“What You Leave Behind”
Written by Ira Steven Behr & Hans Beimler
Directed by Allan Kroeker
Season 7, Episode 25
Production episode 40510-575
Original air date: June 2, 1999
Stardate: unknown
Station log: It’s the eve of the big push into Dominion territory. Bashir wakes up with Dax, the pair having spent the night together, with the inevitable reference to how far down her spots go. O’Brien is nervously making sure Keiko has everything under control with the family (which of course she does), and we find out that he’s received an offer to teach at Starfleet Academy when the war’s over, which he’s going to accept (though Molly is dubious about whether or not he’s really accepted given that he hasn’t actually told Bashir about it). Sisko ministers to his pregnant wife, promising to come home to her, and then Jake walks him to the Defiant. Odo walks with Worf to the Defiant, both expressing the hope that they find Kira on Cardassia.
And then they set off. Sisko asks if Nog remembers how to get to Cardassia, and the ensign assures the captain that if he gets lost, he’ll just follow the ship in front of him—at which point we see that it’s a friggin’ huge fleet of Federation, Klingon, and Romulan ships setting forth from DS9 to Cardassian space.
On Cardassia, the female changeling promises the Breen Earth and Romulus if they win the war, which surprises Weyoun, as he thought he was getting to rule the Federation territories. However, she basically was blowing smoke up the Breen’s ass to motivate him, as this battle will pretty much be it—the war’s going to end this time one way or the other.
Broca enters and reports that there are rumors that Damar is alive and on Cardassia. Broca assures Weyoun and the Founder that if he is alive, he won’t be for long.
Elsewhere, Kira has to save Garak and Damar from being arrested by Jem’Hadar who recognize Damar, which she does by disguising herself as a Breen soldier and catching the Jem’Hadar unawares. But Damar had to risk going out and exposing himself to attend a meeting, whereby a disruption of the communications net on Cardassia was planned. It will cut the military off from Cardassia Prime, leaving them on their own and Weyoun unable to stay in touch with them.
As the fleet approaches Cardassia, everyone is left to their own conversations. O’Brien and Nog work to iron out some bugs in the new Defiant, while the chief also avoids telling Bashir about his job offer. Meanwhile, Worf gives Dax his blessing for her and Bashir’s relationship, and Sisko and Odo express concern over Kira’s absence and survival.
Sisko then has a vision of the Prophets in the form of his biological mother. Sarah says that the Emissary’s work is almost done—and she’s not talking about the war.
On Bajor, Dukat’s eyesight has been restored and he returns to Winn. She isn’t thrilled to see him, but she needs his help to release the Pah-wraiths. They will destroy the wormhole and the Prophets—as well as their Emissary, but Dukat insists that he wants Sisko for himself. They trek down to the fire caves, though it takes a while, as Winn doesn’t have quite the stamina of a Cardassian military officer.
Weyoun notices that the Dominion lines are spread too thin, and the female changeling orders reinforcements sent. But before Weyoun can carry out that order, the power goes out. Emergency power comes on, but long-range communications are down. Broca reports that Damar’s rebels have committed sabotage all over Dominion bases on Cardassia—but the rebels are civilians, not military. Weyoun suggests that, if civilians are agitating, then civilians should be targeted.
When power is restored, Weyoun sends out a message, informing the Cardassian people that the entirety of Lakarian City has been wiped out. Horrified by this action, Damar, Kira, and Garak agree that the best course of action is to attack Dominion HQ directly.
Martok contacts Ross and Sisko, reminding them of their mutual promise to stand on Cardassia Prime and share a bloodwine toast. After that, they engage the enemy, and the battle is joined. While being treated for a shoulder wound, O’Brien finally tells Bashir about the Academy gig. Ross and Martok lead a charge through the thin center lines that Weyoun noticed while Sisko takes two attack wings to help the Romulans, whose front is collapsing.
Three Jem’Hadar and two Cardassians arrive at Mila’s, killing her and taking Garak, Damar, and Kira prisoner. Broca reports this to the female changeling, who orders them executed. But before the Jem’Hadar can carry out the sentence, the two Cardassian soldiers kill the three Jem’Hadar (though one of the Cardassians is also killed). The surviving Cardassian, Ekoor, says, “That’s for Lakarian City” to the corpses and then pledges his loyalty to Damar.
Just as things are looking bad, the Cardassian ships (who probably also heard about Lakarian City) all turn on the Breen and Jem’Hadar. Now instead of three fleets versus three fleets, it’s four versus two. On Cardassia, the long-range communications go back online just in time for Weyoun and the female changeling to learn of the Cardassian military switching sides. The female changeling orders their forces pulled back to Cardassia Prime, has Broca taken away to be executed, and then orders Weyoun to exterminate the entire Cardassian population. As they start to level the city, Damar and a mess of Cardassians (and Kira) plan an attack on the headquarters.
Dukat and Winn arrive at the fire caves. Dukat is disappointed to find no fire, but then Winn utters an incantation from the text and then there’s lots and lots and lots of fire. Winn removes her robes, tossing them into the flames, shedding her raiments of office and a lifetime of hypocrisy (her actual words, hilariously). She kisses Dukat, then pours a drink for them to share—except she doesn’t drink from it, and when the poison kicks in, he realizes why. The Pah-wraiths, she says, demand a sacrifice. He dies.
Garak reports that the bulkhead is made of neutronium, which means they can’t even blow their way in. There’s a moment when they all have some cathartic laughter on the subject of the absurdity of their situation: all set to storm the battlements, and they can’t even get through the door. But then the Jem’Hadar obligingly open the door to kill Broca and two more Cardassians and leave their bodies on the street—giving Damar and the others a way in. They storm the headquarters, phasers blazing. Damar is killed, but the rest carry on through the corridors—and Weyoun sent a large number of Jem’Hadar out of the facility to eradicate the Cardassians, making their task easier. They take the main room; Garak kills Weyoun (the female changeling laments that that was the last Weyoun clone, to which Garak gleefully replies, “I was hoping you’d say that”). The female changeling refuses to call off the Breen and Jem’Hadar, saying that she will not make their victory easy and will make it costly.
Kira contacts the Defiant, and Odo offers to beam down and speak to the Founder, since she’ll at least talk to him. She refuses to surrender, expecting the solids to view her surrender as a sign of weakness that will lead to their invading the Gamma Quadrant. Odo insists they won’t, and asks only that she link with him. Kira and Garak really don’t like that idea, but Odo insists, and they do link. He cures her of the disease, and then she orders the Jem’Hadar and Breen to stand down. She also agrees to stand trial for war crimes and accept whatever prison sentence comes down from that.
But in exchange, Odo will return to the Great Link forever.
Sisko, Martok, and Ross stand on the broken ruins of Cardassia and the two Starfleet officers refuse to join in Martok’s toast to victory. The price was too high, the destruction too great. Martok reminds them that Bajorans would call this poetic justice, but Sisko and Ross don’t think that’s a good enough reason to drink a toast over their bodies.
Bashir beams down to the headquarters and talks to Garak, who is bitterly happy about his exile finally being over—but mostly just bitter at how much Cardassia has lost. Garak says he’ll miss their lunches, and Bashir hopes that they’ll be able to get together again some day.
On Deep Space 9, the female changeling signs the armistice and is taken away for trial, telling Odo that it’s all up to him now. Kira isn’t happy about losing Odo, but he needs to do this for his people in the hopes that they’ll eventually learn to trust solids. She asks only that she be the one to take him to the Gamma Quadrant.
Martok and Ross offer Worf the position of Federation Ambassador to Qo’noS, which he accepts, despite claiming not to be a diplomat. Martok reminds him that he himself isn’t a politician, but there it is.
That night, there’s a big-ass party in Vic’s Place, celebrating the end of the war and saying good-bye to Worf, Odo, and O’Brien. There is camaraderie and drinking, Sisko raises a toast to them all, and then Fontaine sings, “The Way You Look Tonight.”
In the fire caves, the Pah-wraiths resurrect Dukat, restoring him to his Cardassian self, and casting Winn aside. As soon as that happens, Sisko realizes what has happened and takes his leave of Yates, saying he has to go to the fire caves alone. He arrives in time to see Dukat with red glowy eyes. Dukat toys with him, forcing him to kneel, but Sisko insists that he’ll stop him. Winn distracts him for a moment, allowing Sisko to tackle Dukat and they both tumble into the fire caves, destroying the Kosst Amojan book and Dukat.
Dukat is now with the Pah-wraiths, and Sisko is now with the Prophets. His purpose was to stop the Pah-wraiths from being released, and now he can rest with the Prophets. Meanwhile, everyone on DS9 is searching for Sisko, but there’s no sign of him anywhere. But while Yates is in the middle of being briefed about the search, she gets a vision from Sisko who informs her that the Prophets saved him from the fire caves because they have a great deal for him to do, and things he needs to learn. He promises that he will be back—maybe in a year, maybe yesterday, but he will be back. Yates promises to wait.
As O’Brien leaves his cleaned-out quarters, he finds the figurine of Travis that had gone missing. He then remembers his time with Bashir, which prompts a montage. And then several more montages for several of the characters.
Kira and Odo try to slip off the station without anyone noticing, but Quark catches them before they go. Quark wants to know if Odo has anything to say to him. The changeling insists that he does not, doesn’t even want to say goodbye, and then gives Quark one last harrumph before boarding the runabout. Quark raises a toast to him, declaring happily to Kira that the man loves him—it was written all over his back.
The Great Link is green and yucky instead of amber and happy when Kira and Odo beam down. Odo asks Kira to tell everyone that he’ll miss them—even Quark. They have their final kiss, and then Odo “changes clothes” so that he’s wearing a tuxedo. She always said he looked good in a tux, so that’s how he wants her to remember him.
He sinks into the Great Link and it turns amber once again. The Founders are cured.
Kira returns to the station and takes command. Newly promoted Lieutenant (j.g.) Nog brings her a report, and then she grabs Sisko’s baseball and goes out into Ops, tossing the ball, then heads to Quark’s to stop the Ferengi from running a betting pool on who the new kai will be. She leaves Quark’s to see Jake standing on the Promenade, near his and Nog’s old spot, watching the wormhole open. Kira puts an arm around him and they watch the wormhole together as the camera pulls out to Deep Space 9 floating in the Denorios Belt.
Can’t we just reverse the polarity? Neutronium is made out of collapsed star matter. It can’t possibly be constructed on a planet because it’s so dense it has its own gravitational field stronger than that of Earth’s sun. And yet, as in “To the Death,” somehow there’s a Dominion construction on a planet made of neutronium.
The Sisko is of Bajor: Apparently the all-important task the Prophets needed Sisko to be able to perform, his ultimate purpose as Emissary, is to tackle a Cardassian holding a book so that he would fall into a pit of fire. Right.
Don’t ask my opinion next time: Damar thanks Kira for running the rebellion—he admits that it would never have succeeded without her assistance. And to the end, she remains the shot-caller, directing things so that Cardassia can be saved. Irony!
There is no honor in being pummeled: Worf gets to be a diplomat, even though he insists he isn’t, having apparently not realized how many acts of diplomacy he’s been at the center of in his career (most recently only two episodes previous).
Preservation of mass and energy is for wimps: Odo wins the war, but does so at a high cost to himself, to wit, losing Kira. On the other hand, he does get his oft-stated heart’s desire, to return to the Great Link.
Rules of Acquisition: While everyone’s off invading Cardassia, Quark hangs out with Fontaine playing various human card games and hating all of them. He laments how annoying his life is, causing Fontaine to sympathize: “A bartender’s life is a lonely one.” But then Fontaine goes off on a date with Ginger, prompting Quark to remind him of what he said, and Fontaine’s grinning response is that he’s not a bartender.
Plain, simple: Before they can attack Dominion HQ, Garak laments to Kira that he dreamt of returning to Cardassia, possibly even coming back to live with Mila. But instead, Cardassia is destroyed, the house levelled, Mila killed. Kira urges him to fight for a new Cardassia, but Garak says he’d rather just fight for revenge. “That works, too,” Kira mutters.
For Cardassia! Rather than be cowed by the Dominion’s authoritarian tactics, the Cardassians are emboldened by them, as the people and the military all rise up against the Dominion, turning the tide of the war—but also costing them billions and billions of lives.
