Star Trek’s Darkest Show Secretly Has The Brightest Message

To understand why Star Trek: Deep Space Nine hides the franchise’s brightest message in one of its darkest stories, it’s important to briefly recap each episode. “City On the Edge of Forever” is a standout Original Series episode where Kirk and Spock chase a drugged Dr. McCoy into the past to undo whatever he did that caused the Enterprise to vanish from orbit.

It turns out that McCoy saved the life of a pacifist named Edith Keeler, and despite falling in love with her, Kirk must let her die before her activism keeps America out of World War II long enough for the Nazis to win the war and change history for the worse.

A Star Trek hero like Kirk letting the love of his life die to save the future is the darkest way for such an adventure to end. The later DS9 episode “Past Tense” is dark from the beginning, with Sisko and Bashir trapped in a time period where the homeless, the sick, and the poor are ghettoized into so-called “Sanctuary Districts.”

History records that things only improve after a man named Gabriel Bell riots against this injustice, but when the real Bell dies, Sisko takes his place to preserve the future, putting his life in major jeopardy.

So, these Star Trek episodes have some surface-level similarities, but why am I claiming that DS9 has the brightest message compared to this darkest TOS episode? Basically, Kirk and Spock reveal themselves as completely beholden to both history and the Prime Directive. Rather than risk altering the past, even for the better, they are willing to literally let an innocent woman (she runs a soup kitchen, for heaven’s sake!) die a brutal and painful death.

By contrast, Sisko takes a major risk and puts his life directly in danger to save as many people as possible. Even the episode itself doesn’t underscore what a huge gamble this is: there was no guarantee, after all, that Sisko would accurately mirror the actions of the historical Gabriel Bell. Had Star Trek legend Spock been around, he might have provided helpful calculations that Sisko’s actions were far likelier to result in his own painful death rather than a liberation of humanity from its own darkest impulses.

In short, Sisko faced a far harder decision: as far as he knew, history had already been irreversibly changed, and his desperate impersonation of Bell could just as easily have made things worse for humanity rather than better.

Nonetheless, he took action because he would rather roll those cosmic dice rather than sit back and do nothing. Star Trek: Deep Space Nine may be the franchise’s darkest show, but it has a clear and resonant message: one person can make all the difference when it comes to improving things for all of humanity.

That may sound similar to Kirk’s adventure, but keep in mind that “City On the Edge of Forever” paints a much grimmer message: Edith Keeler proves that one person can make such a negative difference that she has to die to save humanity. The best our beloved Starfleet officers can do is sit back and watch a pacifist die because her idealism was destined to doom us all. Sisko was willing to lay down his life to preserve the future… Kirk, meanwhile, forced someone else to make that sacrifice unknowingly.

Now, I don’t compare these episodes to hate on Kirk’s earlier adventure…for my money, “City On the Edge of Forever” is probably the best TOS episode ever made. But it also has Star Trek’s darkest moment as Kirk waters the seeds of the future with the blood of someone he loves. Meanwhile, DS9–the “dark” Trek show–offers a reminder that the only way any of us can build a better world is to risk everything to create it.

Simply put, Gene Roddenberry’s message to fans doesn’t get any brighter than that.