“Sacrifice of Angels”
Written by Ira Steven Behr & Hans Beimler
Directed by Allan Kroeker
Season 6, Episode 6
Production number 40510-530
Original air date: November 3, 1997
Stardate: unknown
Station log: We get a summary of “Favor the Bold,” and then we see the two fleets facing off. Sisko has the small attack ships target the Cardassian vessels and then run, hoping that the Cardassians will get angry enough to break formation to go after them. (The Jem’Hadar are too disciplined to do that.) That might open a hole they can punch through to get to the station.
And then the battle is joined. On the station, Dukat, Damar, the female changeling, and Weyoun consult in Ops. Dukat figures out Sisko’s strategy, and plans to let it work up to a point, pretending to open a hole and then closing it on him before he can get through.
Damar is of the opinion that Rom couldn’t possibly have been acting alone, and figures that Leeta, Jake, and Kira are among his co-conspirators. He suggests arresting them, at least until the wormhole’s reopened. Dukat agrees, but they need to tread lightly when imprisoning two Bajorans and the Emissary’s son, so he makes sure the public story is that they’re being held for questioning. Damar also thinks Ziyal should be confined to quarters, as her friendship with Kira makes her a security risk, but Dukat refuses to accept that possibility, as she’s his daughter, dagnabbit.
Kira, Leeta, and Jake meet in Quark’s. Rumors are flying fast and furious, and no one knows what to believe. Kira suggests they shut down the station’s main computer with a bomb that she can smuggle in. Unfortunately, this plan is short-circuited by Damar’s arresting the three of them.
Dukat orders two squadrons of Cardassian ships to break formation. Sisko is sure that it’s a trap, but they have to take the opportunity, so they plow through the hole. Dukat, meanwhile, is already celebrating his victory. Weyoun is less sanguine, as they haven’t actually won anything yet. The minefield is still hours from being down, and a lot can happen in that time. They then proceed to have an interesting discussion about how to rule, with Weyoun taking a dispassionate, logical approach (eradicating Earth’s population, as that’s the most likely birthplace of resistance to Dominion rule) and Dukat taking a more egotistical approach (you don’t actually achieve victory until your enemy recognizes and acknowledges your greatness).
The female changeling informs Odo that the Dominion’s victory is imminent. Odo, however, is having pangs of regret, and those pangs increase when she informs him that Kira has been arrested and will be executed.
As the Defiant is trying to get through the Dominion line, a fleet of Klingon ships arrives. Worf apologizes for his tardiness, and the Klingons open a hole that the Defiant can get through.
Unfortunately, they’re the only ones to break through the lines. Sisko sets a course for the station. Weyoun intends to order pursuit, but Dukat—who is now carrying Sisko’s baseball around like a teddy bear—says not to bother, as the Defiant by itself is no match for the station’s armament.
Quark conscripts Ziyal to help break the resistance out of jail. He brings a platter with hasperat soufflé for Kira, with Ziyal using her authority as Dukat’s daughter to get past the Cardassian guard. It doesn’t quite work, but the guard is so focused on his inspection of the soufflé that he doesn’t notice Ziyal injecting him with a hypospray.
Armed with two pistols, Quark enters the cell area and tells the two Jem’Hadar guards not to move. Then he tells one to open the holding cells, and when the Jem’Hadar hesitate, Ziyal has to remind him that he just told them not to move. Quark tells one not to move and the other to open the cells.
When the Jem’Hadar move to shoot Quark, he fires both pistols and kills them both. From that point forward, he’s incapable of movement, so Ziyal takes down the force fields and Kira grabs the Jem’Hadar’s rifles. She and Rom will take down the computer core, while Jake gets himself, Quark, Leeta, and Ziyal to safety.
Weyoun comes to inform the female changeling and Odo of the jailbreak. He wishes to bring them to Ops, where they’ll be safe, but Odo says he’ll be fine in his quarters. The Founder respects his decision, and it’s obvious that she realizes that she hasn’t quite fully seduced Odo to the dark side. She goes off with Weyoun and a Jem’Hadar escort.
Kira and Rom are cornered in a cargo bay, but as they take cover, Rom realizes that Bajoran weapons are firing. Odo and four of his deputies have taken out their attackers. Odo promises to keep the patrols busy while Kira and Rom take the main computer down. When it becomes clear that he can’t do that in time, Kira tells Rom to focus on taking down the weapons array.
The Klingons have been a difference-maker in the big battle, as the lines are crumbling, but Dukat isn’t concerned, as they’re ten minutes from 2800 Dominion ships pouring through the wormhole when the minefield comes down. Rom works as fast as he can, but he’s a second too late, as Damar fires the weapons before Rom can finish his sabotage.
The minefield is down. Sisko orders the Defiant to go into the wormhole, which Dax says is one helluva Plan B: one ship against thousands. Meanwhile, Weyoun, Dukat, and Damar are practically giggling, while the female changeling orders them to summon the reinforcements. When they detect the Defiant heading for the wormhole, Weyoun orders it destroyed—but now Rom’s sabotage proves handy, as the station can’t fire weapons anymore.
Sisko orders full stop halfway in the wormhole, with full power to forward shields and weapons. Just as he’s about to fire, the Prophets grab him and assume he wishes to end his corporeal existence, and they do not want him to die. Sisko doesn’t want to die either, but he’s willing to sacrifice his life (and that of his crew) to keep the Dominion from conquering the Alpha Quadrant. The Prophets disagree, and refuse to send him back. Sisko insists that they have no right to interfere in his life; they say they have every right. So fine—if they want to interfere, they should deal with those 2800 ships coming through. The wormhole aliens insist that that’s a corporeal matter and doesn’t concern them, but Sisko throws several of their actions—sending Orbs to Bajor, encouraging a religion that worships them, sending Emissaries—back in their faces. They agree, but say that a penance will be exacted.
And then, suddenly, all 2800 ships just disappear.
The Defiant returns to the Bajor side of the wormhole alone. Damar can’t find any trace of the fleet, and it’s not in the Gamma Quadrant, either. Two hundred Federation and Klingon ships break through the lines and are headed for the station, the Defiant is firing on them, and the station’s weapons are still down. Weyoun and the female changeling decide to fall back, abandoning Terok Nor and regrouping at the Cardassian border.
Everyone’s on board with this plan except Dukat, who’s devastated. Victory was within their grasp, and now it isn’t, and it makes no sense to him. Damar tries to get him to evacuate, but he insists on trying to find Ziyal first.
Sisko lets the Dominion forces leave the station, as the Defiant is truly in no shape to stop them. With the Dominion forces outside Bajor also retreating, Sisko orders the Federation/Klingon task force to rendezvous at Deep Space 9.
Dukat finds Ziyal. He wants her to come with him, but she refuses—and then admits that she helped Kira and the others escape. Ziyal tearfully says goodbye and that she loves him—and then Damar shoots her. He heard the confession. Dukat holds Ziyal in his arms, forgiving her, saying he loves her, and refusing to go with Damar. As Damar leaves, Ziyal dies in Dukat’s arms.
Sisko and the rest of the Defiant crew board the station to raucous applause from the Bajoran population. He hugs Jake and shakes hands with Martok, while Worf and Dax smooch, and Rom finds out that Nog not only was promoted but outranks his own father. Jake sadly informs Sisko and Garak that Kira isn’t there because she’s in the infirmary with Ziyal.
Odo brings Sisko to the holding cells, where Dukat is just babbling, saying he and Ziyal will live together on Cardassia and that he forgives her. Odo takes him to Bashir, hoping the doctor can do something for him. As he passes Sisko, he says he forgives the captain, also, and hands him the baseball back.
Can’t we just reverse the polarity? Kira’s plan goes from bombing the main computer to sabotaging the main computer to sabotaging the weapons. While Rom doesn’t do the latter in time to stop the minefield from coming down, it does cripple the station enough to force the Dominion to evacuate it once faced with the prospect of two hundred ships bearing down on them.
The Sisko is of Bajor: Sisko basically yells at the wormhole aliens to start acting like the gods the Bajorans think they are.
Don’t ask my opinion next time: When they’re in their cells, Rom keeps asking how soon before the minefield goes down, and Kira angrily retorts, “I wish you’d stop asking that.” When they’re at the computer core, Kira keeps asking how long before he brings it offline, and Rom angrily retorts, “I wish you’d stop asking that.”
The slug in your belly: Dax does some very spiffy piloting of the Defiant.
Preservation of matter and energy is for wimps: When Kira asks why Odo came back to their side, he says that he thinks she knows, and also adds that the Great Link was paradise, but that he isn’t quite ready for paradise yet. The look on Kira’s face indicates that, for the first time, she appreciates what Odo has given up for her.
Rules of Acquisition: When Quark and Ziyal show up for the prison break, Rom cries, “Brother! I knew you would come.” Quark’s dry retort is, “It was a surprise to me.”
Plain, simple: When standing over Ziyal’s body in the infirmary, Kira tells Garak that she loved him, and his response is, “I never could understand why.”
Victory is life: The Founder and Weyoun are fairly blasé about having to abandon Terok Nor. The Founder in particular is taking the long view, blithely saying that the war will take longer than expected. Weyoun’s reaction is priceless, clapping his hands and saying, “Time to start packing!”
Tough little ship: The Defiant is the only ship to break through the lines to the station. Because it’s just that awesome.
No sex, please, we’re Starfleet: When he arrests Kira, Leeta, and Jake, Damar assures them insincerely that everything will be all right, as he’s sure that they have nothing to hide. Then he looks right at Leeta’s cleavage and says, “You certainly don’t.”
What happens in the holosuite stays in the holosuite: Within moments of arriving back on DS9, Bashir and O’Brien reserve time with Quark to do the Battle of Britain on the holosuite.
Keep your ears open: “Uh, Chief? How does that poem end?”
“You don’t want to know.”
Garak asking about the end of “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” the Alfred, Lord Tennyson poem quoted by O’Brien and Bashir earlier, and the chief giving an honest answer. (They all die.)
Welcome aboard: It’s another recurring character derby, with ten of the eleven from last time back again: Marc Alaimo, Casey Biggs, Jeffrey Combs, Aron Eisenberg, Max Grodénchik, J.G. Hertzler, Salome Jens, Chase Masterson, Andrew J. Robinson, and Melanie Smith (making her final appearance, as Ziyal is killed). Only Barry Jenner as Ross doesn’t make it in this time ’round.
Trivial matters: This is the first time that CGI has been used exclusively for a space battle in Star Trek, without any model use at all.
Visual effects supervisor and second-unit director Dan Curry (also a martial artists) and staff writer Bradley Thompson (also a pilot) consulted on the space battle to assure verisimilitude in battle tactics.
Sisko mentions Captain Reynolds, presumably the same one in command of the Centaur from “A Time to Stand.” Reynolds plays a much larger role in Diane Carey’s novelization of this arc.
The Prophets told Sisko that they were “of Bajor” in “Accession.” Sisko analogized life to a baseball game to them in “Emissary,” an analogy they use back at him. The consequences of Sisko’s actions will be seen in “The Reckoning” and “What You Leave Behind,” and the reason why they view him as important enough to interfere in corporeal matters will be seen in “Shadows and Symbols” and “Images in the Sand.”