Victory is life: From the beginning, the female changeling has always said that nothing was more important than bringing Odo back to the Great Link. She said it in “The Search, Part II,” in “Heart of Stone,” and in “Behind the Lines.” So when he offers that, it’s more than enough to get her to surrender, especially since it comes with the added bonus of curing the Great Link of Section 31’s disease.
Tough little ship: Nog and O’Brien express concern about the Defiant being sluggish and not as smooth as her predecessor, apparently forgetting how very un-smooth the ship was for a long time.
No sex, please, we’re Starfleet: Dax and Bashir are now officially a couple, continuing the tradition of the couple-that-doesn’t-become-a-couple-officially-until-the-finale that we got with Worf and Troi (who at least had been moving in that direction for most of the season) in “All Good Things…” and would get again with Chakotay and Seven of Nine (totally out of left field) in Voyager’s “Endgame.” (Sadly, Enterprise did not continue this tradition, thus depriving us of the totally unexpected Sato-Reed romance…)
What happens on the holosuite stays on the holosuite: Bashir refuses to take Dax to do the Alamo on the holosuite. However, he is willing to take her to Thermopylae to participate in the battle of the three hundred Spartans holding the pass. Dax says he should talk to a counselor about all his annihilation fantasies—and then agrees to go with him on the holosuite date.
Keep your ears open: “To the best crew any captain ever had. This may be the last time we’re all together. But no matter what the future holds, no matter how far we travel, a part of us—a very important part—will always remain here, on Deep Space 9.”
Sisko’s toast to the crew in Vic’s.
Welcome aboard: This episode has the longest guest star list of any single episode in Star Trek history, and they’re almost all returning guests (in the cases of Alaimo and Eisenberg, playing characters who go all the way back to the first episode). It includes Marc Alaimo (Dukat), Casey Biggs (Damar), Rosalind Chao (Keiko), Jeffrey Combs (Weyoun), James Darren (Fontaine), Aron Eisenberg (Nog), Louise Fletcher (Winn), Hana Hatae (Molly), J.G. Hertzler (Martok), Barry Jenner (Ross), Salome Jens (the female changeling), Mel Johnson Jr. (Broca), Penny Johnson (Yates), Deborah Lacey (Sarah), Julianna McCarthy (Mila), Cyndi Pass (Ginger), and Andrew J. Robinson (Garak). The one and only new guest is Greg Ellis as Ekoor.
Trivial matters: This episode has the odd distinction of being the only one of the four Star Trek spinoff series whose finale took place entirely in the series’ present day. TNG’s “All Good Things…” had scenes 25 years in the future, seven years in the past, and billions of years in the past; Voyager’s “Endgame” had scenes 25 years in the future, also; and Enterprise’s “These are the Voyages…” takes place entirely 200 years in the future.
With the sole exception of Worf, who will appear in Star Trek Nemesis, this is the final onscreen appearance of every character in it.
The final day of filming was at Vic’s Place, including the big party on the holosuite, which was timed deliberately so that the whole cast could get together one last time. Several of the recurring regular actors and the production staff appeared (out of makeup, where appropriate) as faces in the crowd at Vic’s.
Martok, Ross, and Sisko promised to drink a toast on Cardassia in “Tears of the Prophets,” which doesn’t go quite the way they’d planned. (Well, Martok’s actually fine with it, but, y’know, Klingons.)
At the armistice signing, Ross quotes what General Douglas MacArthur said in Tokyo Bay when World War II ended.
O’Brien accused Bashir of losing the figure of Travis in “The Changing Face of Evil,” but it turned out to have fallen behind O’Brien’s couch. Oops.
Early notions of the story had Sisko being killed during the final battle and resurrected by the Prophets to fight the Pah-wraiths. In addition, the script originally stated emphatically that Sisko was to remain with the Prophets forevermore, but Avery Brooks was very uncomfortable with the notion of a black man abandoning his pregnant black wife, which doesn’t have major negative connotations in the 24th century society of Star Trek, but has huge ones in the turn-of-the-21st-century audience watching the show. The line was rewritten to indicate that Sisko would one day come back. (This was very much the right move beyond Brooks’s very legitimate concerns about the message being sent to viewers, as the show had spent seven years showing us that Benjamin Sisko is a great father, and turning him into someone who abandons his wife when she’s pregnant with their child is antithetical to that, plus the ambiguity of his return makes the final shot of Jake and Kira staring at the wormhole that much more poignant.)
The producers also toyed with a final shot of Benny Russell (“Far Beyond the Stars,” “Shadows and Symbols”) sitting outside a studio holding a script for DS9, which would’ve been amusing.
This is one of two Trek series finales in which Jeffrey Combs, Michael Dorn, and Colm Meaney appear. Combs was also in “These are the Voyages…” as Shran, while Dorn and Meaney were both also in “All Good Things…” as Worf and O’Brien.
The short story “Requital” by Andy Mangels & Michael A. Martin in Tales of the Dominion War (edited by your humble rewatcher) takes place in and around the events of this episode, and features (among others) Reese from “The Siege at AR-558” and Ekoor from this episode.
This episode was novelized by Diane Carey, who would also go on to novelize Voyager’s finale, “Endgame.” With the exception of “Emissary,” which was novelized by J.M. Dillard, all the DS9 novelizations were by Carey (“The Search” two-parter, “The Way of the Warrior,” “Trials and Tribble-ations,” and the sixth season’s opening arc in The Dominion War Books 2 and 4).
While this is the last time DS9 has appeared on screen, it was the first of the Trek series to have an official series of novels dedicated to chronicling the storyline following its last onscreen appearance. (There were several individual novels that told original series tales following Star Trek VI and the Generations prelude, but nothing particularly organized.) That series debuted in 2001 with the Avatar duology by S.D. Perry, and has included Abyss by David Weddle & Jeffrey Lang, Demons of Air and Darkness and “Horn and Ivory” by your humble rewatcher, the four-book Mission: Gamma series by David R. George III, Heather Jarman, Andy Mangels & Michael A. Martin, and Robert Simpson, The Left Hand of Destiny Books 1-2 by J.G. Hertzler & Lang, Rising Son and Unity by Perry, the six-short-novels-in-three-books series Worlds of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine spotlighting Cardassia (Una McCormack), Andor (Jarman), Bajor (J. Noah Kym), Trill (Mangels & Martin), Ferenginar (me), and the Dominion (George), Warpath by David Mack, Fearful Symmetry and The Soul Key by Olivia Woods, The Never-Ending Sacrifice by McCormack, Zero Sum Game by Mack, Rough Beasts of Empire, Plagues of Night, Raise the Dawn, and Revelation and Dust by George, A Ceremony of Losses by Mack, Lust’s Latinum Lost (and Found) by Paula M. Block & Terry J. Erdmann, and The Missing by McCormack, with more to come. In addition, the 2000 Garak-focused novel A Stitch in Time by Andrew J. Robinson was retroactively folded into the post-finale continuity, as was the 1999 anthology The Lives of Dax and the WildStorm comic book miniseries n-Vector by K.W. Jeter & Toby Cypress and Divided We Fall by Mack, John J. Ordover, Andrew Currie, & Mike Collins.
The first five stories listed above (Avatar Books 1-2, Abyss, Demons of Air and Darkness, and “Horn and Ivory”) were collected in an omnibus entitled Twist of Faith, which had as its epigraph the Pericles quote from whence this episode’s title derives: “What you leave behind is not what is engraved in stone monuments, but what is woven into the lives of others.”
(Spoiler alert for various Simon & Schuster novels published between 2001 and the present day.) The novels (not just those listed above, but many many many others besides) have explored the decade following this episode and shown the fates of the various characters and situations, including the station at one point being destroyed and rebuilt. Sisko returned from the Celestial Temple in time for the birth of his daughter Rebecca at the same time that Bajor joined the Federation, though the notion that marrying Yates will bring him sorrow has continued to be explored as the couple has had some major tribulations since his return; Sisko left Starfleet for a time, but eventually came back and now commands the U.S.S. Robinson. Kira was in charge of the station, being made a Starfleet captain when Bajor joined the Federation, then later resigned her commission to become a vedek. Dax moved to the command track and then later transferred to the U.S.S. Aventine, eventually becoming her captain. Worf continued as Federation Ambassador to the Klingon Empire for four years before taking advantage of a presidential election to resign his diplomatic post and rejoin Starfleet just before Nemesis to become first officer of the U.S.S. Enterprise following Riker’s departure to command the U.S.S. Titan and Data’s death in that movie. Bashir continued to serve on the station for a time, but got embroiled in clandestine stuff (some of it involving Section 31) and then violated Federation law to help solve an Andorian genetic crisis that led to Andor re-entering the Federation after a temporary departure, but also resulted in Bashir losing his Federation medical license and Starfleet commission. Quark has continued to run the bar (some things should never change), although when Bajor became part of the Federation and its moneyless economy, Grand Nagus Rom appointed Quark Ferenginar’s ambassador to Bajor and designated the bar as the embassy, so he can continue to earn profit in the bar, which is officially Ferengi soil. Odo remained with the Great Link, eventually running the Dominion with Laas (from “Chimera”) when the other Founders went walkabout, though he is later trapped in the Alpha Quadrant while on a diplomatic mission. Nog continued on as the chief of operations on both iterations of the station. Jake spent a goodly amount of time searching for his father before his return (and did bring Kai Opaka home from the Gamma Quadrant), and then later met and married Azeni Korena (from “The Visitor”), continuing his career as a writer. Garak has been heavily involved in the rebuilding of his homeland, becoming a major leader of the slowly rebuilding postwar Cardassian Union. And finally, the female changeling’s words prove incorrect, as we do see another Weyoun show up, eventually becoming Odo’s attaché.
O’Brien and Bashir’s memory montage had clips from “The Changing Face of Evil,” “A Simple Investigation,” “The Storyteller,” “Inquisition,” “Trials and Tribble-ations,” “The Die is Cast,” “Rivals,” and “Explorers.” The music cues used for the bit right before that montage are from “The Minstrel Boy,” established in TNG’s “The Wounded” as a song O’Brien sang when he served on the Rutledge.
Worf’s montage: “The Way of the Warrior,” “Our Man Bashir,” “Penumbra,” “Tacking Into the Wind,” and “Strange Bedfellows.” Tellingly, none of the scenes feature Jadzia, as the studio and Terry Farrell were unable to work out compensation for her appearance in the clips.
Odo and Kira’s montage: “The Abandoned,” “His Way,” and “Chimera.”
Quark’s montage: “Shadows and Symbols,” “The Ascent,” “Homefront,” “Bar Association,” “Take Me Out to the Holosuite,” and “Badda-Bing, Badda-Bang.”
Jake’s montage: “Emissary,” “The Nagus,” “The Jem’Hadar,” “The Visitor,” “The Ascent,” “Explorers,” and “Nor the Battle to the Strong.”
Walk with the Prophets: “Today the guns are silent.” As the final episode of the two-year-plus Dominion War storyline, this is excellent. I love that the two factors that lead to victory aren’t military tactics or superiority, but a combination of a heretofore unsympathetic nation nobly fighting for freedom and justice and from an act of compassion by one of our main characters.
Unfortunately, as the finale of the TV show Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, it fails. The end of the war is not the same as the end of the show. Back in “Emissary,” Sisko was given two purposes: to become Emissary of the Prophets and to get Bajor ready to join the Federation. The former was handled ineptly with an inane storyline involving glowy red eyes and pretentious sounding prophecies that boil down to “we picked you because we needed someone to tackle a guy holding a book into a big fire,” and the latter was totally ignored. The final episode of the series should damn well have had Bajor actually entering the Federation.
Amusingly, of the four spinoffs, DS9—which is, to my mind, the strongest of the quartet overall—is the only one to fail this most basic structural tenet. TNG revisited the trial of humanity by the Q from its first episode, Voyager got our heroes home from the Delta Quadrant, and Enterprise ended with Earth helping form the Coalition of Planets that would eventually mutate into the Federation. But DS9 blew the landing by treating the show like Star Trek: The Dominion War.
Everything was in place for it, too. Kira being given a Starfleet commission so that the Cardassian rebellion would have the approval and influence of the Federation was the perfect prelude to Bajor becoming officially part of the Federation. And it would’ve been a far more appropriate and interesting resolution to the ongoing story of Bajor than a stupid side plot involving fire caves, glowy eyes, magic books, and a simply endless amount of shouting.
