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

Jonathan Banks is the kind of actor who automatically elevates everything he's around. Many first discovered him through his role as fixer Mike Ehrmantraut in “Breaking Bad” and “Better Call Saul,” where his soulful performance helped audiences care deeply about a troubled man who worked a menial job but was found by others through his role as cartoon duck-drawing criminology professor Buzz Hickey. in Season 5 of the college sitcom Community. He's a fantastic performer who brings some amazingly different characters to life, and in the 1990s he stole the show as a guest on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.

“Deep Space Nine” often delved into darker themes than was typical of the “Star Trek” franchise, and in Season 1, episode 12, “Battle Lines,” several members of the DS9 crew were thrust into a truly unpleasant situation on the moon. where residents cannot die. Banks plays Golin Shell, the leader of one of the two warring factions on the moon, and he's a standout even among the regular cast, who are great themselves. Banks has been on television since the 1970s and has made so many guest appearances on shows that his IMDb list seems to last forever. Despite this, his role in “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine” is one of the best.

In the episode, Commander Sisko (Avery Brooks) takes Bajoran spiritual leader Kai Opac (Camila Saviola) on a journey through a wormhole next to the space station Deep Space Nine when their fugitive crashes into a strange moon. Kai Opaka dies, devastating to DS9's first officer, Bajoran freedom fighter Major Kira Neria (Nana Visitor), but soon she's back alive, troubling the minds of Starfleet doctor Julian Bashir (Alexander Siddig), who has signed up for the ride. It turns out that the moon is actually a penal colony and the people who left the prisoners there also left microbes that prevent anyone on the moon from dying so the bloodthirsty warriors can finally learn. Instead, Nol-Ennis and Ennis, led by Shel-la, have continued to fight each other in eternity. It's a disaster of their own making, and when Shel-la learns that leaving the planet will kill anyone dead on its surface, he tries to use that knowledge to destroy his enemies once and for all.

Banks is great, able to be completely convincing as a man who has died countless times but still hungers for war, and his interactions with Major Kira are phenomenal. When he shares hatred against his enemy, Kira begins to relive some of her own wartime trauma and purges her inner demons. It's powerful stuff, and it's just a hint of what “Deep Space Nine” will eventually become.

Some of the best episodes “Deep Space Nine” gets into really difficult topicsand “Battle Lines” was one of the first times the series dealt with war seriously and openly. By Season 5, the series will have its own intergalactic war to deal with in the form of the Dominion Wars, which caused quite a bit of tension behind the scenes whereas Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry did not want the show to be directly related to the war. Instead, “Deep Space Nine” looked at 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 show was willing to go.

In The Deep Space Log Book: A First Season Companion, producer David Livingstone praised Banks' ability to handle all kinds of roles:

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

Wiseguy was a crime drama series that Banks starred in on CBS from 1987 to 1990, and it was his first real big claim to fame before his appearance on the Emmy Award-winning series Breaking Bad. However, for this weird little Star Trek fan? He will always be the war-loving guy who just won't die.