Starfleet Academy’s DS9 Episode Was Completely Different

In the “Star Trek: Starfleet Academy” episode “Series Acclimation Mil,” the holographic character Sam (Kerrice Brooks) has become fixated on her role as an emissary between her holographic species and the flesh-and-blood species she encounters at school. She begins studying history, and finds another notable emissary from centuries before that she would like to emulate. She wants to be like Captain Benjamin Sisko, the Bajoran Emissary to the Prophets.

Trekkies will immediately be able to tell you all about Captain Sisko (Avery Brooks), as he was the lead character on “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.” In brief, Sisko was the first person to make contact with a noncorporeal species of aliens that lived inside of a stable wormhole near the planet of Bajor. The aliens were considered to be the Prophets of the Bajoran religion, and Sisko, quite unwittingly, became a holy figure. Throughout “Deep Space Nine,” Sisko wrestled with his status as the Emissary. The last we saw of Sisko, he vanished into the wormhole and never exited.

“Series Acclimation Mil” sees Sam discovering all this information through ancient archives, as “Starfleet Academy” takes place about 850 years after “Deep Space Nine.” There is a cameo from Cirroc Lofton, who played Sisko’s son Jake on DS9, and Tawny Newsome plays the latest iteration of Dax, a long-lived, body-trading character. The episode ends with a voiceover from Brooks. It’s a fun little handshake to the DS9 fans in the audience.

In a recent interview for “Trek Talks” (transcribed by TrekMovie), Newsome — who co-wrote the episode — revealed that the original pitch for the episode wasn’t pointedly about “Deep Space Nine.” Instead, it was going to be about multiple familiar captains from the past. Only as the episode was workshopped, did it become a Sisko story specifically.

Tawny Newsome didn’t say which captains would have been focused on in “Series Acclimation Mil,” but knowing the nostalgia-forward tack that “Star Trek” had taken with recent shows, it’s likely the “Starfleet Academy” characters would have been doing book reports on the likes of Captain Kirk, Captain Picard, Captain Janeway, etc. Newsome laid it out thus:

“It started as this idea where all of the students were going to be taking a test, and they all had to learn about different captains from the past, and we have some character learning about the captains we know, and then also some captains from the canon that we were going to build out, like some new names. And then I think we decided we just needed to focus on one captain, and a lot of ideas were thrown out.”

She then revealed that she, like so many of us, is a huge fan of “Deep Space Nine,” and pushed to have Sisko be the focus of the episode. “I was pretty adamant from the beginning that it needed to be a Sisko story,” she said, “and also the fact that we kept calling Sam an ’emissary’ for her people. I was like, we can’t say the word ’emissary’ 40 times in this episode and not have it be about Sisko. That’s crazy.” So it became expressly about Sam and her growing interest in Benjamin Sisko as an historical figure. Once that part was unlocked, the script came easily. Newsome even said that the idea was locked into place prior to the 2023 writers’ strike, giving one a good idea as to how long ago it began germinating.

It also seems that Tawny Newsome had to shorten her script. “You should have seen the first draft of Episode 5 from ‘Academy,'” she said. “It was about 72 pages, and I think we had to get it down to about 48.” The resulting episode turned out quite well, and brought the events of “Deep Space Nine” into the 32nd century quite nicely.

The second season of “Starfleet Academy” will air in 2027, but it has already been announced that it will be the show’s last, and that it has already completed filming. Newsome admitted that she didn’t participate much for the second season. “Because I had other obligations,” she said, “I wasn’t full-time in the room.” “Starfleet Academy” will be joined in oblivion by “Star Trek: Strange New Worlds,” which is airing its fourth season later in 2026, and its fifth and final season in 2027. All of the rigmarole over the mergers between Paramount, Skydance, and Warner Bros. (and I will not go into detail here) have also left the future of “Star Trek” something of a question mark at the current juncture.

Some projects have been announced, including a “Strange New Worlds” spinoff called “Star Trek: Year One,” and there is also a potential movie in the works from the makers of “Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves.” But those projects are not in production. Indeed, no shows are currently in production. Time will tell what happens next. But if Paramount needs someone to write scripts for a series of “Star Trek” audio dramas, let them know that I can do it.