You're right that Sisko ran away on the show when Jadzia died, though to be honest, that's never been a character beat I've really bought. After all, his way of coping when Jennifer died was to continue to do his duty... hard to imagine that in wartime he would just run off, even if it was Jadzia. But fundamentally, the trajectory of Sisko on Deep Space Nine is learning to accept that he is "of Bajor." Of course, you can justify that he might go in a different direction, but this new direction looks back at a seven-year story arc, and basically says, "nah, never mind". Plus, it's fundamentally less interesting than the alternative, which the real cardinal sin here. Maybe it's realistic for Sisko to decide to leave Bajor and captain an exploration ship... but it's also boring. There was never a book that did anything I found interesting with it. (Plus, I think each line of novels should have its own distinct identity... at this point we have three ongoing novel ranges about married male captains taking care of toddlers!)
No. He contaminated one Maquis colony world (whatever that even means, since the Maquis are a guerrilla force rather than a civilian nation) with a biological toxin that would force them to evacuate. None of them were killed, although a planetary biosphere without sentient life (evidently a sparse one from the look of it) was destroyed. And the whole point of the story was that Sisko chose to perform that single "villainous" act because that was what Eddington expected of him, so he beat Eddington by adopting the role of villain in that one instance, albeit in a way that didn't actually harm any sentient life. People who try to use this as an indictment of Sisko's character are missing the point that he consciously chose to act out of character in that instance as a calculated tactic. Was it a good thing he did? No. It was a calculated, limited act of "evil" for a specific purpose. But it was orders of magnitude below "nuking colonies." It was more like using tear gas to drive people out of a building, just on a much larger scale. Using tear gas is hardly a good thing -- it's banned in warfare and should probably be banned for police use -- but it would be dishonest to say that someone who tear-gassed a single building had firebombed multiple occupied buldings. They're two entirely different magnitudes of badness -- and more basically, one is true and the other is false. The moment you falsify a fact, you invalidate your argument. Who wanted that? That's certainly not how Sisko was portrayed in the earlier DS9 post-finale novels that Marco edited. He had no godlike powers, but was just a man living on Bajor with his family. Oh, on the contrary. His way of coping when Jennifer died was to retreat to a desk job at Utopia Planitia for three years, and when he was reluctantly assigned to command DS9, he gave serious thought to resigning his commission. (I realized a while back that Sisko's arc in "Emissary" is basically the same as Pike's in "The Cage." They're both depressed and ready to resign, until the events of the story revitalize them.)
He did the bare minimum of his duty in a safe, unremarkable posting, and when he was assigned to a more challenging duty, he was ready to resign at the first opportunity, until that little incident with a wormhole changed his mind. I'd call that consistent with a personality that retreats from life in the wake of tragedy.
I don't see it. He never abandoned a responsibility. There is a big difference between abandoning a commitment and thinking about it. "Retreat to a desk job" seems an unnecessarily pejorative way to describe his actions, when as far as we know, he was assigned the posting; indeed, we know from "Way of the Warrior" that he specifically did not leave Starfleet when he could have.
I think that's missing the point of Sisko's character arc in "Emissary." He didn't start out in a neutral place; he was lost and broken, trapped in his grief and ready to give up on Starfleet. It's not "pejorative" to point out that stories often start with their characters in bad places that they have to grow beyond. And I'd be the last person to see it as a character failing for someone who's lost a loved one to be burdened by depression. That's something that warrants sympathy, not disparagement. Depression is a disease, not a moral failing. It impairs our ability to see our own power or options, so that we lose hope or give up on the things that matter to us. What I'm saying is that we know from the show that Sisko is capable of falling into depression, and I find it plausible that that could lead him to make a bad choice in life.
I'm saying "retreat" is a pejorative way to refer to an assignment that as far as we know, he was ordered to take and did (when he could have not taken it).
I absolutely agree with the depression angle - as you say, Sisko had demonstrated that tendency from his very first appearance. And it kicked in each time after a loss of people he had come to trust and depend upon - Jennifer, then Jadzia, then the Prophets. That's a psychologically plausible character trait for a person to have, and one based on established history. I suppose the difference is that in the first two cases, he went back to his family, to Earth or as near as possible, and held them close. After Jennifer, he went to Utopia Planitia, an assignment as close to home as he could get. After Jadzia, he took Jake and went home to his father. Whereas after the Prophets left his life, he specifically avoided his family, took a ship to the Romulan border then to the Gamma Quadrant to get as far away from them as possible. For a character who was arguably the most family-oriented captain of them all - and one for whom the actor was vocally invested in keeping the character that way, especially as a black American man - I can see how that would rub people up the wrong way. So I think it's an out-of-universe reading of the material creeping into the in-universe reading. There may be logical explanations and justifications for Sisko's behaviour inside the story (he considers himself to be the danger to his family, so stayed away from them for their safety) but it didn't take into account the way that behaviour would look to 21st-century audiences, or at least the one didn't outweigh the other. It's a little bit funny that this entire argument that has been going on for over a decade at this point only happened because DRG3's editor told him "Get Sisko back on a starship bridge". That's it. Out of that, came all of this. .