Seriously, Winn shouts at Dukat, Dukat shouts at Winn, Sisko shouts at Dukat, Dukat shouts at Sisko—and it’s all just to set up a totally absurd confrontation. The alienness of the Prophets, the depth of the rivalry between Sisko and Dukat is reduced to two actors (who deserve way better than this) yelling at each other and then tumbling into a fire. The complexity of the relationship between the two that we saw expressed so magnificently in “Defiant” and “The Way of the Warrior” and “The Maquis” two-parter and in so many other places is cast aside for some cheap-ass melodrama.
Which is too bad, because a lot of other stuff in the episode works beautifully. All the scenes on Cardassia are brilliantly realized, from the determination of Damar, Kira, and Garak to the growing frustration of the female changeling, as the deterioration of the war effort combines with the disease to harsh her mellow something fierce, to the relentless sucking up of both Weyoun and Broca (both of whom pay for their unthinking devotion with their lives). Every scene between Odo and Kira works magnificently—I may not have been sold on the notion of them becoming a couple in the abstract, but Nana Visitor and Rene Auberjonois make a believer out of me every time they’re together, culminating in that great shot of Odo in the tux entering the link. The episode does a beautiful job of closing out Bashir’s two bromances, with Garak and with O’Brien, Quark and Odo get exactly the right end to their bizarre relationship, and James Darren puts the perfect cherry on top with his lovely rendition of “The Way You Look Tonight” following Sisko’s toast.
Having said that, a lot of performances are a bit subdued or just a bit off. Nicole de Boer, Michael Dorn, and especially Avery Brooks seem really flat, and Louise Fletcher and Marc Alaimo are just terrible (though the latter three have by far the weakest material to work with). There should’ve been a scene with Jake and Nog, and the montages were cheesy and woefully incomplete. Why didn’t Dax get one? Why did Odo and Kira only get themselves as a couple when there was so much more to both of them? (Although, man, it’s easy to forget watching the show straight through how tiny Cirroc Lofton was in season one and how friggin tall he got by the end…)
While it was appropriate that TNG ended with the Enterprise pootling off onto its next mission with the crew intact, it is equally appropriate that DS9 ended with half the crew scattered to the nine winds. Sisko’s off with the Prophets, Odo’s off with the Great Link, Worf’s off to be a diplomat, Garak’s off to rebuild Cardassia, and O’Brien’s off to teach at Starfleet Academy. But Quark’s still at the bar, Kira’s in charge, Bashir and Dax and Nog are all still around, as are Jake and Yates. Even more fitting, the series’ final line is Quark, quoting Jean-Baptiste Alphone Karr’s famous line, “The more things change, the more things stay the same.” Indeed.
Warp factor rating: 6
Keith R.A. DeCandido will be the Author Guest of Honor at GalaxyFest in Colorado Springs this weekend, alongside actors Hilary Shepard (who played one of the Jack Pack on DS9), Michael Copon, and Jason Faunt; fellow authors Rebecca Moesta (cowriter of the Trek graphic novel The Gorn Crisis), Jessica Brawner, John Schuerman, Christopher Salas, Daniel M. Hoyt, Dave “Gusto” Jackson, JL Forrest, Kevin Ikenberry, Lou Berger, Mario Acevedo, Paul Lell, Sam Knight, Susanne Lambdin, and W.J. Cherf; special effects artist Ed Kramer; and many more. His schedule is here.
Look for the seventh season wrapup on Friday and very soon an announcement of what I’ll be doing next for Tor.com. :)
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Just to touch briefly on your rant about the purpose of the Emissary…
When I watched this episode originally, I didn’t feel like that was the end of the Emissary’s journey. In fact, quite the opposite. It felt more to me like he was *finally* going to become the Emissary he’s been prophesized to be.
In my head, I imagined that the real purpose of the Emissary was to teach the wormhole aliens about linear existence, and vice versa. That the job they were now sending him on (which he mentions to Yates) was to do just that, and bridge this gap.
I always felt like everything he did up to this point was just prelude to his real purpose. (of course, I never read any of the fiction afterward, so I don’t really know what that established ex post facto). That was just my idea though.
Minsk
You hit on my main issue with this episode exactly. The end of the war and the fulfillment of the Emissary’s role have nothing to do with each other. They just seem to end at the same time, and the Emissary stuff is weak.
— Michael A. Burstein
I agree with so much of this review. The Fire Caves plot was a terrible resolution, just shoddily and ineptly handled. What frustrated me was how totally disconnected it was from everything else. Sisko just gets a Spidey-sense tingle and goes off and tackles a guy off a cliff? That’s the most cursory imaginable way they could’ve ended things. What I felt they should’ve done — before I came to the larger realization that they should never have taken the Prophet story in this direction to begin with — was to have the Pah-wraith-empowered Dukat materialize aboard the station and attack the crew, and actually do something to manifest as a threat, so that there’d be some sense of stakes beyond two guys in a cave, and some sense that Sisko was fighting to protect the people he loved rather than just arbitrarily following divine instructions. And without any handy fire pits to tackle Dukat into, Sisko would’ve had to employ his intelligence or his tactical skills or his leadership abilities as he directed his team to work out a way to defeat Dukat, rather than just being reduced to a blunt object.
Instead, the finale half-asses the wrapup of the Pah-wraith storyline and fritters away endless minutes on goodbyes and montages. The last half-hour of this finale is really terribly paced. Even in my first viewing, I was bored at the sheer self-indulgence of the interminable flashback montage, and frustrated that they were wasting time on it rather than focusing on more important things like resolving the question of Bajor’s Federation membership.
Another aspect of the lousy pacing, and of the total disconnect between the Fire Caves subplot and everything else, is that the events of the war storyline in WYLB clearly take days or weeks, depending on how long it took to prepare for the surrender ceremony, whereas Dukat and Winn can’t be wandering around in the caves for more than a few hours. Sure, sometimes that kind of chronological cheating is necessary for dramatic pacing, but it just underlines how empty and cursory the whole Pah-wraith climax was.
It always disappointed me that they dragged out the Dominion War until the very end of the series. To me, the most interesting stories to tell about a war aren’t about the fighting itself, which is usually just the same old predictable blood-and-thunder and horror-of-war stuff, but about what happens afterward. Wars generally create more problems than they solve, and their aftermath can have a profound impact on history. So I wanted to see some exploration of that process, of what the Federation did to restore balance after the war, preserve its alliances with its wartime partners, rebuild Cardassia, and so forth.
Of course, the bright side of the show’s neglect for those important questions is that it gave Pocket fodder for a really seminal and impressive series of novels, the series that in many ways was the linchpin for the modern novel continuity. But as far as the show itself was concerned, it was a structural weakness to drag out the war and ignore the aftermath.
Maybe it’s because I haven’t been actually rewatching the episodes and experiencing the good parts again, but it’s been surprising to me, as I followed this rewatch, to realize just how much DS9’s storytelling fell apart in the last two years. There was still lots of good stuff happening, but the bad stuff was a lot worse than I’d initially realized.
I think in this episode, I feel the same lack of chemistry from Bashir/Dax that bothered other people in the previous episode. Eh.
I like that, when Ross and Sisko refuse Martok’s toast (where is the Romulan leadership, btw?), Martok doesn’t get offended, but just kind of grunts in a way that expresses, “Humans are weird. Oh well, more blood wine for me.”
The final goodbye between Odo and Quark is good, but sadly not as good as a couple of the other times in the series where they’ve reluctantly/tacitly admitted their friendship.
More than a Benny Russel cameo, I really wish the final moment of the episode had gone like:
Quark: “The more things change, the more things stay the same.”
Morn: “Yup, that sure is the truth, Quark.”
Yeah, I turned to Joe at the end and said, ‘that was kind of dumb’. Really it’s mostly the Prophet stuff…what really got me is pretty much nothing really came (in show) of their threat/warning about marrying Yates. What was the point of that?
I also found the montages super cheesy (and very obviously missing Jadzia) and taking space that could have been used for some other needed scenes (like Jake and Nog, as you mentioned).
I really liked the summary of all the novels, thanks! Bashir kind of gets the shaft…eek. What about O’Brien? Or does he just stay at the Academy and is thankfully not having horrible things happen to him all the time!
Ahahahaha, I love that Quark’s bar is an ’embassy’.
@5: Oh yeah, I meant to comment how the temporal dischronicity with the Fire-Caves subplot bothered me. It’s most noticeable when Sisko runs off to join them after Dukat becomes the Wraith Avatar — the series has clearly established that journeying to Bajor is a matter of (four?) hours. So Dukat was just standing on the edge of the cliff raging, and Winn was dying but not dead, for four hours? Bah.
krad @1:
If this doesn’t involve the words “Voyager Rewatch”, I’m going to be very disappointed…
Outside of the Fire Caves I thought this was a great wrap up of the Dominion War arc and season. Not so much the whole series though.
But! At least it gave us Winn’s death. I hated that character from the first episode she appeared. Oh my god what a conniving, sociopathic, power hungry….character and the embodiment of everything I hate about religious leaders and religious people (the hypocrisy, the desire to use religion for power and so on). Which is a testament to how well Louise Fletcher played this character plus the writing for Winn, was so well done and so strong that even after all these years and watches later I still want to throw something at the screen when she’s on.
Thinking on it now, she should’ve been more an antagonistic focus than Dukat, especially after they took back DS9 in season 6.
I hated the ending with Sisko honestly, it just seemed so anti-climatic an end for him (really, tackling Dukat over the ledge? That’s it?) It just seemed like they had time to fill, couldn’t think of anything, and remembered Winn and Dukat were in the Fire Caves (coulda opened its way into DS9 movies! Right? No? Fine.) And ending it with Benny Russell pitching Deep Space 9 would’ve been been perfect and left Sisko-as-Emissary-and-alive even more ambiguous than just “It could months, or it could be yesterday.”
I also felt like Sisko was a bit too paranoid about the ‘nothing but sorrow’ in the post series novels.
But other than all that, it was a great wrap up to the war. That part of the show was satisfying at least.
Somebody please give Bryan Fuller a Star Trek series with an enormous budget. Oh, and put it on HBO so that he can literally do anything with the plot.
12 episodes per season will be the sweet spot.
@1
If it doesn’t involve the words “DS9 Relaunch (re)read”, I’m going to be very dissappointed….
;)
acemarke & Jarvisimo: You are both going to be disappointed, then. :)
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@8: The 3-hour trip to Bajor (the usual figure) is at sublight velocities. “Emissary” put the wormhole at about 160 million kilometers from Bajor, and that distance in 3 hours works out to about 1/20 the speed of light. So it would be faster at warp. Still, I agree, it bugged me how instantaneous it seemed to be. Even at warp, it would take some time to prep the runabout, launch it, get emergency clearance to travel at warp within the system, make the actual trip, get orbit and landing clearance, and walk to the caves — not to mention that it took Dukat and Winn hours (or days?) to find the cliffs, so how did Sisko get there in moments?
I remember being a bit disturbed by Garak and Bashir’s last conversation. I got the impression that Garak was about to eat his phaser when he stepped out of the room.
@10 Agree. David R George novels kill a lot of my enjoyment in general though. I skipped his entry in ‘The Fall’ series and his last Lost Era novel. I probably won’t read his next DS9 book either.
@1 krad – I look forward to whatever it may be.
I agree with all about the stupidity of the fire cave ending. I recall being quite disappointed when it first aired, and it hasn’t improved with age. It’s more disappointing since they clearly CAN do better. On the flip side, it’s still better than I could have done. :-)
At the time I was really hoping for a DS9 movie, but now I’m glad they never went that route. Some of the later ST movies were so bad I couldn’t even finish watching, and I’m less than thrilled with the reboot. All said, this was my favorite of the various Star Trek franchises, and even this misstep at the end doesn’t change that.
Plus it had Nicole de Boer. Enough said.
@9 Watching Voyager makes me disappointed…
:)
I’m sure the reason there was no Jadzia in the montages had to do with legal / royalties to Terry Farrell. I agree there should have been more of Kira and Odo than just their relationship. Maybe a shot of Kira with either Marritza (“Duet”) or Legate Ghemor (“Second Skin”)? Although that would have the same Royalty problems… :-(
@6: We all know it’s not over until Morn leaves the bar. It’s right there, Rule of Acquisition #286.
Keith,
Thank you for hosting the Re-Watch. It’s been a fun weekly ritual for the last two years and I’ve enjoyed the alternate perspectives and debates it’s generated.
