#avery brooks

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine

I wish Starfleet Academy hadn't implied that Sisko never came back to Kassidy and his unborn child. Here's a note from Memory Alpha about Sisko's fate at the end of DS9:

Originally, the episode was to end without any ambiguity as to whether or not Sisko was going to return to his corporeal life – the answer was a definite 'no'. The idea was that Sisko had become a Prophet, and that was how it would remain for all time, thus confirming the Sarah Prophet's warning in "Penumbra" and "'Til Death Do Us Part" that if he married Kasidy Yates, he "would know nothing but sorrow." The sorrow was that he was going to have to leave his unborn child behind, and would never get to be with her after her birth. Indeed, the final scene between Sisko and Kasidy was shot this way, with Sisko telling Kasidy he would never be back. However, a day or two after the shoot, Avery Brooks called Ira Behr and told him he wasn't happy with the scene. He felt that having a black man leave his pregnant black wife to raise their child alone carried certain negative connotations that he wasn't comfortable with. As Terry J. Erdmann puts it in the Companion; "In the 24th century, the situation conveyed only sorrow. However, in the 21st century, there was a secondary social issue that had particular resonance." As such, the scene was rewritten and reshot so as to clarify that Sisko will return some day.

Awkward family photos.

Picard is the Captain of No Compromise. His morals are his compass, and every time his duty to Starfleet clashes with them, it chafes him, and he refuses to back down until he finds a path that serves both. He will not spend what he is to get what he wants.

Sisko is the 'I can live with it' Captain. We see it most clearly during In the Pale Moonlight, but he is that man from the very beginning; the circumstances of his command just strip away every layer until nothing is left but that core truth. And the hard thing about that moment, that speech, is that he knows. He isn't rationalizing. He walks through every ugly step like he's reading his own indictment, and at the end he doesn't grant himself absolution. He just decides he can carry it. And means it.

Picard could never have been the Deep Space Nine captain. The compromises would hollow him out.

But flip it around and Sisko could never have been the Flagship captain either. Not because he lacks the greatness, but because his greatness is the wrong shape for it. Hugh is a perfect example. Hugh gets to become Hugh because in the end, against his trauma and instincts, Picard refuses to treat him as a weapon, and that refusal only lands with the weight it does because he has never once quietly spent his principles for convenience. He is the ideals. They aren't aspirational when he says them. They're real.

Sisko couldn't hold that position. His strength lives in the grey, and you can't be the beacon and be in the mud at the same time. "It's easy to be a saint in paradise."

Sisko is who you need when the war is real and the cost is brutal and someone has to make the call no one else will make. Picard is who you need when someone has to prove the dream is still worth having.

We need them both. That's the whole point.