6x13 Far Beyond the Stars

[9.7/10] Star Trek had never addressed Blackness head on before. The franchise addressed it obliquely, through metaphor and representation. The Original Series put Nichelle Nichols’ Uhura on the bridge, cast William Marshall as the brilliant scientist Richard Daystrom, depicted one of television’s first interracial kisses, and told stories about the absurdities of aliens who judged one another based on the color of their skin. The Next Generation had LeVar Burton’s Geordi and Michael Dorn’s Worf in the main cast, Whoopi Goldberg’s Guinan as a recurring character, did episodes decrying prejudice of all stripes, and put Burton in the director’s chair, a position he would occupy regularly through Enterprise.

But none of these characters, none of those stories, were explicitly about Black people or the prejudice they face. Part of that is the aspirational sensibility that's in the show’s DNA. Much of the point of Star Trek is to show a brighter possible future, one where racism is an anachronism taken no more seriously than phrenology. And much of the ethos of science fiction is to disarm the audience by tackling social and political issues through allegories that help us leave our preconceived notions at the door. Neither part of the approach is a sin.

On the other hand, maybe Star Trek didn’t have the credibility to address anti-Black prejudice directly. For all of The Original Series’s progressive ideals, Uhura was relegated to the show’s B-team. Its Klingons are arguably in blackface. The Next Generation featured African-coded backwards barbarians in “Code of Honor”. And neither show included Black writers as regular members of their creative team. Narrative art ought to be judged in the context of its times, but there’s myriad ways in which the franchise fell short in that regard as well.

And yet, that thirty-two year delay gives “Far Beyond the Stars” an incredible power from being the first time Star Trek told a story plainly centered on the bigotry faced by African Americans, and one from the first (and to that point, only) series in the franchise featuring a person of color as its lead character. And the results are nothing short of miraculous.

The episode transposes our heroes into 1950s America, with Sisko as “Benny Russell”, a science fiction writer at a genre magazine in New York City. Part of the draw of the outing is the chance to see your favorite performers as they are, free from the make-up and prosthetics that are the stock and trade of Star Trek.

So here is Aaron Eisenberg without Nog’s lobes, Marc Alaimo without Dukat’s neck foils, J.G. Hertzler without Martok’s ridges, Jeffrey Combs with neither his Ferengi flair nor his Vorta verve. The bridge of Nana Visitor’s nose is clear. Terry Farrell is spot-free. The performers who play Quark and Odo still bicker, but this time their faces are plain. And after eleven years in the franchise, Michael Dorn appears for the first time without a single stitch of prosthetics or dab of make-up. There is a thrill to jettisoning the get-ups and seeing these outstanding performers as who they are.

The same’s true for “Far Beyond the Stars”. While Star Trek made its bones on stories of acceptance and overcoming enmity, dropping the pretense of alien species and invented geopolitics and diving squarely into the unpleasant truths at the heart of 1950s Americana comes with a novelty, and a directness, that captures your attention from the word go.

So you feel it when Benny and his colleague, Kay Eaton, are gently encouraged to “sleep late” on the day the magazine’s bringing in photographers so the readers can see what the writers look like, lest the readership dare discover they’re enjoying stories from black people or women. (Eaton’s pen name, “K.C. Hunter”, is not unlike TOS writer Dorothy Fontana going by “D.C. Fontana” for similar reasons.) You feel it when star baseball player Willie doesn’t want to move uptown because his success won’t insulate him from prejudice. You feel it when the cops hassle Benny over nothing because of what he looks like. You feel it when Benny’s editor refuses to publish his story because it features a black man as captain.

The reasons are myriad. Pabst (Odo) blames the pictures on their unsophisticated readership rather than personal prejudice. He dresses his decisions up as blind to any color but green, only wanting to sell magazines and not scare away their subscriber base. But each time the result is the same. People like Benny are denied the chance to tell their stories, to live their lives the way their white neighbors do, to enjoy the peace and prosperity that ought to be as available to them as anyone.

It is, in a word, real, in a way Star Trek rarely, if ever, strives for in telling stories of prejudice. There is no layer of abstraction here. Only cops bothering innocent people, authority figures reinforcing racism even as they claim not to harbor it, and Black talents being confined and stymied because of the color of their skin. Seeing it depicted so clearly, so plainly, is bracing -- in a good way.