I also want to thank you, Marco Palmieri, and the many writers who’ve contributed to the DS9 Relaunch since 2001. Thank you so much for not letting the saga of the onetime mining station end in the summer of 1999. Every time a new book comes out, it’s simply a joyful treat to revisit my favorite corner of the Trek sandbox.
The especially problematic thing about the flimsiness of the whole ordeal with the Pah Wraiths is that Ron Moore went and did it again with Battlestar Galactica. In both shows, I liked the notion of actually bothering to acknowledge that interfacing with the space gods as gods was an unavoidable, and perhaps even appropriate, modality. But in both shows, the massive swirl of prophecy and the sense of myserious and untold forces lurking in the shadows ran out the clock and were resolved by really banal actions.
Which, I suppose, could have been handled fairly- mysterious ways and all that. But, again, in both cases, we’ve had some seriously big plays- the Prophets deleting a Dominion fleet of thousands, the BSG spacegods returning a character from the dead- and in light of those, having the endgame be this understated, it-was-your-place-my-child nonsense is weak tea.
And it seemed so unnecessary. All that you needed to tie things up was make victory over the Dominion essential to the survival of Bajor, and it all wraps up. The divinely inspired general is certainly a fruitful mythological vein. Make Dukat or the Founder or whoever work out that their current doom is the result of the Prophets nuking their reinforcements, and have their Cardassia-leveling dose of rageahol include a suicide run on Bajor, and Sisko dies (or seems to) in the defense. If you must, even wizard him up- the Prophets-who-are-of-Bajor made corporeal in Sisko.
As it stands, though, it’s just one more warning that spooky storytelling is fraught more often than not.
@18: GregR (good name!) beat me to the punch; the lack of a Dax montage was almost certainly due to the issues with including footage of Terry Farrell. It’s a shame but sadly not unexpected.
I read somewhere the montages were used because they ran out of money and time for the final battle. Hopefully they’ll do a DS9 remaster and add stuff like that in as a bonus version of the episode or something. I’m surprised nobody’s mentioned the scenes that are here are reused battle scenes, and not just from DS9 (unless I just missed it). As much as I understand the limitations they faced, I do think the montages and reused battle scenes take away from the story. They interrupt the episode’s flow almost like a commercial break would, paying homage to the real-world production rather than the in-universe narrative.
As krad points out, the issue of Bajor’s political status is ignored here. I’d rather have seen that get addressed instead of watch bits and pieces of earlier episodes and movies. Doesn’t seem like it would’ve required much more than existing sets and actors who were already on the set to begin with.
Others have already pointed out issues with the timing in the episode and the disappointing ending of the Emissary storyline so I won’t go into detail there.
I think if any Trek series should’ve had an 8th season, DS9 would be it. The ending arc feels rushed to me. It has a ton of plot holes, some fairly obvious, that keep these episodes from being up to DS9’s usual quality. Many story threads are left hanging (granted, this helped open the door to the book relaunch, but it’s not like that was planned or that everyone will read each of the books). An 8th season could’ve given them the opportunity to close the series more coherently, as well as to truly develop characters like Ezri. Then again, there’s a lot of tedious filler in seasons 6 and 7 so maybe it’s better it ended this way…
@21: I’d say the difference is that Moore-Galactica‘s treatment of divinity was consistent from start to finish; events were always meant to have a supernatural/divine influence guiding them, even though it took a while for that to become clear. But in DS9, the “Prophets” were originally conceived as just wormhole aliens that the Bajorans had interpreted as figures in their religion, but in later seasons — especially once Weddle and Thompson came aboard — they changed into blatant, out-and-out gods and came to be portrayed in a far less subtle, far more simplistic way. The way they ended up was nothing like what Michael Piller had in mind when he created them, whereas I think Moore’s payoff of BSG’s mystical/divine thread was in keeping with his original plans.
Say goodbye to Quark you goddamnedsonofabitch!!
@15. David R George’s entries are fairly weak, but his entry in The Fall did a decent job of setting things up. But I do agree with some fans that post ds9 novels Sisko is poorly used.
Krad, thank you so much for the rewatch… it was fabulous and I looked forward to them every week even if I never commented very often.
I think you hit the nail on the head with this episode and the series ending in general… I remember watching this with a big group of friends at the time it was first aired and we were all so dissapointed by the way Sisko’s arc ended.
I was so disappointed with the finale. While the Cardassian plot was awesome and made of win, the Pah-wraith plot didn’t seem to make much sense, logically or otherwise. I didn’t particularly care for the montages either, and I hadn’t thought about it, really, but what a number of commenters are saying about Bajor and the Federation is a very good point. This would have been a great place to fit that, but… meh. So much of the build up had been awesome that this was just a huge let-down, although the Cardassian scenes (mostly) carried me through the stuff I didn’t like. Or, at least, as much as the other stuff annoys me, I wouldn’t have wanted to miss them.
May I put in a request for a VOY rewatch, please? These rewatches have been something I’ve looked forward to for a very long time now, and with more series, I’d love to continue to see them. :)
Look for an announcement on Thursday of one of the things I’ll be doing starting in March. :)
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
KRAD,
Thanks so much for the reread! Haven’t commented much, but I’ve read it right through and looked forward to it every week. Whatever you want to do next is cool with me …
S
KRAD As long as you are still posting something, I’ll look forward to reading it.
I’ll reiterate what others have said about how disappointing the emissary arc was. If they didn’t want to have Sisko leave a pregnant wife, why introduce the pregnancy at all- it didn’t really serve any storyline purpose. The whole thing was just a mess.
I liked the montages though, or liked them better than the 20 years later ending that TNG had.
When I first watched this back in 1999, I was deeply disappointed that they had Sisko just leave and go be with the Prophets. From then until now, I had a deep dislike for the episode. On rewatching I realized that Sisko states emphatically to Kasidy that he will be back. Kudos to Avery Brooks for getting the writers to correct a really terrible choice in having Sisko taken away from his pregnant wife and devoted son forever. Being black myself, that really bothered me when I first watched. But I hadn’t watched the finale since it first aired in 1999 (indeed, I had been actively avoiding watching it for the last sixteen years), and again I’m glad Brooks had them undo that bit of awful. Sounds like more Weddle & Thompson half-assery.
A great finale to Star Trek: The Dominon War. As a finale for Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, it really does feel kinda incomplete. I would have loved at least one last scene with Jake and Nog, and a throwaway line about Bajor and the Federation; those would have been great scenes, and we could have done without the stupid fire caves nonsense. Though I agree its gratifying to see Winn and Dukat finally get their comeuppances, those could have been for more satisfying; I’d rather they be both disgraced and humiliated (particularly Winn) and have to face the things they’d done. Killing them lets them off easy.
I am very much looking forward into diving into the DS9 post-finale novels. Even with the spoilers, they sound really great.
Keith, I want to chime in with others in thanking you for doing this rewatch and the previous TNG rewatch. These past two years have been great watching these episodes again with you and everyone here, Keith, reading your always thoughtful and funny analysis, and the great commentary of CLB and all you wonderful folks. Looking forward to your next project here, whatever it may be.
The episode started wrong with Bashir being cheesy in bed, and it ended wrong as described above. A weak ending, indeed.
Looking forward to the season seven recap.
Edit: I am highly amused that this comment list has two #11s.
As regards last-minute hookups go, Reed and Mayweather would have been the best option in Enterprise.
Agree with just about everything said. Felt like the episode ground to a shuddering halt two-thirds of the way through. ‘…and here’s that Fire Caves wrap-up stuff you were all waiting for…’.
Pity Dax never made the montages. They had her appearing in flashbacks up until a few episodes ago. Woulda killed them? Will chip in with more thoughts tomorrow!
It could’ve been worse: Sisko wakes up in bed, turns to Morn, and says, “What a weird dream I had.”
Keith, this is only my second time posting, but I’ve really enjoyed the TNG and DS9 rewatches. Thanks for all the time that you invested in them. I wish that you had been one of the writers for TNG/DS9!
CLB has a great point that the more interesting story would have been the consequences of the war. I always thought that it might have been interesting to have the Romulans discover the real events of In The Pale Moonlight at some point during the closing arc. Imagine the consequences if they discovered that Sisko was responsible for every Romulan death in the war. In general, Trek lets its opening-credits regulars break the rules with no meaningful long-term consequences, so following up on In The Pale Moonlight might have given DS9 a chance to break this unfortunate streak.
As for Dukat, it’s almost painful to watch his scenes in the closing arc, considering how delightfully nuanced he was for much of DS9’s run. Too often, Star Trek’s villains devolve into cartoon caricatures, but DS9 largely bucked this trend with Dukat, Damar, Weyoun, etc. It’s a shame that the writers completely lost their vision with Dukat during the last two seasons; if you only knew Dukat from his appearances in the closing arc, you’d think that he was yet another one-dimensional bad guy.
On another note, this rewatch has left me wondering whether DS9 should have avoided the Sisko-as-the-Emissary arc altogether. With some exceptions, it seems to me that the series-long Emissary storyline led to some of DS9’s worst writing.
Lastly, a general gripe about DS9’s battle sequences. Although the visuals hold up quite well, I wish that DS9 had discovered a way to depict battle sequences without habitually resorting to its cliche of having computer consoles explode, usually in the face of some nameless extra. VOY and ENT were guilty of this as well.
Oh, and as far as a last-minute hookup on Enterprise, I’d have to go with Mayweather-Sato. I always thought they would have made a great couple, and it would have made a hell of a lot more sense than Chakotay-Seven of Nine.
Lisamarie and possibly others expressed similar feelings on a previous post, but the event is in this episode, so I’ll discuss it here:
The series so far has done an excellent job of portraying the Founders as being terribly, irredeemably evil. They are paranoid, xenophobic, aggressive, manipulative, deceptive, cruel, and give not a whit for the life or happiness of any non-Founder. They killed a city of two million civilians as a show of force, and tried to exterminate the Cardassian race for revenge even when it wouldn’t help save themselves.
Saving the Founders strikes me not as “noble” but as something more like “enabling perpetual abuse” and probably “inviting everyone’s death”. I fully expect the Founders to say “gee, thanks, Odo”, and then devote all their resources to figuring out how to invade the Alpha Quadrant again. Point a giant graviton beam at the wormhole and kill the Prophets; try to invent their own pah-wraiths; search for another wormhole; sneak Jem’Hadar and Vorta breeding materials into the Alpha Quadrant if civilian ships start passing back and forth (which they probably will eventually); or, if all else fails, build up a gigantic fleet, send them over, and fight a war 70 years later. (Perhaps sending some changelings slightly ahead of them to investigate and steal any technological advances their opponents have made, and pausing for a year to upgrade their fleet before attacking.)
Is Odo’s presence going to change any of that? I think not. The Founders’ worst crimes happened long after Odo was brought into the Great Link to stand trial, when the Founders carefully examined his memories and experiences. (It is curious to note that the concept of a virus that slowly killed changelings was pioneered by none other than the Founders. Or whoever does research for them–do Vorta? do Jem’Hadar? some other slave race we haven’t seen?) Obviously, Odo’s experiences did not change their opinion of “solids”. What reason is there to expect it’ll be different this time? Would the Founders be grateful for being “saved”? They’ve written off Odo as misguided before. Would they respect the treaty that the female Founder had signed? I doubt it; that treaty was with the Federation et al, they seem to have no problem lying to solids, and they probably want to exterminate the Federation for nearly killing them.
So that’s what I, as a viewer, think. What should certain in-universe people be thinking? Wake up, Garak! Section 31, where are you?! Kill or kidnap Odo before he leaves, plant a bomb on the runabout, send a cloaked ship after them and intercept them on the way, something. Garak had the right idea back in “Broken Link”. (As a matter of fact, would it actually be genocide? There were the 100 changelings sent out, and we know of only one that had returned to the Great Link.) I’m not 100% sure about the morality of doing it myself, but these characters should certainly have tried it. I was saying out loud, “Oh, come on,” as I watched Odo’s plan succeed without interference.
(A resolution that might have worked would be sending in a large occupying force to the Founder planet along with Odo and the cure, and having the terms of the surrender include some kind of disarmament. Reminiscent of the Allies occupying Germany and Japan after World War II, actually. That fits rather well… I think I may just adopt this as my head-canon.)
@35: I’d actually like that, if Morn was the one who wakes up and says “what a strange dream I had” to Sisko.
