Re: How much weight should the objective viewer put on S7 Dukat/Winn s
What is an "objective viewer"?
I had no idea so many people hated the Dukat/Winn story line. I thought it was great - it had great interaction between two rival characters: a great exploration of ambition, deceit, and betrayal. Plus, Winn and Dukat are a lot alike in many ways - ambitious, egotistical, bitter - and it's interesting to see them work together.
I feel that the series was headed this way - Winn makes several comments throughout the series alluding to her great disappointment that the Prophets had never spoken to her, and despite all her faults, she is very devoted and religious. And she's obviously never really gotten over the fact that the Prophets chose a non-Bajoran for their emissary. Plus all the resistance she encounters from Sisko and Kira . . . it's no wonder that she makes a radical change like that. And Dukat . . . he is such a great villain. This storyline was a great chance for this character to demonstrate his deviousness and incredible resourcefulness - no matter what happens, Dukat always bounces back ready for more.
I wonder: are people uncomfortable with this plot line because it addresses a middle aged, slightly chubby woman's sexuality? Are fans disgusted with this storyline because Winn is not cute and sexy like Kira or Dax?
You really can't think of any other reasons why someone could dislike that storyline? Seriously?
You don't think that someone could possibly have a problem with:
- magic books and red-eye demon possessions on a show that had up to that point been showing that religion and SciFi can mix perfectly?
- good/evil dualism of the crudest black-and-white kind on the show that had up to that point been an example of intelligent, complex, shades-of-grey storytelling about politics, religion and war?
- villains who don't have anything even approaching a believable motivation, and are there just to be eeeeevil (the Pah-wraiths) so the Prophets would look better by comparison?
- a character who used to be a truly great villain, reduced into a cartoonish puppet of the above mentioned eeevil spirits, and acting as a plot device rather than true to his earlier characterization - so Sisko would look better by comparison?
- a lot of screentime wasted during the show's "Final Chapter" on a storyline that has absolutely nothing to do with the main plot of the Dominion War, and ends up doing nothing in the grand scheme of things, except providing a rather lame reason for Sisko to die/disappear/whatever?
FYI, not only I didn't have problems with Winn having love scenes, it was one of the few really cool things about that storyline: you rarely see 60-something actresses in Hollywood given an opportunity to play non-stereotypical roles (rather than grandmas), and address their character's sexuality (without it being played as a comedy), and it is great that DS9 did it, twice. (And Louise Fletcher didn't look bad at all for her age.) More importantly, I think the arc did make Winn more interesting - and even sympathetic in a way: we get to see just how desperately she wanted the Prophets to talk to her (a selfish desire, very much in character for Winn, but very 'human' - so to speak - and understandable in a way), and then this man comes along who seems like a wonderful guy and is telling her all the things she always wanted to hear... She can't be happier, until she realizes she's been cruelly manipulated and mislead by all the forces that she has considered her worst enemies. Then she has to make a tough decision and choose between her faith and any shreds of integrity she still had, and her desire to be powerful and important and loved - between the "demons" that seem to care about her, and her erstwhile "gods" who don't. And in the process, to face some hard truths about herself.
So, there is something I liked about that storyline. I didn't even mind it that much at first, when I was still hopeful that it would all somehow make sense in the end - it was entertaining, it was interesting to see Marc Alaimo as a Bajoran and fun to see him playing Dukat playing another character, and perhaps the way it made the character of Winn more interesting could have made me overlook the fubaring of the character of Dukat... If only the storyline itself was not as stupid and as irrelevant in the grand scheme of things.
I think a lot of people who dislike this are just still angry about Waltz and have problems accepting 'evil' Dukat. I would argue that he was always evil, but that can be hashed out in other threads.
It's not an issue of whether he was
evil. I think he was always evil, but the thing is, he was
realistically evil, he was a convincing, well-written, complex, interesting villain. Until Behr and others decided to turn him into a one-dimensional sneering comic book villain, just because they thought the viewers were idiots who needed to be literally told which characters are good and which are bad. And their idea of showing that Dukat was a bad man was to have him go insane, then get possessed by evil spirits and do some dumb shit that makes no sense and has nothing to do with the main plot of the series, and finally laugh maniacally and wrestle with Sisko over a cliff that's supposed to represent hell.
At least they should have decided if they wanted Dukat to be insane, or "pure evil"! Because an insane person is not responsible for their actions, so if you make him insane, you've pretty much denied yourself the chance to condemn his as "pure evil" for any action he undertakes while being mentally ill. Way to shoot yourself in the foot.
But the DS9 writers apparently wanted to have their cake and eat it, so they just couldn't decide whether he should be insane or rational. So first he's insane in
Sacrifice of Angels and
Waltz...and we get one of the most absurd moments in DS9 - Sisko declaring the ravings of a lunatic as a proof of "true evil". Well if Dukat is true evil, then Sisko should have concluded that based on the things Dukat had actually done (and he did them while he was rational). But apparently Sisko didn't think so, and only realized that Dukat was "pure evil" in
Waltz, based on Dukat's insane rambling?
