Icon from a picrew by grgikau. Call me Tir or Julian. 37. He/They. Queer. Twitter: @tirlaeyn. ao3: tirlaeyn. 18+ Only. Star Trek. Sandman. IwtV. OMFD. Definitionless in this Strict Atmosphere.
do not think avery brooks gets enough credit for the degree to which the frequent brilliance of ds9 and many of the bits most appreciated by fans today were his doing
The contradiction between what we were playing and reality is this: Oftentimes we worked until two or three in the morning. We’re not the only company still shooting, but, yeah, we’re late. Cars are going through the gate, the arm comes down. There’s a line of cars. Then when I get there, the gate comes down and security says to me, “Open your trunk.” I said, “No. Why? All these other cars just … Why? What do you think I have in this Volkswagon Rabbit? What’s in there, the Defiant?” What I’m trying to say is that the contradiction, or the paradox of it all, we can’t get away from. You see what I mean? I wish sometimes that were true; that the fact I played Sisko would make some kind of difference on the street. No, only on the screen. The contradictions are evident. They are inescapable in a way.”
Avery Brooks, quoted in, The Fifty-Year Mission - The Next 25 Years, Volume 2, Edward Gross, Mark A. Altman
“I don’t have any trouble being physical with my children. That’s a part of my nature, as opposed to something they wrote about Sisko and Jake. The first day I met Cirroc, I hugged him. And I hug him every time I see him” - Avery Brooks
I think Deep Space 9 will always be the best Star Trek show ever to be made solely because of far beyond the stars. No other st show ever or will ever have anything like that ever again. “Ben Sisko. That future. That space station. All those people. They exist.” I always get stuck on that line like they Exist. You can’t say that with the depth that they say it here about any of the other shows, they just don’t have that heart that’s exhibited here like you can Feel it and it’s Real. It’s just such a fucking genuinely masterfully crafted episode of television it is unbelievable the feelings here are just genuinely palpable in a way that can not be expressed
Thinking today about why, of all the DS9 characters, Sisko seems to be the least readily transferrable from screen to page. To be fair, I’m working from a sample size of three licensed books and a pool of fanfiction, so this isn’t the most well-informed of observations. But that said, none of the Beta Canon works, nor most of the fanfiction (including my own), have managed to capture Sisko’s voice in a way that’s fully plausible to me.
Which made me appreciate all the more how much of Sisko’s distinctiveness is embodied in Avery Brooks, rather than written into the DS9 scripts. I mean, Worf has an idiosyncratic voice. Seven of Nine has an idiosyncratic voice. But at least some of their delivery can be conveyed through their idiosyncratic word choices and syntax. Sisko doesn’t really have that. He doesn’t have catchphrases. His Big Speeches have a kind of rhythm to them (a lot of sharp declarative statements) but, again, that’s mostly in the delivery. Benjamin Sisko lives in Brooks’s intonation and pacing and volume control and, especially, emphasis, and it’s hard to capture that in print without egregious overuse of italics.
So, basically, given an audio sample I could never mistake Sisko for anyone but Sisko, but unless I work really hard at conjuring him up, on the page he often reads as just…The Captain. And this is both a challenge (for me as a fic writer) and a testament to what a brilliant damn performance Brooks puts in for all of those seven seasons.
man i know that deep space nine is one of the lesser watched shows of the franchise but i sure do wish avery brooks got half the praise and recognition for his performance in far beyond the stars as patrick stewart does for his performances in the inner light and chain of command
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