“Image in the Sand”
Written by Ira Steven Behr & Hans Beimler
Directed by Les Landau
Season 7, Episode 1
Production episode 40510-551
Original air date: September 30, 1998
Stardate: unknown
Station log: After a summary of “Tears of the Prophets,” we jump ahead three months. Kira has been promoted to colonel, and is apprehensive about her upcoming meeting with Ross, as the admiral has been unusually nice and polite. Turns out he’s there to tell Kira that a Romulan senator, Cretak, will have a presence on the station, along with staff, guards, and a few ships. Kira isn’t happy, but isn’t given a choice.
The Defiant returns from protecting a convoy, a duty that Bashir considers boring, Nog considers safe, and Worf considers unworthy of a warrior and his warship. Worf is unusually cranky—given that he buried his wife three months ago, duh—and Bashir actually thinks a combat mission would cheer him right up. For his part, a sleepless Worf goes to the holosuite and requests that Fontaine and his band perform “All the Way,” which was apparently Jadzia’s favorite song. Worf runs through about eighty-five different turbulent emotions while just sitting there listening to the song. Then he explodes and trashes the entire club. Fontaine shows Bashir and Quark the damage.
As Sisko’s Creole Kitchen, Sisko sits at the restaurant’s piano, the baseball from his desk on top of it. While Joseph and Jake worry, the ball suddenly falls off, and Sisko has a vision from the Prophets of him digging in the sand on the planet Tyree and uncovering a woman’s face. Sisko believes that he needs to find that woman. He starts putting his memory of her face together on a padd, and Jake recognizes the face as belonging to a photograph of her and Joseph from many years earlier. But when they ask Joseph about it, he’s livid, insisting that she’s “no one at all,” and storms out.
Sisko confronts Joseph, who finally admits that the woman was named Sarah. He met her in Jackson Square, they were married a few months after they met, and had a child: Benjamin Lafayette Sisko. But then two days after Sisko’s first birthday, she just up and left with no explanation. He tracked her down three years later, but by then she’d died in a hovercraft accident. Joseph does give him a keepsake of Sarah’s: a pendant, which has writing on the back of it in Ancient Bajoran, which says, “Orb of the Emissary,” an Orb that has never been mentioned before. But maybe he has to find it, and the first place he’s going to look is Tyree.
Kira is surprised by Cretak—she is friendlier than most, and she even tries a jumja stick. Then she asks if the Romulans could set up a hospital on Bajor’s fourth moon, Derna. Kira says she’ll talk to the Council of Ministers, and they agree to it. Cretak says all of Romulus owes Kira a debt of gratitude. She says she’ll keep it in mind. However, Odo has learned that the Romulans are turning non-Romulan wounded away from the hospital on Derna and sensors have picked up indications that they’re constructing weapons there.
At Bashir’s urging, O’Brien brings a bottle of bloodwine to Worf’s quarters to get him to talk. They reminisce over their time on the Enterprise and other things, and O’Brien finally learns what’s really bothering Worf: Jadzia isn’t in Sto-Vo-Kor because she didn’t die in glorious battle. That explains his annoyance with convoy duty. But they can’t ask Ross to send the Defiant on a dangerous mission. Luckily, Martok arrives at the station, and joins Worf on the holosuite for a bat’leth fight and says he has just the mission to guarantee Jadzia’s entry into Sto-Vo-Kor, and he needs a first officer. Worf says he’s Martok’s man. Bashir and O’Brien volunteer to go along—Quark thinks the two of them are crazy.
Kira interrupts a meeting between Ross and Cretak with an order from the council of ministers to remove the weapons emplacements from Derna. Cretak gives the world’s most insincere apology for not mentioning them, but she insists that the hospital needs to be defended. Kira counters that Bajor will guarantee the moon’s safety, which Cretak says isn’t good enough. Kira delivers an ultimatum, despite Ross’s attempt to negotiate a compromise: take out the weapons, or the Bajorans will remove the weapons for them.
A Bajoran who is part of a new Cult of the Pah-wraiths shows up at Sisko’s Creole Kitchen and attacks Sisko with a knife, saying he’ll never find the Orb of the Emissary. Jake clubs the guy on the head with a sack of potatoes and they get Sisko medical attention. When Sisko recovers from his wounds, he’s finally ready to go to Tyree, and Joseph and Jake insists on going with. Before they can leave, an ensign knocks on the door to the restaurant. She introduces herself as Dax.
