How Star Trek: Starfleet Academy Pulled Off That Surprise Deep Space Nine Cameo

Warning: This post contains spoilers for Thursday's "Star Trek: Starfleet Academy."

This week's "Starfleet Academy" went deep into "Star Trek" lore — and brought back a legendary captain.

In Thursday's episode, holographic student Sam set out to discover what really happened to Benjamin Sisko, the captain of "Star Trek: Deep Space Nine" played by Avery Brooks. She ultimately came up empty, but her search for answers led her to page through "Anslem," the autobiographical book penned by Benjamin's son Jake, with Cirroc Lofton reprising his "DS9" role. (Plus, Sam's instructor revealed herself to be... a new host of the "DS9" Dax symbiont!)

The best cameo of all, though, came in the episode's final moments, as a narrator with a familiar voice rhapsodized: "Divine laws are simpler than human ones, which is why it takes a lifetime to be able to understand them. Only love can understand them. Only love can interpret these words as they were meant to be interpreted." The episode also ended with a on-screen card that read: "Thank you, Avery." 

Yes, that was in fact Avery Brooks' voice we heard at the end, "Starfleet Academy" executive producer Noga Landau confirms to TVLine. But Brooks publicly retired from acting years ago and hasn't appeared in any movie or TV show for more than a decade. So how did they get his voice for this episode? 

"Tawny Newsome, who is one of the writers of the episode, along with Kirsten Beyer, is friends with Cirroc Lofton, who plays Jake Sisko," executive producer Noga Landau explains. "We knew that we wanted to ask if Cirroc would come back to play Jake. He said yes. And Cirroc is very, very close with Avery still, of course, and we knew that what we wanted was to leave this love letter for Avery Brooks, to say thank you for what you did." 

They knew Brooks had retired, but "along the journey of the episode, we realized that Avery had these beautiful spoken word pieces that he had recorded, and we thought, 'Wouldn't it be amazing if we could put one in the episode?' Because the one that's in the episode in a really serendipitous way is exactly the message of the episode. And he was very, very generous, and he said yes."

Brooks is "an incredible jazz musician," fellow EP Alex Kurtzman adds. "So he had done these recordings, and he let us use it." 

"Deep Space Nine" fans may remember that Brooks' Sisko sang a Frank Sinatra song in a Season 7 episode, and Brooks went on to record an album of jazz and blues covers along with a number of spoken word pieces. So he didn't record anything new for this week's "Starfleet Academy," but his presence was still very deeply felt — and "Deep Space Nine" fans got a very special treat.

Beam down to the comments to let us know what you thought of this week's "DS9"-themed episode.