While we’ve still got him, there needs to be a rule that every series ends with Bob Newhart waking up.
As for DS9’s end, yeah, it was so-so. I remember being more disappointed it was one less Trek series we had at the time. I couldn’t get UPN, so Voyager wasn’t an option. Not that I was missing much.
But we’re definitely missing much now. Come back to TV, Trek! You’re our only hope.
My few thoughts –
1) Like Christopher, I thought the timing in the caves was a bother. If they really needed the story, they could have started their trek as the allies celebrated taking Cardassia, arrived during the DS9 celebration (it would be a multi-day trek), Sisko leaves, and then we cut back to his arrival as constituted.
2) How naive were Ross and Sisko? They had to know that taking Cardassia would cost countless lives, whether by allies or (surprise!) Dominion hands. That they thought they would have the stomach to handle bloodwine, but didn’t, was the behavior of peacetime soldiers.
3) I’m glad the Dominion won the war. It makes me….happy. After all, as Keith points out, getting Odo back was their primary objective. They accomplished that at the cost of zero casualties and one prisoner (who is also nearly immortal and will outlive any sentence). While the allies may think they “won,” every group in the Alpha was a loser. Responding to @38, based on the events described by the female changling, I’d say that they seem more like abuse victims, lashing out at those who abused them (remember, the Link is essentially one long shared memory). I’d even argue that in the war they were just doing everything in their power to bring their “child” home. How are they evil? They should be pitied.
4) Does this mean that station management was transferred to Bajoran control? While Kira had the commission, I’m guessing it would have been resigned at the end of the war – otherwise she would have been serving as an officer in another military. That means that Bajor is running the station, with seconded SF officers. That’s a huge shift in getting Bajor into the Federation. I’m disappointed no mention was made of that.
The only way I can spin this as victory for the AQ-powers, is that if the armistice also included the shutting down of JH breeding vats and a permanent quarantine on the link-planet. If all the founders have to go to the link to be cured, then it would be theoretically possible to put a few guard ships in orbit and shootdown any vessel which tries to flee. Trouble is, that is neither the Klingon nor Federation style (for very different reasons) and that only leaves the Romulans which might be so minded, but we know that they aren’t going to be a power for very much longer (thanks a bunch JJ, dumbass).
It’s a victory for the AQ in that the situation returns to the status quo ante. The Dominion is on their side of the wormhole and no one AQ power is dominant. Is it a long-term victory? That depends on what the Founders do now that they’re cured, and what happens to the Dominion if the Founders choose to just stay in the link and be left alone. Do the Vorta take over, and if so are they open to being peaceful neighbors? I suppose it also depends on whether the Prophets allow significant traffic through the wormhole.
How much follow up is there in the novels as to what happens to the Dominion/Gamma Quadrant in genreal? It says there that Odo ‘runs’ the Dominion from that pont on. Do the other Founders actually respect the treaty and stay in the Great Link?
It also seems like the whole culture of the Gamma Quadrant is going to be completely overturned – what about all the other Vorta and Jem’Hadar who viewed the Founders as gods? What happens to all of them?
Thematically, I do like that ultimately Odo is able to stop the war with his act of compassion, but realistically I do have a hard time believing it, giving all the other things we know about the Founders (and considering they didn’t seem to take Odo too seriously the first time they met him, and even Laas didn’t come around to his point of view and he WASN’T brought up by the Founders). It seems like there aren’t really any consequences at all for them, especially if they go on ruling the Gamma Quadrant (via Odo).
I find that fast forwarding thru the fire caves parts makes the episode much better.
Overall, I thought it was terribly rushed. They had the whole of season 7 to develop things but waited until basically the last 4 episodes to bring it to a close. Sloppy.
Sisko really should have had to choose between following his Starfleet duty and resolving the Pah-Wraith plot (or some better spiritual crisis).
In other words, choose between Starfleet Captain and religious Emissary.
Instead he wins the war, then pops off to slug Dukat in the face.
Hey, I’ve been following the TNG and DS9 rewatches since nearly the beginning, though this is my first time commenting. It felt like something I had to leave behind.
Thanks very much, not just to Keith for his amazing recap reviews which I
neveralmost never disagree with, but also to all the regular commentors whose varied opinions and good natured debates make each post a real treat.To echo a lot of voices here, thanks KRad. Came to this rewatch part way through and has been great.
I wonder if a good way of looking at the overall structure is to think of Kira’s mission. Ok, Bajor hasn’t joined the Federation, but following the succesful overthrowing of Cardassia on her home planet, she’s now been utterly instrumental in overthrowing the very Cardassian mindset that could have made it happen again. So she has essentially sealed Bajor’s safety.
Personally I would rather Sisko had been less certain to return. Like most everyone else I didn’t like the prophet storyline (or at least how it played out) but the fact that he would return at some point made a mockery of the warning he chose to ignore. What was really at stake? I’ve not read the books, so I’m pleased to hear that has actually dogged him to some degree.
There’s a scene during the final battle – specifically where the Defiant slowly bypasses a wave of Jem’Hadar warships – in which Dennis McCarthy’s score actually rises to match the enormity of the events (a rare event on DS9). This is the moment where I finally realized Star Trek was coming to an end.
To me, back in 1999, this wasn’t just the end of DS9. It was the end of Trek as a whole. I wasn’t keeping track of Voyager, and as far as I knew, there were no announcements concerning a 10th Trek feature at that point (Nemesis wouldn’t be announced for another year or so). To me, this was the end to a universe that began all the way back in 1987 with Farpoint. The end of the Picard era, in a way.
Back when TNG ended, it didn’t feel like that. DS9 was ongoing, Voyager was about to premiere, and we had Generations coming up. Needless to say, for the first time, it felt like it was all ending. Sad, but bittersweet.
I had my problems with the Pah’ Wraith resolution, but overall I was truly pleased by this finale. Maybe not as cohesive as the TNG finale, but still amongst my favorite shows. I’d give it a 8 or 9.
I was never bothered by the lack of a resolution to the Federation/Bajor situation. One of the reasons Starfleet established a presence on Bajor was to ensure the world wouldn’t be retaken by the Cardassians. Given their situation at this finale, there was zero chance of Bajor being occupied ever again. As far as I know, Starfleet remains on DS9, ensuring that Bajor’s future is their own. They’re part of the Feds in everything but name. That satisfied me.
And this is one finale that didn’t shy away from the consequences. 800 million dead. Cardassia paid the price for Dukat’s delusions. I often wonder how characters like Ben Maxwell would have felt about this situation. We didn’t get O’Brien’s reaction to the massacre, for one.
Odo and Kira had the best ending of them all. Nothing more to say on that front.
And the final shot is downright perfect. Poignant and emotional. A deserved callback to The Visitor. In the end, Jake still ended up fatherless. At least, we get a sense that Benjamin will be back one day, and that Jake will never be alone. Not with Nog, Julian, Quark, Ezri and Nerys hanging around.
I don’t recall when I first started keeping track of the rewatch. I believe it was during the third season. It’s been a while. It was a fruitful experience, with plenty of viewpoints and interesting analysis and debates. Definitely worth it.
@41: It is well known that those who suffer abuse as children are much more likely to grow up to be abusive themselves. Whether you pity them, or think of them as evil, or both doesn’t really concern me, as long as your actions tend towards ending and not enabling their behavior.
Some links I found quickly if you’re curious:
http://www.nytimes.com/1989/01/24/science/sad-legacy-of-abuse-the-search-for-remedies.html
http://www.safehorizon.org/page/child-abuse-facts-56.html (search “continuing the cycle”)
http://stopabusecampaign.com/why-do-people-abuse-psychology-of-the-abuser/ (search “while it is important”)
@50: That’s true, but harshly punitive actions are likely to make abusers even worse, since it’s just causing them further hurt which they’ll then take out on others. The best way to end their behavior is to cure them of the psychology that drives it.
The Founders built the Dominion because they fear and hate “solids.” Odo has lived his life among “solids” and has seen the best in them as well as the worst. So he can serve as a bridge, countering the Founders’ ingrained fear of non-changeling life forms with a more positive view of them and an understanding of how to get along with them. After all, by linking with him, they will absorb his view of “solids” as a part of themselves. And that’s a key step toward achieving better relations and ending the oppression.
In fact, I’ve always believed that’s part of why the Female Changeling agreed to end the war in the first place — not just because she got Odo back, but in part because he showed her there was another way, that there was hope for changelings and non-changelings to coexist. Not that she was an instant convert, of course, but maybe he persuaded her enough that she was willing to try another way.
@51, The additional tragedey of the Founders’ xenophobia is that it’s a self-fullfilling prophecy. They’re so distrustful and paranoid of the Solids that they set about creating an empire that would protect them.
Instead, this Empire only created the conditions that made Solids continue to fear and hate Changelings. Look at all the AQ paranoia from the time of the infiltrations during Season 4.
It’s just like the Typhon Pact’s fear regarding the quantum slipstream drive. They were so paranoid about Starflet using it a first-strike weapon that their attempts to acquire the technology instead brought the UFP to a point where they might use it a first-strike weapon.
I’ve enjoyed reading this, but I sure as hell hope that you never do a VOY rewatch. What is the fun in reading a re-watch by an author who doesn’t even like the show? I readily acknowledge that the show is deeply flawed, but seven seasons of snark would get very old.
Linje: That’s why I am not doing a Voyager rewatch. I do this ’cause it’s fun (and yeah, they pay me, but still…), and two years of doing something not fun would be, well, not fun.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@51: That’s probably the best possible scenario as far as the Female Founder is concerned.
For all the attempts that were made during DS9’s run by its writers to challenge the Roddenberry values and Federation ideals, they sure crafted a very classic Trekkian solution in the end, by allowing the Founders to see past their prejudices and learn to trust others. Same with the Cardassians on a different level. Cooperation, trust and working together to build a better tomorrow. Can’t get more TNG than that.
In Trek-related news, apparently Maurice Hurley has passed away, less than two days ago. Learned it through Brent Spiner’s Twitter.
As most people know, not only he helped run the early seasons of TNG, but also pretty much created the Borg.
Every time I read a comment on these articles bashing Voyager, I’m so torn between affirming the comment and arguing against it … My love-hate relationship with Voyager is an eternal struggle. :-/
There are SO many things to dislike about it, and yet the good parts are so dang good … (And even the bad parts at least carry nostalgia of high school days, spending my evenings watching TV with family.)
@51, “The best way to end their behavior is to cure them of the psychology that drives it.” But the cures are nowhere near certain, nor do they happen quickly (TV speeches notwithstanding). The first measure against a dangerous abuser is therefore to remove their capability to engage in that behavior. Doing so without permanent injury to anyone is desirable–and I’ll again praise “Allied occupation of Founderworld”, which has the further benefits that the Dominion could be dismantled smoothly rather than falling apart in bloody chaos, and that you could clean up cruelty like that of “The Quickening”. Maybe you can figure out about changeling-psychotherapists in the meantime.
I’ve already said why I don’t think Odo rejoining them will significantly affect their behavior, so I won’t argue about that. As for the Founder being “willing to try another way”–it would be nice to believe that, but that just seems too far out of character for me; I interpret it as her humoring Odo by ending the war, in exchange for him ensuring that the Founders back home would be saved.
This was the last Trek I watched alll the way through. I gave up on Voyager sometime in season 4, and Enterprise halfway through the first season.
@58: I don’t think Founders can simply “humor” each other. It would be a mistake to define their psychology in human terms. For one thing, they cherish each other too much. “Humoring” implies a certain dismissal and contempt, and changelings are too deeply empathetic toward one another to feel that way toward one of their own. More fundamentally, when they join in the link, they don’t just interact or converse; they essentially become one another. That’s why their empathy to each other is so profound (and why they have trouble extending empathy toward beings they can’t link with). Their attitudes and worldviews merge far more intimately than is possible with humans having conversations with one another. Remember in the season-6 opening arc when linking with the Female Shapeshifter warped Odo’s values and he stopped caring about his friends.
Now, granted, it could be argued that Odo could end up being just as overwhelmed again, especially with the entire Link outnumbering him hugely; but he’s more experienced now, more sure of himself; and he’s just saved the life of every Founder in the Link, so they’ll feel a profound debt to him. That would give him enormous influence.