The Sisko is of Bajor: Sisko has spent three months cleaning clams. By the time he’s set to go to Tyree he’s incredibly sick of cleaning clams.
Oh yeah, and it turns out the woman who raised him wasn’t his birth-mother. Whoops.
Don’t ask my opinion next time: Kira runs the station quite well, including not taking any crap from a Romulan senator who tries to put weapons in a hospital on a satellite of Bajor.
The slug in your belly: We don’t meet the new Dax until the very end of the episode. So far all we know is that she’s in the sciences and is way shorter than Jadzia. (We only know her first name is Ezri from the opening credits, as she only introduces herself as “Dax.”)
There is no honor in being pummeled: Worf can’t sleep, is frustrated with convoy duty, and keeps going to Vic’s Place, making Fontaine sing “All the Way,” and then smashing the place. Grieving is a process…
Preservation of mass and energy is for wimps: Odo is now acting all optimistic and stuff, and he credits his relationship with Kira for it.
Rules of Acquisition: Quark is not worried about Worf’s well being, he’s just worried that he might get bored with smashing a holographic bar and start smashing the real one downstairs.
Victory is life: The Dominion has not allowed the Federation, Klingons, and Romulans to penetrate deeper into Cardassian territory than Chin’toka. Weyoun says the closing the wormhole has turned the tide in the Dominion’s favor, which makes no actual sense…
Tough little ship: The Defiant is on convoy duty. This thrills no one, except maybe the people in the convoy. Well, and Nog…
For Cardassia! Damar is drinking a lot of kanar. It’s almost like he doesn’t like his job. At one point, Weyoun snidely asks if Damar even bothers with a glass when he’s alone or just guzzles it from the bottle.
What happens on the holosuite stays on the holosuite: Apparently, Jadzia Dax—a Trill who’s lived for three centuries, been exposed to numerous cultures and formst of artistic expression—listed Frank Sinatra’s “All the Way” as her favorite song. That’s totally plausible.
No sex, please, we’re Starfleet: Joseph had a whirlwind courtship with Sarah, during which he was incredibly happy—until she up and left after their son’s first birthday with no explanation.
Keep your ears open: “Are there any other secrets I should know about?”
“Just my gumbo recipe—but I’m taking that to my grave.”
Sisko and his father after the revelation of who actually gave birth to the former.
Welcome aboard: Megan Cole appears as Cretak, the first of three appearances by the character, but only two by the actor—she’ll return in “Shadows and Symbols” next time, but be replaced by Adrienne Barbeau when the character comes back in “Inter Arma Enim Silent Leges.” Cole previously appeared as Noor in TNG’s “The Outcast.”
Although she gets no billing, Deborah Lacey makes the first of several appearances as Sarah Sisko. She’ll be back in “Shadows and Symbols” as well, this time with an actual guest star credit.
We also get some of the usual gaggle of recurring regulars in Casey Biggs (Damar), Jeffrey Combs (Weyoun), James Darren (Fontaine), Aron Eisenberg (Nog), J.G. Hertzler (Martok), Barry Jenner (Ross), and Brock Peters (Joseph).
Trivial matters: This episode marks the first appearance of Ezri Dax, as played by Nicole deBoer, who was added to the opening credits, replacing Terry Farrell. In addition, Kira was promoted to colonel between seasons, making her the fourth opening credits regular to be promoted over the course of the series, the others being Sisko in “The Adversary” and Jadzia Dax and Bashir between the third and fourth seasons. We also get Ross’s first name of “Bill” established for the first time.
Cretak appears in several tie-in novels, among them the Lost Era novel Catalyst of Sorrows by Margaret Wander Bonanno (which takes place fifteen years prior to this episode), which establishes that she was at the Khitomer Conference (from Star Trek VI), during which she first met Uhura and established a relationship with her. The senator was also in “Blood Sacrifice” in Tales of the Dominion War and Vulcan’s Soul: Epiphany, both by Josepha Sherman & Susan Shwartz, as well as Hollow Men by Una McCormack (which has her first meeting with Ross, laying the foundation for the relationship between the two seen in this two-parter).
The planet Tyree was named after Benjamin Tyreen, the character played by Richard Harris in Sam Peckinpah’s Major Dundee (and not the character in “A Private Little War,” which most people assumed). The Monac shipyards were named after special effects supervisor Gary Monak.
