The Fall of Ben Sisko

[RPJOB]

I'm not a fan of fiction that feels the need to treat its characters with kid gloves lest the writers be perceived as catering to some sort of stereotype.

Granted DS9 went a little overboard with the "Gays only exist in the Mirror Universe!" cliche, but there's a huge difference between a single incident involving one character and multiple incidents with multiple characters.

IMO if you really feel that the writing of Sisko is catering to a stereotype you're not giving the writers enough credit.

I'm not saying that the minority characters have to be treated with kid gloves. I'm saying that you have to take the cultural and historical background into account when dealing with them in certain situations. These characters, intended or not, can be looked at as role models. Whoopi Goldberg said that she got into TOS because it was one of the few shows that had a woman that looked like her that wasn't a maid.

When a young black boy sees Ben Sisko as a role model who then leaves his family, leaving a single mother, does it simply reinforce the idea that that is proper behavior for black men? It doesn't have to necessarily be shown that the father is leaving of his own free will. Just the fact that he's leaving can have an effect on someone. The writers of the shows (and books) have to be aware of this and take it into account when deciding on storylines. That doesn't mean that you can't have it happen but, as Avery Brooks said, you have to look at it with a more critical eye.

 

[RPJOB]

We, in canon, have seen one married Captain as a major recurring character.

He also got married in the 18th episode of the seventh season! So he barely made it as the "one married captain" in canon.

Having an African American man leave his wife is, unfortunately all too common.

I would say that happy marriages in any ongoing television saga are a rarity, even for white people. Look at "Rhoda", an oft-quoted yardstick: audiences dropped off rapidly when she was happily married to Joe, despite the ratings for the wedding being so huge. So she had to divorce him - and the audiences returned.

Doug and Julie on "Days of Our Lives" were split up several times, even though the actors were married in real life.

Brooks never portrayed Sisko and lacking in adversity to overcome.

Huh?

I assume you're not forgetting Jennifer, Sisko's first wife. For most of DS9 Sisko was portrayed as a loving single father. When Kassidy entered the picture it appeared that the family would grow as happened when they got married. However, shortly thereafter the marriage was torn apart when Sisko left. How many other captains have 1) Been portrayed as happily married, 2) Been a parent, 3) Gotten remarried 4) become a father again? A grand total of one. When you're showing a member of Starfleet in a marriage for the first time, you're setting the tone. How would this work? Add in the fact that you're also dealing with a member of a minority whee single mother's are more common and the marriage itself becomes a much more important part of the character.

It's all well and good for a bunch of white people to sit around and say "I don't see anything wrong with it" but when the actor raises a concern about it I tend to listen to what they have to say about it in the same way that I give more weight to the arguments of women in the debate over abortion. It's a situation that impacts them much more directly that it does me.

When the Mary Tyler Moore Show, of which Rhoda was a spinoff, was first produced the idea would be that Mary Richards was a divorcee. That idea was shot down by the network. Something similar was proposed for Carol of The Brady Bunch. Divorced characters were very, very rare on TV at that time. Rhoda was famous due to it being one of the first, if not the first show, to have it's main character divorce.

Soap operas such as "Days of out Lives" have such long running plotlines that they really don't have any basis in reality. A friend of mine was a great fan of one of them (I can't remember which one) and once told me the backgrounds of the various characters. One had been married, divorced, had a marriage or two annulled, had a spouse declared dead and later had them turn up alive, given birth to twins but had one hidden from her only to have them turn up years later (evil, natch). You can't really compare the dramatics of soap opera and "regular" dramatic TV. They're totally different.

 

[Therin of Andor]

I'm not saying that the minority characters have to be treated with kid gloves.

But... that's exactly what you seem to want.

I'm saying that you have to take the cultural and historical background into account when dealing with them in certain situations.

So Sisko should be handled with kid gloves and be given a charmed, "happily ever after" married life, just so he can be an exemplary role model to young boys of colour.

Ditto Dead Janeway, who should never have been "shoved in the freezer", according to the feminists and "Bring Back Janeway" campaigners.

You really can't have it both ways.

It's all well and good for a bunch of white people to sit around and say "I don't see anything wrong with it" but when the actor raises a concern about it I tend to listen to what they have to say about it

And the writers listened. And they changed the ending for him. That doesn't mean the character must get forever locked into a holding pattern.

Okay, let's also not let Picard retire, because that would send a message that elderly men were no longer capable of showing leadership.

How dare Whoopi Goldberg allow her character to work with alcohol. And keep a machine gun under the counter.

How dare they kill off Yar, the only female action-oriented character, and keep all the service-oriented females: Troi, Selar and Crusher/Pulaski.

Why should Wesley be the boy genius when David Gerrold had proposed Lesley Crusher to be a fifteen year old girl?