There’s also the fact that the F.S. seemed to have some sort of leadership role in the Link, if such a thing exists. She was always the spokesperson, and she was the one who spearheaded their efforts in the Alpha Quadrant, which suggests that her influence carried significant weight in the Link. It could be that she was the prime mover behind the war. And now she’s no longer part of the Link, since she’s in a Federation prison. So her aggressive influence has been removed just as Odo’s peacemaking, justice-oriented influence has been added. That might help shift the balance in a better direction.
Trivia question: 800 million Cardassians dead, out of a total population of – what? Was that ever mentioned? Because if it’s out of 810 million, that really sucks.
This recap helped answer a problem I always had with the ending of the show. And not the pah-raith issue. I hated that from the beginning. But it really bothered me how they ended the Dominion war. I never forgot the fact that the founders tortured the population of an entire planet for the crime of disobedience. I felt this to be particularly horrific. Yes, stopping the war was the goal of AQ, but I never felt right about how it did. Reading this clicked it for me.
The female changeling agreed to end the war, but only after getting what she wanted. That’s what stuck in my craw. She was saying that her actions were because of fear of invasion. But all the AQ had to do to wipe out the dominion was..nothing. Without the founders, the Vorta and the Jem-Hadar would be directionless. Also, since founders see solids as beneath contempt, we can’t be sure of anything they tell us. I agree that they don’t lie to each other, but to solids. I can’t see them as victims anymore. There crimes far outstretch anything done to them at this point. I am glad others have brought that up.
But it was reading all this back to back that help me. I wish a little bit of dialog was there to even out this ‘she “agreed” to it’ bit. Someone like Kira calling her out on the obvious BS there. I understand that the show had limited time and the goal was end the killing, but maybe having the changeling realize her mistakes might have helped. I largely agree with nrvnqsr but also lean towards the hope that Chris proposes. Maybe there were some details in the peace treaty that stipulated some prevention of future atrocities. Maybe the acknowledgement of solids rights to exist.
But enough ranting from me. Thanks for the good reading and look forward to hearing about Bones kvetching.
@62: This may sound a bit hokey, but I think that ending the war by saving the Founders rather than destroying them was really about saving the Federation’s soul. If it had “won” the war by committing genocide, it would’ve lost everything that makes it a civilization worth preserving. That was what was really at stake throughout the Dominion War arc: the values that Star Trek stands for. DS9 challenged those values repeatedly, pushing them to their limits, but in the end, it showed them prevailing. In the Star Trek tradition, the killing was ended by someone saying, with conviction, “I will not kill today,” and thereby convincing others to say the same.
More pragmatically, I don’t think that directionless Jem’Hadar would be harmless. If anything, I think they’d wreak chaos if they didn’t have the Founders keeping them under control. Sure, they’d die out eventually without the White, but they could do enormous damage in their death throes. And if the Federation had killed their gods, it would’ve borne the brunt of their vengeance.
I’m glad someone explained why Sisko had that scene with Cassidy explaining what happend and that he would be back someday. I’ve always been bothered that he NEVER spoke to Jake as well. The entire Pah Wraith storyline was pointless, but I did enjoy picturing Dukat in Bajoran hell for all eternity. The montages were kind of silly the writers could have filled that with Bajor joining the Federation instead of clips all most all from season 7 anyway. I’m glad the Founders were saved in the end it would have been wrong to kill them all. I’ll have to look around and have to check out the rest of the tie in fiction I missed. I’ve only read Avatar and a the Cardassian books Stitch in Time and Sacrafice something and few random others. I enjoyed the re-watch and thanks for all the hard work Keith. Final score 7.
I’m not sure if I agree with the resolution of the war. The founders are left to their own devices: cured of disease, still presumably in control of the Jem Hadar and Vorta and safe in the Gamma Quadrant to attack another day. We’re expected to believe they’ll keep the peace out of gratitude for their lives being spared? Relocate the founders to the Alpha Quadrant. De-fang or disenslave the Jam Hadar. Destroy all Gamma Quadrant Ketrecel White facilities. Collapse the Wormhole already. Locking up one female changeling after they killed billions just seems like a terrible idea.
@65: Look at history, and you’ll find that most wars (at least in modern times) don’t end with the annihilation of one of the countries. They generally end when the aggressor realizes it’s in their best interest to stop fighting and negotiate terms. Sometimes the aggressor government is kicked out and replaced, but sometimes they just agree to a cease-fire or surrender and sign a treaty. And it’s continued dialogue between them, not the elimination of all contact, that has the best chance of leading to a lasting peace.
After all, anyone who thinks that war is actually a neat and tidy way to solve problems is a fool. Wars don’t have happy endings. They generally just create horrible messes, and sometimes the best thing you can do is just stop before things get any worse.
And part of realpolitik is recognizing that a nation can’t automatically get everything it wants. It’s hard for Americans to understand that because we’re used to being a superpower, but generally, politics is the art of the possible. The fact is, the Dominion is very large and powerful compared to the Federation, so it’s just not possible for the Federation to dismantle them, and they’d be wiped out if they tried to go on the offensive against the Dominion. The best they can do is find a way to coexist. Yes, maybe the Dominion is still a threat, but there’s nothing that can practically be done about that except through diplomacy, because the power imbalance is not in the Federation’s favor.
My only complaints with the finale were the way the “death” of Sisko was played out and the fact we never got to see the fruition of the reason behind Starfleet’s administration of DS9 in the first place–prepare Bajor for admission into the Federation. I think the writers were going for some sort of messianic symbolism in Sisko being “killed” and promising to come back some day (whether you believe in his teachings or not, it’s hard to ignore the fact that one of the single most-influential people in human history said the exact same thing, so it can’t be coincidental that the writers did that). It would have been a lot more powerful if, for example, Dukat and Winn attacked the Bajoran admission ceremony, Sisko gave his life defending it, and THEN revealed he was with the Prophets, promising to come back someday. THAT would have been a powerful scene to behold!
@66: well, I suppose I was thinking about history. Germany folded quietly after World War I and rearmed in a relatively short period of time to fight again. I don’t care to get bogged down in a discussion of “what war is really like” though.
Starfleet could deny the Founders a cure if they didn’t unconditionally surrender. (or to close the wormhole) It might not be in keeping with how we view the Federation but, hey, it’s worth considering to option of crushing your enemy or using whatever leverage you can to disarm them at that point. It definitely was an open question in I Borg. Picard or Bashir would have taken the high road and given them the cure, no strings attached. Admiral Ross? Sisko? The jerk-admirals-of-the-week we saw in TNG? I’m not so sure.
Havblu: Germany didn’t “fold” after WWI, they were forcibly kept down and had a boot on their neck. The extremity of that response to Germany in 1918 is one of the main reasons why there was another “war to end all wars” only a couple of decades later.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
There were those that thought that post WW1 Germany was not punished *enough*. The French Field Marshall, Foch, stormed out of the post-war negotiations in 1919 saying that “This is not a peace. It is an armistice for twenty years”. He was only out by 65 days too.
It is true that the Treaty of Versaille was a botched job, that is the only thing people can agree on. Depending on your political inclination it was either too soft or too hard, but either way it was a failed compromise that was seen to be a failed compromise even as it was signed.
I think the Star Trek equivilant is the Maquis Treaty. Either the Federation should not have ceded territory at all and should have had the fight with the Cardassians right there and then, or it should have ceded properly and Picard and Admiral Blondie should have yanked those colonists properly. The “nice” compromise pretty ensured a future conflict, which in turn gave the Dominion its foothold in the AQ. How much harder would the Dominion have had to fight if it hadn’t had the Cardassians as a willing partner/victim? Would it even have been possible at all?
@70: “There were those that thought that post WW1 Germany was not punished *enough*.”
And they were idiots. Punishing people doesn’t make them nice and friendly, it makes them angrier and more determined to strike back.
My father once said something I’ve always found very wise. He couldn’t understand why so many countries have felt that if they were attacked and oppressed, they would be inspired to fight back relentlessly until they prevailed, but at the same time were convinced that if they attacked or oppressed someone else, then those others would be completely broken and have no will to resist ever again. Why couldn’t they see that the other nation or culture would react the same way they would, that the attempt to break their enemy will just make their enemy more determined to fight back? All they achieve is an endless vicious cycle of mutual retaliation, because both sides will be equally driven to avenge an attack. It’s that blind spot, that dehumanizing belief that the other side lacks the same basic human values and convictions that your own side has, that traps so many societies in such cycles of revenge and violence.
It is certainly true that the post-WW2 European Union has been better at fostering peace and cooperation in Europe than the previous thousand years of trying to batter each other into submission. Admittedly with some problems in the Balkans, Greece, and currently Ukraine, but still much more successful than previously.
Have you seen the info-vid about how war is getting less popular, despite the press hysteria?
@71, You just summed up my feelings on the Israel-Palestine clusterf****.
(Comment deleted by its author)
@74: I think any author would be too close to one’s own books to review them fairly; one would probably just notice all the flaws and the things one wished had been done better. If Keith did do a novel re-read, he’d have to defer to a guest reviewer for his own installments.
It would be fun for somebody at Tor to do a re-read.
We take it for granted now, but trying to continue one of the shows’ adventutes past the series finale was a novel and untested idea back in 2001.
I’m as delighted as anyone that it worked and that the 24th Century’s stories are continuing, even with the Abrams reboot.
@76: Well, except for TOS. There have been novels set after the third season for decades, and after The Undiscovered Country came out, there were a number of novels advancing the story beyond it. But TOS was always an episodic series, and those books were mostly standalones that didn’t even necessarily fit in the same continuity. The DS9 post-finale series was the first to establish an ongoing, serialized continuity that advanced the story past the end of the TV series in a systematic way.
and except, perhaps, the Doctor Who: New Adventures series (Virgin Books) from 1991-1997…
@77, True.
Ds9 is important to me; it really influenced my own storytelling and I remember being delighted as all hell when the Relaunch began.
And I’m glad it led to Relaunches for the other shows. Even with Abram’s reboot, we still get to follow our beloved characters and their respective sagas.
While I am not as disappointed in the Pah Wraith thing as many people, I still think maybe this should have been resolved at the end of S6, the last season dedicated instead to the Federation and the Alpha/Beta quadrants and not wormhole aliens.
Still, I guess, in the end, it’s my favourite Trek series as it had continuing storylines with lasting impact, something Voyager never got right.
I found the spots line a little odd, because he’s her doctor, and he doesn’t know how far down the spots go?
And apparently Dukat’s Wraith powers go away when he gets distracted? He has to keep looking at Sisko to keep him immobilized.
I agree that the whole Pah Wraith ending in general was pretty lame, but I also think the end to the war was kind of a cop out. Having done the rewatch makes it have a little more sense, in that the Founders place a huge importance on Odo coming back to the Link. But that’s not really recapped here…the whole linking and “Conversation” they have is not revealed to the watcher. We get some sense that maybe Odo was able to use his knowledge of the solids to convince her, but it’s just kind of handwaved away in that we don’t get to see any of it. It just strikes me as really lazy writing. There was all this build up, and then it was all just sort of anti-climactic.
Also, it’s like they didn’t even TRY to go through the footage and find good memories for the montages. They mostly pulled stuff from the last few episodes. Not having Jadzia because of legal issues is one thing, but one of Worf’s favorite memories of the station is getting pushed through a pane of glass by Gowron??? I mean, maybe for a Klingon, getting beat up by the Supreme Chancellor is a cool thing to happen, but still…
LOL @81. Probably is, for a Klingon :D
I really think that, given that they couldn’t get Jadzia’s image, they should have done away with the flashbacks entirely. It was really an obvious lack – all of these people, some of whom were very close to Jadzia, would have flashbacks and NONE of them would include her? It was just dumb.
And so the end comes…
Thanks for a great rewatch. I really enjoyed it. I also enjoyed reading everyone’s comments. T.V. shows are always the more enjoyable when you get to share them with like-minded (and polite) people.
One possible reason the series ended without Bajor entering the Federation is that the producers said that the studio had ordered them back in season 4 not to do episodes focused on Bajor and the Prophets specifically b/c they weren’t “ratings winners” according to Hans Beimler. I agree that the Dominion War took over too much at the end of the series, to the determent of other storylines. Personally I liked some of the Gamma Quadrant stories like “The Quickening,” and “Children of Time” and wish they had done more exploration, since the Dominion was a significant player there but it wasn’t like they were the only ones around. But alas, there are the boundaries of television production. It is a TV series and after all, the bottom line was what was and is most important to Paramount. If episodes on Bajor don’t get watched as much as battles with Klingons or Jem’Hadar, so be it. The production exists for revenue and mass entertainment, not a handful of die-hard Trekkies.
