But Starfleet Academy is—like Deep Space Nine was—a show about juking when it’s expected to jive and marching to its own beat. So it’s only fitting that its exploration of Sisko’s impact in the Star Trek universe in this week’s episode, “Series Acclimation Mil,” did so too and remembered what Sisko’s actual legacy always was: the bonds he made with his friends and family.
This is something that Deep Space Nine was interested in from the very beginning, as much as it was what Sisko would come to be best remembered for by fans. What roots Sisko’s animosity with Picard in DS9‘s pilot isn’t necessarily a difference in attitudes and approaches—it’s that he holds Picard responsible for the death of his wife during the battle of Wolf 359, unmooring Sisko’s life far more than the representative shock of one of Starfleet’s bloodiest battles ever could represent for the broader franchise. What leads to his elevation and acceptance by the Prophets of the Bajoran Wormhole initially is not the pre-destined fate we’d come to learn made Sisko a spiritual icon, but his attempt to explain that incredibly human feeling of losing a bond like the one he had with his wife to godlike alien beings.
Sisko’s connection to his family and friends fills up so much of Deep Space Nine—his relationship with Dax and Jake, two things that become the core of Starfleet Academy‘s remembrance of him through Dax’s latest host, Professor Illa, and Sam’s exploration of Jake’s life after Sisko transcended the physical realm after the events of DS9‘s finale. His relationship with his father and their connection through food, which Starfleet Academy touches on when Sam tries to understand Sisko better by replicating gumbo for her own friends to try.
But the specter of that other, more accepted remembrance of Sisko’s legacy sits at the edges of Starfleet Academy‘s tribute. It’s not disrespected, but the show makes clear that it’s not interested in relitigating those oft-remembered qualities. When Sam visits a recreation of a museum dedicated to Sisko’s life, the hologram of Jake she calls up, taken from an interview a few decades after the events of DS9, plainly recalls the qualities about the man that mattered most to him—if people wanted to know about him as a captain, they should consult Starfleet records; if they want to know about him as the emissary, ask the prophets. This was his dad, and that’s the legacy Jake is concerned with preserving.
That comes up again when Illa gives Sam a copy of Anslem—the future book Jake was planning to write about his life and his dad in one of Deep Space Nine‘s most remarkable explorations of their relationship, “The Visitor”—eventually revealing that Dax hosts have been sharing it with people “who would understand how to use it” since Jake gave it to them hundreds of years prior. Anslem is, as Sam reads, not a book that gives the definitive answer to who Ben Sisko was or what happened to him at the end of Deep Space Nine; it’s a book about Jake’s memory of his father, about what he represented and was embodied by his friends and family for generations after he was gone.
“You know, all those things you think he missed… he didn’t,” Sam’s hazy recollection of Jake tells her as she thumbs through Anslem. “He was always there. He never really left us—I can’t prove it, but I know it’s true.” Ben Sisko was preserved for generation after generation, not as a hero of war or the unfaced emissary of Bajor’s prophets, but as the spirit Jake and his own descendants kept alive about his fatherhood. In sharing that with Sam—who ends the episode, emboldened by his legacy, sending a thankful honor to Sisko for sharing his life with the universe and for being the dad he was to Jake—that spirit is primed to ripple on through her own connections and family she’s come to develop at the academy.
There’s perhaps no better way for Starfleet Academy to have eulogized Sisko than this, to take a leaf out of the pages of Deep Space Nine‘s book and do it the unexpected way. We’ve had almost 30 years to have reckoned with Sisko the warrior and Sisko the emissary. Reminding us that he was Sisko the father, above all else, allows us to remember what he, and Deep Space Nine, really left behind.
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