When Worf and O’Brien are reminiscing about their time on the Enterprise, they mention both Barclay and La Forge and the events of “Hollow Pursuits.” Barclay will also be referenced in the “These are the Voyages…” episode of Enterprise, and so will thus at least be mentioned on all four Trek spinoff shows (he actually appeared in both TNG and Voyager).
Sisko plays Thelonious Monk’s “Round Midnight” on the piano.
Walk with the Prophets: “I just never thought I’d see a Romulan eat a jumja stick.” There’s little I can point to in this episode and say that it’s bad. I think the notion of a Pah-wraith cult is actually the first good use of the Pah-wraiths in the show, as it makes sense that such a cult would develop. Just in general, the sameness of Bajoran religion is something that needed shaking up (says the person living on a planet that has thousands of religions).
Worf and Kira both get decent storylines, but I kinda wish they’d just done both of them in one episode instead of welding them to Sisko’s vision quest and stretching all three plots to two episodes. Worf needing to be brought out of his funk by something Klingony has already been a B-plot of a TNG episode (“The Icarus Factor”), and his storyline has the exact same beats, which isn’t exactly a rousing endorsement. The notion of using O’Brien getting him drunk to get him to open up is a good one, at least, though having him drown his sorrows at Vic’s Place is another case of Ira Steven Behr unconvincingly crowbarring his love of lounge music onto his characters.
As for Kira, her story only is compelling because Nana Visitor is awesome. Megan Cole has all the charisma of a dead fish—the bland affect that made her an effective bureaucrat in “The Outcast” served to make her a spectacularly uninteresting Romulan. As a result, her heel-turn from friendly to militant has no bite to it. We didn’t need anything as extreme as, say, William Sadler similar shift of Sloan’s character in “Inquisition,” but we needed something.
The Sisko storyline manages to drain all the charm out of the Sisko family, subsuming it to contrived drama, Sisko’s depression, and Joseph’s overblown avoidance of the issue of Sarah, which mostly seems to be there to allow for scene cutaways that play dramatic music rather than service character.
Plus it continues the ruining of the wormhole aliens. In “Emissary,” the Prophets were a fascinating alien species that were so other that they could only communicate with linear humans by talking down to them via memory fragments. In “Image in the Sand,” the Prophets are the GM of a role-playing game, dropping clues on Sisko so he can go on his quest to find the treasure and gain experience points. It’s not an improvement.
Ultimately the real problem with this episode is that it’s got three B-plots, stretched over two episodes. An A-plot would’ve been nice…
Warp factor rating: 5
Keith R.A. DeCandido encourages everyone to buy the new Jonathan Maberry-edited anthology Out of Tune, featuring stories by him, Simon R. Green, Jack Ketchum, Seanan McGuire, Christopher Golden, Nancy Holder, Gregory Frost, and more. Keith’s story, “Fish Out of Water,” features Cassie Zukav, who also appears in the stories in his 2013 collection Ragnarok and Roll.
And 5 seconds of Ezri Dax isn’t enough to bump it up to a six? Maybe they should have introduced her sooner.
I think the reason the episode falls flat is that it’s filler. It’s all setup for the next episode. All the players are introduced, and it’s over. Wait until next time. That’s the downside to having stories that don’t always wrap up in one week. Some weeks just don’t have enough going on to be interesting on their own, no matter how necessary they are to the overall story.
This episode is completely blah. Honestly, a 5 feels generous; I couldn’t have gone higher than a 4 myself. Everything is so jumbled that so much story potential ends up wasted. A freaking assassination attempt, and we’re done two minutes later?
The hospital on the moon being a cover for weapons was so painfully obvious, I’d rather have had it jettisoned altogether and Nana Visitor given something else to chew on. The moment Cretak suggested it, I wanted to scream at Kira, Rocky Horror style, to reject the idea. And then – oh, surprise! – they’re turning away Vulcans and caching weapons. Dammit, Kira, I told you! (Also, I’ll say it here: I despise Kira’s hairstyle this season, even more than S1.)
Brock Peters was the standout performance in this, though. Admiral Cartwright never did anything for me, but Joseph Sisko’s response to his son’s repeated pushing for information was heartfelt. That was really the only time I was emotionally invested in the episode – exploring Joseph’s resistance to revisiting the pain of his past. Nice picture of the gaping Siskos here, too.
