Seems like a good way to avoid ever finding out if you might like something that some other people do not.
DS9 for those who don't necessarily love DS9?
- Thread starter Gaith
- Start date
Okay, now that I've watched "Emissary" after "Past Prologue," the thought occurs to me... what if Tahna Los had succeeded in blowing up the wormhole entrance? Given the wormhole aliens have the power to turn it off and back on again, what makes him think any such damage would be permanent? 
Especially this early in the series, Our Heroes don't really know the extent of the Prophets' ability to control the wormhole versus the ability of outside forces to disrupt it.Okay, now that I've watched "Emissary" after "Past Prologue," the thought occurs to me... what if Tahna Los had succeeded in blowing up the wormhole entrance? Given the wormhole aliens have the power to turn it off and back on again, what makes him think any such damage would be permanent?
It has to be pointed out that neither the word “Prophet”, “wormhole alien” nor “Celestial temple” is uttered in “Past Prologue”. The wormhole is only ever talked about in terms of it being a shortcut to the Gamma Quadrant, bringing in commerce and power to Bajor. The idea that the wormhole was the Celestial temple housing the Prophets was alluded to by Kai Opaka in the pilot (and apparently was part of old religious texts), but it’s not clear how quickly that view becomes mainstream among Bajorans. I don’t remember Tahna Los being portrayed as particularly religious; so it could also be that he just didn’t know or care about the Prophets all that much.
I rarely see this being discussed, but there’s also definitely some “Early Installment Weirdness” going on in the first two seasons of the show. Opaka calls Sisko “Emissary” in the pilot, but the whole idea that the Bajoran people worship him in that role is absolutely an afterthought that only gets introduced later in the show. The first time Sisko gets called “Emissary” again is in the final episode of the season, where it is Winn who is promoting the idea that he has “earned [a cherished place] in the Bajoran spiritual life”. Another season goes by before he’s even called “Emissary” again, once more by Winn in “The Collaborator”. And then finally in the middle of season three, in “Destiny”, Kira for the first time mentions seeing Sisko as a “religious icon” and the Emissary. So the notion that he was revered by regular Bajoran folk definitely seems like an afterthought.
Similarly, the belief that the wormhole aliens are the prophets is ignored almost entirely for the first season and only brought up once in the final episode “In the Hands of the Prophets”. So one really has to wonder if the writers intended for that idea to be the mainstream view before they mentioned it in the season one finale.
I rarely see this being discussed, but there’s also definitely some “Early Installment Weirdness” going on in the first two seasons of the show. Opaka calls Sisko “Emissary” in the pilot, but the whole idea that the Bajoran people worship him in that role is absolutely an afterthought that only gets introduced later in the show. The first time Sisko gets called “Emissary” again is in the final episode of the season, where it is Winn who is promoting the idea that he has “earned [a cherished place] in the Bajoran spiritual life”. Another season goes by before he’s even called “Emissary” again, once more by Winn in “The Collaborator”. And then finally in the middle of season three, in “Destiny”, Kira for the first time mentions seeing Sisko as a “religious icon” and the Emissary. So the notion that he was revered by regular Bajoran folk definitely seems like an afterthought.
Similarly, the belief that the wormhole aliens are the prophets is ignored almost entirely for the first season and only brought up once in the final episode “In the Hands of the Prophets”. So one really has to wonder if the writers intended for that idea to be the mainstream view before they mentioned it in the season one finale.
The synopses on Netflix are often awful. I think they just use AI to analyse the teaser or first five minutes or so and the description is solely based on that, even if the episode has little to do with the events of the teaser as they occasionally don’t. Amazon Prime Video is worse if I remember. I was watching Farscape recently and the episode descriptions were just terrible and clearly not written by a human.
as of right now i want to avoid getting side tracked because i just want to finish the main plot of the series. after that, i can go back and complete it
To each their own.
What even is “the main plot of the series”, though? Arguably there is no one story being told throughout the entirety of the series, or is there? Is it the Dominion war? Because I never viewed that as the main thing being told in the show; heck, it didn’t even get properly introduced for two years. Is it “Bajor after the occupation”? Then for large chunks of the show that “main plot” doesn’t even matter all that much.
when i registered to this site i made a thread asking for a list of all bajor/cardassia episodes. back then i dident even knew about the dominion. i guess the main story would be everything that is about the dominion,bajor,and cardassia
The story is the broken man who brings his son to a broken world to rebuild it. Everything else is a B story.
Sure, if you squint that’s definitely one of the throughlines of Deep Space Nine. But nothing I would personally call the “main plot”. Many of those individual episodes you would have to count as parts of this main plot were very likely not intended to further any overarching plot. The writers’ main focus was on individual episodes for the majority of the show.
You know, I was considering naming that as a possible “main plot of the series”, and you are right that it’s definitely one of the main threads of the show, but then again, it feels very loosely connected, often even half-abandoned, and mostly not like a deliberately planned plot.
All joking aside, while there are definitely episodes of DS9 that I feel don't significantly advance the plot or the characters, to me those are so few and far between that spending the under-an-hour to watch them and potentially enjoy them seems worth the 'risk'. I feel rather bad for people who deprive themselves of the pleasures of experiencing the show as it was meant to be seen.
There are ebbs and flows, but it is the constant from which all the other plots of the series emerge. RHW admits that in the beginning, the writers relied a lot on Sisko being a dad as the element that distinguish DS9 from TNG. Then Jake grew up, and he became part of a different story with Nog. The Bajoran thing became a problem for the studio, so the writers shifted from politics to religion. More importantly, Sisko's own support for Bajor was subsumed by his relationship with Kira, whose relationship developed an unusual richness. I think there are some indirect references to development on Bajor, but almost all of it was off camera. The Dominion War became a major emphasis in the latter seasons, but just as often as it was a struggle to preserve the values of the Federation, it was a struggle to allow Bajor to evolve on its own. I don't think it was a mistake that the writers had Sisko choose Kira to help Damar, in a small way handing over the baton. In some way, it's Bajor, it's values as they have been cultivated with Sisko's help, that symbolically wins the war. And the series starts almost as it began, Jake staring into space with the woman whom Sisko helped realize her potential.
Where it becomes difficult to see is Bajor itself waning from the story. It's always there in conversation, but seldom visited. The number of new Bajoran characters drops of from season to season. There is an uptick in season 7 with Covenant and the monk who roots out Winn. But if I am not mistaken, there is only one new character, a woman vedek,who kills herself by the end of the episode during the six/eight episode arc. They went through a long story in which the Bajorans struggled against the Dominion alone on the station without creating continuing Bajoran characters.
ETA: Wolfe admitted that most episodes are indeed stand alones which have had "elements of continuity threaded through them." They were always taking stories from whatever source and developing them to suit their needs. But that means the first serialized element was the Bashir-O'Brien relationship, a long term project that Baer evolved by tweaking elements of numerous episodes.
Okay, but 90% of the episodes touch on at least one of those things. DS9 is a Bajoran station and the Bajoran government has the last word on what happens there.
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