The female changeling’s assertion that Odo will one day rejoin the Great Link will be fulfilled in “What You Leave Behind.”
Quark and Ziyal’s jailbreak scene is reminiscent of the bank heist scene in Raising Arizona.
It’s established in the short story “Three Sides to Every Story” by Terri Osborne in Prophecy and Change that Jake writes Ziyal’s eulogy, as delivered by Kira.
The Jem’Hadar soldiers trapped in the wormhole are seen again in the novel Unity by S.D. Perry (where they play a role in the novel’s climax) and in Star Trek Online (in the featured episode “The 2800”).
Walk with the Prophets: “I forgive you, too.” There’s a lot to like about this episode. The space battle is superb, for one thing. This is the second time DS9 has topped itself for providing the best space battle in Trek history, having set the bar in “The Die is Cast,” raised it in “The Way of the Warrior,” and raised it again here. Just some superb work. In particular, I cheer every single time I see the Klingon fleet coming in from the “top,” a nice reminder that space is three-dimensional.
On top of that, there’s some great character work with Dukat. There’s an argument to be made that the world would’ve been a better place if this was Dukat’s last appearance—with the exception of “Covenant,” his subsequent appearances are disappointing to say the least, which we’ll get to in due course, starting with “Waltz.” But man, was he superb in this, from his seeing through Sisko’s strategy to his verbal fencing with Weyoun to his passionate love for Ziyal.
But the best moment is when the Defiant is the only ship to come through the wormhole while 200 Federation and Klingon ships are en route, and the weapons are down. Weyoun immediately says, “Time to start packing!” (still one of the best moments in the show’s entire history), and the female changeling just figures the war will take longer. This is a minor setback. Hell, for the Dominion, this whole war is a minor engagement. They have huge swaths of territory in a whole ’nother quadrant. This is a potentially useful expansion to them, but it’s hardly their only concern, and they’ve been taking the long view all along. Ultimately, neither Weyoun nor the female changeling have a huge amount invested in holding Deep Space 9/Terok Nor.
Dukat, though, has everything invested in it. He and Damar posturing about how they’ll eventually make Weyoun and the Founder pay for their insolence sounds pathetic at best, and more so when Dukat completely falls apart at having to again abandon the station. Cardassia is just part of the Dominion, and not even a very big part. Dukat keeps talking like they’re allies, and Weyoun goes along with it to keep the peace, but it’s never more evident than this episode that the Cardassians are not equals. Weyoun wants to win the war; Dukat wants to win his conquered subjects’ hearts. It’s not at all hard to believe that one is part of a hugely successful thousand-year-old empire and the other is a failed despot.
Then there’s Kira and the rest of the resistance, including Quark’s heroic moment (which Armin Shimerman plays magnificently), then there’s O’Brien and Bashir quoting “The Charge of the Light Brigade” until Nog tells them to stop, then there’s the Klingons coming to the rescue that really should’ve been to the tune of the Mighty Mouse theme, then there’s Dukat spending the entire episode clutching Sisko’s baseball and handing it to him at the end, then there’s Odo rescuing Kira and Rom and his sad admittance that he isn’t ready for paradise, then there’s Ziyal’s awful, tragic death…
And it’s almost completely ruined by the solution to the problem. I’ve been loath to compare DS9 to Babylon 5 in this rewatch, as that’s a can of worms best left closed, but both shows had the exact same resolution to a major conflict, to wit, the captain character unconvincingly yelling at powerful beings for several minutes to allow for a deus ex machina ending. On B5, it was the Shadow War ending in “Into the Fire” by Sheridan and Delenn self-righteously lecturing the Vorlons and Shadows, and on DS9 it’s Sisko being equally self-righteous and the Prophets not really sounding like themselves. And both of them are just awful.
Ira Steven Behr expressed annoyance in The Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Companion that there were complaints about the ending. I quote Behr: “Hearing people refer to it as some dopey deus ex machina is really annoying because I would think they’d give us more credit for being on the ball. We didn’t have to end it like that, we chose to end it like that. Because we wanted to say that there was something going on here.” The sad thing is, this quote makes it worse. It would at least be understandable if Behr and Hans Beimler felt they had written themselves into a corner and had to pull the Prophets out of their asses. Given the magnitude of the situation, and given that they have to produce a weekly TV show, sometimes stuff happens.
Instead, Behr assures us that he intended the lame-ass ending all along. And to his credit, it will pay off, in several different episodes, but that doesn’t make this feel any less like a depressing hand-wave, no different than the worst TNG or Voyager technobabble solution, where wholly made-up science is used to solve a problem based on other wholly made-up science. The fact that there will be consequences in other episodes doesn’t help this episode, which feels like the coppiest of cop-outs.
Warp factor rating: 5
Keith R.A. DeCandido will be at Dragon Con 2014 this coming weekend. His full, and rather insane, schedule can be found here. He’ll be doing two Star Trek panels: “Star Trek Authors” Friday from 7-8pm (along with Peter David, Jimmy Diggs, Christie Golden, and Thomas Zahler) and “Klingon History” Monday from 11.30am-12.30pm (along with Erika Figueroa and Morgan Skye). He’ll have copies of many of his books, among them The Klingon Art of War and Farscape: The War for the Uncharted Territories, with him for sale at the convention, particularly at his autographings on Saturday (noon at the SFWA table in the Hyatt and 2.30 in the autograph area in the Marriott) and Monday (10.30am at the SFWA table).
Total deux ex machina ending! You’re right there. Seemed like kind of a cheesy way to end it after building up this moment for so many episodes. I would have rather seen the minefield stay in place and maybe have the Dominion start constructing a mega-weapon on the other side of the wormhole (or at least a similar type of array that de-mined the wormhole from DS9.)
I do disagree that this should have been Dukat’s last episode as I greatly enjoy the next one? I think its the next one. The one where he remains crazy while trapping Sisko in the cave and seeking Sisko’s admiration/approval.
Nice to be back on the staion. Although, I immediately miss the excitement of needing to recapture the station.
I don’t think I agree about the ending being a deus ex machina. Yes, that literally means divine intervention solving a story, but as a term of criticism it’s generally used to mean solving a crisis with something that’s introduced out of the blue and has no prior setup in the story. The Prophets and their relationship with Bajor and Sisko have been set up from the start. I’ve complained about the series turning them from the intriguingly alien entities they originally were into something more like conventional gods, but since the series had taken them in that direction, it only made sense for Sisko, who’d been more or less their puppet for years, to stand up to them and say, okay, now it’s your turn to do something for me, and for the Bajorans you claim to have so much invested in.
Although I grant that it would’ve been less of a deus ex machina with regard to this specific episode or arc if there’d been more setup, if it had been an established thread within the prior five episodes and been alluded to earlier in this episode, rather than having Sisko’s visit to wormhole space just kind of pop up without prior groundwork.
I do agree entirely that Dukat’s arc should’ve ended here, or at least should’ve gone in a different direction. At the time, I hoped that he would truly repent after this, finally wake up and realize the horrors he’d been responsible for and the terrible mistakes he’d made. I’m a big believer in redemption stories. But his arc would’ve been perfectly satisfying if it had decisively ended here, if he’d just spent the rest of his life getting mental health care in a Federation penal institution. It certainly would’ve spared us the cartoon villainy we were in for in the remainder of the series’ run.
Literally Deus ex machina, but in a good way. A lot of scifi fans would agree with you and in general the majority of scifi fandom has a real problem with religion in stories. Personally I think it was incredibly refreshing to see the give and take between a near omnipotent set of ‘gods’ and a people that are worshiping them.
It doesn’t come out of left field, the prophets are well set up in the seasons before this as having this kind of power and being interested in the wellfare of Bajor. To have them not take a hand would tip the scales too far toward callousness, which would make the Bajoran’s religious faith feel pointless. To have them take a hand sooner without the Emissary involved in convincing them would make them too much like The Caretaker from Voyager, not allowing/encouraging independence in their followers.
Deus ex machina is really only a bad thing if it’s not foreshadowed and justified. Otherwise it’s just a different type of storytelling.
I also disagree to a lesser extent about the B5 climax you referenced. In both cases, there is a dramatic effect to the impassioned speech cutting down to the issues that really matter. Do our heroes convince them too easily? Probably, but it’s a 1 hour show. The audience doesn’t have patience for what would be a true length argument and counter-argument slowly bringing someone to a new point of view.
Also, Ziyal’s death really surprised me and hit me hard. It shouldn’t have because Dukat and Garak’s resulting anguish over a minor character is out of storytelling 101, but as a teen I was interested in seeing her get a larger role.
I actually didn’t mind the deus ex machina ending. We had already established that we had a powerful race with a vested interest in Bajor- all Sisko did was appeal to them to take an interest in Bajor. Had the Wormhole Aliens not shown already a propensity to meddle or it been some other super group involving I would object, but the Wormhole People/Bajor Gods are already in play anyways…
I actually rate this higher than you do KRAD… I figure that this episode was on par if not better than Best of Both Worlds which was a 6 on the KRAD scale… there were a lot more moving parts to the plot that wrapped up mostly well than in BOTB and the battle scenes were better both visually and tactically. Also the character work was very good all around, with Avery Brooks infusing passion into his character, Nog showing serious nerves, and Dukat going from meglomaniacal to completely batty.
Lastly, I just want to comment- how many Miranda class ships were in the fleet. These things seem to number in the hundreds and get blown up easier than swatting a fly. If I were on a Miranda going into this battle, I’d get off at the earliest possibility, since they were flying death traps. It’s like the battle scene in the 1987 Transformers movie where all of the minor characters got killed off before Optimus (the Klingons), except Paramount didn’t have a new toy line that they wanted to introduce in season 7…
@CLB 2… the redemption story isn’t Dukat- it’s Damar’s. He goes from Dukat lackey to Cardassian leader to rebel as his eyes are opened to the horror of the Dominion that he was party to.
Will link when I get home, but SF Debris mounts a pretty good defense of the Deux Ex Macchina ending (as well as an utterly hilarious takedown on the use of “Charge of the Light Brigade” as a source of inspiration).
I agree that this was the natural end of Dukat’s arc. It’s just so hard to let go of a great villain, though.
Whoo-hoo-hoo, look who knows so much!
only MOSTLY dead.
@2 Agreed. Deus Ex Machine criticisms are overused and misapplied all the time.
On the one hand, this would have been an almost perfect ending for Dukat (although we would then have needed some exposition at some point about his ultimate fate), but on the other hand I’m not sure that Damar could have achieved his redemption without Dukat. Still, Dukat should have had a better end then he finally does.
I agree that the ending is just too pat. For that matter, the arrival of the Klingon fleet just in the nick of time had been pretty obviously going to happen since the previous episode. And peeking into the can of worms, I’d say that there is a lot of resonance with what happened to Sheridan on Z’ha’dum as well; both captains must pay a reckoning.
One other thing I just noticed here is something that happens a lot. I don’t know if it’s exclusive to Behr’s scripts, but we very often get a bit where Character A says/does something to make Character B snark and then the roles get reversed later, as with Kira and Rom here. It probably stands out more in a reread than it would have under normal watching conditions, but it’s a definite tic in somebody’s style.
