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

Jonathan Banks is one of those actors who automatically elevates everything he appears in. This is how many people discovered him his role as fixer Mike Ehrmantraut in “Breaking Bad” and “Better Call Saul,” where his soulful performance helped audiences care deeply for a troubled man in a despicable industry, while others discovered him through his role as cartoon-duckling criminology professor Buzz Hickey in Season 5 of the college sitcom “Community.” He’s a fantastic performer who brings some surprisingly different characters to life, and in the 1990s he stole the show with a guest role on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.

“Deep Space Nine” often dealt with darker themes than was typical of the “Star Trek” franchise, and in Season 1, Episode 12, “Battle Lines,” several members of the DS9 crew got into one for real on a moon unpleasant situation where the residents cannot die. Banks plays Golin Shel-la, the leader of one of the two warring factions on the moon, and he stands out even among the regular cast, all of whom are great in their own right. Banks has been acting on television since the 1970s and has made so many guest appearances on shows that his IMDb listing feels like it lasts forever. Still, his role in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine is one of his best.

In the episode, Commander Sisko (Avery Brooks) takes Bajoran spiritual leader Kai Opaka (Camille Saviola) on a journey through the wormhole next to the space station Deep Space Nine when their speedster crashes on a strange moon. Kai Opaka dies, which is devastating for DS9’s first officer, Bajoran freedom fighter Major Kira Nerys (Nana Visitor), but she is soon alive again, confusing Starfleet doctor Julian Bashir (Alexander Siddig), who was along for the ride. It turns out that the moon is actually a penal colony and that the people who left the prisoners there also left behind microbes that prevent anyone from dying on the moon, ensuring that the bloodthirsty warriors finally learn their lesson . Instead, the Nol-Ennis and the Ennis, led by Shel-la, have fought each other off and on for ages. It is a misery of their own making, and when Shel-la learns that leaving the planet will kill everyone who died on its surface, he seeks to use this knowledge to end his enemies once and for all destroy.

Banks is great, managing to be completely convincing as a man who has died countless times yet still longs for war, and his interactions with Major Kira are phenomenal. As he shares his hatred for his enemy, Kira begins to relive some of her own wartime traumas and cleanse their inner demons. It’s powerful stuff and just a taste of what Deep Space Nine would ultimately become.

Some of them The best episodes of Deep Space Nine deal with really difficult topicsand “Battle Lines” was one of the first times the series dealt intensively and openly with war. By season five, the series would have its own intergalactic war to contend with in the form of the Dominion Wars caused some tension behind the scenes Because “Star Trek” creator Gene Roddenberry didn’t want the series to deal explicitly with war. Instead, “Deep Space Nine” focused on the horrors of war and the difficult decisions we must make in the face of those horrors, and “Battle Lines” was an early indicator of how far the series was willing to go.

In The Deep Space Log Book: A First Season Companion, producer David Livingston praised Banks’ ability to take on all sorts of roles:

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

“Wiseguy” was a crime series that Banks starred in on CBS from 1987 to 1990, and it was his first real stardom before his Emmy-winning performance in “Breaking Bad.” Still, for this weird little Star Trek fan? He’ll always be the war-loving guy who just wouldn’t die.