And from this and the rewatch of “The Outcast,” we learn that dead fish lack both charisma and passion. Hey, at least they are tasty!
@1: Yup — the downside of serial storytelling is that it can become an excuse for not bothering to make individual installments that can stand on their own merits.
I definitely have some things to say about this storyline, but they’re best deferred until the thread on “Shadows and Symbols.” For now, I’ll just say, yay, Ezri’s here!
I think the real problem with this episode is it makes you think of “Shadows and Symbols.”
With regards to Jadzia’s favourite song it probably just means her most recent favourite. Anyone’s favourite music/film/book can change over time and they’ve been hanging around in Vic’s bar for months.
@5: Perhaps it just meant her favorite song out of those in Vic Fontaine’s repertoire.
Little known fact: the Dax symbiont was Frank Sinatra at one point. How else can you explain “I’ve Got You Under My Skin”?
So, yeah. This was an episode that happened. We all saw it, we can’t unsee it. It is episodes like this that make me a fervernt believer in not writing season ending cliffhangers, because you get episodes like this where everyone scrambles to tie up a lot of hanging threads from the season ending big bang in order to get some sort of vaguely coherent story to start the new season off. I suppose I’d be less critical if I didn’t think the mystical crap was just taking over the show at this point and getting in the way of the space-fiction stories. I never cared for the Bajoran religion at all, except when it served as a jumping off point for a real story. It certainly wasn’t interesting enough to be a story in and of itself. Oh well, it was the 1990s and everyone was into that mystical bobbins stuff I suppose.
This episode goes in the trunk with Move Along Home, and Profit and Lace along with the rest of the “Never to be watched again” episodes.
@7, LMAO.
@8: I’m with you on not liking the mystical cockabooty, but it’s been there since “Emissary” and it’s part and parcel of DS9.
To continue with my previous rambling about the episode…the real problem here is that it’s the season opener, but it’s also the middle of a three-episode arc. We’ve been waiting all summer, Jadzia just got killed for crying out loud, it’s finally time for the new season and…we get this mish-mash. Nothing is really resolved until next week, and it feels like a let-down after all that anticipation.
I wouldn’t put it as low as “Profit and Lace” (it’s not outright offensive, and as I said I like Brock Peters in it), but as season openers go, it’s damn weak.
Definitely blah, and predictable. As soon as Joseph started getting cagey, it was obvious she was a past lover. And as soon as they found the necklace, I said, “Oh, man, the writing is going to Ancient Bajoran, isn’t it?” And then I said, “And let me guess – we’re going to find out that his mother was actually Bajoran/a Prophet or he’s some type of foundling”. Well, not EXACTLY, but I did find the resolution in the next episode rather unsatisfying since wasn’t one of the points that he was a big outsider? I don’t remember.
The Sto-vo-kor plot irritates me to no end. Not Worf’s part of it, but the way Bashir and Quark just kind of glom on to it – frankly, I agree with Worf’s anger in the next episode about it, and I hate that they reverted back to the ‘Bashir is in love with Jadzia’ thing (and, furthermore, don’t Keiko and Molly have anything to say about Miles going off on this crazy quest? Isn’t he supposed to be keeping the family together?) – it would be one thing if they really were going out of friendship, but I didn’t like how it couldn’t just BE friendship.
@10: But that’s just it — the Prophets in “Emissary” weren’t “mystical,” they were science-fictional. They were extremely alien beings who existed outside of time and could not be directly comprehended, and who had little comprehension of corporeal, temporally linear beings in turn. They were interpreted as deities by the Bajorans, but there was no evidence they saw themselves that way. It was only gradually that the writers started turning them into more conventional Space Gods, sacrificing the complex alienness in favor of a cliched “mystical” portrayal rooted in Western expectations of religion and divinity (e.g. the simplistic good/evil duality behind the Pah-wraith concept).
@8: I don’t know if cliffhangers are necessarily a problem per se…as long as you have the WHOLE story written out ahead so the resolutions fit the whole better. But I think the cliffhanger is bound to set up for a little disappointment, just because the purpose of the cliffhanger is to build and leave this tension. And once that tension goes away, well, it’s gone. It’s one thing to get relief from tension and have that be satisfying, but when the POINT of the episode is tension, then you are removing that point by relieving the tension.
