Warning: SPOILERS for Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 1, Episode 5 – “Series Acclimation Mil”Benny Russell’s typewriter is on display in Star Trek: Starfleet Academy‘s Captain Benjamin Sisko (Avery Brooks) Museum thanks to a retcon by Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. Written by Kirsten Beyer and Tawny Newsome, and directed by Larry Teng, Star Trek: Starfleet Academy episode 5 is a heartfelt ode to Avery Brooks’ legacy as Captain Benjamin Sisko in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.
One of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine‘s greatest episodes is season 6’s masterpiece, “Far Beyond the Stars.” Written by Ira Steven Behr and Hans Beimler, and directed by Avery Brooks, the Prophets of Bajor give Captain Sisko a vision that he was a 1950s science fiction writer named Benny Russell.
Faced with the racism of his era, Benny suffers a nervous breakdown when his white publishers refuse to print his story about the black Captain of a space station called Deep Space Nine. In Star Trek: Deep Space Nine season 7’s “Shadows and Symbols,” the Pah-Wraiths give Captain Sisko another Benny Russell vision to prevent him from opening the Orb of the Emissary.
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine left it open to interpretation whether Benny Russell actually existed in Star Trek’s history or whether the tragic author was merely an alternate persona for Captain Sisko created by the Prophets and then co-opted by the Pah-Wraiths. 24 years later, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds unexpectedly revealed that Benny Russell was a real historical figure.
Benny Russell’s Typewriter In Star Trek: Starfleet Academy’s Sisko Museum Was Explained By Strange New Worlds
In Star Trek: Starfleet Academy episode 5, Benny Russell’s typewriter is one of many artifacts and ephemera on display at the Benjamin Sisko Museum in New Orleans. Benny’s typewriter appears because Star Trek: Strange New Worlds season 1, episode 8, “The Elysian Kingdom” retconned Benny Russell as a real author who existed in Star Trek history.
Benny Russell’s canonical work includes “Bad Day at Red Rock,” “Deep Space Nine,” “Far Beyond the Stars,” “The Kingdom of Elysian” “This Island Mars,” and “Solar Odyssey.”
Benny Russell was the author of “The Kingdom of Elysian,” a children’s fantasy story Dr. Joseph M’Benga (Babs Olusanmokun) read to his young daughter, Rukiya (Sage Arrindell). A non-corporeal entity inside the Jonsian Nebula (that was not unlike Bajor’s Prophets) turned the crew of the USS Enterprise into characters in “The Kingdom of Elysian.”
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds‘ retcon not only answered the decades-old question that Benny Russell in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine was real, but it also established that other Star Trek characters read Russell’s stories. Thus, Benny’s typewriter becomes a treasured memento of Captain Sisko’s fascinating life, honoring how Benjamin’s mind-meld with the 1950s author made him “the dreamer and the dream.”
Captain Sisko Became 2 Historical Figures In Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
Series Acclimation Mil aka SAM (Kerrice Brooks) and her friends researched Captain Benjamin Sisko’s life in Star Trek: Starfleet Academy episode 5. Had they dug deeper, however, SAM and the other cadets might have been flummoxed by Benjamin’s history as Benny Russell, and also that Sisko bears a striking resemblance to a man named Gabriel Bell.
In Star Trek: Deep Space Nine season 3’s “Past Tense” two-parter, Commander Sisko, Dr. Julian Bashir (Alexander Siddig), and Lieutenant Jadzia Dax time-traveled to 2024 Los Angeles. Mired in the tragic events of the Bell Riots, Sisko ended up impersonating Gabriel Bell (John Lendale Bennett), the leader of demonstrators protesting San Francisco’s abusive sanctuary districts.
Captain Sisko’s image ended up as the historical record of Gabriel Bell, although it’s Benjamin with hair and without his signature goatee. Thus, Starfleet Academy’s cadets might not have recognized Captain Sisko had they stumbled upon Gabriel Bell in their research.
Captain Benjamin Sisko’s unusual feat of somehow becoming the doppelgänger of two historical figures in Star Trek history is as worthy of study in Professor Illa Dax’s (Tawny Newsome) Confronting the Unexplainable class in Star Trek: Starfleet Academy as the Emissary’s disappearance is at the end of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.
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