Ditto
Or the Moonies, et al. If this were a pure allegory to cults, it was a couple decades late to the party.
Except she was presented as being sincere and there was no significant undercurrent of deception (just hiding old technology and if I recall how Sisko and O'Brien were forced into landing?) She didn't seem like a Jonesy type.
And if Sisko were the analogue of Leo Ryan, I didn't see it. But it's nice to have some twists than a by-the-numbers remake, of which many real life shows utilized.
Sisko may have been no Leo Ryan, but I do hope that he was as tough on Alixus as he was on Eddington and the Maquis.
Alixus didn't drink her own kool-aid at the end; she turned herself in. I hope Sisko threw the book at her when they got back to the station, especially because she made him spend a torturous amount of time in that sweatbox, as well as her denying real medical care for the sick.
"Paradise" had a good story, but I didn't see it as necessarily an allegory to cults. I don't recall the colonists worshipping her as some divine figure. Alixus was surely an authoritarian, and maybe she did have god complex; but her approach to life (for the colonists) seemed more ideological, or quasi scientific, rather than religious.
The colonists seemed to have resigned themselves to their fate on that planet. They didn't know Alixus fraudulently "crash landed" them on that planet and then forced them to live off the grid. They seemed to have followed her lead out of necessity. But what didn't seem too believable was that the colonists weren't up in arms outraged at her, after O'Brien exposed her fraud.
The very last scene of the episode, I found intriguing. Those two kids were just standing there and staring in the direction of the sweatbox where Sisko, O'Brien, Alixus and her son had just beamed off the planet.
They probably never saw anything like that before, if they were born on the planet. They would not have ever seen such technology before, let alone be aware of such technology.
I am curious if the message of that last scene was that while their parents and other adults may have been content to live the rest of their lives on that planet and off the grid, the kids would be denied the opportunity to experience and to interact with the wonders of the wider galaxy. The children would metaphorically be stuck in that box of a planet.
Their situation may be synonymous with parents who leave the city with their children and move to some isolated rural place because they think it would be a better place to raise a family. But would the kids be really better off growing up in such relative isolation?
Maybe I read too much into the story. In any case, I liked the episode.
The next episode, "Shadowplay", I also enjoyed. It was also the type of story about wayward or rogue colonists. Usually the episodes about colonists present stories that show a different way of life or a different way of thinking about life. Good stories.
