‘Star Trek: Starfleet Academy’ Team Talks Major ‘Deep Space Nine’ Connections

[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for Star Trek: Starfleet Academy Season 1 Episode 5 “Series Acclimation Mil.”]

The newest Star Trek series on Paramount+, Starfleet Academy, revisits a major character from the long-running franchise’s past in the Thursday, February 5, episode, when Sam (Kerrice Brooks), working against the clock, goes on a journey that has her digging into another emissary’s history.

Sam is Kasq’s emissary to the Federation, the only photonic cadet, and it’s up to her to explain organics (those with physical bodies) to her makers, who have never left their world. Her makers are worried that organics will try to use them again, like when they saw them as servants. She must convince her makers that organics can be trusted. Her task is to become enrolled in an advanced seminar, Confronting the Unexplainable, but the professor, Illa (Lower Decks‘ Tawny Newsome!), tells her she’s already missed a lot and to look to next year. But if she can solve the mystery of The Fate of Benjamin Sisko, Emissary of the Prophets… Yes, as in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.

And so that sends Sam on journey, enlisting the help of the other cadets, to find out what happened to Sisko (Avery Brooks) after he never returned from the Bajoran Fire Caves and presumably lived with the prophets as a guardian of Bajor. In the end, while Sam feels like she failed, that Sisko (separated from his family) didn’t get to live the life he wanted, that emissaries who succeed must lose everything they love and are doomed, Illa argues she learned a lot. She also shows her the book that Sisko’s son, Jake (Cirroc Lofton from Deep Space Nine!) never published. Sam then envisions a conversation with Jake about the realities of being an emissary and who his dad was. Sam then realizes there’s more to Illa than just being a professor. She’s Illa Dax, as in Dax, the mentor to Sisko Dax. Sam then tells her makers that she can trust organics and will reach out when there’s something to report.

Newsome also co-wrote this episode with Kirsten Beyer.

“That was part of the conversation from the beginning, was that she should play the teacher, Isla Dax,” executive producer Alex Kurtzman tells TV Insider. “That episode was so amazing because we wanted to write a love letter both to Deep Space Nine, but also to Avery and to Cirroc, and Tawny is friends with Cirroc. I think Deep Space Nine is the one that’s deepest, deepest in her heart of all the Trek shows. And she and Kirsten have very different, but also connected connections to the show, so they were a perfect pair. They really brought two different perspectives to it. And it was a fantastic first draft. It was like one of the best first drafts we got all season. And it didn’t change a ton. It was really just a wonderful thing.”

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Since Sam and Sisko are both emissaries, “it always seemed totally natural and organic that she would eventually find out about [him],” says executive producer Noga Landau. “And then it became really irresistible for her, a photonic being who has all the answers. She thinks she has all the answers to confront something that actually is unanswerable. And to have that be what leads her on this journey of self-discovery, that’s so pivotal to her character.”

Kerrice Brooks calls this episode “beautiful,” especially with what it means to Sam.

“Oh my Gosh, it felt like I was reaching for an ancestor that I didn’t know, but I knew I felt connected to. That’s what it felt like spiritually for Sam, even though she’s not a spiritual person. I think there’s an unspoken spirituality about Sam because there’s so much belief in her. That’s her cornerstone and there’s so much hope. And I think that the cornerstone of faith is trust,” she explains.

“She doesn’t have a reason to not trust. And so with the episode with Sisko, it was beautiful because it was all kind of like a letter to him and we see that by the end of it. But it’s just saying like, ‘Hey, what’s up? This is my life. These are my friends. This is what I’m here to do. I heard about you. Talk to me please.’ And I think that that reaching, that yearning is such a beautiful thing because it’s coming from the bottom of her heart. She just wants to relate to someone,” she continues. “She’s never had a family. She doesn’t have a father, no mother, no sisters, no brothers, no cousins. There’s literally no one from our planet besides her. And Sisko is just an amazing thing that he’s like her north star that she can’t see, but she feels and she lets it migrate up here and she lets it live up here and she wants it to live down here. And so it’s about finding that heart chakra for her really.”

What did you think of the Deep Space Nine connections in the latest Starfleet Academy? Let us know in the comments section below.

Star Trek: Starfleet Academy, Thursdays, Paramount+