Jonathan Banks is the kind of actor who automatically elevates anything. Many first discovered it through his role as fixer Mike Ehrmantraut on "Breaking Bad" and "Better Call Saul," where his soulful performance helped audiences care deeply about a troubled man in a loathsome line of work, while others found him 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 surprisingly diverse characters to life, and back in the 1990s he stole the show in a guest role on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.

Deep Space Nine has often delved into darker themes than is typical of the Star Trek franchise, and in season 1, episode 12, "Battle Lines," several members of the DS9 crew were put in a truly uncomfortable situation on the moon. where the inhabitants cannot die. Banks plays Golin Shel-la, the leader of one of the two warring factions on the moon, and he's a standout even among the regular cast, who are excellent themselves. Banks has been acting on television since the 1970s and has made so many guest appearances on shows that his IMDb list seems to go on forever. Even so, his role in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine is among his best.

In the episode, Commander Sisko (Avery Brooks) takes Bajoran spiritual leader Kai Opaka (Camille Saviola) on a journey through a wormhole to the Deep Space Nine space station when their escape crashes on a strange moon. Kai Opaka dies, devastating to DS9's first officer, Bajoran freedom fighter Major Kyra Nerys (Nana Visitor), but she is soon alive again, which plagues the mind of Starfleet Doctor Julian Bashir (Alexander Siddig). who tagged 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 microbes that prevent anyone on the moon from dying, to ensure that the bloodthirsty warriors finally learn their lesson. Instead, Nol-Ennis and Ennis, led by Shel-la, continued to fight each other over and over again in eternity. It's a misery of their own making, and when Shel-la learns that leaving the planet will kill anyone who dies on its surface, he tries to use that knowledge to destroy his enemies once and for all.

Banks is excellent, managing to be completely convincing as a man who has died countless times yet yearns 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 trauma and purge her inner demons. It's powerful stuff, and just a hint of what "Deep Space Nine" would eventually become.

Some of the best episodes of "Deep Space Nine" delve into some really heavy subjectsand "Battle Lines" was one of the first times the show dealt heavily and openly with war. 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 because Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry didn't want the show to explicitly deal with war. Instead, Deep Space Nine stared at the horrors of war and the tough decisions we must make in the face of those horrors, and Battle Lines was an early indication of just 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 different types of roles:

“I worked with Jonathan Banks on 'Otherworld' at Universal. This is where I knew him originally. He is a very strange and unusual actor, he wears this beautiful makeup and he 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 Emmy-winning performance on Breaking Bad. However, for this odd little Star Trek fan? He will always be a man who loves war, who simply would not die.