How come African American Jake was too scared to join Starfleet - and become a "safer occupation" trainee journalist instead?

We could go on forever.

 

[RPJOB]

You really aren't listening, are you?

You don't have to treat any character with kid gloves. You don't have to have any character live "happily ever after". You also don't have to break up the only married couple who also happen to be persons of colour. There are other ways of presenting them with challenges and adversity.

Ben and Jake went through a lot of adversity during DS9 but that didn't include making them estranged or enemies. If anything their love for each other grew stronger as the show went on. Marrying Sisko and Jennifer and then breaking them apart just a short while later was dramatic (overly so in my opinion) but it also was perceived by Brooks as nearly being a cliche about African Americans. That's why he had the line added where Sisko promised Kassidy that he'd be back.

 

[DonIago]

I'm sorry, but whether or not characters are construed as role models, shouldn't the real question be whether or not the text -endorses- their behavior?

Just because a character is a role model doesn't mean (in fact, I'd argue in good fiction it -shouldn't mean-) that they're infallible, and if you're really expecting your protagonists to behave in an exemplary manner all of the time, you're going to be disappointed. In fact, if that's what you're hoping for I might recommend sticking with Young Adult fiction or such...which Star Trek novels decidedly are not generally billed as.

Are you basically saying Sisko should be allowed to behave in any sort of manner the writers wish him to -as long as his family unit isn't impacted-? Because that doesn't seem especially realistic to me either. I don't see why the writers should have to constrain themselves in that manner, and I really don't think you're giving either writers or most readers enough credit here if you think anyone's going to buy into the notion that Sisko treating his family as he does (apparently, I haven't read the book) is supposed to be something to be emulated.

 

[MatthiasRussell]

^ I agree with you for the most part.

However, Trek is about a better humanity, a united human family that gives us something to aspire to. Is a prominent Trek character who leaves his family showing a better humanity worth aspiring to?

I agree characters should be realistic, but morally lofty characters is part of what Trek is all about and what seperates it from darker sci fi like Battlestar Galactica.

One of the things I hated about ST09 is when Spock wasn't willing to save Nero and his crew at the end. The morally superior Spock who sets an ideal for us in the present would have tried to save the life of his enemy.

 

[DarKush]

You really aren't listening, are you?

You don't have to treat any character with kid gloves. You don't have to have any character live "happily ever after". You also don't have to break up the only married couple who also happen to be persons of colour. There are other ways of presenting them with challenges and adversity.

Ben and Jake went through a lot of adversity during DS9 but that didn't include making them estranged or enemies. If anything their love for each other grew stronger as the show went on. Marrying Sisko and Jennifer and then breaking them apart just a short while later was dramatic (overly so in my opinion) but it also was perceived by Brooks as nearly being a cliche about African Americans. That's why he had the line added where Sisko promised Kassidy that he'd be back.

I agree with a lot of what you are saying here. And it's funny that some of these people defending Sisko for abandoning his wife and infant daughter for some trumped up reason on the basis of it being 'real' or that it would be wrong to have him and Kasidy to 'live happily ever after' have no problem with the the Riker-Troi marriage or the Picard-Crusher marriage. Those generally happy unions aren't considered unrealistic. I haven't read any criticism of those marriages along that line. And to be blunt, maybe the idea of a happily married or functional black couple is too alien for some readers to grasp or just bores them to tears.

That being said, I hated DRGIII's decision but that doesn't mean I wanted Sisko to have a merry existence, and I think for some of the backers to keep trying to use that argument is trying to create a false choice, that it's only family abandonment or an idllyic existence.

I want Sisko to be challenged, I don't want everything to always go his way in the books, like it didn't on the show or in the novels thus far either. But what's wrong with showing Sisko and Kasidy working through their problems together? That could be just as interesting-in fact I think more interesting-than shipping Sisko off to a boring ship with a colorless crew. That has been something we have rarely seen in Trek and especially from a Trek captain.

I think Avery Brooks was drawn to Sisko because of the potential the character could be to be a role model and there's nothing wrong with that. He understood the power of art and images. Maybe some folks don't grasp that because their people have tons of positive media portrayals to choose from. But other communities aren't as lucky. So I think Brooks understood the impact of a Sisko, and he played the character, IMO, for the most part with an eye on Sisko's potential cultural impact. And I think his suggestions to the writers to alter his ending in the finale spoke to that. He didn't like the idea of Sisko leaving his family behind-even because of death-and I got where he was coming from. He didn't like the message it could potentially send. So the idea of Trek Lit. Sisko leaving his family behind-without a fight or even an impassioned speech to the Prophets-just left me cold.

Therin talked about Sisko being stuck in a holding pattern. That's not the issue. There's nothing wrong with growth or evolution or even stagnation and decay, in some cases, for characters. But there are core convictions, there are things that root a character and for Sisko that was his commitment to his family. Throwing that away isn't evolution or even decay, it more like a plot-driven, inorganic decision from on high.