I’ll add my voice to those that didn’t mind the ending. Sisko made the argument right in the episode: intervening here is consistent with the Prophets’ behavior. They have already identified themselves as “of Bajor”. We don’t know why, we never really do find out why, but Bajor matters to them. Sisko said it: “You want to be gods, then be gods.” And they did.
I also want to add that the sceen when Garak find Ziyal in the infirmary is probably one of the most touching and poignant moments in all of Star Trek. His line, “I could never figure out why.” I honestly think that may have been one of the only times we saw Garak, for real, no games, no masks, just a real main in pain. It was powerful. Made even more powerful by his very next line. “I guess I never will.” Already he’s retreating from that one raw, real moment, closing down again. Andrew Robinson is just brilliant, he really is.
The obvious alternative to begging the Prophets would have been to collapse the wormhole-but then they walled that option off in “In Purgatory’s Shadow,” unfortunately.
I’m of two minds about the ending. On one hand, it isn’t often that the Federation and its peers ever seems to be caught under the feet of the more sophisticated and ancient powers crawling about the galaxy, with the exception of the Borg. So the notion that the tides could turn on the whims of the gods is in keeping with DS9’s more serious and consequentialist tone with regards to its resident magical beings.
However, it’s fouled up by the fact that Sisko doesn’t actually have a play when he dives into the wormhole. He’s already lost, near as he knows. 2800:1 is a failure condition. It would be different if the autodestruct on the Defiant could collapse the wormhole, and the Prophets were faced with the choice of getting their hands dirty or losing their friend and teacher The Sisko-and possibly perishing themselves (about which antics could ensue visa via them seeing it coming or not, and which they may or may not resent as spacegod hostages,) or if Sisko announced that their one remaining move was to bargain with the wormhole aliens on behalf of Bajor or die in the attempt. Both of those versions preserve the agency of the characters, whereas the aired version is reducible to angels sweeping in to save the worthies from certain death.
In some ways I think it was the start of DS9’s missteps when it came to handling the religious elements of their setting- missteps which ultimately culminate in the series finale of Battlestar Galactica? At the start of the series, there was tension in the space between Ben Sisko being in the right place at the right time to fulfill a prophecy wide open enough to encompass all manner of chance, and fact that the Prophets were in fact real, powerful, and unhitched from the normal flow of time. Tasty paradoxes abounded- all the stoner fun of time travel without the leaping through foggy portals. By the end, however, he’s actually been birthed by gods (who sure couldn’t have been very puzzled by 3+1 spacetime to pull that off,) and his whole life he’s been secretly drawn to a cave on Bajor for a wrestling match. Here, in the wormhole, instead of Sisko being their guy because he ran into the wormhole and teaching them lessons about corporeal existence, doing the whole Star Trek dialogue thing plus Destiny?!, it’s pretty well established that he’s extra special Space Jesus, and their insistence that they will exact a price never seems to pay off in any but the most literal sense- a problem that will eat the fourth season of BSG alive.
As everyone else pointed out, the Deus Ex Machina solution really doesn’t bother me. Sure, they had written themselves into a corner, plot-wise, but at least the Prophets had been established for six seasons.
Character-wise, this episode’s a masterpiece of little moments amidst the climax. Losing Ziyal was an appropriate, yet tragic outcome for both Dukat and Kira, making it clear that you don’t earn a good ending without paying the emotional price.
As for your B5 comparison, Krad, you brought it up, and I’m defending it. Sheridan was never going to be able to win the Shadow War through brute force and military strategy. Two ancient races were battling each other with planet killers. Their last engagement had them losing 2 allied ships for every single enemy ship destroyed. Not a good ratio. The only way you could end this war was by making everyone see through reason.
And Sheridan’s solution was foreshadowed a season prior, as Sheridan followed his father’s first advice: never start a fight, but always finish it. B5’s solutions, much like a lot of Star Trek, always stemmed from communication and understanding rather than brute force. You only had to resort to violence when there was no other option (ex: taking Pres. Clark down).
The toughest part about this episode is how you feel about Dukat at the end. The whole way, you laugh at the over-the-top villian and his twirly mustache. And then Ziyal dies. Dukat falls apart and you begin to feel for him. I can’t begin to imagine what it would do to me if I had to witness the same with my daughter. And with each succeeding episode, you think about how Ziyal’s death leads to his decisions. I don’t think the makes-little-sense-good-vs-evil-to-the-death arc is very good, but I can understand his bitterness.
This episode? I wanted to like it. I wanted to love it. I wanted to care for it. But I don’t, can’t, and I suppose it could have been worse.
1) The deus ex wormhole plot was bad. At least B5 had the courtesy of building a relationship between the Vorlons and the younger races. The Prophets seem to only show up when necessary for the plot.
2)The Rom/Damar countdown was a surprise, since you expect a last minute stop, but the timer with one second (don’t they show Rom finish before Dukat says “fire”?) was cliche.
3) The oft done 2D battle lines was irritating, even if the Klingons show up from over the top. If they could go over the top, why didn’t they send some forces directly to DS9? That would have drawn off Dominion ships and gotten some ships in position with more time to spare. SF could have even sent ships with them.
I know this was better than many other episodes, and certainly that of VGR (I watched the Dr. Doctor and Mr. Doctor and Muzak: The Episode last night – after my previous effulgent praise of Picardo/The Doctor, I must hang my head in shame, even if it was the script and not the actor).
An exciting episode. I loved it. as for the final solution, I would have preferred to see Sisko start his attack plan before the Prophets grabbed him, but that’s a quible. I would have preferred to see our characters solve the problem, but the way Sisko handled it wasn’t bad.
It’s really interesting to watch Damar’s journey, which I didn’t pay as much attention to the first time around because who suspected he would become as important the the storyline as he eventually did? Certainly not me.
Bobby
@@.-@. I join you in staring at the horror of being a crewman on a Miranda class vessel. They might as well have called it the Redshirt class. They are so easy to knockout and destroy that I bet in a videogame they wouldn’t even warrant points for doing so.
Count me as on the fence as to the conclusion. I like that the desperate race against time did not work, and was lost by the good guys (or by Kira’s side at least), for once. So used to the Galaxy Quest “the counters always go to the last second”-cliche. I do think the plot line with the prophets/wormhole aliens is well set up and is is DS9’s version of Picard’s begging Q and showing human humility. I think it is only a deus-ex in the most pedantically literal sense, but in no way a narrative sense. However, I just flat out do not like it. That is a personal preference though.
It is well set up and well executed, it is nice to see the most militaristic of the Trek series not just finding a non-military solution, but needing to find a non-military solution too. It is the Trek message in a nutshell. Being Military and shooting guns only takes you so far, but when it really comes down to it, you need to take a leap of faith and think outside the box. That is a good thing.
@3: My problem with the ending is Bajor didn’t really seem to be under any immediate threat in this episode. (The Dominion fleet wasn’t coming through to attack Bajor after all.) It would make sense for the Prophets to intervene if Bajor was going to be attacked (though they notably failed to do that during the Cardassian occupation), but why would the Prophets bother to intervene when Bajor wasn’t actually in any danger?
Quoth Christopher: “I don’t think I agree about the ending being a deus ex machina. Yes, that literally means divine intervention solving a story, but as a term of criticism it’s generally used to mean solving a crisis with something that’s introduced out of the blue and has no prior setup in the story.”
I was going for what the phrase actually means, and it is a deus ex machina story pretty much by definition. Obviously Ira Steven Behr agrees with you, since his complaint about the complaint is rooted in it having the connotation of lazy writing. But my issue isn’t that it’s lazy, it’s that it just doesn’t work.
I didn’t expect my opinion to be shared by everyone, any more than I expected my hatred of “The Drumhead” to be shared by everyone, but I calls ’em as I sees ’em, and I see this as a failed ending to a great storyline, and the only blot on an otherwise superb episode.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@16 You know I never spotted that in all these years. I suppose it is a tribute to how well it is put together that the power of the moment makes you forget there is no direct threat to Bajor at them point. I suppose I can handwave it away after the fact though by saying that with the prophets/wormhole aliens being non-linear beings (timey-wimey, wibbl….sorry) they could see that in the future that the Dominion was a threat to Bajor. Lets face it, one way or another the Dominion want to rule everyone and Bajor is exactly the sort of place that would actively resist if it felt too many of its freedoms were restricted. Even the incredibly minor restrictions on DS9 was enough to drive one Bajoran cleric to kill herself in protest. Sooner or later Bajor would be under Dominion control and would resist in a major way. We know how the Dominion treats planets that resist, the lucky ones are wiped out, the unlucky ones are left to suffer generation upon generation of pain and body-horror. I guess the prophets/wormhole aliens just saw that potential future when The Sisko told them to go look at it.
I’ve disagreed mightily with you before … and I do so again. I think the wormhole sequence makes sense given everything we’ve seen so far about the wormhole aliens. It properly invokes the past and solidly sets up the future of the Prophets.
Possibly my favourite episode, so many great moments. Never had any problems with the ending, I like the way it shows how the Prophets have changed since the first ep through their interactions with Sisko.
Dukat is a megalomaniac, but that doesn’t mean he is wrong. If the rulers of an empire want to STAY the rulers of an empire, they need to win over their new subjects loyalties so that, when it comes to the crunch, they will fight for the rulers rather than against them.
Most of the Mongol Hordes were actually Turks. Most of the people who fought for Cortez and Pizzaro were American Indians. All the european colonial empires used to buy African slaves for their own armies – and got them to fight for their buyers.
If you can’t pull that sort of thing off, you don’t deserve to run an empire. And you won’t, for very long.
What is wrong with Dukat is not that he wants his subjects to support him. What is wrong with Dukat is that he has no idea how to make that happen – and he never, ever, learns.
@21: “Most of the people who fought for Cortez and Pizzaro were American Indians.”
A point of clarification: They fought with Cortez and Pizarro. They fought for their own interests, whether to overthrow a tyrannical state in the former case (not realizing they were just trading in for another set of tyrants) or to attempt to seize power from a rival faction in the latter (IIRC). The conquistadores simply piggybacked onto existing internal power struggles to advance their own interests, then moved into the power vacuum when the smallpox germs they brought killed off most of the population.
I like the ending, because it shows why the Federation deserves to win (although that’s totally ruined later)
The Dominion has had plenty of its people go through the wormhole. Presumably some of them have talked to the Prophets. It isn’t just Jem’Hadar (who can be expected to be confontational) or Vorta (who you can expect to suck up like the suckiest suckups who ever sucked an up), but Changelings too. So the Dominion would have had a chance to take their best shot at befriending the “wormhole aliens”.
Who is Sisko at the start of DS9? He’s a Commander at the shipyards of Mars, working on anti-Borg ships. His last posting was as first officer on a Miranda-class starship, which has got to be the crappiest starship to get a posting on. Furthermore, a ton of Starfleet has just died at Wolf 359, so promotion is probably rapid. I think it can be confidently stated that as far as anyone could say, at the series start Sisko is an above average officer, but only one out of hundreds.
This guy is then thrown into a meeting with an entirely new form of life, and what does he do? He rocks! At the end of his time in the vision, the Federation and the Prophets have made real progress towards understanding each other, and it happens because Sisko really means it: he does live to meet new cultures and grow from mutual understanding and improvement. He just an average guy in Starfleet, and that’s totally awesome.
