Entertainment
Starfleet Academy's Avery Brooks Tribute Makes No Sense, Proves Writers Didn't Watch DS9 At All
By Chris Snellgrove
| Published
Recently, Starfleet Academy released an episode intended to celebrate Deep Space Nine legend Benjamin Sisko, complete with holographic character SAM taking a virtual trip through the Sisko Museum. The museum is filled with artifacts important to the Starfleet officer’s life, including the baseball that he always kept in his office on the station. One of those artifacts is the typewriter owned by Benny Russell, and while this is a great way to honor the episode “Far Beyond the Stars,” this particular tribute to the captain and Sisko actor Avery Brooks makes no sense whatsoever.
First, some context: in “Far Beyond the Stars,” Captain Sisko begins receiving strange visions from the Prophets in which he is a 1950s sci-fi writer named Benny Russell. The writer’s crowning achievement is a series of stories set on a space station named Deep Space Nine, but as a Black man, he is having trouble publishing these stories due to the rampant racism of the time period. His story is ultimately suppressed by the sci-fi magazine that he writes for because it features a Black man as its hero, and Benny collapses, only to pop up in an asylum in a later episode.
The Dreamer And The Dream
This vision had a profound impact on Benjamin Sisko: moved by the notion that he is “both the dreamer and the dream,” he is inspired to stay on Deep Space Nine and lead the fight against the Dominion. Because of this, you might think the presence of Benny Russell’s typewriter in the Sisko Museum would make perfect sense. But it’s actually crazy for many reasons, including the fact that, until a few years ago, there was no real Benny Russell in the Trek canon!
In Deep Space Nine, Benny only appeared to Sisko in visions, first by the Prophets and later by the Pah-Wraiths. We never see Sisko look up the historical Benny, implying that he doesn’t exist; in fact, the Star Trek Encyclopedia entry for Benny Russell claims that he “may have existed in an alternate reality, or perhaps only in certain reaches of Ben Sisko’s mind.” The fact that Benny didn’t previously exist is likely what Jake Sisko actor Cirroc Lofton was referring to in a recent TrekMovie interview, where he declared that the typewriter in the museum “technically…does not exist.”
The Dream Suddenly Became Real
However, Strange New Worlds retconned Benny Russell into existence by revealing that he wrote a book, The Kingdom of Elysian, that Dr. M’Benga liked to read to his daughter as a bedtime story. At the time, this was more of an Easter egg than anything else. The fictional tale had to be written by someone, so why not choose a beloved character known for writing sci-fi stories?
This brings us up to Benny’s typewriter appearing in Starfleet Academy, something that seems more impossible now than ever before. You see, it’s easy enough to accept that he was a real writer within the fictional canon of Star Trek. But how would Benjamin Sisko have gotten the actual typewriter from a failed writer who died centuries ago?
The Most Confusing Museum In The Galaxy
Of course, whether Benny failed as a writer is something of an open question. On Deep Space Nine, we see him as a man who goes crazy after his sci-fi masterpiece isn’t published, and he gets committed to a psychiatric hospital after a delusional breakdown. It’s never made clear exactly how he went from being someone who couldn’t publish his magnum opus to a published, respected writer whose works are still being enjoyed centuries in the future.
Even if you can accept that Benny Russell was real (like, did all of his friends actually look like the entire cast of Deep Space Nine?) and that he became famous and successful, there’s still one last question: how does anyone know about any kind of relationship between Sisko and this relatively obscure 20th-century writer? In DS9, it was implied that the only person he told about Benny Russell was his own father, Joseph Sisko; maybe he told Dr. Bashir, but this information would presumably been protected by doctor/patient confidentiality.
One More Thing About Sisko That Makes No Sense
It’s possible that Sisko filed a report about this to Starfleet, but that seems unlikely; after all, he would be admitting to having the equivalent of a mental breakdown while he was spearheading Starfleet’s war with the Dominion. That would be a bad look for anyone, and we know that Sisko doesn’t have a problem with keeping information from Starfleet. That’s one of the big lessons of “In the Pale Moonlight”: that he’s not afraid of omitting information, especially in the name of the greater good.
All of this adds up to the typewriter in Starfleet Academy being something of a paradox: longtime Star Trek fans understand its importance, but it’s unclear how Sisko would have obtained it, much less why the museum would have displayed it as one of his most prized possessions. Still, it makes for a fun Easter egg, one that continues to keep the fandom talking. Now, those fans are left with one final question: what else will we learn about Benny Russell that completely changes what we know about Star Trek?