Captain Benjamin Sisko (Avery Broooks) in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine avoided a tragic trope that affected his fellow Star Trek captains, making the character and the show better as a result. DS9‘s Sisko was a unique figure in the Star Trek TV shows of the 1990s, as he juggled his duties as a Starfleet captain with those of being a father, a husband, and a religious icon. This marked Sisko out as different from Captains Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart) and Kathryn Janeway (Kate Mulgrew) each of whom placed their commitment to Starfleet above all else.
Unlike Picard and Janeway, Captain Sisko was a family man, and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine‘s cast of characters included various members of his wider family. Captain Sisko’s father, Joseph (Brock Peters) grounded him, and imparted various pearls of wisdom over jambalaya at Sisko’s Creole Kitchen. Unfortunately for Picard and Janeway, and other Star Trek captains that followed, they weren’t able to seek advice from their own fathers as they had died years before they took command of their respective starships.
In Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Voyager, alien intelligences use the images of Picard and Janeway’s fathers for their own ends. Q (John de Lancie) technically conjured up the image of Maurice Picard twice, deliberately in TNG‘s “Tapestry”, and accidentally in Star Trek: Picard. Both times that Maurice appeared in Star Trek were attempts to get Jean-Luc to confront his issues with his father and his traumatic upbringing. Meanwhile, Captain Jonathan Archer (Scott Bakula) blames the career disappointments of his late father on the Vulcans in Star Trek: Enterprise, creating a prejudice that could often be quite ugly.
By contrast, the portrayal of fatherhood in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine is much more positive, thanks to the introduction of Sisko’s father in season 4. While Captain Sisko had talked of Joseph in the past tense in earlier DS9 episodes like “Paradise”, season 4 confirmed that Joseph was very much alive. Seeing the three generations of Sisko men interact was always a joy, and it gave DS9 an emotional reality that was missing from other Star Trek shows of the time. Without Joseph, the revelations about Sarah (Deborah Lacey) and the birth of Captain Sisko in DS9 season 7 wouldn’t have had the same impact.
Joseph Sisko holds the distinction of being the only father of a Star Trek lead character to both be alive, and part of the recurring cast. Picard, Janeway, Archer, the Kelvin Timeline’s Captain Kirk (Chris Pine) and Captain Michael Burnham (Sonequa Martin-Green) all lost their fathers years before their respective TV shows and movies began. It was later revealed that George Kirk, the father of Captain James T. Kirk (William Shatner) was still alive during Star Trek: The Original Series, but he never appeared on-screen. Star Trek: Deep Space Nine‘s Joseph Sisko is, therefore, a unique character in the wider canon.
Interestingly, Joseph Sisko and Maurice Picard are the only fathers to Star Trek captains who weren’t serving Starfleet officers themselves. Joseph pursued a career as a professional chef, and ran Sisko’s Creole Kitchen in New Orleans for decades, teaching his children to cook. Maurice oversaw the production and distributon of Chateau Picard Wine, a business he wanted Jean-Luc to inherit. This means that, despite their differences in the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine pilot, Sisko and Picard do have something in common; their respective family’s links to the food and drink industries.
All episodes of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine are available to stream on Paramount+