So in this episode he goes into the wormhole and convinces the Prophets to take a side. As others have mentioned, Bajor wasn’t in any real danger, not for a while at least. When Sisko says they need to act, they believe him, all because the Federation produced Sisko and so must be better than the Dominion (who produced whoever on that side must have talked to the Prophets).
And then they go and screw all of that up with Sisko’s parentage. Grar.
On another topic, does it seem weird that there was never a Jake/Ziyal pairing? They are about the same age, they are both artists, and having the son of the Emissary fall in love with the daughter of the Occupation Leader seems like drama-city. I don’t know if that would have been any good, but I’m just curious if it was ever considered.
BrianDolan: I strongly recommend Terri Osborne’s “Three Sides to Every Story,” which is in the DS9 tenth-anniversary anthology Prophecy and Change, which came out in 2003. Terri told a story of Jake and Ziyal’s burgeoning friendship, which takes place during this six-part occupation arc. It also shows some of the other things the resistance accomplished.
(Also in that anthology are me — “Broken Oaths,” a sequel to “Hippocratic Oath” — regular rewatch commenter Christopher L. Bennett — “…Loved I Not Honor More,” a sequel to “Looking for par’Mach in All the Wrong Places” — and Andrew J. Robinson — “The Calling,” a sequel to Robinson’s novel A Stitch in Time and his play The Dream Box.)
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Cool, I will look for that.
The prophets irked me in this episode. For someone who seem to have encouraged the devotion of the Bajorans, they’re pretty cavalier about Bajor’s fate when you’d think they’d want to lend a hand.
And to be pissed at Sisko for calling them out on it? I really had no use for the prophets after this.
“I also want to add that the sceen when Garak find Ziyal in the infirmaryis probably one of the most touching and poignant moments in all of Star Trek. His line, “I could never figure out why.” I honestly think that may have been one of the only times we saw Garak, for real, no games, no masks, just a real main in pain. It was powerful. Made even more powerful by his very next line. “I guess I never will.” Already he’s retreating from that one raw, real moment, closing down again. Andrew Robinson is just brilliant, he really is.”
This. It was magnificent. Broke my heart and I’m normally not a ‘shipper.
Loved Weyoun’s “time to pack” line.
Agree that they should have ended Dukat’s arc here. I absolutely hated the story where he built the cult and got a Bajoran’s wife pregnant, but that was small potatoes compared to the Kai-Dukat partnership. Ugh.
Some random thoughts on this episode.
-Great space battle. The effects hold up well.
-Great acting from Alaimo when the fleet doesn’t show up. That alone made any deux ex machina worth it.
-I hope Starfleet retired the Miranda class after the war (if there were any left).
Ziyal’s death broke my heart seventeen years ago, and it still does. I really loved that character and her relationships in the cast. I do wish we’d seen more of Ziyal and Jake being friends. Garak and Kira standing vigil was wrenching, Garak’s bewilderment especially.
I never minded the ending with Sisko and the Prophets, but then, I never minded Sheridan and the First Ones either, so hey.
@23: That is a terrific analysis of Sisko. I never thought of it that way before, but it’s lovely.
Although I wouldn’t entirely agree that he was an average officer because he was a shipbuilder at Utopia Planitia. He settled for an unambitious job because of his depression about Jennifer’s death. He was on the verge of retiring to a civilian teaching job when he was assigned to DS9. So he was in an “average” role by lack of effort, not lack of ability.
A deus ex machina requires the problem being resolved from on high by supernatural beings who have made no prior appearance or effect on the story, and through no direct action of the established characters. The Prophets have been there since the very first episode and many times since, so they can hardly be called unestablished. And Sisko specifically asked them for help because he had no options left; they were perfectly happy to not interfere at all until he demanded that they do. So really really not a DEM.
Even your Babylon 5 comparison was not a deus ex machina either, since for one thing it was the lesser beings who stopped the higher beings from fighting, not the other way around. Plus the whole point of the conflict between the Shadows and the Vorlons was a philosophical one, with both sides trying to convince the younger races to take a side. So the conclusion had to philosophical too – the younger races saying “FU, we’re not going to pick a side. Your only option is to destroy us all, and then you’ve lost anyway.”
So basically, neither were DEMs. Unsatisfying maybe, but that’s a matter of opinion, and you’re welcome to yours. But don’t go calling things they’re not.
The only bit of this episode’s conclusion that seems like a missed opportunity to me was where Sisko went into the wormhole only planning to fight, not planning to contact the Prophets. It was only when they tried to stop him from fighting that he thought to ask them for help. It would have been better if he’d gone into the wormhole with every intention of asking the Prophets for help, and indeed I originally thought that’s what the scene in “Favour the Bold” was about, the one where he says to Ross that he’s been scanning the prophecies for “guidance, insights, loopholes.” Sadly that was not to be.
Space is BIG. Really Really BIG. So when you’re going to have a space battle, lets put everything in a few square kilometres and forget about the going-around-things bit. Grrrr.
And it is Deus ex Machina as I can’t recall any foreshadowing of the prophet’s ability to ‘disappear’ ships. What happened to the preservation of matter and energy ? (did TV have physics consultants at this time ?)
Did the Prophets vaporize the Dominion fleet or simply transport them somewhere else?
Hmm, that might make for an interesting story: a lost Dominion fleet out there still thinking the war is on long after it’s over.
@31. I imagine that the reason they all piled into the same few kilometers is because that as soon the Dominion detected Starfleet’s ships on the move they sent their own fleet to intercept them. The “Space is big so there will be no fleet actions” becomes hard to justify when you have faster-than-light sensors. Same with the other usual complaint of close quarters combat. Once you have shields and FTL sensors and engines, but only slower than light weapons, you need to be up close and personal to inflict injury and not give the other guy time to dodge.
As for the prophets/wormhole aliens’ power to inflict damage to starships, well I’ll agree that simply vanishing them is new, but they are shown to be able to disable them way back in Emissary when they disable Dukat’s Galor Class warship so thoroughly that a runabout has to rescue it (the episode also showed that they could vanish ships when they sent Dax back inside an Orb, but kept Sisko and the runabout inside). The episode Crossover established that the wormhole can dump people into alternate realities. The episode Accession had them vanish a ship only to spit it out hundreds of years later, then timey-wimey it back to its original time. In the episode Prophet Motive they performed a mental rewrite of Nagus Zek, and were preparing to do the same to Quark before he talked them out of it.
In short: While vanishing entire fleets is new, there was no reason to suspect (in-universe or out-universe)the Wormhole Aliens did not have the power to deal with the Dominion fleet currently traversing the wormhole. It is well established they are almost godlike within the wormhole itself.
And here’s Chuck’s imaginary conversation between Sisko and O’Brien on the ‘Charge of the Light Brigade’:
@31 – I figure the big fleet battle reason was simple- you could use fleet tactics vs. fleet tactics. As apposed to trying to sneak all your ships around and have each one outnumbered (one vs. ?) when the enemy intercepted them. You could try to go around, but then you’d end up with many tiny battles instead of one big one.
As far the Miranda’s go, I always figured they’d just lost shields by the time we see them getting destroyed. But as far as what we see on screen, no one is using shields anyways (or at least they are now like the shields seen the original films rather than the bubbles we get on TNG). Or does the Dominion still have the ability to fire through Fed shields? Didn’t they fix that last season?
Overall I loved this episode but you can put me down for hating the ending with the vanishing fleet. I agree with others who said that if Sisko had gone in there with the purpose to convince the prophets then it would have been better though.
Plus, gotta love a HUGE space battle! Hey, I admit, I like explosions, especially ones in space!
As far as the space battle goes, I figure they are tangling in the middle of nowhere because they really don’t have a choice. From the Starfleet perspective, just getting to the Bajoran system doesn’t do much- the space is a lot more clogged with things like plaents, asteroids and a really really big minefield that could limit maneuverability, so it tactically makes more sense. Besides, they couldn’t retake the station (batter down DS9’s shields, drop their own and conduct a boarding operation) at the same time they are fighting the Dominion fleet, so they need to defeat or at least tie up the Dominion fleet first.
From the Dominion point of view, the last thing you want to do is protect your base at the doorstep of your base, so you sortie out to meet the Federation. If you’re doing battle on your doorstep, there’s an off chance that even though you’re fighting off the enemy, something will get through and damage/destroy your base. If you engage the enemy far enough away, your base is much better protected. It’s the same reason that battles often happen outside a city rather than in it- the armies have a chance to do their fighting without actually involving the city which adds an entirely different dimension to the combat (harder to attack but easier for the city itself to get destroyed).
A modern example of this is the concept of Carrier Fleet defense. Fighters are sent out to 300 miles away from the fleet on the axis of attack to defend the attacking planes. Any leakers are engaged by first an outer ring, then an inner ring of defenders with long range missiles. Only if the attacker has penterated all 3 levels of defense does the carrier defend itself, and presumably by then, the number of attackers has been whittled down significantly.
@30: More generally, a deus ex machina is any solution that comes out of nowhere; in Greek theater it was divine intervention, but these days it can be anything where the problem is randomly solved by something that has no prior setup in the story. For instance, if an extended hunt for a serial killer is solved when the killer is randomly hit by a truck while going out for groceries. Or if a romantic triangle is resolved when suddenly a cop shows up and reveals that one of the love interests is wanted for a crime he committed 15 years ago in another state.
@31: The Prophets exist beyond linear time. If they simply moved the ships to a different part of spacetime, they would seem to have disappeared from the perspective of an outside observer. Consider Kira and Bashir’s runabout in “Crossover,” or Akorem Laan’s sailship in “Accession.” Both of those seemed to disappear inside the wormhole, but they were simply moved to another century or another timeline. An observer who’d actually been inside the wormhole watching them when that happened would have probably seen them appear to vanish just as the Dominion fleet did.
@33: “Up close and personal,” sure, but when you’re talking about movement in space, that’s on the order of tens of thousands of kilometers, not hundreds of meters. Think about how fast ships need to move in order to get from one place to another in the immensity of even interplanetary space; then think about how far apart cars on the freeway need to be as opposed to cars on a 15 MPH side road. The faster you’re going, the more insanely stupid it is to stay in naked-eye visual range of another ship, because a split-second miscalculation in course could cause a fatal collision at those ranges and speeds. The only time you ever need to be that close to another ship is if you’re actually docking with it.
As far as dodging goes, for beam weapons (assuming the particles are relativistic) it’s enough to be within, say, a light-second (300,000 km), and for torpedoes, the range doesn’t matter because presumably they can correct their own course and intercept a fleeing ship. In which case ships would want to stay as far from each other as possible to minimize the chance of getting targeted by a torpedo. They’d have to balance that with the need to stay close enough to successfully target the enemy, though.
