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Avery Brooks can ham it up like nobody's business. When he's bad, he's really bad. Like, when he starts making strange, high-pitched sounds and squeals, or bursts into theatrical outrage. But when he's good, he's pretty damned good. Sisko is a conflicted, tormented character. I think you need to see Brooks's performance in that light. He is not the classic do-gooder, overachiever, always-makes-the-right-call Starfleet captain you see in every other Trek series. He is often wrong. He is not on a fast track. He is not getting various maneuvers named after him, or making the textbooks and history books in real time. When the series starts, he's a broken and bitter man assigned to a career-killing backwater post. That post happens to become strategically important, and he's forced to rise to the challenge. But he's still got all of that baggage to deal with, and he still has his flaws. To make matters worse, he finds himself the unwitting messiah figure to an entire race of alien people. He didn't ask for any of this. But he steps up, slowly and clumsily at times, and finds himself again. I think Sisko is one of the more nuanced characters Trek has ever given us, and if you can look past Avery Brooks's hammy tendencies, you can see a lot of merit in both the actor and the character. Brooks's acting is at its best when Sisko's not at one or the other extreme end of the emotional spectrum. When Sisko's at about a 4 to an 8, Brooks is superb. When Sisko's in the 1-3 or 9-10 ranges, look out, here comes the ham. Dax as Spock? I think things started out that way, or perhaps were initially intended to be that way. But she was pretty un-Spocklike for most of the series. Farrell was not a world-class actor by any means. But her performance kind of got better as it went along, and as the writers gave Dax more to work with. And she was a lot better than Ezri Dax by a wide mile. (Not that that's saying much.) DS9 Worf is a controversial figure. I loved his post-Dax arc. He rose to the occasion and became a true hero. Perhaps my biggest issue with Worf in DS9 is that the show pretty much forgets all of what happened in TNG, and forgets that Worf is half human. It's as if they recast him as 100% Klingon, rewiring all of his backstory and his personality traits accordingly. You get none of the "Which world do I really belong to?" drama that made him interesting in TNG. Instead, he's Alpha Klingon Badass all of the time. It's ironic, because DS9 is the one Trek series that (in my opinion) fleshed out the Klingon race into something fantastic and multifaceted and real. I was never a huge Klingon fan until DS9 came along, and after having seen DS9, I was totally into them. |
Troi, on the other hand, was explicitly half-human, although it seems that was only because the telepathy that comes with being full-Betazoid would destroy too many of the plotlines -- nobody remembers her mixed heritage all that much and we keep having to be reminded of it when it becomes relevant.