Another Kind of Prescience

EVERY WEDNESDAY NIGHT in the early 2000s, my parents and I watched Voyager (VOY, 1995–2001) and subsequently Enterprise (ENT, 2001–05). Interspersed with reruns of The Next Generation (TNG, 1987–94) and episodes recorded on VHS before I was born, the Star Trek universe provided a foundation for my own. What may have been merely a science fiction world of fantasy and make-believe, aliens and far-off galaxies, androids and subspace organisms served as a formative investigation of what it means to be human—or rather alive in an intergalactic community of sentient beings.

Between existential threats from the Borg and Xindi, my parents occasionally opined that there was a truly dark period in Star Trek’s history that they were glad to have left behind. That six-year period was Deep Space 9 (DS9, 1993–99). All I knew about this seemingly detestable series was its fundamental departure from Star Trek’s core ethos of exploration and European liberal humanist values. DS9—in contrast to the USS Enterprise’s warp speed travels from planet to planet, solving crisis after crisis in The Original Series (TOS, 1966–69) and TNG—is rooted in place on the station from which it takes its name. Located adjacent to Bajor, a non-Federation world, DS9 remains embroiled in the aftereffects of the Bajoran people’s recent expulsion of their genocidal, materially extractive Cardassian colonizers of over 50 years, who tore through the planet, leaving much to rebuild and replenish in their wake.

Keen to fill the gaps of my Star Trek education in adulthood, I watched the entirety of DS9 but with the blinders of my preconceived notions, feeling this to be a laborious exercise in simply doing my due diligence as a self-identified Trekkie. A Different Trek: Radical Geographies of Deep Space Nine (University of Nebraska Press, 2023) by David K. Seitz has, however, revolutionized my understanding of what I now see as a widely underappreciated and understudied series.

Seitz unveils how DS9 throws the blind optimism and utopian ideals of the other series into doubt, complicating the clean prognostication of a better, egalitarian, postcapitalist society. Within the Star Trek series, the true inner workings of the Federation’s postcapitalist, post-scarcity, merit-based, welfare system are never laid bare. Despite Starfleet’s interstellar treks,  ships’ crews remain isolated from fully immersing in other worlds and cultures, due to Federation values and practices. Consequently, it’s the clash of customs, currencies, and cultures on the ever-stationary DS9 that unveils the Federation’s relationship to not only money but also religion, colonialism, militarization, and interpersonal conflict.

In six chapters, Seitz examines the full spectrum of DS9’s dynamics: he analyzes its queer subtexts by way of Dr. Julian Bashir’s (Alexander Siddig) friendship with Garak (Andrew J. Robinson), the Cardassian tailor and former spy, as well as Jadzia Dax’s (Terry Farrell) embodiment of seven past lives, both male and female, that she experienced as a Trill host. Seitz questions the place of social reproduction in Star Trek’s theoretically classless, anti-racist, post-sexist society via Chief Miles O’Brien (Colm Meaney) and Keiko O’Brien’s (Rosalind Chao) domestic relationship. And Seitz elucidates the proliferation of commerce adjacent to—or perhaps, he suggests, always inherent to but unacknowledged within—the Federation through Quark (Armin Shimerman), his bar, and his Ferengi brethren.

But at the core of A Different Trek is Seitz’s examination of Bajor. Just as the Bajoran people declare independence from their Cardassian oppressors, the Bajoran Provisional Government welcomes a Federation “peacekeeping” presence in their sector and on their space station, the former Cardassian ore-processing facility renamed DS9. Starfleet Commander Benjamin Sisko (Avery Brooks) is assigned to command the station and help shepherd Bajor toward Federation membership. Through analyzing the broader allegorical geography of Bajor, predominantly via Major Kira Nerys (Nana Visitor), the Bajoran first officer assigned to DS9, Seitz presents a reading of the planet and its people as a lens for Palestinian resistance, Black freedom struggles, and Indigenous challenges to settler colonialism. Through this analysis, Seitz problematizes the Federation’s vaunted position as an enlightened, morally superior union of planets. When the Federation’s relationship to Bajor is juxtaposed with the not-so-distant Cardassian occupation, the Federation—so often framed as a beacon of equity and liberalism—begins to look like a new, soft imperial power, meddling in the affairs of alien worlds.

By centering Bajor—and teasing out their long-term process of reckoning with past traumas, a violent history, and the role of religion as a unifying force in the struggle for independence—DS9 served, Seitz observes, as a “counterpoint, corrective, and critical intervention” in the Star Trek universe. Defying cardinal prohibitions against religion and money, DS9 and by extension Bajor contradicts much of what the Federation strictly upholds, throwing Star Trek’s utopic vision of the future into stark relief and, as such, revealing the messy, morally ambiguous workings of an intergalactic community that ultimately serves as a corollary to our own messy, far-from-utopic present.

