Benjamin Sisko
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Benjamin Lafayette Sisko is a character in the fictional Star Trek universe. Played by actor Avery Brooks, he is the central character of the Star Trek spinoff series Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, in which he is the commanding officer of the space station Deep Space Nine and the starship USS Defiant. He began his role in the series pilot "Emissary" as a Commander, and was later promoted to Captain in "The Adversary". Due to Sisko's discovery of the Bajoran wormhole also leads the Bajorans to acclaim him as the Emissary of the Prophets, an important religious figure in their culture.
He was the first African-American lead character on a Star Trek series, and the first Trek series lead to not hold the rank of Captain or command a starship at the beginning of his series.
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Overview
Born in 2332 in New Orleans, Louisiana, Benjamin was the son of Joseph Sisko, a New Orleans chef and owner of the restaurant "Sisko's". Ben has a sister named Judith. He is the father of Jake Sisko and the widower of Jennifer Sisko, who was killed in early 2367. During the last season of the series, Benjamin marries Kasidy Yates, who at the end of the series is carrying his child.
Throughout the series, Benjamin distinguishes himself as a dedicated military commander and political tactician against the Klingons, the Romulans, and the Cardassians, and also the Dominion throughout the Dominion War. But the deeply-religious Bajoran people have decided that he is the "Emissary of the Prophets", and the expectations placed on him are not always compatible with his role as a Starfleet officer.
Sisko loves baseball, a sport which has largely disappeared by the 24th century and is kept alive only by a small group of aficionados. He keeps a baseball in his office and is often seen clutching it in times of deep thought.
Early Starfleet career
Ben Sisko entered Starfleet Academy in 2350. During his sophomore year, he was in a field-study assignment on Starbase 137. Early in his career, he was mentored by Curzon Dax, a joined member of the Trill species, when the two served aboard the U.S.S. Lexington. Joined Trill were humanoids in whom were implanted sentient slug-like creatures called symbionts, the joining of which created a hybrid personality distinct from the individual two. The significance of this aspect of Trill culture, and the difficulty of maintaining relationships as the symbionts are passed down from host to host became an important point in Sisko's later relationships with his Deep Space Nine science officer Jadzia Dax, who inherited the Dax symbiont from Curzon, and Ezri Dax, who received it after Jadzia's death.
Sisko later served aboard the U.S.S. Okinawa under the command of Captain Leyton, who saw command potential in Sisko, whose interests at the time lay in engineering. Leyton promoted Sisko to lieutenant commander, making him Okinawa's Executive Officer. It was during this assignment that Sisko and Leyton fought in the war between the Federation and the Tzenkethi.
Sisko eventually transferred to the U.S.S. Saratoga as its first officer, and in early 2367, fought the Borg in the Battle of Wolf 359, as the Borg advanced toward Earth in an attempt to invade it. In this encounter, he faced Locutus of Borg, a Borg drone created from the assimilated Jean-Luc Picard, the Captain of Enterprise. The Borg used Picard's knowledge of Starfleet to annihilate the Starfleet ships making a stand there, and Saratoga, along with 38 other ships, was destroyed in this battle; among the 11,000 lives lost was Sisko's wife, Jennifer.
Sisko was then assigned to the Utopia Planitia Fleet Yards on Mars, overseeing the development of new ships, such as the USS Defiant, which was designed to combat the Borg.
On Deep Space Nine
In 2369, Sisko is assigned to the Bajoran sector. He and his son Jake take up residence on Deep Space Nine, a space station in orbit around the planet Bajor built by the Cardassians in 2351 to process ore. The station had been the headquarters of Gul Dukat, the last prefect of Bajor during the Cardassian Occupation, who would become Sisko's archenemy (and occasional ally) during the course of the series. The Cardassians had been forced by the native resistance movement to relinquish Bajor after 60 years of brutal tyranny. The newly-freed Bajorans were experiencing great turmoil in the wake of the Cardassian withdrawal, with a provisional government that many worried was not strong enough to prevent civil war. Because they did not possess the resources to run the station, they requested Starfleet assistance.
Starfleet's hope was that Bajor would eventually apply to join the United Federation of Planets, and Sisko's assignment was to do everything to help guide Bajor in that direction, short of violating the Prime Directive. Sisko, who since the death of his wife at the hands of the Borg two years earlier at the Battle of Wolf 359, had been less enthusiastic about his Starfleet career, accepted the assignment, but warned Captain Picard, who briefed Sisko on his assignment, that he was considering resigning from Starfleet. Because of Picard's role as Locutus of Borg in the Battle of Wolf 359, Sisko continued to feel a great deal of animosity toward him.
By chance (or so it was thought at the time), Sisko and his crew discovered a stable wormhole to the Gamma Quadrant and the aliens living therein. The devoutly spiritual Bajorans believe them to be the Bajoran Prophets and the wormhole their Celestial Temple. These aliens live outside of linear time, which means that they can perceive what we think of as the past, present and future simultaneously. Communicating with the Prophets also tends to reveal intimate details and psychological insights about oneself, and as a result of his initial encounter with them, Sisko came to realize that he was holding on needlessly to the memory of his wife, and needed to move past his grief. The novelization of "Emissary" says that Sisko let go of that hatred and learned to see that Picard was just as much of a victim of the Borg as Sisko was, if not more so. This was less explicit in the aired episode, the end of which showed him merely extending his hand in friendship to Picard, and indicating subtly that he had overcome his personal demons.