 

[Elias Vaughn]

I, too, hate the terrible stereotype of a black father being told by his gods that being with his wife will bring him great sorrow, ignoring those gods, experiencing sorrow, deciding that his gods were right after all, and leaving his family because he's utterly convinced that it's the only way to protect them.

When will Pocket Books learn?

 

[Therin of Andor]

Trek is about a better humanity, a united human family that gives us something to aspire to. Is a prominent Trek character who leaves his family showing a better humanity worth aspiring to?

It's the beginning of a new arc. Sisko has to be down in order to get back up again.

Was a Borg invasion worth aspiring to? Section 31? The Dominion War? The Eugenics Wars? World War III? Spock's death?

... have no problem with the the Riker-Troi marriage or the Picard-Crusher marriage. Those generally happy unions aren't considered unrealistic.

Those unions are quite recent, compared to Siskos.

I fully expect future marriage and family turmoils for the Picards and the Rikers. Troi went through several personal hells bringing her baby to full term.

Throwing that away isn't evolution or even decay, it more like a plot-driven, inorganic decision from on high.

Of course it's plot-driven! As it should be. But it is not "inorganic". DRG3 has drawn out threads he found waiting in the DS9 canon to springboard Sisko into a new personal and professional set of story arcs.

 

[MatthiasRussell]

Trek is about a better humanity, a united human family that gives us something to aspire to. Is a prominent Trek character who leaves his family showing a better humanity worth aspiring to?

It's the beginning of a new arc. Sisko has to be down in order to get back up again.

Was a Borg invasion worth aspiring to? Section 31? The Dominion War? The Eugenics Wars? World War III? Spock's death?

I don't see how these compare? I'm talking about humans having "evolved sensibilities" and of higher morality than current humans.

The Eugenics War and WWIII are before the Trek Era and show how man has improved. Humans were not responsible for Dominion War or the Borg Invasion, that was an act of the evil antagonists. Spock's death was a noble sacrifice, the type of character trait of saying trek exemplifies. Section 31 showed there were still bad seeds in human society but our main protagonists refused to sacrifice their principles and follow Section 31's philosophies.

 

[DarKush]

Trek is about a better humanity, a united human family that gives us something to aspire to. Is a prominent Trek character who leaves his family showing a better humanity worth aspiring to?

It's the beginning of a new arc. Sisko has to be down in order to get back up again.

Was a Borg invasion worth aspiring to? Section 31? The Dominion War? The Eugenics Wars? World War III? Spock's death?

... have no problem with the the Riker-Troi marriage or the Picard-Crusher marriage. Those generally happy unions aren't considered unrealistic.

Those unions are quite recent, compared to Siskos.

I fully expect future marriage and family turmoils for the Picards and the Rikers. Troi went through several personal hells bringing her baby to full term.

Throwing that away isn't evolution or even decay, it more like a plot-driven, inorganic decision from on high.

Of course it's plot-driven! As it should be. But it is not "inorganic". DRG3 has drawn out threads he found waiting in the DS9 canon to springboard Sisko into a new personal and professional set of story arcs.

Granted Sisko and Kasidy have been married for some time before Rough Beasts, how much time has actually been spent showing or exploring their married life? Not much. For one, there were impositions placed on that by the TV series finale. But even when Sisko returned, the marrige got short shrift. So I don't think it's an issue of time length of marriage.

I can accept the idea that Rough Beast's the start of a new arc, however, the DS9 relaunch hasn't done a great job-to be honest-in completing previous arcs, especially with the time jump. So I have a wait and see approach-not a certainty-that Sisko will actually have an arc and that his family situation will be a focus of it.

 

[RPJOB]

It's the beginning of a new arc. Sisko has to be down in order to get back up again.

But why does he have to be down when we see him? A large part of the problem is the gap in time of DS9-R. We're seeing these characters years after we last saw them and how they got there has been for the most part quite sparse. There is a series coming up that will hopefully fill in a lot of the gaps but even so it's jarring.

Sisko could have been shown as parted from Kassidy but not having abandoned her. He's already on a ship, why did he feel he had to make the choice that he did to treat her so badly?

Some people have said that he's done this before. That he ran away when Dax died. But, in that case he wasn't running away from his family, he was running to them! He took Jake with him and went to his father's house. His family has always been his source of strength. It's one of his defining characteristics if not THE defining one. To see him toss that aside based on a prophesy, to me, is out of character to him. He's defined the prophesies before. His struggle to keep this from coming true would be much more interesting if he were actually doing something about it rather than running from it.