Not for nothing, for all its heart-rending gravity, “Far Beyond the Stars” can also be tremendously fun. As in season 4’s “Our Man Bashir, while the accents can be a bit dodgy in places, it’s a hoot to see the usual cast stretch their wings and show off their range in a period setting. The dye-in-the-wool capitalist Quark portraying a suspected commie, while the fiercely justice-minded Odo portrays a “my hands are tied” pragmatist when it comes to right and wrong is a neat switch. Seeing gruff and grumbly Worf play a suave and playful lothario is a trip. The sure-footed and colorful O’Brien plays a retiring, absent-minded scribe. Seeing the costumes and hairstyles and mid-century setting is novel enough, but folks playing against type adds to the thrill of it all.

And yet, amid the differences, “Far Beyond the Stars” lays the seeds for the idea that Benny Russell drew from his own life to create the story of Deep Space Nine we know and love. The Cardassians and the Dominion are the personifications of the crooked cops who harangue him. The station’s chief engineer is a pastiche of a friend who always writes about robots because he just likes ‘em. His father and Kai Opaka are a reflection of a street preacher who speaks of “the prophets” and spurs him to use his voice and embrace his power.

The parallels are, commendably, not one-to-one, in the way writers’ inspirations rarely are. But there are layers here, to the experiences Benny has and the way that translates into the stories he’s compelled to write. This is, in a more complex way, Star Trek’s Shakespeare in Love, a story about how a writer’s life spurred their magnum opus.

None of Benny’s inspirations is more heartbreaking than the death of Jimmy, a slick petty criminal who’s murdered by the police. It is somehow, only the episode’s second most harrowing scene. To find someone so young snuffed out, where the theft of a car turns into an execution, is gutting. The only thing worse comes when a distraught Benny, pleads with the cops over it, gets agitated with them over this patent injustice, and is beaten brutally while his girlfriend screams for them to stop, while a crowd of people watches and does nothing. It is a chilling reminder of the indifference to suffering, to brutality, and a society that would permit it, and maybe even condone it.

In the modern day, in the wake of the George Flloyd protests and the Black Lives Matter movement, these scenes sadly come with the same force today they did in 1998, not far removed from the beating of Rodney King. It nonetheless still plays as a radical choice, to depict such a horrible thing so unflinchingly, with such patent cruelty, to a network television audience halfway between the conviction of the Central Park Five and the election of America’s first Black President.

A scene of such horror makes it all the more poignant that Benny would use his story to turn “Jimmy” into Jake, a son whom he can watch after, guide, and protect. Jake gets to have a life Jimmy never will, a chance to live on, a guardian to save him from the worst villains he might encounter.

Because through Benny’s eyes, Deep Space Nine is first and foremost a story of hope. There is a grand contrast between the prejudice Benny deals with on a daily, even hourly basis, and the tale of a Black man whose position of power and prestige has everything to do with who he is and nothing to do with his race. The triumphs of Ben Sisko become that much more bittersweet when measured against the writer who’s beaten down at every turn.

Benny Russell needs to write these stories, of a brighter future for his people, and all people, free from the limits that hem him in constantly. The hope that Star Trek represents is given new force, with an episode that explicitly affirms the stories told since 1966, but especially those told since 1993, for what they mean to the people who get to see themselves in the tales.

Especially for those that don’t. There may be no more devastating turn than Benny Russel, willing to water down the statement made by his science fiction masterwork by framing it all as the dream on a down-on-his-luck Black man, walking on air at the fact that his editor will print the story he felt spiritually bound to tell, discovering that his publisher would rather pulp the whole edition than let such ideas reach the public, and wants Benny fired to boot. The heaven and hell of it. The rank injustice of it. The bitter cowardice of it. It’s almost too much to take.

So is Avery Brooks' performance. The man pulls double duty as both director and star, and the man practically deserves a medal for it. In a period setting, Brooks’ camera captures the bustle and patter of the Big Apple in the 1950s and its denizens. His efforts deserve extra credit given that all of this visual language and vibe had to be created from scratch, without being able to rest on past precedent for stories set in the normal Star Trek universe.