The crew of Deep Space Nine decided to move the station to the mouth of the wormhole, in order to lay claim to it, making Bajor a new hub of scientific, commercial and political activity. This gave Sisko a greater degree of importance as the commander of the Bajoran sector.
Sisko's discovery of the wormhole also led the Bajorans to acclaim Sisko as the "Emissary of the Prophets", a role about which Benjamin was decidedly ambivalent through at least the first five seasons. Slowly however, Sisko came to accept his role, in particular in the fifth season episode "Rapture".
The Prophets intervened in the Dominion War and gradually revealled that Sisko's destiny was intertwined with that of Bajor. In the seventh season premiere "Image in the Sand", after the murder of Jadzia Dax and the collapse of the wormhole entrance by the Pah-Wraith-possessed Gul Dukat, Sisko learned that the Prophets had arranged his birth. In a vision sent by the Prophets, Sisko saw a woman on the planet Tyree. He drew her image on a PADD with a facial reconstruction computer program. Jake then remembered seeing the same woman in a photograph in a storage room in his grandfather's restaurant. Confronted with this information, Joseph Sisko reluctantly told them about Sarah, his wife and Ben's mother. She was possessed by a Prophet so that she would marry Joseph and give birth to Benjamin. Sarah left two days after Ben's first birthday. After three years of searching, Joseph discovered that she had been working as a holophotographer in Australia until her death in a hovercraft accident just one month before he tracked her down. He then produced a locket that belonged to her; it has an inscription in ancient Bajoran that Ben translated as "Orb of the Emissary". Ben then journeys to Tyree with Joseph, Jake and the newly-joined Ezri Dax, where he found and opened the Orb. This released the Sarah Prophet within, who then reopened the wormhole, from which the Pah Wraith were vanquished.
In the series' finale, "What You Leave Behind", Sisko's destiny was fulfilled. He confronted Gul Dukat, still possessed by the Pah Wraith—the antithesis of the Prophets — and imprisoned him forever with the rest of the Pah Wraiths by pushing both Dukat and the Kosst Amojan, the powerful Pah-wraith who possessed Dukat's body, into the fiery abyss of the Bajoran Fire Caves. Shortly thereafter, Sarah informed him that it was time for him to live with and learn from the Prophets; Ben said a final goodbye to his wife, Kasidy, and told her he didn't know when he would be able to return to her.
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Alter egos
Benjamin Sisko can be identified with three other characters in the Star Trek universe, one possibly imaginary, the other two real.
Benny Russell
In the episode "Far Beyond the Stars", alien interference results in Sisko briefly living the life of "Benny Russell", a writer of science fiction stories in the United States of the 1950s. Every day, Russell, an African American, faces the prejudices of his world, and his publisher won't even allow his photograph to be made public. Russell comes up with a story called Deep Space Nine in which he envisions a universe in which prejudice and bigotry are a thing of the past. But, because he makes the commander of a space station a black man, his publisher refuses to release the story. (This is similar to the works of Robert Heinlein and some of the early EC Comics stories, which frequently end with the surprise that the protagonist was black all along.) This eventually drives Benny insane, and soon after, Sisko finds himself back in the 24th century, questioning the nature of reality. At the start of the final season, Sisko experiences flashbacks to his "life" as Benny, who is now in a mental institution, obsessively writing Deep Space Nine stories. It is left ambiguous as to whether Benny was real or a creation of the Prophets.
Gabriel Bell
Due to a time travel incident (depicted in the two-part episode "Past Tense"), Sisko takes the place of Gabriel Bell, an important figure in early 21st century America and the instigator of the Bell Riots which helped change the course of human history. The real Bell dies as a result of Sisko's presence at a crucial time in history, so Sisko takes his place (fortunately he and Bell have a similar appearance). Although Sisko is successful in fulfilling Bell's destiny, history is still changed so that all records of Gabriel Bell now show Benjamin Sisko's image: during a later episode, "Little Green Men", the Ferengi cadet that Sisko sponsored into Starfleet Academy, Nog, was looking through a data PADD on Earth history, and remarked to Quark that Bell bore an uncanny resemblance to Sisko, though Quark brushed it aside by saying "all hew-mons look the same".
Joran Dax
In "Facets", Sisko lent his body to Joran Dax during Jadzia Dax's zhian'tara ritual. This encounter only lasted a few minutes until Joran attempted to strangle Jadzia.
Trivia
Initially, Sisko had hair — some fans have said that this was in order to distinguish him from Captain Picard (actually, the producers of the show asked him to retain his hair in order to distinguish Sisko from a previous role Avery Brooks had played - that of Hawk from Spenser: For Hire). In the fourth season a number of changes were made to Deep Space Nine, including the decision to allow Sisko to shave his head and grow a beard; this coincided with Brooks' appearance as Hawk in several Spenser reunion telefilms.
The original idea for the end of DS9 would have had Sisko permanently taking his place with the Prophets. Avery Brooks, concerned about perpetuating the image of a black woman (in this case, Sisko's wife Kasidy Yates) left to raise her child alone, asked that Sisko's eventual return be mentioned in the storyline, and the producers agreed.
External links
- Template:Memoryalpha
- Emissary of the Prophets article at Memory Alpha
- StarTrek.com: Benjamin Sisko
- "Sisko Song" at YTMND
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