TheGodBen Revisits Deep Space Nine

[Nagisa Furukawa]

I started DS9 on January 1st this year and just finished WYLB two months (and a day, grrr) later. Overall, it was quite good, but I do have some issues.

I know that some men just wanting to watch the world burn is a common trope in genre storytelling, but did the resolution to the Pah-wraith arc really have to be so cheesy? The Pah-wraiths don't seem to have a purpose other than to be evil and want to kill everyone, and their conflict with the Prophets has no depth to it. It's a black and white tale of a race of evil supernatural beings that hate everything, and a race of friendly supernatural beings that want to stop them. When the Prophets were introduced, they were presented as a truly alien race that allowed Star Trek to explore some harder sci-fi material than normal, as well as the human ability to dwell on past suffering. It wasn't high art, but it was trying to do something more than your standard space opera. It's a pity it all descended into this madness.

Adding insult to injury, the final confrontation between Sisko and Dukat is just lame. Firstly, Sisko's reason for going to the Fire Caves is because his spidey-sense tingled. When he gets there, Dukat magics him up a little while gloating, then they both fall into a fiery cavern. So Sisko's great trial was to lunge at a guy? Couldn't the Prophets have just sent Sisko the message to burn that book 4 years ago? This is an anticlimactic, nonsensical end to a story that had a lot of potential, but which didn't develop properly.

Completely agree. Felt like a total joke to me, especially compared to the Vorlon/Shadow conflict on B5.

I don't like the way it actually happened, but I do like the idea of Sisko joining the Prophets, it just feels right somehow. His faith in the Prophets has been slowly growing throughout the series to the point where he is willing to make the ultimate sacrifice for them. Personally, I prefer to think that Sisko is trapped in the Celestial Temple for eternity and that is the penance and great sorrow he was warned about, but the ending is open enough for fans to also imagine that he will return one day should they wish to do so.

Yeah, I agree that I like the general idea of Sisko-joining-the-Prophets, but I have a few big problems with the execution of this.

One, the whole pregnancy storyline should've been left out for the same reason the Defiant 2.0 should've been; it comes too close to the end to actually mean anything. The only things it affects are one's ep cliffhanger and then Kassidy being sick at the beginning of the next one. All it does is muddle and confuse the "Sisko decides to stay with the Prophets" issue, especially since I think...

Two, Sisko should've explicitly been said to remain there permanently, as you believe. The idea that he can return (presumably put in because of the baby storyline, maybe because they didn't think audiences would accept a captain dying in the finale, I don't know) just cheapens the impact. Like Sheridian jumping into Z'ha'dum, there must be a sacrifice and it must be permanent. "Sisko remains with the Prophets forever" has soooooo much more impact than "Sisko goes on holiday with the Prophets."

And the big one...

Three, it should've been Jake, damnit. Kassidy's an okay love interest, but she's not REALLY that interesting of a character. I don't hate her or anything... but for Sisko's last scene? For his goodbye to the mortal world and everything he loves? No. Should've been Jake, and more than that, it shouldn't have been in a cliche white void; it should've been on the pier, the same pier they shared their first scene together on. If THAT scene had happened, Sisko appearing to Jake on in the wormhole-version of the pier and telling him he won't be coming back... I would've cried, no doubt. As it was, the scene didn't have anywhere near that impact.

 

[Supernuke]

Thanks for doing this, TheGodBen! I didn't look at every one of your reviews but I did stop by from time to time. I found your reviews to be insightful and very interesting. I'm sure it was very time consuming as well, so thanks again.

 

[Skywalker]

Looking forward to the ever-popular graphs and your final thoughts, GodBen! As always, it's been a lot of fun following your review thread.

So...Farscape next?

 

[Deranged Nasat]

So...Farscape next?

We can only hope.

 

[HaventGotALife]

Thanks for doing this, TheGodBen! I didn't look at every one of your reviews but I did stop by from time to time. I found your reviews to be insightful and very interesting. I'm sure it was very time consuming as well, so thanks again.

And he did it for free. It was very interesting as I was re-watching some of the episodes to come in here and fight such bright and insightful commentary. I also learned a thing or two about the show behind the show. Just an amazing piece of work, one of the best threads I have seen in my 10 years of being on any message board anywhere. You are obviously very gifted, TheGodBen. I hope you find some other outlet for this now that you have watched the entire series.

 

[TheGodBen]

No, it mustn't end like this. Let the thread live on by reviewing all the Relaunch novels.

I mean, it can't be any worse than enduring Crusade was.

Star Trek novels have never worked for me. It has nothing to do with the quality of them, but novels get inside the head of characters more than TV shows do, and that's weird for me when reading about characters I think I know. It's like when they do a film adaptation of a book you love and the actor plays the character differently than you had imagined in your head, but in reverse.

Two, Sisko should've explicitly been said to remain there permanently, as you believe. The idea that he can return (presumably put in because of the baby storyline, maybe because they didn't think audiences would accept a captain dying in the finale, I don't know) just cheapens the impact.

