My name is Kenneth Jones. I'm forty years old, and I teach chemistry at a public high school in Baltimore. I watched the first episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine in January of 1993, and I watched the last one, What You Leave Behind, this June, with my wife Lynda and two friends and a pot of gumbo, and in between I missed exactly two episodes, both of which I caught in reruns. This page is my thank-you note to the show, three months late. It took me that long to be ready to write it.

Why it was the best Trek

I will make the case in the form of a lab report, since that's how I make most cases.

The Captain

I want to be careful how I say this, because it matters to me. When I was a boy in the late sixties, I watched Lieutenant Uhura on the bridge of the Enterprise, and I knew it meant something that she was there. But she was one officer among many. Benjamin Sisko was the man in the center of the story. A Black man in command of the station, and more than that, a widower raising his son by himself.

That second part is the one that got me. In the very first episode we learn that Sisko lost his wife in the Borg attack at Wolf 359, and that he is bringing up Jake alone. And then, for seven years, we watched him do it. He cooks his son breakfast. He worries about the girls Jake dates. He wants Jake to go into Starfleet, and when Jake tells him he wants to be a writer instead, Sisko swallows hard and backs him all the way. That's a father.

I have taught a great many young men in this city whose fathers were not around. I am not going to pretend a television program fixes that. But for seven years there was a man on the screen every week who showed exactly what it looks like to be there, and I never once saw him played for a joke.

He was a lot of other things too. A commander, then a captain. A man who loved baseball in a century when nobody else did, and kept a baseball on his desk. The Emissary of the Prophets, which he didn't want to be and grew into. And a man with a temper, which I liked, because the other captains were sometimes a little too calm to be believed.

Avery Brooks

Before DS9 most of us knew Avery Brooks as Hawk on Spenser: For Hire and then A Man Called Hawk. He's also a professor of theater at Rutgers, a jazz singer, and a stage actor who played Paul Robeson. He directed several episodes of DS9, including Far Beyond the Stars, which you'll find on my one-per-season page. Last fall he turned up as a high school principal in American History X, and as a teacher I'll say he got it right. When he shaved his head for the fourth season, two of my students asked me if I was going to do the same. I had a head start.

The Crew

The Feud

For those who weren't on the newsgroups in 1993: Deep Space Nine and Babylon 5 premiered within a few weeks of each other, both of them set on space stations, and the fans of each spent the next several years insisting the other show was the copy. It got ugly in places. My friend Douglas, who teaches physics across the hall from me, is a Babylon 5 man, and we have been having this argument in the faculty lounge for six and a half years.

Here is my peace offering. Both shows are over now. They were both ambitious, both told long stories when television wasn't supposed to, and both took their characters seriously. We were lucky to have two. If you want the other side of the argument made well, read Neil Brandvold's The Long Arc: A Babylon 5 Page. He makes a better case for that show than Douglas ever has, and I've told Douglas so.

Elsewhere in the galaxy

Voyager carries the flag now. Margaret Becker's Command Presence: A Captain Janeway Tribute is the best case for that captain I've read, written by an engineer who knows something about command. And we lost Dr. McCoy himself in June; there is a fine tribute to DeForest Kelley by an Atlanta ER nurse, The Country Doctor.