But still, I think a lot of the Star Trek two-parters could’ve benefitted from having the whole story written, and then figuring out where to split it/leave it hanging. I feel like with BoBW for example, the writers did a great job of writing an amazing first part that just lead up to this cliff, but then they had to scramble to figure out how to get out of it, because they hadn’t planned it out beforehand and made the cliffhanger to fit that ending.
Maybe DS9 was trying the old Nintendo code of Up,down, up, down, A,B,A,B?.
I agree that they should have the plot lines better; I think they went for quanity, not quality.
@12: I didn’t just mean the Prophets themselves – “Emissary” leads off with Kai Opaka. Like @8, I have no objection to some of the storylines that center on Vedeks and Kais, but I don’t like the mystical trappings that go with them. As I said, though, it’s part of the show, and has been since the beginning. The religious overtones can no more be removed than could the fact that we’re situated by a wormhole to the Gamma Quadrant – they’re both essential parts of DS9. As you and Random22 noted, the mumbo-jumbo does increase as the show moves on, but it’s always been there, and even if I don’t like it, I wouldn’t get rid of it – that would end up being a completely different show.
@15: You’re misunderstanding my position. I’m not saying they should’ve abandoned the religious elements. I’m saying they shouldn’t have dumbed them down so much. They should’ve stuck with the original, more science fictional approach that the Prophets were exotic and extremely alien entities whom the Bajorans interpreted through a spiritual filter. A lot of interesting stories could’ve been gotten out of that ambiguity, as we saw in “Destiny.” The problem was when they lost the ambiguity — not only abandoning the science-fiction side and reducing the Prophets to more literal, straightforward gods, but portraying them in an increasingly conventional, Judeo-Christian way so that the alienness of Bajoran religion was lost. What started out as an imaginative, original, exotic portrayal of an alien society’s mysticism got more and more cliched and lazy and faux-Biblical, and the creativity was lost. The problem isn’t that the show got more mystical, the problem is that the mysticism got boring and corny.
@16: Ah, I did misunderstand. Thank you for clarifying – I agree that would have been more interesting overall. Perhaps there’s a novel to be written from the Prophets’ point of view about it…
I forgot now whether it was revealed in Emissary what the true purpose of the orbs was. Were they meant to be probes or something, or were they really gifts to the Bajoran people?
@18: The Prophet “Picard” in “Emissary” said that their Orbs were sent out to “seek contact with other life forms.” It was implied that they did not expect those life forms to be “corporeal creatures.” I think the original idea was that Bajor just happened to be next to the wormhole and thus a lot of the Orbs ended up there. All the “We are of Bajor” stuff, the Prophets actually intentionally playing the role the Bajorans perceived them as playing, was a later retcon.
Ok, that’s what I thought…I had some idea that the orbs were probes to explore space, but then in “Sacrifice of Angels,” Sisko claims they sent the Bajorans orbs because they care about them specifically and were “encouraging” them to create a religion…so that’s a total retcon.
Sisko introduced to the Prophets the concept of linear time, therfore they went to great lengths to ensure he was born so he meet them and teach about linear time.
I hate causality loops, makes my brain itch.
@21: Hmm… I have to admit, since the Prophets don’t experience time in the same order we do, it’s possible that they didn’t start seeing themselves as connected to Bajor until they started dealing with Sisko, and then started intervening in Bajor’s past and retroactively doing all the stuff they were later revealed to have done. Although that still doesn’t excuse the lameness of the Pah-wraith idea.
All setup and no payoff. Obviously the DS9 writers were still learning how to produce serialized stories. As Game of Thrones has proven, season openers need breathing room to reintroduce the characters we’ve spent a long time away from. Image in the Sand actually performs this particular job quite well. Problem is, it’s nothing but a series of B plots.
There’s a distinct lack of drama on this season opener. At least last season’s A Time to Stand had the good sense to tell a convincing dramatic plot that made use of these characters. At least Shadows and Symbols compensates somewhat for this…
@22
And for all we know, the Prophets had several lifetimes to deal with having Sisko as the Emissary, and having Bajoran society as its most devoted follower. That’s the thing about introducing an alien species that exists outside the concept of linear time. It opens up a number of possibilities.
I also thought Keith was going to bring up the very questionable character choice of having Sisko bring his aging father to a desert trip, but then I remembered that doesn’t happen until next week. I’m surprised as to how little I remember this season opener.