According to MA, the original version of the scene was like that and Sisko was trapped with the Prophets for eternity, but Avery Brooks was uncomfortable with it because he feared some in the audience would see it as a brown man abandoning his pregnant wife. When he explained his concerns to the writers, they rewrote and reshot the scene with Kasidy to include a promise to return some day. Avery Brooks may have been right that a black role model like Sisko shouldn't end the series that way while those stereotypes still exist, so I don't fault him for that, but I prefer a more ambiguous interpretation of the ending.

As for Jake, it is a little weird that Sisko doesn't say goodbye to his son, but I feel that the lack of a goodbye scene maybe adds a little something to that final shot of Jake looking out the window. That lack of closure is similar to what he went through in The Visitor, to which that shot is a visual callback.

So...Farscape next?

We can only hope.

Farscape is tempting as I know absolutely nothing about it, but doing a first-timer thread is a bit weird. If I were to redo my B5 thread now, I would rerate a number of episodes (some up, some down) because my knowledge of future arcs would affect my feelings about things.

And he did it for free. It was very interesting as I was re-watching some of the episodes to come in here and fight such bright and insightful commentary. I also learned a thing or two about the show behind the show. Just an amazing piece of work, one of the best threads I have seen in my 10 years of being on any message board anywhere. You are obviously very gifted, TheGodBen. I hope you find some other outlet for this now that you have watched the entire series.

Thanks. Although, I'd substitute the word 'gifted' with 'obsessive'.

I'll probably do more threads in the future, but I have no definitive plan. I was thinking of maybe TNG, but people seem to want Farscape, and I'm easily pressured into doing things other people suggest. Hence my meth addiction.

 

[apenpaap]

I would enjoy reading your views on TNG most.

 

[DalekJim]

According to MA, the original version of the scene was like that and Sisko was trapped with the Prophets for eternity, but Avery Brooks was uncomfortable with it because he feared some in the audience would see it as a brown man abandoning his pregnant wife. When he explained his concerns to the writers, they rewrote and reshot the scene with Kasidy to include a promise to return some day. Avery Brooks may have been right that a black role model like Sisko shouldn't end the series that way while those stereotypes still exist, so I don't fault him for that, but I prefer a more ambiguous interpretation of the ending.

I love Brooks as much as anybody (Well, as much as anybody should!) but I hate that line of reasoning. Especially as the most famous similar plotline would be the ending of Close Encounters when the decidedly non-black Richard Dreyfuss ditches his family for aliens.

Still, I don't mind it so much these days. We know that if Sisko does never return then Jake will ruin his entire life trying to get him back ala The Visitor. Which would negate the point of that episode and Jake's sacrifice in it.

 

[Seven of Five]

Hmm, TNG vs. Farscape?

I love TNG, or a lot of it anyway. Some of its earlier and later stuff is questionable, and I'd love to see you review that.

However, I've also seen it a billion times.

I bought a cheap complete series set of Farscape a while back now, on the recommendations of others here. I only made it around 14 or so episodes in before I kind of forgot about it. I'm not sure what distracted me from it as it's an amazingly quirky show. It take's a premise a bit similar to VOY's, but with far more interesting characters, and it isn't afraid to have fun with them.

I should probably start watching again, as I've stopped apparently before the show got much better, as the episodes up to where I stopped were pretty much standalone.

Not sure if that's a strong recommendation or not?

 

[Nagisa Furukawa]

Do Doctor Who from An Unearthly Child to the present day.

 

[DonIago]

I'm always up for reading reviews of Six Feet Under or Lost myself, though I suspect mine will be a minority vote.

 

[Seven of Five]

Ooh they're good choices too.

Basically, write it, and they will come.

 

[DalekJim]

Do Doctor Who from An Unearthly Child to the present day.

With Loose Canon recons for the missing stories.

And skip a bunch of RTD episodes for the sake of sanity.

 

[Nagisa Furukawa]

Do Doctor Who from An Unearthly Child to the present day.

With Loose Canon recons for the missing stories.

Agreed. And they're not too hard to find streaming with a bit of searching.

And skip a bunch of RTD episodes for the sake of sanity.

Nah, "WHY AM I WATCHIN THIS???" negative reviews are funnier than positive ones.

 

[Harvey]

I want to read TheGodBen's take on Farscape myself, but let us be honest -- I'd read reviews of The Flying Nun if he wrote them.

Actually, do that.

 

[DalekJim]

TNG is an awesome show but I find S1 incredibly tough to marathon. It isn't even bad in a fun way. It's just lop-sided, poorly paced and frequently boring.

Nah, "WHY AM I WATCHIN THIS???" negative reviews are funnier than positive ones.

Voyage of the Damned and End of Time make Meridian look a lot more appealing.

 

[Sykonee]

I'll probably do more threads in the future, but I have no definitive plan. I was thinking of maybe TNG, but people seem to want Farscape, and I'm easily pressured into doing things other people suggest. Hence my meth addiction.

