Star Trek: Starfleet Academy EP Details "Love Letter" to Deep Space Nine (Exclusive)
Star Trek: Starfleet Academy executive producer Alex Kurtzman explained to SYFY Wire the origin of "Series Acclimation Mil,” a “love letter” to Deep Space Nine and Avery Brooks’ Captain Sisko.
Star Trek: Starfleet Academy has made first contact with Deep Space Nine.
The freshman season’s Feb. 5 episode, "Series Acclimation Mil,” dove headfirst into the advanced studies course that is the fate of Captain Benjamin Sisko (Avery Brooks) in DS9’s series finale, “What You Leave Behind.” Plus, Trekkies are thanking the prophets for two very sentimental cameos.
Spoilers ahead!
As co-showrunners Alex Kurtzman and Noga Landau mapped out season one in the writers room, conversations drifted toward the series that dared to ditch Star Trek’s trademark five-year mission premise for a space station packed with misfits and mysticism.
“We talked a lot about Deep Space Nine. We talked about Avery. We talked about the fact that, in some ways, Deep Space Nine didn't quite get its due,” Kurtzman explained to SYFY Wire. “It was very ahead of its time. We wanted to write a love letter to both Deep Space Nine and also Avery.”
The way into honoring Sisko was through the lens of a fellow emissary, sentient photonic SAM (Kerrice Brooks—no relation to Avery), who sets out to uncover what fate befell the legendary Starfleet officer.
At the same time, producers didn’t wish to tamper with Deep Space Nine’s intentionally ambiguous conclusion, a fitting end for a show devoted to characters finding esoteric truths at the intersection of science and spirituality.
“If we had given you a definitive answer, no matter what answer we'd given, I think you would have been really disappointed,” Kurtzman said. “Because it would have broken what the point of that show was and what the point of that ending was about.”
That’s not to say the episode didn’t offer some tangible gifts to longtime Deep Space Nine fans.
Who from Deep Space Nine had cameos on Starfleet Academy?
Avery has essentially been retired from on-screen acting for 25 years, but his signature commanding voice returned to Gene Roddenberry’s universe (via permission to use a snippet from a spoken word album Avery once recorded) to close out the episode with an emotional coda:
“Divine laws are simpler than human ones, which is why it takes a lifetime to be able to understand them. Only love can understand them. Only love can interpret these words as they were meant to be interpreted.”
As SAM begins to tackle one of the Federation's most enduring mysteries, she takes a hard look at the two prevailing theories, which ask: Did Sisko die in the Fire Caves of Bajor, or did Sisko live on in the Celestial Temple?
For Kurtzman—a veteran collaborator of J.J. “Mystery Box” Abrams—fans are far better served with an enlightened perspective on Deep Space Nine’s final chapter over concrete answers.
“I think it does take us into a newer understanding of what [the ending] was,” he noted. “But it doesn't give you a definitive answer, because I think that would be a real crime in a way.”
Along SAM’s investigation, she encountered two people who knew Sisko best, including his son Jake Sisko—with original actor Cirroc Lofton returning to wax poetic about his father.
In a late-episode surprise, SAM also discovered her newfound mentor, Professor Eyla, is actually the latest iteration of the millenia-spanning Trill symbiote Deep Space Nine fans knew as Jadzia Dax and Ezri Dax (played by the episode’s co-writer and Lower Decks alum Tawny Newsome).
“It was a very hard story to break. As they all are, by the way. It wasn't any harder than any other, to be honest with you,” Kurtzman revealed. “It was challenging, because writing a love letter—you better get it right.”
A tale of two emissaries
"Series Acclimation Mil” is just as much a celebration of Deep Space Nine’s triumphs as it is about finding peace with a devastating loss, a journey that hit close to home for the episode’s lead star.
“The way that Sisko died was unexplainable,” Kerrice Brooks told SYFY Wire. “For me, when my granddad died, it felt very unexplainable, too.”
On the set, she found herself feeling “like I was talking to two people at the same time that were merging into one. It felt like everything was collapsing in and colliding.”
With SAM navigating the downside of her own diplomatic duties, she was an ideal audience POV for an extended meditation on Sisko’s 800-year legacy.
“It made a lot of sense, because SAM has been sent there to be an emissary for her people,” Kurtzman offered, “and she's trying to figure out what it means to be an emissary.”
He added, “Tawny Newsome and Kirsten Beyer, our writers, really led the charge on that.”
SAM felt an instant connection with Sisko’s burdens as a chosen one. At first, the 7-month-old hologram struggled with the implications of predetermined fates, before following his example of ultimately fulfilling one’s destiny—but doing so on your own terms.
How did Deep Space Nine end?
“We spent a lot of time in our writers room talking about what Star Trek means to everybody. Everyone will give you kind of the same answer, but also everyone will give you a very different answer,” Kurtzman shared. “If you ask any two people, they'll tell you that their favorite series is two different ones.”
But for many, Deep Space Nine remains the high water mark among the franchise, citing everything from the show’s groundbreaking use of serialized storytelling, to its touching portrayal of Black fatherhood.
The show ended in 1999 following a seven-season run as the “middle child” of ‘90s Star Trek, having debuted between The Next Generation and Voyager.
In the series finale, Sisko vanishes mid-battle with Pah-wraith zealots. Per Bajoran scripture, he was taken directly from the Fire Caves to the Celestial Temple, where he still lives with the prophets as a guardian of Bajor. Meanwhile, Starfleet simply listed him as MIA since his body was never recovered.
As Darem (George Hawkins) put it, Sisko is perhaps better off as “Schrödinger's prophet.” If no one seeks answers, then “everybody wins.”
Season one of Star Trek: Starfleet Academy debuts new episodes Thursdays, exclusively on Paramount+.