What we see in Trek space battles has to be taken as a figurative representation for the sake of clarity rather than what you’d actually see through a live camera. This has been made explicit on occasion: There are scenes in some episodes where the exterior shots make the ships look like they’re just a few ship lengths apart, but the characters’ dialogue confirms that they’re something like 20,000 kilometers apart. Clearly what we’re seeing is not literal. Which is obvious from all the huge impossibilities, like ships banking to turn when there’s no atmosphere to bank against, explosions being roiling, turbulent fireballs when there’s (again) no atmosphere for them to mix with, phaser beams being visible when there’s (I sense a theme) no atmosphere to scatter their light, etc. The visuals have to be taken as a fanciful dramatization of what’s really going on.
@36: Interplanetary space isn’t really “clogged,” though. In a system anything like ours (which, granted, is enormously less typical than we used to believe), the planets’ orbits are tens of millions of kilometers apart, and of course any planet itself takes up only an arcsecond or two of its orbital circumference. As for asteroids, contrary to the stupidly wrong portrayals in all screen fiction, the typical separation between asteroids in the Main Belt of our system is something like 6 million kilometers, 16 times the Earth-Moon separation. You could fly through the Belt fifty times on random trajectories and never even see an asteroid with the naked eye. Space is never, ever “clogged” under any circumstance. They don’t call it “space” for nothing.
Curiously enough, Joseph Sisko made this exact point regarding the vastness of space and the futility of having a war at all since everyone can live in peace within their own personal space, back in A Time to Stand.
But of course, this isn’t really about territorial disputes. For the Dominion, it’s about seizing power and enacting revenge for all the prejudice that’s been thrown against Changelings.
@38
Revenge? Against people who had never even heard of changeling, much less done anything nasty to them?
They may choose to say “revenge”, but that is not what it is about.
Yeah, add me to the chorus of those not all that annoyed with the Prophets’ almost literal deus ex machina here. It works for me because of the previously stated relationship they’ve had with Sisko and Bajor, as well as the fact we’ve seen the Prophets can deal with vessels passing through the wormhole if they choose to.
What I actually like about it is that it’s a solution that stops the Dominion without defanging them. This is such a large, overwhelming force that it takes interference from higher beings to stop them. And the war still goes on for almost two years with the risk of defeat throughout. They’re a force to be reckoned with the likes of which the Federation has never seen and sometimes in fiction that is too much for our heroes to overcome. I kind of like that.
Heh. I’m a bit less grumpy about Damar getting pummeled, after this.
I love the Klingon kavalry coming out of the sun when things look hopeless. I loved it when the Romulans showed up in By Inferno’s Light. Something about the trope of an old and dangerous rival having your back when a worse enemy or threat shows up.
Agreed that this is one of Garak’s best and most crushing moments too. The subtle acting makes it, although that doesn’t detract from Dukat’s own reaction. Different strokes.
Lastly, I can see that the Prophet intervention is a kind of deus ex machina, or a cop-out, or similar. But when almost 3,000 deadly ships vanish in a split-second, the hairs on the back on my neck still tingle a bit.
I’d assume the fleet was simply vaporised or wiped from existence. I’m surprised to hear that the ships and crews were held captive, in a way, in the expanded literature. Now I’m eager to find out what happened.
This reminded me of how I felt when in the show “Heroes,” Claire’s Dad get saved by her magic blood. It meant that now any time someone was close to death, the writers could just pull out a vial of magic blood and make it all better.
From this point on I started to worry that the whole war was going to be resolved by Sisko just calling up the prophets and asking them to do him a solid.
@42: That’s why the episode made a point of having the Prophets tell Sisko there’d be a reckoning for their intervention, that it wouldn’t be free of cost.
Besides, the Prophets were only able to intervene because the fleet was inside the wormhole. That’s their universe, the realm they have control over. Aside from the rather ridiculous ending of “Accession” where they somehow tweaked the timeline so that people remembered two contradictory versions of Akorem Laan’s history, there’s never been any indication that the Prophets can affect things outside the wormhole except by sending Orbs or agents out into our universe. So no, Sisko would not have been able to ask the Prophets to simply perform a miracle and end the war. They’re not omnipotent.
@23
I agree, and I’m sure there will be time in S7 to go into it, but messing with Sisko’s background took away what was so cool about him, that he was just a regular guy put into a remarkable situation and that he ultimately chose to be “Of Bajor.” Free Will is always more interesting than Predestined Purpose.
I never thought about it, but Jake/Ziyal would have been dramatic gold
@27.
I agree. We ultimately knew the good guys would get the station back. That it was a bit hand-wavy is incidental. There was so much character gold in this episode that I’d forgotten about that plot point.
@43:
I think in hindsight it’s easy to say “The Prophets can’t do that” but upon 1st viewing this in 1990-something, I remember wondering if bringing the Prophets into the war was the direction the show was going to go in to defeat the Dominion.
@45: I’m not speaking from hindsight, I’m arguing strictly from the evidence that was available at the time. As I already said, aside from “Accession,” nothing had ever suggested that the Prophets had the ability to influence anything beyond the wormhole. In fact, the episodes that aired after this gave the Prophets more ability to meddle in the outside universe. At the time this episode first aired, there was even less reason to think the Prophets could affect the larger universe than there is in hindsight. I can see how you could speculate that the writers might take things in that direction, but there was no actual in-story precedent for such a thing. Even the timeline change in “Accession” was the result of events within the wormhole.
So, now that the Federation has re-taken DS9, they’re going to re-build the minefield just in case the Prophets change their minds and stop blocking the wormhole, right?
(Which should work because if the Dominion could destroy the minefield from the other side–firing an anti-graviton beam through the wormhole or from inside it or whatever–then they’d have done that already.)
I don’t think they ever do. And I think this has minor consequences for them. Well, oh well.
@47: What consequences? From this point on, the Dominion won’t risk sending more reinforcements through the wormhole, so the forces already on this side will have to carry on the war themselves. That’s why they have to start breeding their own Jem’Hadar and get local supplies of ketracel white, and why they need to ally with the Breen later on.
Just as a point of order for those arguing over the deus ex machina semantics, in fact although the Gods would appear out of nowhere in the original Greek theatre that this expression comes from, everyone in the audience would have known that they were there, who they were, their entire backstories and that they were capable of intervening. So in fact it is an almost exact analogy for what happens here.
That’s not to say that I disagree with the ending. But as with another comment further up (not going back to figure out which) I kind of wish Sisko had gone into the wormhole specifically for this purpose rather than happening upon it. His actions make no sense otherwise. He is taking one ship into the wormhole to fight 2,800 of them. He cannot possibly hope to be any more than a minor inconvenience to them, so he is throwing away his own life and the life of his crew for absolutely no good reason, when he could have turned and survived to fight another day. That makes no sense. On the other hand, knowing the wormhole aliens are there, knowing he is important to them, and putting himself in harms way right in front of them deliberately in order to force them to act, that is a satisfying conclusion. And even though the script suggests otherwise, it doesn’t specifically preclude this from being what happened, so I choose to believe that it is.
@48: There are some times in the future when pah-wraiths are brought into play and they seem able to temporarily neutralize the Prophets. Dukat specifically tried to use a pah-wraith to break the wormhole blockade. I don’t think his plan worked, but it seems like it could have, and the fallout from the attempt did have some negative effects on our characters.
@50: Well, I’ll concede that the Dukat/pah-wraith storyline had negative effects on the quality of the episodes it was in.
I guess what you’re talking about is what happened in the season 6 finale, though. But surely if they had resorted to another minefield, that would also have provoked attempts to bring it down, and those could’ve had negative consequences for any number of characters as well. After all, it’s much easier to come up with ways to take down a minefield than it is to come up with ways to defeat an extratemporal, cosmically powerful alien race with a god complex. So in that event, there would’ve been more Dominion attacks on the station, not fewer.
@51 Yep. As my Grandfather used to say: “Build a wall and people will queue to climb over it. Leave the yard open, and folks will not even notice it is there.”
Putting a new minefield up would simply give the Dominion a solid and concrete target to rail against instead of having them sitting around wondering what to do next. Sort of a military version of the
Streisand Effect.
Of course the whole thing falls apart logically when you realise that the Prophets could have stopped the Dominion fleet coming to the AQ originally in In Inferno’s Light
Actually lets back track further. The Prophets sent a vision to Sisko in “Rapture” to the effect that Bajor cannot join the Federation, becasue if it does it will be destroyed. Yet, the way it would be destroyed is if those self-same Dominion “locusts” would traverse the Prophets own temple to get to Bajor.
So, Prophets, for a race that lives non-lineraly through time, you are pretty stupid to not put two and two together to realise that YOU are the ones who need to protect Bajor. I guess they really did need Sisko to nursemaid them through logical sequences. B does follow A.
And a final unrelated musing that is never answered. Why does the Bajorians Celestial Temple act as a wormhole to the Gamma Quadrant at all? Why did the Prophets basically put a highway through their church to go to a place that they have no interest in? They are interested in Bajor, sure. But the GQ? Would have been interesting story maybe if there was a GQ version of Bajor on the other side.
But wouldn’t it be strictly better to have both the Prophets and the minefield blocking the wormhole than just the Prophets? I suppose it’s possible that building the minefield could make the Prophets say “eh, you’ve got this, we’ll stop blocking it”.
Actually, I was surprised in any case to learn that the Prophets’ intervention turned out to be “we’ll block the wormhole indefinitely”, instead of a one-time “we’ll vanish this fleet and then you’re on your own; build your damn minefield again”. They seemed reluctant to help at all; I’d imagine they’d be annoyed at the chore of continuing to vanish every Dominion ship that tried to enter in the future. (I expect that the Dominion on the other side would daily try to send at least one small ship through; they don’t care about sacrificing Jem’Hadar.)
I don’t think it was discussed, though; it just became apparent after a while that no ships were coming through the wormhole, no one expected them to, and meanwhile no one had even mentioned the idea of re-mining the wormhole. Really, I would at least expect Starfleet Command to be skeptical about the reliability of these “Prophets”, and to order Sisko to re-mine it even if he assured them it was unnecessary.
As for the consequences… I may have overstated my case. But. If you leave yourself open for your opponent to take a shot at you, that seems like a mistake. If something unexpected happens and he misses, but something else unexpected happens and he kills one of your friends instead, can we say that you’re suffering consequences from your mistake? Anyway, Sisko might not have predicted that Dukat would summon a pah-wraith, but he could have predicted that something might stop the Prophets from helping him–such as him offending them, someone using a chroniton beam to kill them all (from “The Assignment”), or them just changing their minds–and he could have chosen to be safe rather than sorry.
@54: What would be the point of trying to remine the wormhole? The Dominion knows how to take the cloaked mines out now, and it’s a comparatively trivia action for them (all it took was a single phaser shot afterall). Why bother putting the minefield back up if it’s not a meaningful barrier anymore?
Won’t get any argument from me on the silliness of not relying on the Prophets to block the wormhole. Mine it of course! Though it is very very odd that passage to teh GQ is never again mentioned. Except for the last epsiode where they seemingly can.
@55. Didn’t Damar have to do some technobabble thing first to decloak the mines. I imagine Starfleet could magic up new frequencies or whatever for a new cloaked minefield. Or just post a swarm of turrets all around the wormhole. Or interlocking regular minefields. Or a million other things which of course they don’t bother doing.
bguy: It didn’t take “a single phaser shot,” it took several hours of disrupting the mines’ ability to self-replicate before that phaser shot would work.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@53: “Would have been interesting story maybe if there was a GQ version of Bajor on the other side.”