Uh oh, we might end up 'competing' again if you do Farscape , as I've plans to do another Versus thread that would include it. But, eh, that probably won't be for another year anyway. (Too... many... projects...)

 

[Thestral]

Oooh, Farscape! I'd love to see your take on that - much as I love TNG, Farscape would be so entertaining!

And skip a bunch of RTD episodes for the sake of sanity.

Nah, "WHY AM I WATCHIN THIS???" negative reviews are funnier than positive ones.

Well, fortunately there's no reason for TheGodBen to do that with any RTD episodes. Maybe parts of The End of Time, but only parts.

 

[TheGodBen]

Do Doctor Who from An Unearthly Child to the present day.

Nah, Doctor Who isn't really my thing. I watched the first series of nuWho when it aired because there wasn't much else on on Saturday evenings. It was okay, but it didn't interest me enough to continue with it.

I'm always up for reading reviews of Six Feet Under or Lost myself, though I suspect mine will be a minority vote.

Lost has potential. I used to love it, but the time travel stuff in season 5 bored me, and the ending left me a bit soured on the whole experience. As such, I have the first four seasons on DVD but haven't bothered rewatching any of it since the finale. A rewatch from that perspective might be interesting.

Also, I'm playing Far Cry 3 at the moment and that game is putting me in a bit of a Lost mood. A tropical island, smoke pillars, mysterious happenings, bears...

I'd read reviews of The Flying Nun if he wrote them.

Actually, do that.

I'm waiting on the bluray release.

TNG is an awesome show but I find S1 incredibly tough to marathon. It isn't even bad in a fun way. It's just lop-sided, poorly paced and frequently boring.

Perversely, that's part of the reason why I'm tempted to go with TNG. TNG season 1 is probably the worst season of Star Trek ever produced, and I want to quantify just how bad it is with graphs.

Uh oh, we might end up 'competing' again if you do Farscape , as I've plans to do another Versus thread that would include it. But, eh, that probably won't be for another year anyway. (Too... many... projects...)

A year? So I would just about be finishing season 1 at that point?

 

[Deranged Nasat]

I know that some men just wanting to watch the world burn is a common trope in genre storytelling, but did the resolution to the Pah-wraith arc really have to be so cheesy? The Pah-wraiths don't seem to have a purpose other than to be evil and want to kill everyone, and their conflict with the Prophets has no depth to it. It's a black and white tale of a race of evil supernatural beings that hate everything, and a race of friendly supernatural beings that want to stop them. When the Prophets were introduced, they were presented as a truly alien race that allowed Star Trek to explore some harder sci-fi material than normal, as well as the human ability to dwell on past suffering. It wasn't high art, but it was trying to do something more than your standard space opera. It's a pity it all descended into this madness.

Adding insult to injury, the final confrontation between Sisko and Dukat is just lame. Firstly, Sisko's reason for going to the Fire Caves is because his spidey-sense tingled. When he gets there, Dukat magics him up a little while gloating, then they both fall into a fiery cavern. So Sisko's great trial was to lunge at a guy? Couldn't the Prophets have just sent Sisko the message to burn that book 4 years ago? This is an anticlimactic, nonsensical end to a story that had a lot of potential, but which didn't develop properly.

Completely agree. Felt like a total joke to me, especially compared to the Vorlon/Shadow conflict on B5.

I've been thinking about the Prophet/Pah-wraith conflict, and it strikes me that there was a way to ground it in more complex moral conundrums and the show's prior mythology without altering how either side is presented. It seems to me that the Prophets and Pah-wraiths could be said to represent different aspects of the Bajoran character, symbolically at least - and I don't mean "good" and "evil". In season one, we see Kira Nerys trying to reconcile the anger and violence that the occupation forced her to adopt with her desire to live up to the peaceful ideals of the Bajoran faith. She was caught between two poles. It fits with her people's deities and the mythology surrounding them: the cool blue Prophets as the reflective, introspective insight and the pah-wraiths as the burning anger and will to destroy. During the occupation, we're told many times (by Sisko, by Winn, by Kira, by Opaka) that it was the Bajorans' faith in the Prophets that saved them (because it made them hold on to the better part of themselves, presumably). But wasn't it also their willingness to hate and rage and blow things up that saved them? Didn't liberation from Cardassia owe just as much to the burning anger at the injustice and the will to violence as to the "Prophet" side of the Bajoran soul? And yet the Bajorans reject that part of themselves, insist on only promoting the other side of things, just as the Pah-wraiths themselves have been banished from the temple. From their viewpoint, is that fair?

Why not have the Pah-wraiths be seeking acceptance for their contribution? Tie the Wormhole Aliens/Deities arc back into the original "peaceful culture turned to terrorism" arc that was so important to the show's early seasons and its portrayal of Kira and the Bajoran culture.

The Pah-wraiths could still be violent, hateful, destructive and in urgent need of being stopped, but rather than being EVIL they're seeking recognition. Bajor needed them, but then turned its back on them, and still aligns everything Prophet blue with "good" and everything Pah-wraith red with "evil" despite using both during the occupation to achieve their salvation.