From Pain to Passion;
Captain Benjamin Sisko
The very first captain to come to mind whenever Star Trek is mentioned is usually James T. Kirk, or, in rare cases, Jean-Luc Picard. Very rarely will someone go straight to the best of them all- Benjamin Sisko.
We can forgo the arguments of ‘he wasn’t a captain at the start of the series,’ or ‘Deep Space Nine isn’t as good as the original series or Next Generation.’ Your opinion is yours, but bear in mind this comes from an average kid who watched this series every Saturday growing up with his family and eating homemade pizza.
With the reboots of Star Trek happening, and the subsequent reworking of the entire Trek-verse, it’s easy to forget some of the best story-telling the franchise had to offer, and that was found on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.
As with all Star Treks, the captain is usually the anchor, and therefore the center of most of the action.
“Of course, it’s always got to be about you, doesn’t it!?” — Alexander Dane, Galaxy Quest
As with any character worth reading about or watching on screen, there has to be some sort of reason to like him, to empathize. Benjamin Sisko, at the rank of Commander when DS9 began, was a broken man. He had a great façade going though; tough, resolute, wise. Yet, when he meets the ‘wormhole aliens,’ they show him that he hasn’t quite gotten over something that’s happened to him in the past- the death of his wife.
Again, we’ll forgo the arguments that this is a pretty standard approach to creating a like-able character. And what is the simplest way to make a character easy to empathize with?
Kill off a loved one!
It worked for Bambi.
From the cold, calculating viewpoint of a writer, this is quite easy.
From the perspective of someone who’s had to watch a loved one pass away well before their time, or even when they’d lived a long life, that pain is easily identifiable, and one is all too eager to see how said character deals with that pain. Sadly, for most of us in the real world, our life continues on in its usual mundane way; go to work, pay the pills, wash the car…
One doesn’t have to then contend with keeping a fragile nation together, whilst fighting off a sadistic imperialist race, and deal with being a chosen emissary to a foreign race, AND pick up the pieces of a torn life.
But then again, we’re not all part of star fleet.
“Folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back, only they didn’t. They kept going because they were holding on to something…”- Samwise Gamgee. The Two Towers
Part of the reason a character needs to be like-able is so that there’s a reason to keep reading the story, or watching the movie or the show. It doesn’t matter if there is some deeply profound nugget of wisdom that is pleasantly prepackaged within the story to be served up at the end in an easily digestible manner. It’s usually the characters that make it worth watching, and if they don’t grab the audience at the get-go, then that profound wisdom will stay undiscovered.
Benjamin Sisko, though fictional, is one of the best role models that this writer can think of to watch. Not just for men, but for women as well. And not just for fathers, but mothers too. Not just for people of color, but for all backgrounds.
He was a broken man when the series started, and by the end, there was still that pain, it didn’t just go away. He’d learned to take that pain of watching his wife die and knowing he was going to have to raise his son by himself, and let that drive him forward in his goal of helping to guide Bajor in their reconstruction, leading the crew of Deep Space Nine in exploring the Gamma Quadrant, facing off against The Dominion, and many other challenges.
His pain led to his passion.
Along the way, however, we saw him flinch, question why he was doing it, and even give up for a time. Doesn’t this happen to us in real life? Yet, as all passions normally do, he couldn’t let it go, and ended up returning to the station to finish what he’d started.
While it may be a little embarrassing to admit this now, this writer only watched the series because there were only five broadcast channels and one TV in his house while growing up. Despite this, when a similar pain visited him later on in life, Captain Ben Sisko was one of the role models he looked to when it was time to pick up the pieces and move on with life. Thankfully, no wormhole aliens or fragile provisional governments were needing his help.
But Captain Benjamin Sisko was there to help.
Kyle Weckerly is a freelance writer, white paper specialist, and working on becoming a ghost writer. Feel free to stop by weckerlywriter.com to check out if his writing services are right for you.