And at the same time, he gives his greatest performance in the series. Benny’s mental breakdown in the office upon hearing the news is utterly devastating. The frantic breaths, the stuttering speech, the physical distress all make you feel his complete loss at the futility of his efforts crashing against an edifice of bigotry. Brooks gives a performance that is no less vulnerable than Patrick Stewart’s in TNG’s “Chain of Command”, of a man so utterly broken by the injustice, by the distance between this sublime thing he’s compelled to create, and a cruel society that punishes him for it, that if you cannot feel for him in that moment, you must be made of stone.

When he demands of his colleagues, “I am a human being, damnit!”, when he speaks his confessional about how you cannot kill an idea, when he practically pleads that these figures are real, I’ll admit, I broke down. Perhaps someone who feels compelled to write cannot help but sympathize with a figure who professes the same and is nevertheless stopped in their tracks. But as a lover of stories, I also think of all the ones we never got to have, because people who felt them, who bled them, were held back from the gates of power for cruel and inhumane reasons. To see a person with a dream, something they want in their very souls, denied without recourse and left to rot for daring to envision something better, is heartbreaking in ways that I, being no Benny Russell, struggle to articulate.

The parting thought of “Far Beyond the Stars” is that Benny didn’t fail, that his world is not a vision from the Wormhole Aliens, but rather reality, and that the world of Benjamin Sisko, the one we’ve been watching for six seasons, exists only in Benny's mind. Truth be told, I’ve never known quite how to feel about that. There’s trifling but irksome aspects to the idea. (Did Benny dream up the adventures of Kirk and Picard too? That's a hell of an involved preamble!) And despite superb stories like “Normal Again” from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, I’m always a little hesitant of the “These adventures are all in the character’s head!” trope.

But I’m also uneasy about the idea because of how it ascribes Deep Space Nine as the triumph of a Black man who not only doesn’t exist, but who has no real life analogue. None of the three credited writers for this episode are Black. Every showrunner in the franchise to his point had been white. The producers deserve credit for having Brooks direct, but as much as Star Trek has been a bastion of representation in front of the camera, it rarely was behind the scenes. To pretend otherwise, to paint this show itself as the realized dream of a writer beaten down by billy clubs and bigotry because of his Blackness, without a single actual Black writer participating in the story, feels churlish at best.

Despite my qualms, there is beauty in the idea that whoever penned it, this show represents the dream of so many people like Benny, who imagined a better future that might never live to see. Deep Space Nine is a series about civilization, about war, about religion, about moral gray areas and cultural exchange. But it is also, much more quietly, about Black success, Black fatherhood, Black love in a way that is no less potent. That such a series exists, that it is so beautiful and heart-rending on a regular basis, that it normalized these things through Captain Sisko when people are still freaking out about black main characters in major franchises to this day, remains a miracle.

I don’t want to be a pollyanna. Black people in the United States and beyond continue to face tremendous prejudice and systemic challenges that threaten them in ways that are less overt than those faced by Benny Russell, but no less insidious today. The entertainment industry is by no means immune from these forces, and in some cases perpetuates them. And the internet has seemingly emboldened bigots to cry out “forced diversity” anytime something comes out with something besides lily white casting.

And yet, we live in a time when creators like Jordan Peele and Ryan Coogler have captivated audiences and generated beaucoup box office bucks with tales of science fiction and fantasy that speak to the Black experience. We live in a time where Moonlight a superlative, incredible film written, directed, and starring Black creatives won Best Picture at the Oscars. And not for nothing, we live in a time where there are not one, not two, but three Star Trek series in production at the same time whose lead characters are played by Black performers.

That doesn’t happen without Deep Space Nine. Benny Russell isn’t real, but the people he stands in for are. The events of DS9 aren't real, but the stories it tells are. You cannot kill those ideas. You cannot erase their power. And for all the mixed blessings of Star Trek’s efforts at representation, it’s telling that “Far Beyond the Stars”, one of the few outings where it goes directly at something it danced around for so long, remains one of its high water marks. Delusion or reality, fact or fiction, the hope and dream that Benny Russell represents lives on. We’re still watching it.