And then post-
Waltz, all signs of insanity disappear, except for the fact that his plans don't make sense. It is so convenient - and so lazy - to write a villain who is supposedly insane: whenever he does something that doesn't make sense, just because it is convenient to the plot, we can just say "oh, but he is insane, so it doesn't have to make sense"!
So then we get:
- Dukat forgiving Damar and blaming Sisko for Ziyal's death. (WTF? What did Sisko have to do with it? At least if he blamed Kira or Garak or anyone who was either a) at the station at the time of the Dominion Occupation, or b) was close to Ziyal, it could have made some convoluted sense - at least you could say that he blamed that person for influencing her and making her "betray" him. But Sisko?) It is clearly just a plot device just in order to set up a Sisko/Dukat conflict.
- sealing the wormhole in Tears of the Prophets while saying with a straight face that this would help the Dominion and hurt the allies. As Weyoun said: "How does that help us?" And you have to wonder why they are letting him do all that stuff. especially if he is known to be insane.
- and there we come to another problem - Dukat was the man who aligned Cardassia with the Dominion and practically started the war, he was instrumental in the war and occupation - but now he gets some weird storyline that has nothing to do with the Dominion war; and suddenly he is showing no interest whatsoever in the war, in Cardassia, in Terok Nor, or even in his 7 Cardassian children, which he used to mention all the time without any provocation? He shows up to talk to Damar and urges him to be a great leader of Cardassia, but it's hard to figure out what he thinks about Cardassia and Dominion or anything else that's going on.
And, you know, Dukat (or his pairing with Winn) is certainly not the only problem of this storyline. If we disregard him, I still hate the Pah-wraiths storyline alltogether, and I equally hate the unnecessary and unfortunate retcon of Sisko as Space Jesus and his Prophet mom. The latter only made the Prophets look ultra-creepy. Both the Prophets and the Pah-wraiths had possessed people and used them for their own ends before, but Kira at least was voluntarily possessed. But now we learn that the Prophets used a woman's body, made her have sex and live with a man and conceive and give birth, regardless of her will?
And they manipulated a man into thinking that he was in love with a person who basically ever even existed, before she left him and he never learned why?
So, we want a black-and-white battle of Good and Evil, but the Prophets don't really seem all that good, what do you do? You make their enemies look as bad as possible. So, it wasn't enough for the Pah-wraiths to just have a a rational motivation, like having a long-standing conflict with the Prophets and wanting to get back to the Celestial Temple; no, suddenly we learn that they want to... end all life?
Eh, what? Why? What is their problem? It doesn't matter, all that matters is that they are eeeeevil enough.
The story could have worked if it was only written differently. The Prophets and the Pah-wraiths could have just been two warring factions of aliens, with believable motives. If you want to portray the Prophets as being the better of the two, try to make the Prophets genuinely seem good (rather than just "better than those other guys who are really evil") - maybe by showing some interest in the non-linear world other than helping Sisko after he's begged them for it. Or, alternatively, make both the Prophets and the Pah-wraiths basically indifferent to everything but their own conflict, but aligned with different sides in the Dominion war.
Dukat aligning himself with the Pah-wraiths because Sisko is aligned with the Prophets, would have worked much better if Dukat had still been the leader of Cardassia and aligned with the Dominion when he did it. Dukat would be rational in that scenario, and would be trying to win the war by countering the power of Sisko's allies, the Prophets, with powerful godlike aliens of his own, believing that he could use them to his own ends, just as they wanted to use him (pretty much the same reason Dukat had aligned Cardassia with the Dominion). Then the whole Prophets vs Pah-wraiths arc would actually be connected to the main storyline, rather than sticking like a sore thumb.
Just to touch base on the last part of your post, I believe Dukat was always supposed to be evil, but the writers didn't want him to be a simple two dimensional evil character like other shows.... they wanted you to sympathize with Dukat and his troubles, find him charming, funny, honorable, witty at times, helpful and even a good guy from time to time.... just to keep you guessing what his real role is.
Then when you think you got Dukat figured out, he turns 180 degrees, goes nuts and shows just how evil he can be.
It's as though they wanted the viewer to learn who Dukat was personally, show the "humanity" in him, that he's about as normal as the next person, but that anybody under extreme circumstances and who's gone through what he's gone through could possibly end up just as bad and evil as he did..
That’s not how it went. You’re giving far too much credit to the writers, as if they actually had some grand plan from the beginning. In fact, they were just making stuff up as they went, just like in most TV shows. Dukat was at first meant to be just a one-dimensional villain/antagonist, but Marc Alaimo (who had been typecast in villain roles for far too long, for whatever stupid reason) took every opportunity the writers gave him to play his character as multi-faceted, and as he made Dukat charismatic and popular with the DS9 fans and had a good chemistry with Nana Visitor, the writers took that up and wrote more and more such scenes and storylines (Ziyal, his children, etc.). But then Behr – by his own admission – became worried that Dukat had become
too popular with the fandom, and that some fans were finding excuses and justifications for him, so he decided to send the character on a path that should have proved once and for all that he was “true evil”.