They should have 86’d the first episodes leading to the nine-part finale, made the nine-part finale the first nine episodes of season seven, ending the war, then spending the next 16 episodes to go over aftermath, politics of Bajor joining the Federation, the Sisko flying away to hang with the prophets. Maybe pull a BSG and do the one year later thing. C’mon, Ronald D.! Anywho, I agree this is a great end for the war, a sloppy end for the best Star Trek spinoff.
Jason: I’d have settled for a mid-season end to the war. The aftermath of the conflict has even more story possibilities. Hell, the first three seasons of the show were about the aftermath of a conflict…….
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@@@@@#6: I think you should win the award for what the last line of the episode should have been!
@@@@@#11-2: Wow! You win the award for being most omniscient! You predicted the precise person who would resurrect Star Trek, that he would have a very healthy budget to do so, are only one episode off from the count for the first season order, and though the series won’t be on HBO, it’ll basically be a non-network show where it’ll have more creative freedom. I’m very impressed with you!
This finale is a mixed bag for me, and I rate it as the second best series finale of the modern Trek era spin-offs. Some parts were quite beautiful and made me teary-eyed like the various goodbye scenes, and some of it was quite lame like the whole pah-wraith nonsense and what the writers reduced Dukat and Winn to, not to mention their respective actors. I agree with everyone else, the finale should have ended with Bajor being admitted to the Federation. And I also agree ending the war earlier in the season and dealing with the aftermath would have been a more interesting direction to go. Finally, it was dumb if Terry Farrell and the studio couldn’t agree to proper compensation for the use of her image in a Dax montage. I think it would have been better for her to agree to receive some amount rather than nothing and have her completely absent from the finale. But those montages were a waste of precious airtime that could have gone to other important scenes anyway.
@88/GarretH: It’s not that prophetic to link Bryan Fuller with a Trek revival, since there’s been chatter in the media about him having a Trek pitch since at least 2013. So a lot of us were hoping he’d be the one they picked when the time finally came to make a new series. And we got our wish — for a while.
@89, Ah, I wasn’t aware there was chatter about him that far back about Fuller doing a revival. But yes, it was great that that was what ultimately ended up happening initially.
Random scattershot impressions of this uneven finale:
I was pleased to note when they did the camera pan through the regulars at Vic’s, Ezri was hanging with Worf instead of Bashir.
When Dukat was resurrected back to his Cardassian self but still wearing his Bajoran clothes, he looked way too much like a 70’s era incarnation of the Frankenstein monster.
Thought it was way out of character, jarringly so, for Garak to react so emotionally and recklessly in response to Mila’s death, rushing out and putting himself (and consequently the others) in harm’s way to no good purpose. I’ve always admired Garak’s cold ruthlessness and guile, and it just didn’t seem like something his character would do.
I understand Sisko and the Admiral’s reluctance to drink a toast to victory considering the cost, but it seemed pretty shitty of them to go out of their way to dramatically pour out their blood wine (which was supposed to be some special vintage, as I recall) in front of Martok. If you don’t want to drink then decline. But don’t take a cup from the man and then pour it out. Serious party foul.
Until this episode, I never really saw any chemistry between the Odo and Kira characters – but I will begrudgingly admit that their interaction here was played beautifully. First time they ever convinced me that they were truly in love.
Finally, although I think on balance I enjoyed TNG more than DS9, because the highs of the former (Inner Light, Best of Both Worlds, Chain of Command, Tapestry, etc.) were so much higher than here (I still don’t get the high praise for the Visitor or Benny), DS9 was definitely more densely packed with thought-provoking scenarios and multifaceted characters. Although it bogged down in the final season and for a time it was a chore to slog through it – on balance I very much enjoyed it, and although I was late to the rewatch party I’ve appreciated reading krad’s thoughts and the comments…. :)
JohnC: disagree loudly about Garak only because it was Mila. It was obvious from her first appearance back in “Improbable Cause” that she was Garak’s only true parental figure. Her death is probably the only thing that would harsh his mellow, as it were, and I thought it completely in character, given how differently he acted toward her than toward anyone else………
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Fair enough Keith. It’s just my feeling that Garak would not allow personal relationships to jeopardize the goal of a free Cardassia, which is why he is there in the first place. But I suppose we all have that one weakness that makes us vulnerable.
Did no one else notice that Vic was looking directly at Kira (with the nose ridges) when he sang, “And that laugh that wrinkles your nose…”?
I disagree that the series should have ended with the admission of Bajor to the Federation. I think Bajor proved that it wasn’t ready. Let me explain. The Prophets and the Pah-wraiths really exist in objective reality, and can manifest and interact with our plane of existance. These lifeforms are aliens and presumably got to where they are by a process of evolution, just like all other life-forms. Thus, they are natural, not supernatural. By deifying these aliens, the Bajorans showed that they are still in the grip of primitive superstition, not unlike the tribes who thought the people from the tall ships were gods in our own history. Perhaps now that the Emissary is sharing experiences with the aliens, the aliens will realize that their interaction with the Bajorans stunted the growth of Bajoran civilization, and will come down and apologize, and tell the Bajorans not to worship them. Bajor was well on its way to becoming an interstellar civilization before they discovered the prophets, but the fanaticism engendered by the religion took them backwards, sort of like how the Arab world was the center of knowledge until the clerics decided that mathematics is blasphemy. Once the Bajorans renounce their silly religion, then they will be ready to become a member of the Federation.
He was right about that. I was thinking “wow, as soon as his wife is pregnant, he goes away. What a douche!” lol.
But, now I am even more confused about why the prophets where against Sisko marrying? Literally the only remotely “dark” thing happening was that his peppers got burned. Ok, Kasidy is now left alone with a child, but that would’ve happened anyway. The prophets didn’t have anything against the relationship, just against the marriage…
@96/waka: The Prophets weren’t “against” it. They didn’t make the future happen, they just saw the future, hence the name. They just told Sisko what they saw would happen if he chose that path.
97. ChristopherLBennett: They actively warned him about the marriage. “Bad things will happen” isn’t something you say just to warn someone about burned peppers. But nothing bad happened because of the marriage, so it wasn’t really useful advice anyway.
@98/waka: What you say does not contradict what I said. Yes, they warned him, but not in the sense of “We object to this and will punish you,” but in the sense of “We literally see the future and know that it will work out badly.” A warning from people who already know how things will turn out is not an expression of their personal disapproval, merely an objective description of what will occur.
For instance, if I’m aware that there’s a big gaping hole on the other side of a door and I warn you “Watch out, you’ll fall through a hole if you step through that door,” that doesn’t mean I’m personally hostile to the idea of your stepping through the door or that I’m threatening to make you fall. It just means I’m aware of a danger and informing you of it for your own good. So the fact that the Prophets warned Sisko of the danger does not mean they caused the bad outcome or wanted it to occur.
I found it interesting that in “What You Leave Behind: The Making of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine,” that when the writers met in the writing room again, they mentioned that keeping Bajor out of the Federation wasn’t something forgotten about, they deliberately did not resolve that and they thought that was a good move on their part.
@95 Worshipping the Prophets did not slow Bajoran civilization or their economic and technological progress.Being invaded by ruthless Cardassians did.
@101 I disagree. The Bajorans had a technological head-start on both the Cardassians and Earth. In fact, by the 16th century, Bajorans were already exploring their solar system while we were lucky to cross the ocean. This head start was squandered in by a unwavering faith where any form of dissent or alternate hypothesis regarding the true nature of the worm hole aliens, was met with hostility and shunning. This type of extreme conformity can only impede innovation. I would like to point out that in the TNG episode “Parallels” The alternate universe Bajorans had overthrown the Cardassians and were even considered a threat to the Federation. The alternate universe Bajorans had no knowledge of the worm hole, or the aliens living there, so they could not have had a religion based on that.
@102/IndianaJoe: TNG: “Ensign Ro” established that the Bajorans (or “Bajora” at the time) had an advanced civilization before Homo sapiens even existed, so DS9 putting their space age only a few hundred years ago was kind of shortsighted.
Still, there’s no requirement that every civilization has to advance at the same rate or in the same direction, and it’s an ethnocentric fallacy to assume that a culture that isn’t advancing as fast or in the same direction as Industrial-Age Western civilization has something wrong with it. Over the grand sweep of human history, that kind of rapid advancement is the exception rather than the norm. Technological development tends to follow the same kind of punctuated equilibrium as biological evolution. If a society’s needs are met by its existing technology and resources, it has an incentive to maintain stability, to remain basically as it is for as long as that status quo remains. Innovation still occurs, but at a gradual, non-disruptive pace. It’s only when a society’s existing means do not fulfill its needs that it has an incentive to innovate rapidly or embrace radically new approaches.
That’s certainly true, however that does not negate the point I was trying to make. Superstition never helps progress.
@104/IndianaJoe: It is facile to equate religion with superstition. There have been societies where religion has encouraged science and innovation. Contrary to the myth of the “Dark Ages” (which was invented by Renaissance figures who fetishized Greece and Rome), it was the church that largely kept scholarship alive in Medieval Europe, and there was great scientific and medical progress in the Islamic world in the same era. Great physicists like Kepler, Newton, and Einstein were motivated in their work by the desire to understand the mind of God.
Religion is just a human institution like any other. It’s a tool, and like any tool, whether it’s used positively or negatively depends on the intentions and judgment of the user. Religion has often been used as a tool for quashing progress or innovation, yes, but it’s just as often been used as an inspiration or partner for scientific progress. Blanket generalizations are a lazy excuse to avoid thinking and learning. You have to evaluate each case individually. Societies are complex things, and their pieces can fit together in vastly different ways in different cultures and eras.
In the case of the Bajorans, it makes no sense to dismiss their religion as a matter of pure faith, given that it is an absolute, concrete fact that the Prophets exist and have indeed taken an interest in Bajor over the millennia. The basic articles of their faith are objectively provable, so it’s bizarre to dismiss them as superstition. And claiming there is no room for dissent in their society is completely counterfactual, given that we’ve seen many different expressions of faith among Bajoran characters, from Winn’s fundamentalism to Bareil’s and Kira’s more flexible approach to the Pah-wraith cult to Ro Laren’s agnosticism.
The worm hole aliens are an alien life form, not supernatural at all. Worshiping them as deities did nothing to help the Bajorans, and by way of example I point out that 2 different versions of the Bajorans, one from the Mirror Universe and one from the alternate universe in “Parallels”, both had no knowledge of the worm hole and both versions were better able to defend themselves. First you say we shouldn’t judge an alien race by our standards, then you pull examples from our own history. That’s not very consistent. Let’s just stick to what we know “in universe”.
@106/IndianaJoe: It is ethnocentric to assume that the Western belief in the physical and supernatural worlds as mutually exclusive is universally shared, even on Earth. There are many human cultures where things with indisputable physical reality are considered to have a divine nature. Many Native American cultures perceive individual people and animals as divine. In Japanese Shintoism, things like mountains and rivers are believed to be imbued with spirits, and even a created object can gain a sentient spirit after enough time.
It’s also ethnocentric to assume that recognizing divinity requires worship in the Western sense. That was a mistake often made by European explorers who assumed that being seen as gods meant they were seen as superior — and often ended up getting killed because they didn’t play the correct ritual role required of a god.
As for the Mirror Bajorans, you’re forgetting that they were conquered by the Terran Empire. The reason they’re strong in the 24th century is because they allied with the Klingons and Cardassians in fighting against the Empire, just as the Prime universe’s Bajorans became strong post-occupation by allying with the Federation. Both Bajors went through equivalent histories of occupation and liberation, just at different times and with the opposite partners.
And as for the “Parallels” Bajorans, nothing in the episode addresses their knowledge of the wormhole or lack thereof. The only thing we’re told is that they’re an aggressive power who conquered the Cardassian Empire and is now attacking the Federation out of unfounded paranoia. They were pretty clearly portrayed as a warlike, malevolent power in their universe, hardly an admirable alternative.
“Let’s just stick to what we know “in universe”.”
You first.
On different planets and in different universes, different religions give different answers. On different planets and different universes, science gives the same answers (assuming fundamental constants remain the same). Any religion, western, eastern or alien, depends on faith. Faith is not a good way to find things out about the nature of reality. Only the Scientific Method is reliable enough to find out the truth, and it works everywhere, and for all species.