The authors and editor of the post-finale DS9 novels certainly thought so… ;)
@54: It is never “better” to have a minefield. Again, we have to come back to the understanding that minefields are very nasty things. They’re literally huge quantities of bombs left lying around to blow up unwary passersby. They’re not a nice, happy, easy solution — they’re an ugly, brutal, haphazardly dangerous option that could do as much damage to innocents or to your own people as to an enemy. Their use is now considered a war crime in real life, and the Federation is supposed to be more ethical than we are, not less. They’re not something any sane or moral person would choose to employ except as a desperate last resort.
Actually, I was surprised in any case to learn that the Prophets’ intervention turned out to be “we’ll block the wormhole indefinitely”, instead of a one-time “we’ll vanish this fleet and then you’re on your own; build your damn minefield again”.
Actually we don’t know that, but the point is, neither does the Dominion. It’s possible that the Prophets would’ve let another Dominion fleet get through just fine, but the Dominion couldn’t know that. In fact, the Dominion probably has no idea what happened to their fleet. For all they know, it was some Starfleet superweapon in place within the wormhole. So they weren’t about to risk a second attempt.
The situation after “Errand of Mercy” was quite analogous. The Organians, Trek’s first dei ex machina, made it very clear that they despised interacting with corporeal beings and wanted nothing to do with us ever again. But after they stopped the Federation-Klingon war, both sides abided by the treaty and avoided open conflict. They didn’t know for a fact that the Organians would interfere, and in fact there was plenty of reason to doubt they would; but even the chance of it was evidently enough that neither side was willing to risk it, at least until later in the movie era.
(I expect that the Dominion on the other side would daily try to send at least one small ship through; they don’t care about sacrificing Jem’Hadar.)
Oh. Hmm. Well, maybe. But on the other hand, they already have a huge territory in the Gamma Quadrant, and adding the Federation and its neighbors would be nice but nonessential. It’s more about neutralizing them as threats to the Dominion anyway, and if they assumed the wormhole was impassable in both directions, they might’ve decided they were safe enough.
I’d imagine they’d be annoyed at the chore of continuing to vanish every Dominion ship that tried to enter in the future.
They exist outside of time. Past, present, and future are simultaneous to them. So from their perspective, they’d only have to do it once.
I guess I’m almost the opposite of krad here, in that I find the end to this particular episode to be fine but hate what it signifies about the way the final two seasons will play out.
With every episode, the Prophets grow less and less interesting, and this episode in some ways marks a significant turning point. From here on out, this is more and more a show about this pseudo-religious flimflam and less and less a show about intergalactic politics. Of course, there’s still plenty of interesting political and military stuff. But they clearly decided to make this primarily turn on the question of competing mysticisms. And I just have very little patience for that stuff.
I’m sure there ARE some examples out there of good stories built around aliens-too-powerful-and-different-to-comprehend. But I honestly can’t think of a single one that works for me. All to often it’s an excuse for faux-deepness, lazy writing, and infinite variations on the same non-linear dream sequences that plague the genre.
I don’t mean to sound so grumpy, but the final couple seasons of DS9 really bum me out for being only okay when I think they could have been truly great.
@57: Fair enough, but the point remains that if the Dominion sent an invasion fleet to retake DS9 then they could easily knock out any new minefield that was put up within a few hours. Thus a renewed minefield simply isn’t a meaningful impediment to a Dominion invasion of the Alpha Quadrant.
(And that is probably why the Fed-Klingon Alliance henceforth deploys the Ninth Fleet to DS9. They know they can’t rely on static defenses to protect the wormhole anymore, so instead they are going for an active defense by deploying an entire battle fleet to the area.)
The Dominion sent close to 2000 ships through the wormhole before the Prophets vanquished them.
This begs the question of how many forces have they left in the Gamma Quadrant. If I were a Vorta, I’d think twice before sending any further forces through an unstable passage controlled by atemporal beings, especially when I need those forces to keep a tight leash on my own corner.
That’s why I think there’s no further need to blockade the wormhole with something like a minefield. Clearly, the Female Founder has realized she has to build her own forces within the Alpha Quadrant and conquer it from within rather than send for needless reinforcements that could be needed back home, and not lose more ships to the Prophets.
@37: I’m way late on this, but funnily enough that’s exactly the solution Star Trek Online used.
The Featured Episode Series ‘The 2800’, which is set during the game’s timeframe in… 2409? 2410?, takes it as a base assumption that this is exactly what the Prophets did: moved the fleet to a later point in time rather than simply vanishing it.
They come pouring through the wormhole just as you’re in the middle of a diplomatic conference with the Federation, Klingons, Cardassians, and an STO original race called the Deferi; they promptly take DS9 and hold it until they can get in touch with the Founders. It’s one of the better featured episode sets in STO, storywise (gameplay-wise, there’s a few parts where the way the game AI works can make it much more difficult than they intended).
You even get an Orb experience in the middle of the arc where the Prophets tell you “yeah, we couldn’t really destroy the fleet, we pretty much just had to send it to a time and place that was ready for it”.
The ending is the “deus ex machina” in it’s most literal form, but that’s not a bad thing. This established the Prophets as more than soothsayers and the creators of the wormhole: They were powerful beings to be reckoned with, making them both a valuable ally in the war (which they weren’t connected with before) and a dangerous enemy if you got on their wrong side. The conflict between the Prophets and the Pah-Wraiths carries more weight due to this episode.
It’s also interesting, after all the god-like creatures we’ve seen in Trek, to finally have one serving as an ally in a major way (beyond the Organians enforcing a treaty and Q’s occasional helpfulness).
If you really want to compare this to B5 (minefield that that is), I think a better comparison would be “Interludes and Examinations” where Sheridan tells Kosh the Vorlons need to “get off their encounter-suited butts and do something!”, thus bringing them into the war, not ending it.
@63: You have a point — if nothing else, this episode tied the Prophet/Bajor arc more closely into the Dominion War arc, and brought more unity to the storyline as a result. Although given what happens from here on out with the whole Prophet/Pah-wraith thing, it’s questionable whether that was really a good idea.
@64: True, but I don’t hold that against this episode any more than I blame it for the odd Dukat arc that followed. (Not that I’m implying that you feel otherwise.)
(Incidentally, hanging my head in shame that the “it’s”/”its” mistake in the first sentence of my above comment slipped through… Where’s an “Edit” button when you need one?)
@65: If you register with the site, you get to edit your comments. Also you don’t have to go through the Captcha thing to post.
I actually was totally unspoiled for this episode (kind of a surprise since I’ve been vaguely spoiled for a lot…in fact I’m trying to only skim these comments as it is a minefield (ha!) of spoilers). So, first of all, I was totally shocked at Ziyal’s death, and really did feel a modicum of sympathy for Dukat there. In fact, it may be possible this is the one time he was truly being honest, as there was nobody (he thought) to see him. It’s possible that his reconciliation with Ziyal wasn’t JUST to get leverage over Kira (although I can definitely see him using it that way). One really has to wonder what was it about his upbringing/background to make him so desparate for approval and justiffication of his actions. I’m with CLB that I would have loved to see a redemption (or at least a self awareness) arc with him. In fact, I thought this was his crazy descent into villainy people had referenced, but I guess there’s even more to come – which I find kind of sad. I defiitely agree his character has a nice sense of completion here (although I’d love a redemption arc too) and also the potential to be a more nuanced character. But, I guess maybe he’ll just go totally nuts instead. :(
I wonder if the characters know in universe who shot her. Because his rambling could totally be seen as due to the trauma of him shooting her himself and then having a villainous BSOD over it.
(Also, is it bad that also think he’s a bit hypocritical in forgiving treason in his daughter but being so ruthless to everybody else? I’m glad he forgave her, but still…)
Regarding Garak…I can’t help but think Ziyal didn’t make the greatest choices regarding whom to love, actually. Not that I hate Garak, but…I don’t know that he’s necessarily trustworthy or moral either. Although agreed that it was a touching and rarely raw scene for him (OR MAYBE THAT’S WHAT HE WANTS US TO THINK…)
I suppose Odo has kind of made up for things, but I definitely wouldn’t be able to trust him again fully…
As for the end, I didn’t find it a bad deux ex machina at all. Actually, based on the title, I thought the wormhole was going to be closed somehow. As soon as they went into the wormhole, I figured Sisko was banking on intervention by the Prophets, or maybe even planning on destroying it. That wasn’t the case, but I thought what happened followed pretty logically from set up that had been done throughout the series. So I didn’t find it a cop out at all.
One has to wonder how much time this buys the Federation. I can totally see the Founders taking the long view since, what have THEY got to lose? Just more Jem’Hadar/Vorta, who are just solids. But it seems like in a few years or decades they can just rebuild a huge fleet and come through again, and maybe even just send a few stealth ships right to Earth. It may not be the key to the Alpha Quadrant, but it IS the key to the Federation, emotionally/spiritually.
But I suppose we’ll get there when we get there!
Stunned at how many people are OK with this ending. It’s way too easy and way too much of a copout. The Prophets don’t have to save Bajor now any more than they did when the Cardassians took over the first time. Rapture establishes Bajor would be destroyed if it joined the Federation at that point. It didn’t, and it later signed a non-agression pact with the Dominion. The immediate threat was not there and would not necessarily exist in the foreseeable future.
However, by making the fleet vanish the Prophets make themselves enemies of the Dominion. Therefore, the Dominion should have been looking for a way to neutralize them while maintaining the wormhole’s integrity. Conversely, they could have looked for a way to collapse it entirely. We know the Founders think in the very long-term – hundreds of years in fact – so destroying the wormhole wouldn’t have been out of character for them. After they decide to abandon the station the Female Founder even makes a statement that the war will take longer than they thought, and she doesn’t seem particularly disturbed by this notion. They would simply build up their forces and prepare for a date decades or centuries away when they expand to Federation territory or vice versa, while forces remaining in the Alpha Quadrant would fight to the death.
But the Dominion ignore the Prophets, and neither them nor the Federation really attempt peace in the wake of this incident. Instead we get the Dukat/Pah-Wraith storyline later, motivated more by Dukat’s personal vendetta against Sisko than anything else.
As one person mentions, Star Trek Online attempts to rectify this ending by having the ships reappear in 2409. Granted, it has its own set of issues (such as how ships 30 years out-of-date so easily overpower the station and blow you up so easily), but it’s among the better stories in the game and is far more satisfying than the poof-they’re-gone solution in this episode.
@68: Ah, but the Dominion already shot themselves in the foot when it comes to collapsing the wormhole. Changeling Bashir made certain in “By Inferno’s Light” that the wormhole would be hyper-stabilized and impossible to collapse.
And the Pocket DS9 novels used the reappearance of the Dominion fleet (after a fashion) as a plot point years before Star Trek Online ever existed.