"Pejorative" is a truly bizarre word to use here. I'm not insulting his choices as a person, because he's a fictional character and his choices are made for him by the writers to reveal and advance his character arc. Many character arcs start out with the characters in bad places, which is not intended to insult them, but to set up their journeys of growth and self-discovery. The plot point of Sisko's three years at Utopia Planitia was not meant to indicate merely a neutral, routine assignment, but to reveal something specific about his character. Here's the dialogue from "Emissary": Sisko wanted to stay at Utopia Planitia, or to resign from Starfleet altogether. It wasn't "just following orders." It wasn't character-neutral. The whole point was to use that assignment as a symbol for where Sisko was emotionally at that stage, trapped in grief and unable to move on with his life. "You exist here." He kept bringing the Prophets back to Jennifer's death because he couldn't move forward from it. That's why he withdrew to a desk job and resisted a more challenging assignment. Yes, on the surface he said it was to take care of Jake, and that was part of it, but there's a subtext that was revealed more fully over the course of the episode. This is a good analysis. There are in-story rationalizations for why Sisko's choice was necessary, but having an in-story explanation doesn't necessarily mean that something was the right story to tell in the first place. I'm not really commenting on the worth of this specific story one way or the other, I'm just saying I don't think it's necessarily out of character for Sisko to withdraw when he's in a bad place emotionally.
I think you're misreading the character, at least I understand him. (People are allowed to have different opinions, but you are coming across as unwilling to understand mine.) You said, "His way of coping when Jennifer died was to retreat to a desk job at Utopia Planitia for three years, and when he was reluctantly assigned to command DS9, he gave serious thought to resigning his commission." I think that misreads the situation, I don't see it as a "retreat." We don't have any indication that he fled from his duty as an officer; he threw himself into his duty as a father, yes, but continued to perform his duty as an officer. In "Emissary" he sees this as being in conflict, but comes to realize he can do both. Heck, in the opening arc of S7, when Sisko runs away from his duty as an officer, where does he go? Back to his family. I guess maybe that's what rankles me about this, I don't see any indication in the seven years of the show that Sisko would ever abandon his duty to his family in the way he does in the Destiny-era novels. Even if it your reading is correct, I would argue it's a fundamental mistake to have your lead actually make the mistake that the entire premise of the show is built around him learning not to make. I don't want to read about a Sisko who runs away because he got over that in 1993.
In the writing's defence, I don't think Sisko's choice to leave his family for their safety was ever presented as the right choice. He's got people constantly telling him he's made the wrong decision - Kira, Kasidy, Vaughn, Rogeiro. And the fact that he eventually reversed that choice certainly implies the narrative wants to present it as the wrong choice as well. It's just that his depression led him to choose the worst possible interpretation of a set of circumstances, while obsession led him to fixate on that to the exclusion of all logical arguments. Two well-established character traits combining to form a perfect storm of bad decisions. .
You're right we are not supposed to see it as correct, but we do need to see it as plausible, and that never happens. (For me, anyway.) Plus, like I said, it's boring.
No, I just think it's very strange to use the word "pejorative," as if I'm insulting a nonexistent character rather than analyzing a story choice by his creators. I'm just trying to clarify that I don't intend anything as bizarre as what you're attributing to me. I never said he retreated from his duty, and I have no idea why you're defining it that way -- since, after all, we're talking about a novel where he was assigned to command a starship, so "fleeing from his duty" is a straw man with no bearing on this discussion. What I'm talking about is which kind of duty he preferred at the start of "Emissary" and what the script used that to say about where he was emotionally. Sisko has stopped striving forward into the unknown galaxy like a typical Star Trek protagonist, and has settled for a more sedate post at a shipyard in the heart of the Federation, where he can lead a routine life with no risk (or so we would've seen Utopia Planitia prior to "Children of Mars" and Picard season 1). When he's assigned back to a frontier posting and given a challenging, important assignment that Picard expects him to jump at, Sisko's reaction is "No, I don't want that, I'd rather stay back at my routine desk job, and failing that I'll retire completely from Starfleet." That sure sounds like a retreat to me -- a retreat from a challenge, from an opportunity to get out of his rut. And of course, once the story's over, Sisko is ready and eager to embrace that new challenge, and he pursues it diligently and with increasing personal investment over the next seven years. Which makes it clear that his resistance to the Bajor assignment at the beginning was meant by the writers to be a problem he had to overcome, not merely a neutral posting. As DS9Continuing pointed out, though, Sisko believed he was doing his duty to his family by leaving them, because the Prophets had told him they'd only know sorrow if he stayed with them. That was the whole point -- that his love and commitment to his family made him feel compelled to stay away from them for their own safety. So I think you're reading it all wrong. It was a bad choice, by the author's intent, but it wasn't out of character, because he wasn't "abandoning" his family, he was (he believed) protecting them by keeping his distance. They felt he'd abandoned them, but that wasn't how he saw it.
This is the key point for me. Regardless of whether this instance of “Sisko reacts badly to sudden trauma and retreats from some of his responsibilities” is dramatically consistent with prior ones, it’s not telling us anything new about the character or opening up storytelling opportunities. It’s just an obstacle for the sake of having an obstacle, so that Sisko”s character arc over the course of the three Typhon Pact DS9 novels can be about restoring aspects of the status quo rather than moving the story forward. It’s symptomatic of a larger sense that there’s very little actual narrative for DS9-the-series in the 2380s. It’s as if the editorial team wanted the time jump so that DS9 could be used to expand the scope of the big Federation politics crossovers, but put so little thought into the individual storylines of the series that backfilling the Ascendants arc provided the closest thing to narrative momentum.
For what it's worth, I basically agree with Christopher here that DRG3 did a fairly successful job at scaffolding the story in a believable way given Sisko's character. It was just an awkwardly constructed plotline from the beginning with bad real world optics. I didn't know he'd gotten an editorial mandate to get Sisko back on the bridge; how weird that is in the first place! Given that he did alright, I guess, but it still was a poorly advised story.