Before Breaking Bad, Jonathan Banks stole the show as a guest star on Star Trek

Jonathan Banks is the type of actor who automatically elevates whatever he’s into. Many people discovered it for the first time His role as Mike Ehrmantraut’s fixer on Breaking Bad. and “Better Call Saul,” where his soulful performance helped audiences care deeply about a troubled man in a despicable line of work, while others found him through his role as a cartoon duck drawing on criminology professor Buzz Hickey In the fifth season of the comedy series “Community”. He’s a great performer who brings some different characters to life, and in the ’90s, he stole the show in a guest role on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.

“Deep Space Nine” often touches on darker themes than was typical of the “Star Trek” series, and in Season 1, Episode 12, “Battle Lines,” several members of the DS9 crew are thrust into a truly disturbing situation on the surface of the moon. Where the population cannot die. Banks plays Julien Silla, the leader of one of the two warring factions on the moon, and he stands out even among the regular cast, who are all great. Banks has been working on television since the 1970s, and has made numerous guest appearances on shows, making his IMDb list seem to go on forever. However, his role in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine is among his best.

In the episode, Commander Sisko (Avery Brooks) takes Bajoran spiritual leader Kai Opaka (Camille Saviola) on a journey through a wormhole next to the space station Deep Space Nine when their rover collides with an alien moon. Kai Opaka dies, which is devastating to DS9’s first officer, Bajoran freedom fighter Major Kira Nerys (Nana Visitor), but she soon comes back to life again, which boggles the mind of Starfleet doctor Julian Bashir (Alexander Siddig), who accompanied him. On the trip. It turns out that the moon is actually a penal colony and that the people who left the prisoners there also left microbes that prevent anyone on the moon from dying, so as to ensure that the bloodthirsty warriors might finally learn their lesson. Instead, the Null-Ennis and Ennis tribes, led by Shel-La, continued to fight each other over and over again forever. It’s a misery of their own making, and when Shel-la learns that leaving the planet will kill anyone who died on its surface, he attempts to use this knowledge to destroy his enemies once and for all.

Banks is fantastic, managing to be completely convincing as a man who has died countless times and still yearns for war, and his interactions with Major Kira are amazing. He also shares his hatred for his enemy, Keira begins to relive some of her wartime trauma And purge her inner demons. It’s powerful stuff, and just a hint of what “Deep Space Nine” would eventually become.

Some of The best episodes of “Deep Space Nine” deal with really tough topics“Battle Lines” was one of the first times the series addressed war intensely and frankly. By Season 5, the series will have its own intergalactic war to deal with in the form of the Dominion Wars, which It caused a great deal of tension behind the scenes Because “Star Trek” creator Gene Roddenberry did not want the show to explicitly deal with war. Instead, “Deep Space Nine” stared at the horrors of war and the difficult decisions we must make in the face of those atrocities, and “Battle Lines” was an early indicator of how far the show was willing to go.

In “The Deep Space Log Book: A First Season Companion”, producer David Livingston praised Banks’ ability to handle all different types of roles:

“I worked with Jonathan Banks on ‘Otherworld’ at Universal. That’s where I originally knew him. Then I knew his work with ‘Beverly Hills Cop,’ and then of course on ‘Wiseguy.’ He’s a very strange, unusual actor, and he wears this makeup.” Awesome and doing a great job (sic).”

“Wiseguy” was a crime drama series in which Banks starred on CBS from 1987 to 1990, and was his first real big break in fame before his Emmy Award-winning performance on “Breaking Bad.” However, for this weird little Star Trek fan? He will always be the war-loving man who will never die.