Wow do I disagree on the hatred of this ending. The show is a series and you can not view each episode as a seperate thing. They are like different chapters in a novel. As in B5 the prophets here are actual characters and talking to them and getting them to act like Gods is certainly not a deux ex machina. I begin to wonder if people really knows what that means. It is certainly not out of left field as as in B5 the thematic qualities were built up from the very begining and used wonderfully here. B5 is one of the only shows that I enjoy more than the later seasons of DS9, so saying the ending tho both is stupid really ticks me off…..next you will say the ending to the new BSG was terrible…sigh
The hatred of sci/fi fans when anything that might be called spiritual enters the genre is really ridiculous. Spirituality is not the enemy and Sci/fi should not be about technology always saving the day….this is why Le’Quin and not Clark is the better sci/fi author.
We interrupt this thread for a public service announcement:
Deus is the Latin word for “god.” Deux is the French word for “two.” All the folks writing “deux ex machina” are saying “two from the machine,” bilingually.
daniel: I have no problem with spirituality in my science fiction, as my review of “Rapture” on this very site will attest. For that matter, one of my absolute favorite B5 episodes is “And the Rock Cried Out No Hiding Place.” I’ve dealt quite a bit with Klingon spirituality in my Trek fiction, and I’m the one who created the first ever Jewish captain on a Trek ship in Captain David Gold of the U.S.S. da Vinci in the Starfleet Corps of Engineers series, going so far as to make his wife a rabbi.
So when I tell you that I hate the ending of this episode — and for that matter, hate the end of BSG, though I had long since given up on the show by then — it’s not because of the use of spirituality, it’s because the stories did not work for me as stories. My objection is editorial, not spiritual. :)
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Last of these reviews I’m reading. LOST ALL respect for your ability to understand & appreciate THEIR story as written produced and devised. THE BAJORANS GODS ARE MAJOR CHARACTERS AND PLOT POINTS and ARE NOT the ??Vorlons or some such crap from B5.
Corporal being are passing through them regularly, but this time Sisko, THEIR APPOINTED SAVIOR is about to KILL HIMSELF INSIDE THEM. But you say, “Naw, it’s deux ex machina and copying B5 exactly that Beimler writes DS9 CORE god wants to SAVE it’s people. I Give it a FIVE.” To think I’ve told others to come here to enjoy you reviews, til this. It was ATLEAST 7-8 level. I didn’t know B5 captain was also some savior to some aliens too.
The WHOLE majesty of the END of the war arc was THAT the ‘atheistic’ Cardassians&Founders didn’t think of the aliens in the wormhole as possible enemies or allies. Wormhole Aliens HAVE ALWAYS BEEN, through out the show’s tenure, performing Deux ex Machina time mind games on Sisko.
To have a fit when They show up at a logical critical story point and say it’s LAZY clumsy writing into a corner is myopic or subconscious jealousy seeing another group of writers artists succeed in pulling off reversing the writing trope stereotype. Mad that they were clever enough to have been planning it from the get go and CRAFTING massive build up/suspense over 5 episodes to show near complete failure to get to the point of no return. Plot out all of that to reach the preplanned PART AND PARCEL OF THE WHOLE SHOW PREMISE, “Bajor Gods are for of Bajor/Sisko and WILL SAVE THEM” always available deux ex machina. Why review a show with that over all premise and cry WAHH they pulled it out and used it as a GOAL to map their storyboard?
I actually thought that this was a fairly well crafted ending to the storyline. Star Trek is well known for its technobabble endings, only on DS9 it is spiritualtechnobabble (patent pending.)
I was hardly surprised that they pulled that rabbit out of their hat, but was not disappointed either. What rather did bug me was the hand slap that Sisco received. The prophets, throughout the ages, were pretty good at letting Bajor know that they were to be, if not worshipped, highly regarded via the sending of the orbs and such. So, why then would they be so mad that they were asked for help from the person that they appointed as their emissary? I don’t know, it just seemed like inept parenting.
I watched very little of DS9 during its original run. A handful of episodes in the earlier seasons (I specifically remember snippets of “Captive Pursuit” and “Move Along Home”), a couple from Season 5 (“Sons of Mogh” and “Bar Association”), “Far Beyond the Stars” (which remains, to this day, my single favorite hour of Trek), and the last few episodes of the series. But one sequence I followed from start to finish was from “Call to Arms” (probably on a repeat the week before the new season started) through this episode. There are three moments I distinctly remember from that original watch lo these many years later. First was the baseball’s big scene at the end of “Call to Arms.” The second was Kira ripping Odo a new one at the end of “Behind the Lines” (“You just HANDED the Alpha Quadrant to the Dominion!”). And the third was the “Charge of the Light Brigade” back and forth in this episode. I loved the call and response between O’Brien and Bashir, Nog’s pleas for them to stop, and the callback with Garak later, quoted by our Humble Rewatcher in the recap above.
Count me as another who was never too disappointed with the Deus Ex Machina ending. Even the first time I saw it, few episodes though I had seen at that point, it felt legit. When I finally did my series watch-through a decade later, it felt right. As CLB pointed out somewhere above, with the established capabilities of the Wormhole Aliens, with their established relationship with Sisko, with their desire to protect Bajor (despite the non-aggression pact allowing, at least for the moment, that they were not in imminent danger, it was only a matter of time) – this absolutely felt within their wheelhouse.
Feel obliged to point out that only about a hundred of the six hundred died during the Charge of the Light Brigade, which is just slightly less than “all”…
KRAD, the Dominion has existed for 2000 years, and 75: Sons of Mogh and The Bar Association were S4 episodes.
Okay. We get all this build up, a massive 6-7 parter, millions of ships batteling, death toll in the billions… And we end all this with the wormhole aliens simply snipping their fingers and making 20 trillion Jem’Hadar ships disappear? I am sorry, but
ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME?!
Yeah, not the best resolution.
@78 I thought it was particularly fitting and very Star Trek. The Dominion conquered by force and huge fleets with shoot ’em up lasers galore, but the Federation makes peace by alliances. We saw that in microcosm, those who desired force and battles were ultimately undone by one person making an alliance with other, totally different, lifeforms. That is Star Trek, that is the power of being nice, and that was a very apt and applicable message. We need to learn it more, to take our guns and get out and leave the peacemakers and alliance builders to their work.
The idea is nice, the execution, not so much.
It wouldn’t have been so much of a let down if during the 6 parts it would have been so much as hinted at the possiblity that the wormhole aliens might be of help during the fight.
@82-
While they don’t directly foreshadow it, it makes sense in the context of the series. The Prophets do not come out of nowhere and their powers are well established. That’s really all that matters for me. I also disagree with @81-the execution was fine.
@83: No, the execution was bollocks (pardon my french). It’s almost as if the writers realized they where running out of time and tried to come up with a solution that could fit in the last 20 seconds of the episode.
Another great review!
As one who considers this episode of DS9 a favorite — so hold your fire, fans of this episode — I find myself agreeing with everyone — both with those who like and those who don’t like the ending.
For my two cents, I liked the ending. I found it to be a good — not great, but good — conclusion to the six-episode arc. In my opinion a great next step in the relationship between Sisko and the prophets, and as megancyber said, a new kick in the pants for the Dominion. Had this been the ending to all of Deep Space Nine I would be a lot more harsh.
But why not play out this next step in the relationship differently? In another episode? And maybe with less at stake but still needing help from the prophets? Let’s say another episode in season 6. 200, not 2800, dominion ships somehow make their way to Bajor and Bajor is doomed. The Defiant is the only ship in the region and so Sisko plays the 1-ship-against-many tactic. The prophets interfere, yada, yada, yada, yada. They could have made it a good stand-alone episode. I don’t blame people who think that it was a let-down to have this ending at the end of an amazing 6-episode story.
Personally, I like what Behr and Beimler did and was intrigued reading that they had planned it, but I see why not many people don’t like the ending
I may have missed it somewhere in the series, but is there ever a motivation given for why the Founders need to rule the galaxy? Every time the Female Changeling talks to Odo, she goes on and on about how being in the Great Link is so wonderful, and how being a Changeling is such a HIGHER type of existence. Assuming that’s true, why not just chill on their own planet in their ocean of goo? If they’re worried that other species will bother them, they certainly have demonstrated the ability to defend themselves, or to remain hidden. I haven’t yet seen why their “better” way of existing requires galactic domination. They’re certainly not letting other species join in any shape-shifter games. Come to that, if shape-shifting is so great, you’d think they’d want to promote maximum diversity in the galaxy, so they have many more shapes to try on. What’s the point of the Great Link if all there is to “talk” about is how great it is in the Great Link?
Speaking of galactic domination, do the Borg ever battle it out with the Dominion, either in the TV/movie canon, or in “official” literature?
@86/Poker Player: The Founders were persecuted by “solids” early in their existence. So they’re afraid of solids and believe they have to keep them under control for their own (the Founders’) protection. It’s not about “ruling the galaxy,” it’s about taming the things that can threaten them. Fear is rarely a rational motivation, but it can be a very powerful one.
@87: The issue is we only have the Founders’ word on it; there’s no objective evidence to support their claims of persecution, and like all bullies, the Founders are quick to paint themselves as the victim in order to rationalize their contemptible behaviour. And even if it was true, past suffering does not give you the right to hurt others, especially on such a massive scale. I know we live in an era in which stubbing your toe getting out of bed is the root of sustained, crippling, multi-generational trauma, but there isn’t a Freudian excuse in the world that can justify the Blight or trying to blow up the Bajoran system or keeping slave races or any of the other heinous shit the Dominion perpetrates.
And yes, KRAD, declaring either this episode or “Into the Fire” from B5 to be deus ex machinas are major misreadings of both. In the case of DS9, not only has Sisko’s relationship with the Prophets been at the heart of the story since the beginning, but think back to how often over this six-episode arc we’ve seen the Founders and their servants espouse their so-called divinity, how often these limited, cruel and self-destructive beings cloak themselves in the mantle of godhood. Really, in their hubris, they do everything except for launch into the chorus of “Playing With the Big Boys Now” from The Prince of Egypt. Dukat may be the one celebrating his victory before he’s actually won it, but his partners in conquest are hardly any better in that regard, just a bit quieter about it. As such, having the Founders run afoul of actual gods (more or less) works really well thematically. And let’s face it, considering that the cloaked, self-replicating minefield is fairly egregious technobabble nonsense, is the intervention of well-established and powerful aliens really that unrealistic in comparison?
@88/Devin: “The issue is we only have the Founders’ word on it; there’s no objective evidence to support their claims of persecution, and like all bullies, the Founders are quick to paint themselves as the victim in order to rationalize their contemptible behaviour.”
But most bullies and other abusers were abused themselves. These things are cyclical. And hate is usually driven by fear.
Besides, if it were nothing more than a power trip, the Founders wouldn’t have been so determined to hide. Their behavior is consistent with their stated backstory and I see no reason to doubt it.
“And even if it was true, past suffering does not give you the right to hurt others, especially on such a massive scale.”
Nobody said it did. Of course it doesn’t; that’s not the point. Understanding the origin of a behavior is not about excusing it, it’s about understanding as an end in itself. Just because you don’t approve of something doesn’t mean you have a license to make up your own facts about it. You still have a responsibility to understand its origins as objectively and truthfully as you can, without letting personal bias warp your perception of reality.
Understanding that abusers were themselves victims of abuse is not about “excusing” their actions, it’s about understanding what caused them so that we can prevent it from happening to other people, head off the creation of future abusers and tyrants before it happens.