Something I’ve noticed on the review:
though having him drown his sorrows at Vic’s Place is another case of Ira Steven Behr unconvincingly crowbarring his love of lounge music onto his characters.
Technically, wouldn’t Worf really be Gene Roddenberry’s character? Ira could only claim credit on characters he created. Martok would be one such character. Zek would be another.
Eduardo: by the way you’re defining terms, Worf is Gene Roddenberry & D.C. Fontana’s character, since they both wrote “Encounter at Farpoint.” (Fontana never receiving co-creator credit — which violated Writers Guild rules, BTW — is one of several reasons why Fontana left the staff of TNG in a huff in the first season.)
Anyhow, that wasn’t the way I meant “his characters,” I meant it in terms of the characters he’s responsible for as show-runner.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Completely forgot about Fontana. I’ll eat my hat now.
You’re right, of course. As showrunner, Ira can claim the characters as his responsibility.
@24 & 25: Roddenberry didn’t want Worf, as I recall. He had to be talked into including a Klingon in the crew. The TNG Companion says that Bob Justman was among those pushing for a “Klingon Marine” in the crew, but it doesn’t name the others.
Still, apparently he first appeared in writing in the final draft script to “Farpoint,” which was credited to Fontana and Roddenberry, so they would officially count as his creators. (And Keith’s right — since they were both credited as writers of the pilot script, they should both have been credited as creators of the show.)
Argh, retcons. The Prophets go through so many of them. I MIGHT not really mind their more-involved portrayal with Bajor in the later seasons of the show if it wasn’t just an obvious, jarring retcon from the way they were portrayed earlier. (OK, I’d still mind it because it’s tied to the despicable cheesiness of the Pah-Wraith storylines.)
And among these retcons, the changed status of Sisko’s personal origins particularly grates on me. It’s just SO obvious that his unusual birth was a new development, something that the writers hadn’t planned on all along. (If there was some foreshadowing of this point back in Season 3 or something, then it would bother me a lot less. It would still be cliche — really, the Prophets couldn’t find a less hands-on way to be involved with Sisko’s life before he met them, rather than giving birth to him?! — but it would bother me a lot less than the retcon.)
Also agreed with @11 — just as it did in “Tears of the Prophets,” the retconned portrayal of Bashir’s and Quark’s relationships with Jadzia continues to be terrible.
Still, as KRAD says, there’s a lot of not-bad stuff diluting the terrible stuff in this episode. Thank goodness for small favors. (Although @2 is also right, Colonal Kira’s new hairstyle is awful.)
On top of everything else, one of the problems with Sisko’s new origin story here is that it’s led to the erroneous meme that Sisko is “half-Prophet” and thus has some sort of alien powers. He isn’t; both his parents were human. It’s just that one of them was controlled by a Prophet and manipulated into conceiving him.
So many things in this episode took me out of suspending my disbelief. Knocking out a trained assassin my hitting him in the head with a sack of potatoes?
no.
A trained assassin assassinating someone by cutting open their belly?
no.
Every forced scene with the Siskos? I mean, we are talking overacting the likes of Days of our Lives have rarely matched?
no.
The typical Klingon problem solving method of smashing everything to avoid the feels?
no.
Kira’s hairstyle looking like it was bring your kid to work day while you nip out for cocktails?
NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO!!!!!!
I’m sorry. This episode was a trainwreck. So much so that I found the bland portrayal of a Romulan senator refreshing. Please do better DS9. Please don’t feed me this pap your last season. I will be very, very angry.
You wouldn’t like to see me angry.
@30/doompaul: Why assume the Pah-wraith cultist was “a trained assassin?” He wasn’t a hired gun, he was a true believer acting out of fanaticism.
doompaul: Christopher is correct. There was nothing in the episode that gave the notion that the Pah-Wraith cultist was a trained assassin. He was a religious zealot, a fanatic.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
touché.
I was just under the assumption that if a cult bothered to send someone out to kill a major religious figure, they would send someone who would have fared better against a +1 sack of potatoes.
@33/doompaul: But did the cult send him? It seemed more to me like he was acting on his own, out of his belief that Sisko needed to be stopped from freeing the Prophets.
In fact, in “Covenant,” Vedek Fala specifically says that the cultist who went after Sisko did so entirely on his own.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
I defer to those who’s memory serves better than I.