To me Kirk's the larger than life hero. Picard is the one I wish I could be, But Sisko is the one that I feel I could be if I had the strength of character. Picard and Kirk are both ideals. Sisko is the one we are actually most like.

(Not as big a fan of Janeway or Archer although, as I said in another thread, I'm finding Janeway much more interesting now that she's dead, not so much for who she is to me but for who she was to her crew.)

 

[Therin of Andor]

But why does he have to be down when we see him? A large part of the problem is the gap in time of DS9-R. We're seeing these characters years after we last saw them and how they got there has been for the most part quite sparse. There is a series coming up that will hopefully fill in a lot of the gaps but even so it's jarring.

It's supposed to be jarring. It's a valid way of hooking readers on a mystery and the author spends the next few books reeling them in.

Or, if it's not to your taste, you walk away now.

As I said earlier, a novel which polarizes its audience is often more preferable than one that everybody regards as innocuuous, harmless, bland meh.

 

[RPJOB]

A novel can polarize it's readership, no question. However, it can also bring them together. Writing something for the shock value needs to have a very good reason behind it.

Sisko's actions bringing the Romulans into the Dominion war were shocking and in many ways reprehensible. He may not have done the deed himself but he was satisfied with the outcome. The journey to that point was a fascinating one but there was build up to it. Sisko came down a long, torturous path that brought him to a fork in the road and we were shock, surprised and saddened when the turned left instead of right. We may not have agreed or approved of his decision but we could understand why he did.

Due to the gap in DS9-R, we didn't see the path he took to get to that point. We were told what he did and why he did it. That may be satisfying enough for you, you. You seem to be more interested in where he goes from here. For me, it felt hollow. I'd much rather see the journey that took him to that point and see for myself what he went through in making the decisions that he did. Of course I'm interested in where he goes from here but, seeing as I know what happens, filling in the backstory at this point seems a little pointless. I'm sure that a lot of our questions will be answered but it's just to get us up to the point that we already know where he is.

 

[flandry84]

The five year jump is turning out so well,isn't it?

 

[F. King Daniel]

^I'm enjoying it.

I don't see how these compare? I'm talking about humans having "evolved sensibilities" and of higher morality than current humans.

A Next Generation concept that DS9 deliberately undermined from the get-go.

 

[Therin of Andor]

A novel can polarize it's readership, no question. However, it can also bring them together.

As we've seen on this board, there is no universally-liked Star Trek novel. There are certainly some universally-bland ones, though.

Writing something for the shock value needs to have a very good reason behind it.

And you haven't read those books yet. None of us have. Except maybe DRG3's beta readers.

Due to the gap in DS9-R, we didn't see the path he took to get to that point.

Many tales, movies, comics, etc. are partly told in flashback. It's an author's choice to have a story unfold by the way they feel best tells the story being told. Nothing new here. Be patient! DRG3 could have set the beginning of his three books five years ago and proceed chronologically, but he chose a different storytelling method.

I'm sure that a lot of our questions will be answered but it's just to get us up to the point that we already know where he is.

So? What's so bad about that?

 

[rfmcdpei]

Some people have said that he's done this before. That he ran away when Dax died. But, in that case he wasn't running away from his family, he was running to them! He took Jake with him and went to his father's house. His family has always been his source of strength. It's one of his defining characteristics if not THE defining one. To see him toss that aside based on a prophesy, to me, is out of character to him.

RBOE made it clear that Sisko can't remain with his family, no much he wanted to, because he sincerely believed--based on his personal experiences of the Celestial Temple, and (he believes) confirmed by his subsequent experiences in the linear universe--that if he stays with his family that he'll experience a life of sorrow, i.e. his family will die.

Would Sisko like to stay with his family? Yes, definitely. Could he have handled the separation better? Probably. Does he sincerely think that if he did stay with his family they'd die? Yes.

What should he have done?

 

[MatthiasRussell]

^I'm enjoying it.

I don't see how these compare? I'm talking about humans having "evolved sensibilities" and of higher morality than current humans.

A Next Generation concept that DS9 deliberately undermined from the get-go.

I disagree. In TNG, the quadrant was fairly stable to the point where the UFP and humans had gotten used to it. Without enemies always threatening to over-run them, they could be more introspective as a society.

In DS9, the whole quadrant went to hell BUT you see humans not giving into their darker side like what happened in Galactica. Sure there were times when characters made poor decisions or damaged their conscience by iffy activities, but for the most part, the humans stuck to the lofty morality of Trek.

Even in Pale Moonlight, I find Sisko's big mistake was trusting in Garak to play by his rules. Garak did all the morally reprehensible things. Sisko's guilty is in letting it happen.

 

[DonIago]

I think it could be argued that on some level Sisko approached Garak because he knew full well on some level that Garak might do the things Sisko wouldn't be able to bring himself to do. Handing him the loaded gun, so to speak.