@89: “But most bullies and other abusers were abused themselves.”
Most is not all, and that’s assuming in the first place that this pop psychology explanation for their bad behaviour is accurate, and not, you know, their own conscious decision to be weapons-grade earslings. There are plenty of people with good upbringings and every advantage in life who nevertheless choose to inflict harm on others, no Dr. Phil-level sob story required.
More to the point, the Dominion is an authoritarian society, and the two things authoritarians do best are fixate on external enemies and rewrite history to suit their agenda. Every single dictatorship in human history, no matter their political ideology, has sought to portray itself as the innocent, hard-done-by victims, while painting those they persecute as the real monsters, and given the willingness of the Founders to screw over their allies and manipulate others for their own ends, I can’t see them acting any differently. If you honestly think the Founders haven’t pulled a Nicholas Kerensky and taken a pruning shear to the historical record, I’ve got a bridge to sell you.*
“Besides, if it were nothing more than a power trip, the Founders wouldn’t have been so determined to hide.”
Or maybe they’re just cowardly, xenophobic assholes? You don’t need to know or understand someone to fear them; indeed, frequently the opposite is true. Those American states most opposed to accepting Syrian refugees, for example, usually had a collective Muslim population that could fit into a mid-sized family SUV; their fears were the product of their own craven imaginings rather than anything rooted in objective reality. The Great Link is, by design, an insular system, where only those involved matter, and any external influence besides that of another Changeling can be willfully disregarded.
“Their behavior is consistent with their stated backstory and I see no reason to doubt it.”
You mean besides the aforementioned fact that they’re the leaders of an authoritarian civilization, one that openly seeks to enslave every other civilization they encounter, and that this is a “truth” they’re telling to people they consider inherently beneath them, fit only for slavery or annihilation? They’re galaxy-conquering jihadists, not Woodward and Bernstein.
And again, there’s no objective, independently-verified evidence that anything they’re saying has any merit. With the Kazon, their history as slaves of the Trabe was something that was eventually confirmed. It didn’t justify what they were doing, and it didn’t stop them from being some of the worst villains in Star Trek, but it was a backstory that had some grounding. We don’t get anything like that with the Founders. They’re the only source of this tale of supposed persecution by the Solids, and given everything they do before and during the Dominion War, you’ll forgive me if I take it with several hundred shares of a salt mine.
* Who are we? WOLVERINES!
@90/Devin Smith: “And again, there’s no objective, independently-verified evidence that anything they’re saying has any merit.”
You’re forgetting that the first character to tell the backstory of the Changelings and their persecution by solids was not a Changeling — it was Croden in “Vortex.” A lot of what he claimed was false, but he finally said that the stories of Changelings being persecuted and driven out by solids were the myths of his people on Rakhar. He’d never actually met a Changeling, so he couldn’t have heard those tales from them. So that’s the independent confirmation.
Besides, this isn’t objective reality, it’s fiction, so we can assess things based on narrative logic, not just in-story evidence. Star Trek is generally about understanding the Other and portraying hostile cultures as relatable and redeemable, misunderstood or lashing out from fear or need. A cynical interpretation just isn’t in keeping with the spirit of the franchise. And a one-note pure-evil portrayal of the Founders wouldn’t be in keeping with the idea of Odo caring about his people and wanting to reunite with them, or with the series finale in which peace was made and Odo went home to help his people find the right path again.
Besides, is it reasonable to assume the Changelings were never feared or persecuted? That they were somehow miraculously able to go through their entire history without ever encountering species that mistrusted or hated them for being different, for being shapeshifters? Come on, of course shapeshifting blobs of goo would be met with suspicion and fear by at least some other species. We saw this with the Bajorans’ treatment of Odo in “A Man Alone.” We saw it to an extent with the Vendorians in “The Survivor,” a species that was interdicted because of other species’ mistrust of their “deceptive” ways. So it’s highly plausible that the Changelings faced the same thing.
Do we know how long ago it was when the Changelings were abused by solids? Was it thousands of years? Do they share direct memories of their past abuse or is it more a legend? Because the Founders themselves could be slaves to their own mythology, just as the Vorta and Jem’Hadar are to the Founders.
I suppose ultimately it doesn’t matter. The present-day 24th century solids had nothing to do with those in the distant past, and as soon as the Founders learned of Odo being welcome in solid society — evidence linked and downloaded directly into them, no less — they should have reconsidered their prejudice and cynicism.
@92/JFWheeler: I’m not saying the Founders were saints, or that it’s easy to cure a damaged society of a deeply entrenched pattern of harmful behavior. I’m saying that, if we analyze Star Trek as a work of fiction, there is no reason to postulate that the Founders were meant to be anything other than what the writers portrayed them to be, a society that was persecuted in its past and responded by developing a persistent xenophobia and hatred of “solids” that drove it to become oppressive and authoritarian out of fear of what would happen if they relaxed their grip. After all, the Founders have no independent, objective existence. They are merely narrative constructs presented to us by the show’s creators. So if this is what the creators intended them to be, there is no way in which they can “actually” be something else independent of that.
Sidestepping some of the headier conversation here (I’m inclined for narrative purposes to accept that we are intended to take the story at face value given the nature of Star Trek’s usual themes/storytelling, although I also do have experience with the kind of bullies Devin mentions, and can certainly see it being a mix of both) I just want to say that that Kerensky reference at @90 was a deep cut, lol.
I made my way through a ton of those books in college (more than 15 years ago) and well…that’s a name I’ve not heard in a long time…a long time :)
@94: Thanks! Yeah, I’ve been on a bit of a BattleTech fix lately, brought about in large part by the great 2018 strategy game, where I totally did not have a player character descended from survivors of the Not-Named Clan who escaped during Operation SWITCHBACK, who totally didn’t take on the Black Widow Company of Wolf’s Dragoons during the Heavy Metal DLC simply to flip off someone with the Kerensky bloodname. (Seriously, it’s a great game, check it out). “Tex Talks BattleTech” has also been my YouTube viewing of choice for the past little while, especially his great video on the Battle of Tukayyid: https://youtu.be/QffouI6OA00
Getting back to the subject of the episode, I’m of two minds when considering the fate of Dukat and whether or not this should have been his final appearance. On the one hand, it is a logical conclusion to his story arc; the tyrant, arrogant and wholly convinced of his own righteousness, brought down from the heights of his hubris and made humble by powers far beyond his own and actually worthy of the worship he demanded from others. (Seriously, there’s something very biblical about that, and it fits in well with the episode’s religious themes). On the other hand, having Dukat alive and free to bedevil the heroes throughout the rest of the series is a good idea on paper, and even though the execution was lacking, it did open up storytelling opportunities and threats for the crew to deal with beyond the strict confines of the Dominion War. I can also respect the desire of the writers to stop having people make excuses for Dukat’s behaviour as well, as Draco In Leather Pants logic is always a pain to deal with.
Lockdown Rewatch. I am glad others have stated this is where Dukat’s story should have ended, it would certainly have spared us all the nonsense with the damm Pa Wraiths. I don’t have as big a problem with the ending as some seem to, I don’t see any other way they could have got back to the station without destroying the worm hole and that kills the rest of the series dead if they do. What might have bee interesting was if they had kept the Cardasian / Dominion alliance in charge of the station for the entire season but that was probably a risk they weren’t going to take.
In just watching this with my wife, she was very cross with what she considered Ziyal’s “fridging,” and I wondered if anyone would bring that up here, but I don’t think I saw it. Behr and Beimler’s statements for their plans to kill her – to motivate Garak and how we see it change Dukat – would seem to put her in the fridge. (They even said they made her more “puppy dog” like.)I would say there are more problems in that choice than in anything to do with the Prophets.
kalyarn: Oh yeah, Ziyal was definitely fridged.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
To complete the B5 analogy, Sisko should have yelled at the viewscreen “Get the hell out of our galaxy!” (or quadrant) and the Dominion fleet did just that.
I won’t repeat my comment in its entirety from the rewatch of “The Assignment”—head over there to read it—but I feel Behr’s exactly right. The ending of this episode, considered in light of the previous seasons of the show, was very much the opposite of a cop-out. It’s the key centerpiece, between “Emissary” and “What You Leave Behind”, to one of Deep Space Nine’s most important themes: as above, so below.
I enjoyed this review. I agree with some of your remarks about the ending i.e. other than ‘Covenant’ we don’t really have another great Dukat episode (I didn’t care for the Dukat/Pah-Wraith storyline either), and I kinda of agree and disagree with your criticism of the role of the Prophets here.
My issue with the Prophets destroying the Dominion ships is not the fact that they do it–given that the power of the Prophets & their concern for Bajor in general & concern for Sisko in particular has been well established–I have a problem with the execution. Having Sisko LECTURE the Prophets the way that he does seems out of character given the direction he has taken. From “Destiny” to “Ascension” to “Rapture” we have seen Sisko becoming increasingly a man of faith & comfortable with his role as Emissary so his attitude towards the Prophets seems profoundly wrong.
Having Sisko want to go into the wormhole to directly appeal to the Prophets for help & then they answer would feel a lot better to me.
@101/Conrad: “Having Sisko LECTURE the Prophets the way that he does seems out of character given the direction he has taken. From “Destiny” to “Ascension” to “Rapture” we have seen Sisko becoming increasingly a man of faith & comfortable with his role as Emissary so his attitude towards the Prophets seems profoundly wrong.”
That’s missing the point of what the Emissary is. An emissary is a go-between, someone who delivers messages. In Sisko’s case, that goes both ways. His role is not merely to inform corporeal beings of the Prophets’ will; as we’ve seen since the pilot episode, his role is to teach the Prophets about the nature of corporeal beings, to help them understand us better. So it is absolutely in keeping with that for Sisko to teach them that their choice to guide the Bajoran people gives them a responsibility to the Bajoran people, one they’d be wrong to shirk.
Faith does not require blind submission. Sisko’s faith is that the Prophets have a deep connection to Bajor and care about its people. But he recognizes that that also creates an obligation, and his job as Emissary is to help them understand that.
Besides, I’ve seen or heard stories about people of devout faith getting very angry at God — for instance. Faith doesn’t preclude talking back. People in power may believe that faith requires total subordination, but that’s twisting it to serve the interests of the powerful. Faith is fundamentally about one’s relationship with the divine, and people in relationships argue and talk back to each other all the time, without there being any less love or loyalty involved.
Honestly, I think this is practically the only time in the entire series when Sisko tells the Prophets to actually earn the faith that the Bajoran people place in them, so it gers a pass from me. And it was established way back in the first episode that passage through the wormhole is possible only with the consent of the aliens living there, so the twist doesn’t come from nowhere. That said, it would have been really nice if someone, at some point, had floated the possibility of asking the Prophets to block Jem’Hadar through-traffic at any point during the three seasons they’d spent worrying about a Dominion invasion.
Another thing that stood out to me is that this episode fairly definitively shows that Jack and the other augments are completely, tragically wrong in their psychohistorical projections a few episodes later in “Statistical Probabilities”; the Dominion have apparently also identified Earth as the likely centre for a rebellion against their rule and would respond to that threat by simply annihilating its population. Evil imperialists are apparently quite capable of running their own projections.