Kira’s hairstyle this season looks like one of the prebuilt hairdo options in an MMO character creator.
The Sarah Sisko storyline has some strange implications:
1. So a Prophet possesses a human female. Then essentially proceeds to use that body, to mate with Joseph Sisko The human trafficking/rape implications would shut that story down before it even began today.
2. there is an odd implication that Joseph Sisko must be some kind of terrible person. Sarah had a child with him while possessed. She regains autonomy, and immediately completely abandons her child and Joseph. To me this implies that she is completely traumatised – to the point where she doesn’t even consider keeping her own child. If she had anything in common with Joseph or any kind of attraction/connection to him you think she would have potentially stay or at least wanted to see her child.
3. All the retconning of the Sisko family is obnoxious. At one point in season 1 Sisko talks about being with his brothers and gardening with their father. We then hear later that season that Sisko’s father is dead when Sisko is discussing father figures with Odo. Then we are told several times (but never see on screen) about Sisko’s older sister Jackie. So is she Sarah’s offspring as well? Is there yet another ex Mrs. Joseph Sisko out there? What happened to the whole idea of Ben Sisko having Brothers? DS9 has many annoying inconsistencies like this.
Mostly I always found the idea of the prophets abducting a woman and essentially pimping her out as a brood mare against her will to be distrubing. This could have made for an interesting topic if explored from the point of view of the prophets being closer to their original betrayal as alien beings with a totally different concept of morals and ethics). But I honestly think the audience is not even supposed to consider this disturbing detail. We are just supposed to take away that Sisko was born because of prophetp preDestiny nonsense.
The only two good things in these two parters and in season 7 in general are Kira’s new hairstyle and Worf’s wanting to put Jadzia into Sto-Vo-Kor. I hate season 7 and Ezri Dax.
Agreed with your comment about Jax having “All the Way” as her favorite song. The obsession with 20th Century Earth history by all the characters from other planets in the Federation was a little silly. We have a lounge from 60s Vegas, we saw Kira and Odo spending an evening in 20s Paris. Then there was Kira and Jadzia playing out a Camelot fantasy and having strong opinions about Les Miserables and other Hugo works. Hundreds of planets in the Federation with thousands of cultures and everyone’s just fascinated by Earth history because we’re just SO special. Aside from the implausibility, it was a missed opportunity by the writers to come up with other interesting ideas.
w/r/t the sack that Jake hit the cultist with – it was a sack of clams, not potatoes. Hence the conversation immediately prior about taking a sack of clams on the runabout, and Sisko saying “if I ever see another sack of clams again it will be too soon”, and everyone having a good laugh. Then of course, a sack of clams saves him from the cultist.
It was some funny and good writing.
Lockdown Rewatch. I think at this point in my original viewing of the series I was heartily sick of the Vic Fontaine character and wished he would just go away, if you had told me after this episode that in a few months time he would be the joint focus of one of my favourite ever episodes I would not have believed you.
Kira has proved herself a competent officer but I do question whether Starfleet would have left someone who was not a member of Starfleet in command of a Station thats been established as the key location in a major war, I know it’s a Bajoran station but I think they would have appointed a Temporary replacement of Captain rank to take charge of the post whilst Sisko was away.
Kira has proved herself a competent officer but I do question whether Starfleet would have left someone who was not a member of Starfleet in command of a Station thats been established as the key location in a major war, I know it’s a Bajoran station but I think they would have appointed a Temporary replacement of Captain rank to take charge of the post whilst Sisko was away.
Realistically, yeah.
But for dramatic expediency, I can kinda buy Sisko or Ross (who’d worked with Kira enough at this point) to exercise cache to keep her in place.
It could also be that with Starfleet spread thin and the Chin’Toka occupation taking up all time and resources, there was nobody else available.
My absolute least popular Star Trek opinion is that I prefer Ezri Dax to Jadzia; and in fact, it’s not particularly close.
I also like Vic Fontaine and unironically enjoy his musical interludes, so take that for what it’s worth.
Also I quite like Cretak’s dynamic with Kira, and think that it’s a terrible shame that various Trek series keep teasing the idea of a Romulan hero character and then either immediately writing them out (T’Rul; Cretak) or doing absolutely nothing with them (Elnor; Laris; Saavik, depending on who you ask)
I agree with 5 and 6. I think All the Way being Jadzia’s “favorite” song can be easily handwaved away.