First of the concept of someone who's SF and has turned against all tech is intriguing. Paradise was kinda clunky developing this but I digress. Second, I had to go back and relisten and look @ script. ALIXUS: I won't have you disrupting everything this community has worked for, Ben. SISKO: I don't intend to stay any longer than necessary. ALIXUS: And that's another thing. Let's not bring up the Starfleet rescue party again. Until they come, if they come, you'll have to do things our way. I'd strongly advise you get rid of that uniform. By mid afternoon, it gets hot in the fields. Not sure if those last lines would in 2022 to Brooks/Sisko Third, I'd like to punch Alixus in her pointy chin. I hope she got hard time on a remote Fed penal colony
Federation justice would be too good for Alixus. I'd have liked to see her get kicked out onto the surface of Rura Penthe without a suit. That's the kind of fate she deserved. I mean, she wants to return to nature? There it ing is, BITCH!
She would like that though. Locking her up in the most advanced prison the UFP has where robots/holograms does everything for her so she doesn't even have to lift her own arm would be a better punishment.
Given that she was willing to let people die for her beliefs, she clearly was in need of some professional help. Maybe they shipped her to the sanitarium next to Tom's penal colony in New Zealand, and gave her lots of Thorazine, or its 24th century equivalent. And her kid too, that boy needed some deprogramming.
Alixus is just lucky that none of the other "colonists" got ahold of her after they learned the truth. I'm guessing they would have made her suffer BIG time.
Except they didn't. They rewarded her efforts by being like "*Shrug* It's our home now, so I guess it all worked out in the end!" Something akin to the sunk cost fallacy I think.
But it has one of my favorite Sisko moments, when he basically tells Alixus what she and her ideology can go do with themselves... and seriously puts his money where his mouth is.
Ugh, the ending of this episode makes me want to punch the other colonists even more than Alixus herself. She and Kai Winn probably would have hit it off quite well.
I like to think that they at least shut off the duonetic field generator, and brought in some modern convenience with Alixus gone. Including full medical equipment. Meg's unnecessary death was hopefully the last.
It's the framing that bugs me: a last second cheat that is trying to justify the notion that the cult leader "had a point".
The problem is that it should have ended with the Federation sending an emergency team to that colony that can help de-program the people there and help them work through the mental problem Alixus had inflicted on them. (they are written like brainwashed cult-members for the entire episode, and Alixus was written as a cult leader, making the ending tone-deaf) After the de-programming, when the people are actually able to choose for themselves again, that's when you can give them the option to stay on their planet or return to the Federation (and it should never have been an unanimous decision, but Trek often is bad with that) It was basically a somewhat more harmless version of Jonestown, just that Alixus didn't have the chance to mix Kool-Aid for everyone. Alixus had no leg to stand on and was just a product of the general "technology bad, we'd ought to be noble nature people" trend that seems to have been going on back then in the real world.