Star Trek Day 2024 Special: What if Captain Picard commanded DS9?

Cereal Creatures x Osbourn Draw celebrate Star Trek Day with free artwork that asks the question: What if Captain Picard commanded DS9?

It’s been 58 years since Star Trek first graced those mostly-black and white television sets on Sept. 8, 1966. Now, all these years later, the franchise is awash with spin-off series, movies, books, comics, collectibles, action figures, cosplayers and more.

For our free Star Trek art project this year, we’re doing a “What If…?” concept that Marvel made famous with comic stories that propose a different outcome for one of their heroes or teams. It’s not in continuity, just a fun exploration of circumstances that didn’t come to be. For our project, we considered how Star Trek: Deep Space Nine might have been different if Captain Jean-Luc Picard had commanded the station instead of Commander Sisko.

What if the powers that be wanted to kick start it as more of a spin-off of The Next Generation. The best way to do that would have been to bring over a heavy hitter from that cast and who better than Patrick Stewart as Picard? TNG would continue with Riker as the lead and add a new cast member. Viewers even had a hint of this at the end of season three when it wasn’t clear Picard was going to survive the Borg incident.

In universe, it would be explained that the Cardassian threat was greater than Starfleet originally believed. They were secretly behind the pullout of the Bajoran system with plans to turn DS9 into a home port for a wing of Starfleet. Also, rumors of an ancient wormhole in the Denorios Belt would be a strategic position that couldn’t fall into Cardassian hands.

This isn’t a full comic, but just a few pages that explore that concept from Picard leaving the Enterprise to him assembling a crew that would be different from Sisko’s.

We think he’d want Ensign Ro as his second in command given their experience with Bajoran affairs. Chief O’Brien planned on leaving the Enterprise anyway. Dr. Bashir chose DS9 as it was on the final frontier. Odo was already there with the Cardassians. We think Dax may have chose the assignment because of Sisko, so we picked Nella Darren, Picard’s one-time love interest, to be the science officer with an expertise in finding the mysterious wormhole. This necessitate a little tweaking of the timeline since Picard didn't meet Nella until later in season 6. We kept Quark just because we like Armin Shimerman as an actor.

Here’s a first look at “What if…Captain Picard commanded Deep Space Nine?”