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.
12 - Far Beyond the Stars “You can deny me all you want but you cannot deny Ben Sisko. He exists. That future, that space station, all those people, they exist in here, in my mind.”
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
Hey so can we talk about the implications of Benny Russell being a real person in the Strange New Worlds universe?
Does it means Sisko lived in someone else’s life for a while?
Does it finally cement that this is in fact a different universe than the one occupied by the older shows?
Was this even the same Benny Russell?
Does this mean he got out of the hospital? Or was he never there?
Did this Benny Russell write Far Beyond the Stars, and did it mimic Ds9? How would he know?
The subtle way the other writers exist in Benny’s world is so interesting. They’re all in some way marginalised - Benny is treated most obviously so by the narrative, and arguably would be treated the worst in real life, but also in the room are a Jewish communist, an Irish immigrant, a woman in an interracial marriage, and an Afro-Arab foreigner. There’s differing degrees of “otherness” here, but none of the writers would have been considered representative of idealised white society in the 50s.
So why is this just Benny’s story? The obvious answer is that he’s the most visibly other, since this is set before the American civil rights movement, but Julius isn’t white either and could not pass as such.
I think it’s because Benny’s the one who’s most aware of his identity - and perhaps more importantly, the only one who most believes a better world is possible. We do see that the other writers are aware of their disadvantages - but when Julius asks for more than what he’s got, he’s still asking for less than his colleagues. I think that if Julius had written Deep Space Nine, he would have written about a white captain with a black first officer. That story might have gotten published, because it ultimately conforms with racist standards, despite being better than the status quo. But Benny wrote himself as the captain.
If Benny asked for a pay raise, he would have asked for four cents. And he would have pushed the issue until they made him stop. Far Beyond The Stars is Benny’s story, not because he’s the only marginalised character, but because he refuses to assimilate.
“If we had changed the people’s clothes, this story could be about right now. What’s insidious about racism is that it is unconscious. Even among these very bright and enlightened characters – a group that includes a woman writer who has to use a man’s name to get her work published, and who is married to a brown man with a British accent in 1953 – it’s perfectly reasonable to coexist with someone like Pabst. It’s in the culture, it’s the way people think. So that was the approach we took. I never talked about racism. I just showed how these intelligent people think, and it all came out of them… it was about racism, well maybe so, maybe not [….] But the fact of the matter in ‘Far Beyond the Stars’ is that you have a man who essentially was conceiving of something far beyond what people around him had ever imagined, and therefore they thought he was crazy.”
ALT