Beyond his examination of Bajor’s allegorical nuances—and the ways in which it challenges accepted conceptions of the Federation as an undeniable force for good—Seitz embraces in A Different Trek an expansive definition of the Star Trek universe, weaving into his examination perspectives not only from all series but also from the movies, the fan fiction, and the actors themselves. Seitz’s choice to examine the defining impact that DS9’s actors had on its political and emotional resonances, plotlines, and central conceit serves to enrich the characters, their experiences, and my own. I’m ashamed to admit that I originally found Sisko dull. The poetic cadence of his speech, I thought, damped and often qualified the meaning of his words. He was not Captain Jean-Luc Picard of TNG, nor did he make grand unimpeachable declarations in the face of seemingly impossible moral quandaries. Instead, when rewatching DS9 after reading A Different Trek, I saw Sisko in a new light. Seitz’s cultural geography teases out connections between people and place within both real and fictional worlds in such a way that Sisko’s poetry now reads as an enlightened realism, a constant balancing act, an inner struggle between what he might want, need, or know to be true, and the many actors (in both senses of the word) that play upon his decisions.

Nichelle Nichols wouldn’t have continued to play Lieutenant Nyota Uhura on TOS were it not for Martin Luther King Jr.’s encouragement, affirming that she was making a difference in the Civil Rights Movement by painting a picture of what was possible for the Black community, perhaps most iconically partaking in the first interracial kiss on TV. Similarly, Avery Brooks asserted that he wouldn’t have been on Star Trek were it not for the many influential Black figures that came before him, most importantly, Paul Robeson, the Black American musician, communist activist, lawyer, and athlete whom he had previously portrayed onstage. Seitz pushes far beyond a reading of Sisko as a simple hallmark of inclusionary liberal politics to instead paint a full and lively picture of a multidimensional character whose cultural legacy (one shared by Brooks) is not merely Earth lore but also consequential in the lives, politics, and social formations of DS9’s present.

Sisko is not simply a fan of baseball (particularly the Negro leagues), a collector of African diaspora art, and an excellent cook of Creole cuisine, regularly making jambalaya and gumbo like his father who runs a restaurant in New Orleans. As Seitz suggests, Sisko’s worldview is heavily informed by Brooks’s own politics and experiences, which manifest in the character via fiercely anti-colonial sentiments, a moving treatment of the existential pain of anti-Blackness, a deep knowledge of Earth’s history and the revolutionary work of Black freedom struggles, and, perhaps more importantly, the tenderness exhibited between Sisko, his father, and his son, Jake (Cirroc Lofton). No other Star Trek series of the era delved as deeply into the nuances of an interpersonal relationship, particularly one between two men. What makes the dynamic between Sisko and Jake so special and lifelike, Seitz explains, is the real love the actors exhibited for one another.

DS9 does away with the kind of multiculturalism that relied on hollow tokenism—which in Star Trek has manifested as Black characters inherently othered by way of prosthesis—whether that be Michael Dorn’s ridged forehead as the Klingon Worf on both TNG and subsequently DS9; LeVar Burton’s visor, which he wore playing Geordi La Forge, a blind engineer on TNG; or Tim Russ’s pointy ears as Tuvok, a Vulcan on VOY. Brooks’s embodiment of Sisko is not whitewashed for a future in which racial divisions no longer exist, but rather rich in complexity and contradictions, laying bare the work, the stories, and the traditions that paved the way for the 20th century to become the 23rd—all without suggesting that the latter is free of all difference like the rest of the Star Trek opus might have us believe.

The two-part episode in season three titled “Past Tense,” for example, transports Sisko, Bashir, and Dax back in time to the year 2024, which Sisko knows well as the time of the Bell Riots in Los Angeles. This episode paints an all-too-realistic picture of our present, wherein the US government jails aspiring immigrants, repeatedly decamps the rising homeless population in efforts to hide such “unpleasantness” from a more affluent public, and strips the right to basic dignities from so many.

It’s consequently easy to marvel at Star Trek for its prescience—its forecast of cell phones, tablets, and video calls enables us to hold tightly to the hope that its creators will soon be right about replicators, transporters, space travel, and interracial if not interspecies equity as well—though what DS9 foretold was not a far-off future of technological advancement but instead a grim allegory of the present and immediate future. DS9 was a dark period in Star Trek’s history not because it diverted from the show’s core principles but because it held up a mirror to the darkest truths of the present. Although Star Trek has always allowed us to believe, to hope, that these realities are a passing phase on the road to something better, they can be a far more illustrative guide than the aspirational principles of the Federation that are so firmly proselytized by the other series. DS9 thus forces us to sit in the consequences of our actions, to live in the tension of our differences, and yet to still find the strength to boldly go.