We all have people in our lives who are so important that their deaths would be tragic at an existential level. Recently, one such person in my life almost died. It wasn't one of those things where he narrowly escaped from sniper fire in a starship fight and we could raise a glass of synthahol in Ten Forward afterwards. He was plugged into life support machines for over a week, unconscious, with doctors shaking their heads and urging us to "be patient." Medical staff said completely terrifying things like "I think he'll probably make it."

I had plenty of time to imagine how my life would be utterly different without him. He's part of the family I've found with my circle of nerdy friends, and losing him would be like losing, well, part of my family. Part of me. Every night when I came home from the hospital, there was only one thing I could do that didn't make me want to cry. I watched Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.

I never really thought of ST:DS9 as a comforting show, or even a particularly brilliant one. I grew up on Star Trek: The Next Generation, so DS9 is definitely "my" era in Star Trek, and I have hazy memories of enjoying it in college. Still, I never really loved DS9 the way I loved Data and Picard and TNG's ongoing wonky obsession with maintaining the Prime Directive on what Guinan called a "ship of peace." Yet in my darkest emotional hour, DS9 was what did it for me. I think that's because the show combined everyday stories of awfulness and political meltdown with an aggressive hopefulness about the future. Call it Utopia ex machina.

War and peace

How do you get a message of universal social democracy out of a world where Bajor struggles with post-colonial poverty while their former oppressors, the Cardassians, team up with the Romulans to start a war on the Dominion? And how do you wrest a sense of justice out of a story where one of the main characters, saloon owner Quark, successfully exploits everyone, including his own brother? The answer is: awkwardly.

I keep thinking about "Past Tense," that two-part episode in season 3 where Sisko, Dax, and Bashir go back to "primitive" Earth in 2024 and take part in the Bell Riots to liberate the walled shantytowns called Sanctuaries. In fact, Sisko has to take the place of rebel leader Gabriel Bell when the real man is killed because the DS9 gang has altered the timeline slightly. There's this very 1990s Star Trek moment where Bashir is tending to the sick in a Sanctuary and is completely shocked by how horrific the health care is. "How could they let it get this bad?" he asks Sisko, who replies that humans didn't stand for this kind of injustice for long because of people like Gabriel Bell.

That kind of dogged Utopianism in the face of our present-day reality comes across as frankly a little bit weird. It seems absurd to imagine we'll go from a world of ghettos to one where it's "obvious" to all humans that eliminating poverty is the only way forward. And today it's even harder to swallow the idea that space station captains of tomorrow will consider what amounts to an Occupy activist as the foundational hero of human civilization.

But as I watched with my sadness-blunted brain, DS9 kept me stumbling onward with its optimism. Episodes vacillate between goofy stories of mirror universes, mystical Bajoran prophesies, and dark tales of the Dominion War. Really annoying things happen, like when Troi's mom has psychic dementia and infects everybody on the station with the lust she feels for Odo. But there are cool character beats cutting through the clutter, like when Changeling Odo and Cardassian Garak bond over how much they dislike the politics of the ruling groups on their home worlds. (Also, I'll confess, I like the Kira/Odo ship.) And over time Sisko proves to be the perfect captain. He always keeps his cool and his sense of humor, which are both pretty important on the wormhole front in the Dominion War.

The sheer counter-intuitive craziness of DS9's optimism is what soothed me as I waited for my human to wake up and live again. No matter how horrific the war gets, the guiding principle of this show is that humanity is on the path toward peace and justice for the oppressed. I think this idea animates TNG and Voyager, too, but the contradiction between lived reality and this ethos is sharpest on DS9. The main characters always strive to take the most rational and humane action they can even in the face of betrayal and misery. Episode after episode, I knew I could count on these space station dwellers to do the right thing—even Quark, who manages to be rather noble at times.

Optimistic realism

Without this stubborn nugget of hope at its core, DS9 would be more like the 2000s version of Battlestar Galactica—a story about space mysticism and war that's laced with a fatalism about humanity. Ron Moore was an executive producer on DS9 and the creator of BSG, so the overlap makes sense. But on DS9, we are immersed in a world where our faith in the basic decency of intelligent beings can remain unshaken. Whether solid or liquid, most of the creatures who live on the space station always do the right thing. And most importantly, the good guys prevail not just because they are good, but because they are able to put their ideals to practical use. More than TNG and Voyager, DS9 helps us understand how humans got from the Bell Riots to social democracy in space. Our heroes do it by resisting imperialism and inequality and by allying themselves with other people who do. That's why the Federation has struck a deal with the Bajorans rather than the Cardassians.

Is this vision of the future realistic? It's easy to say no, but the truth is that I don't know. My beloved person almost died from heart failure and a massive lung infection, but he managed to survive. That wasn't exactly a realistic outcome, either. Humans are surprising animals, and I don't just mean biologically. Colonial governments do topple when people resist them, and, as crazy it sounds, some people always resist.

Could a bunch of decent, rational people headquartered in San Francisco spread an ethos of peaceful exploration throughout our local volume of space in the Milky Way? It sounds nuts and naive, but I refuse to give up hope. The best part is that I'm not alone. Star Trek's popularity over the last 50 years is testimony to the fact that millions of people, over decades, have wanted to share the same fantasy of a better world.

Of course, we're in it for the action and mirror universe Kira shenanigans, too. But fundamentally the appeal of DS9 or Star Trek at-large is that humanity has overcome petty prejudices, class divisions, and an addiction to waste. The idea is that we're on the right path, even if Earth today seems like a shithole. That's the kind of message that really does bring me hope, both on a personal level and as a member of Homo sapiens, a species I still love despite all our flaws.