@108/IndianaJoe: You’re still making false and grossly ignorant generalizations about religion. Just because certain prominent religious groups in our culture are hostile to science does not mean they all are. As I said, many great scientists throughout history have been motivated by their religious faith, and many religious cultures have embraced and encouraged science. You claim to be contemptuous of faith, but your own faith in your prejudiced view of religion is closing your mind to the facts. You claim to be defending the Scientific Method, but you’re refusing to use it by questioning your own hypothesis.
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You claim that when I say that all religions depend on faith, that I am making an ignorant generalization. I am the kind of person who loves to be proven wrong because it means that I get a chance to learn something. Please give me an example of a religion that does not depend on faith, and I will be happy to admit I am wrong. All that it takes to change my mind is evidence. What does it take to change your mind?
Finally wrapping up my own re-watch 20 years later….
I guess there were things that always bothered me about the Pah Wraith / Fire Caves plots but I never really thought about it much. I’ve skipped over most of it this time around and have been fine without it.
The way Sisko suddenly showed up in the Fire Caves bothered me, too. I wonder if the writers meant to show the Prophets transporting him there somehow but lost it in budget or editing. For some bizarre reason, the Pah Wraith changes Dukat’s appearance back to Cardassian. Okay …
Then Winn throws in another dramatic cliche and has to ALERT Dukat that she’s about to throw the book into the flames so he can have the chance he needs to stop her. Really a pathetic end for a character who could have been much more complex. Then Sisko does the same thing by SCREAMING as he rushes Dukat .. (sigh) … and the book of incantations turns out to be the key to the Wraiths’ power.
Overall, the ending arc could have been so much more and Dukat and Winn could have gotten much better resolutions if they had just dropped that whole subplot. I guess it was cheap to produce. Still, I’ve always been grateful that the writers and network cared enough to do this kind of incredible ending wrap up. It was unheard of at the time and probably hasn’t been seen much since. These days fans are more likely to be incensed at whatever ending the writers try to do.
I think the ending montages were a lot more effective for an audience who had been watching the show week-to-week for the past several years. The absence of Terry Farrell was definitely a weakness but they still felt like a grateful nod to the fans.
I feel a bit underwhelmed having reached the end. Again, the series really was meant to be watched weekly and knowing what’s coming takes a lot away. I’m glad to have rediscovered a number of the episodes and how good they actually were, though.
@111/IndianaJoe: “Please give me an example of a religion that does not depend on faith, and I will be happy to admit I am wrong.”
That is not even close to what I said. What I said was that many religious traditions are not hostile to science, that many great scientists have been devoutly religious and many religious leaders have been open to the truth of science. They are able to reconcile both faith and reason by recognizing that they apply to different questions, different aspects of reality, rather than being competitors for the same function. For instance, the official modern position of the Vatican is that cosmology and evolutionary theory correctly explain the physical origins and nature of the universe and humanity, while the Bible symbolically and allegorically explains their spiritual origins and nature, the aspects of human existence that are intangible and non-physical. The religion still does rely on faith, but specifically in those abstract, spiritual and philosophical areas where faith is useful. It just doesn’t make the mistake of applying faith to questions of physical reality that can be better answered through science.
In short, there is a difference between blind faith and informed faith. By analogy, if you get an e-mail from a Nigerian prince asking for your credit card number and you eagerly hand it out, then that’s blind faith. But if you know that a friend of yours is unreliable and can’t be trusted with money, but has never let you down as a friend when you needed a shoulder to cry on, then you have faith in your emotional bond with them even if you’d be reluctant to give them a loan. That’s informed faith, measured faith based on knowledge of what you can and can’t have faith in, as opposed to just blindly believing everything someone tells you.
@112/Andrewfl: “The way Sisko suddenly showed up in the Fire Caves bothered me, too. I wonder if the writers meant to show the Prophets transporting him there somehow but lost it in budget or editing.”
After Sisko says farewell to Kasidy, there’s a shot of a runabout approaching Bajor. That’s how he got there.
You are absolutely correct; the Vatican does accept evolution and the big bang. Are you saying that because they are right about one or two things, they must be right about everything? They also believe that demons are literally real and can possess humans. The existence of demons would seem to me to be a claim that can be scientifically tested.
@114/IndianaJoe: “Are you saying that because they are right about one or two things, they must be right about everything?”
You insist on injecting straw men that have nothing to do with my point. What I am saying is exactly what I have said explicitly all along and you keep choosing to ignore: that it is invalid, lazy stereotyping to assume that all religious people think in exactly the same way. The problem is not religion itself, the problem is the ignorance and intolerance with which some people wield religion. And wielding ignorance and intolerance against religion is no better.
I respectfully disagree. Religion itself IS the problem. When you can believe absurdities, you can commit atrocities. Critical thinking and skepticism are the only way out of the current crises we face. Burying our heads in the sands of superstition and futilely praying for divine intervention can only make matters worse.
@116 – your hatred of religion, like that of Dawkins and Hitchens, is noted.
So here is the end of a long ride following along with Keith’s write-ups for DS9 during my binge rewatch, which has been a pleasure. I’ve got to say that I agree with a lot said in both Keith’s write-up and some of the comments about the Pah-Wraith story-line and the hasty conclusion to the Dominion War. It felt a bit too “oh, we’re running out of air time” how it was all simply bow-tied. This is especially frustrating and head-scratching when DS9 establishes the recurring theme of trying to avoid the neat, straightforward conclusions.
After a few months, I’m bored of working on the same project, so I couldn’t imagine what it’d be like after seven years, but then again, I’ve never had the pleasure of working on something as enriching and compelling as DS9 must’ve been behind the scenes. But if that’s your usual, it wouldn’t be that enriching and compelling after dozens and dozens of episodes now, would it?
The Pah-Wraiths storyline was just — it’s not something that revisiting has shed new, warmer light on. It was bad then, and it’s bad now. It reflects the classic line of thinking that every yin in a story needs an analogous yang, which I would beg to differ particularly when dealing with nebulous, “divine” characters like the Prophets. Adding in a by-the-book evil counterpart was the bellwether for the shark jumping of the whole Prophet-Emissary storyline. Even after its introduction, they could’ve tried to shore it up into something different than the supernatural black-white, good-evil thing they did. It is quite fitting that it had the conclusion where Sisko literally tackled the Pah-Wraith possessed Dukat off of a cliff into a pit of fire to end it. It almost couldn’t be anything else if it was going to stay true to the hamfisted approach to how the Pah-Wraith nonsense was written.
The Dominion War is very much a product of its time. TV back then wasn’t starting from a dark place with moments of levity interspersed throughout like it often is now, for better or for worse. Watching it now from an era of the Breaking Bads and Game of Throneses makes the flaws in its presentation and its ending much more apparent, but a poorly stuck landing doesn’t negate the decent routine before. You just can’t help but wish that the landing had been stuck better for the sake of the good that came before.
@113 – Isn’t it something like 3 hours from the station to Bajor? Dukat must have really been taking his time reveling in his newfound power if he and Winn were still just standing there waiting for Sisko to show up.
So when the female changeling signed the treaty…
…
…what NAME did she sign?
X X X
I found the first half of “What You Leave Behind” very entertaining. I found the second half very boring. Why was it so important to the Trek franchise to kill of Sisko? Or send him to the Prophets? I never understood it. I’m already annoyed that of the six leads in the Trek franchise, one black lead began as a Commander and wasn’t promoted to Captain until Season Four. The other black lead is not even the highest ranking character in the regular cast. And chances are she’ll never be. Does the Trek franchise have something against the black leads of their franchise?
@122/Claudia: There are now seven leads in the Trek franchise, and two of the current three are black women — Michael Burnham of Discovery and Beckett Mariner of Lower Decks. In the case of LD, the Cerritos‘s Captain Freeman is also a black woman. So no, I don’t think they have anything against black leads. They’ve just grown beyond the convention of centering shows on commanding officers.
Yeah, the Pah-wraiths storyline ended badly, but since almost all of it was bad, I can’t say I ever expected much from it. The war story ended much more strongly. As for whether or not Bajor should have entered the Federation at the end of the show, I remember reading somewhere that Ira Steven Behr was eventually against the idea of Bajor entering the Federation, and that he was proud that it hadn’t. I disagree with that sentiment, not because I think everyone has to join the Federation, but because they didn’t do anything interesting as an alternative. They jut let it go.
The wormhole aliens aka Prophets experienced time non-linearly, so in my head, Sisko got his “feeling” at the party that sent him to the runabout three hours before we saw him arrive in the Fire Caves to confront Dukat. But I also suspect I’ve thought harder about that matter than the writers of the episode did.
Thank you for this rewatch, krad. It’s been my go-to after every episode since I began this rewatch last year. Your insider knowledge has really added to the experience for me.
Now, since this is probably my last real opportunity to ask: does anyone know why the other end of the wormhole opened where it did? The Prophets live in the wormhole, and presumably created it. The Alpha Quadrant entrance is near Bajor, and Bajor is special to the Prophets. So what’s near the other end of the wormhole that’s also special to the Prophets? Or that the Prophets wanted to make accessible to the Bajorans?
Has that question ever been explored or answered in any of the tie-in fiction?
terracinque: Yes, it was addressed in the post-finale DS9 novels. A Gamma Quadrant species called the Eav’oq also worshipped the Prophets.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Post Lockdown rewatch complete.
The biggest gripe for me with the way the series ended, along with the Pah Wraith, Winn, Dukat nonsense, was the way the show ended in taking Sisko away from Jake, mainly because it ‘Alien 3’s’ the great ‘The Visitor’ episode and seemingly renders to nought all Jake’s sacrifices in that outstanding episode in getting Sisko back to Teenage Jake. It really really annoyed me back at the time in 1999, and still annoys me now. Now I know they sort of brought it back with the post finale novels but they didn’t know that was coming at the time and it was really poor thinking when they plotted this out..
also I gather one of the best scenes in the episode between Bashir and Garak nearly was left on the cutting room floor as apparently Rick Berman didn’t think anyone would remember those two characters relationship! Another pointer that Berman was losing the plot at this point,
I take the view that the Founders are aware the Federation is smarter than the Klingons and Romulans. They will be able to eliminate the Founders if they try to invade again. The Federation chooses NOT to wipe out the Founders (except it did–Odo chose to spare them and Bashir before him). So the Founders got the message and will stay on their side of the Gamma Quadrant.
@65 / CLB:
More pragmatically, I don’t think that directionless Jem’Hadar would be harmless. If anything, I think they’d wreak chaos if they didn’t have the Founders keeping them under control. Sure, they’d die out eventually without the White, but they could do enormous damage in their death throes. And if the Federation had killed their gods, it would’ve borne the brunt of their vengeance.
Yeah, Tain even explicitly brought that up in his projections from “The Die is Cast”.
And I can’t imagine 31 didn’t take that into account when they ran the numbers. Did they even care about AQ/GQ causalities?
Or was the hope that the GQ would be so weakened that nobody could fill the Founders’ shoes and they wouldn’t be a threat to the AQ?
I would have enjoyed seeing Ferengi join the alliance fleet as cavalry. Maybe someone thought of that but budget problems forbade it. Did we ever see a Ferengi warship in DS9, or were they omitted on purpose? Could never see the Negas as a war leader.
@130/cecrow: How do you mean “cavalry” in this context?
The ending of the war is consistent with Trek as a whole. The Federation didn’t try to dismember the Romulan empire after that war, they didn’t deliberately bring about regime change with the Klingon. The Bajorans fought for their independence themselves, as did the Cardassions here. It’s essential to the spirit of the story that Damar gets people to rally to him before the Federation fleet shows up and he does it without any weapons or intelligence or money provided by the Federation, just verbal support. Just as it’s essential that in Voyager,
The Federation isn’t going to invade the gamma quadrant. If the jemhedar want freedom, they need to get it themselves.
I think it’s really funny that they did pretty much exactly what #11 wished for, but it kind of was a monkey’s-paw version of the wish coming true.
With the prominent inclusion of DS9‘s main adversaries into Picard, it would be wonderful to pick up on even more threads from the former series left dangling and if not just a trip back to DS9 itself. I’d love to see Nana Visitor back in some capacity but I think it might stretch credibility if she’s still the station commander after some 20+ years. She could definitely be in the planetary government though (and I believe the novels have her as a vedek).