Paramount Is About To Ruin The Best Star Trek Show

As a lifelong Star Trek fan, my hottest take is that Deep Space Nine is the best show in the entire legendary sci-fi franchise. Part of what makes this show so resonant is that its finale left the final fate of Captain Benjamin Sisko (last seen with the wormhole aliens who saved him from certain death) deliciously ambiguous.

Now, though, the upcoming Starfleet Academy show is about to reveal his fate. I’ve got a sneaking suspicion that these revelations are going to retroactively ruin Trek’s greatest show.

Teasing Disaster

Concerns about Starfleet Academy began about two months ago when the first teaser trailer dropped. Look closely, and you can see a character staring at a screen featuring a man in silhouette. Above it, the text reads “The fate of Benjamin Sisko, Emissary of the Prophets.”

More recently, Starfleet Academy co-showrunner Noga Landau discussed the upcoming show with the corporate trades saying, “There’s also mysteries. Watch out for Benjamin Sisko! We get to do some really cool stuff that hasn’t been done in a long time that I think really honors the fans who’ve been waiting to see what happens.”

Beaming Down Some Disappointment

When that first teaser trailer came out, I tried to tell myself that the Sisko screen was just an Easter egg. Maybe just a simple confirmation that Starfleet still cares about Sisko eight centuries after he became one with the Prophets.

However, the showrunner’s comments about “mysteries” and appeasing fans who have “been waiting to see what happens” make me think the show will answer the big question of when or if Sisko came back to reality after time with the noncorporeal profits. The blunt truth is that no matter how they write this Deep Space Nine character into the show, it’s going to piss off old-school fans like me.

In the Deep Space Nine series finale, Sisko stops Gul Dukat from unleashing the pah-wraiths by tackling him over a cliff in the Fire Caves of Bajor. Dukat dies, but Sisko is saved by the Prophets, with whom he would spend an undefined amount of time living in a dimension that exists outside of space and time.

Later, he appeared via a kind of vision to his wife, Kassidy Yates, who asked when her husband would return. “It’s hard to say,” Sisko said. “Maybe a year, maybe… yesterday. But I will be back.”

Paramount Is About To Ruin the Best Star Trek Show

Personally, I’ve grown to love the ambiguity of Sisko’s fate. Once it became clear that Sisko actor Avery Brooks would never be returning to Star Trek, I made my peace with the fact that fans would simply never learn what happened to this famous (and sometimes infamous) Starfleet captain. Now, though, it looks like the franchise is going to spell out the character’s final fate without Brooks’ involvement, and it’s guaranteed to be a major disaster for multiple reasons.

First of all, even if the Starfleet Academy writers come up with a cool idea for Sisko (which is unlikely; more on this soon), nothing they come up with is going to be cooler than what Deep Space Nine fans have come up with. We’ve all had decades to come up with our head canon for the character’s eventual return, and any official explanation will inevitably be a disappointment. I always found it fitting that the extremely unconventional Star Trek series Deep Space Nine ended a show about a character’s religious journey by asking fans to take a leap of faith into the unknown rather than explaining what happened to Sisko with the usual precision of franchise technobabble.

There Are Always (Awful) Possibilities

Considering how careless Discovery could be with Star Trek canon, I’m really nervous as to how the writers of the spinoff show Starfleet Academy will handle Sisko’s return. Will we find out that he came back and ended the Temporal Cold War, or maybe that he popped up in the distant past to join Section 31? Both of these ideas are as awful as a TNG Season 1 episode, but I wouldn’t put it past modern Trek writers to do something at least this stupid with the franchise’s coolest character, retroactively ruining him for fans of Star Trek’s golden age.

I hope to be proven wrong here: maybe Starfleet Academy really will just tease Sisko’s fate with a weird monitor pop-up and not go any further. Unfortunately, modern Trek writers are not known for restraint, so it’s possible that Sisko’s fate will somehow be tied into one of NuTrek’s infamous season-long mystery arcs. Should that happen, older fans may have to answer a mystery of their own…the mystery of why they are still watching a franchise that is slowly collapsing into a black hole of faded creativity and empty, corporate pandering.