Star Trek Nearly Destroyed Because Of One Series Finale

Just how would that wild ending have worked? To explain, we need to go back to the earlier Deep Space Nine episode “Far Beyond the Stars.” In that episode, Captain Sisko is on the cusp of leaving Starfleet because of the seemingly endless Dominion War when he begins experiencing vivid hallucinations that he is a science fiction writer (Benny Russell) in 1953 whose attempts to share his story are stymied by racism.

Sisko eventually wakes up after a priest — played by the late Brock Peters, who plays Ben Sisko’s father in the series — cryptically tells him he is both the dreamer and the dream. The captain is left wondering whether his entire life and everyone he knows really could be a dream.

You can probably guess where this is going. While writing the Deep Space Nine finale episode “What You Leave Behind,” producers considered making the final scene of the entire show Benny Russell waiting outside a TV soundstage holding a script prominently labeled Deep Space Nine. Such an ending would have made it explicit that none of the events in this show or any other Star Trek show were “real” because everything is a dream straight out of Benny Russell’s mind.

Some Deep Space Nine fans would have certainly loved such an ending: after all, it provides a surprising and emotionally resonant follow-up to the previous Benny Russell episode. For that matter, it could be exciting just to see “Far Beyond the Stars” get any kind of follow-up at all. To this day, that remains Star Trek’s most direct examination of racial bias in America–by bringing Russell back for the series finale, the series could have ended with a note of triumph, showing that Russell overcame the racism of his time period and transformed his short story into a television show.

With that being said, we think that if Deep Space Nine had ended in such a way, it would have spelled disaster for the franchise. For one thing, the “‘it was all a dream” is a sure way to anger fans and make them think they’ve wasted all those hours watching the show. Just ask fans of the classic TV show St. Elsewhere who had to watch a series finale confirming that all six seasons of the show actually took place in the imagination of a young autistic boy who dreamed up entire worlds inside a snow globe.

To expand on this idea, it’s one thing for a TV show to dangle a potential crazy twist: the obvious comparison is the Buffy the Vampire Slayer “Normal Again,” which introduced the idea that the entire show might be a delusional fantasy on the part of a mental patient named Buffy Summers. Playing the “is any of this actually real?” card with audiences is a great way to give them goosebumps, but definitively stating that everything was fake immediately destroys all of the stakes the show has spent long years building up.

If Deep Space Nine had used the last scene of the last episode to confirm that nothing in the show had been real, we would have had a series finale even worse than the one for How I Met Your Mother.

For all of these reasons and more, we’re happy that Deep Space Nine ditched the Benny Russell scene and gave our favorite characters graceful and dignified exits. Ditching this scene also meant producers got to avoid the inevitably angry fan questions about whether all of Star Trek was a dream or not. Benny Russell might be both the dreamer and the dream, but ruining the entire franchise like this would have been a complete nightmare.