I tend to re-watch Deep Space Nine roughly once or twice per year. Yesterday, I again watched the episode, "Rapture" in which Benjamin Sisko re-discovers the lost city of B'hala and something struck me that hadn't before: this is the episode that Sisko begins treating The Prophets as a religion rather than as an alien species. Perhaps there were other hints of it earlier, but in general I felt that Sisko approached the entire idea of himself as The Emissary and the wormhole aliens as "Prophets" with a great deal of skepticism.
For me, though, this is a striking tonal shift for the show. Until this point, even with the introduction of Pah Wraiths in the Keiko/Miles episode earlier in the season, the Trek writers had tried to keep a separation between religion and science. At this point, though, it's as though they wanted to intentionally blur the lines between the two. And, even after all these years having watched the show, I'm bothered by the shift.
Once Sisko was mentally damaged (or "enhanced," if you will) by his accident, he became almost zealously committed to the visions presented to him. Rather than seeing them as a side-effect of the non-linear nature of the wormhole aliens' existence, suddenly he saw a "grand plan" that was laid out for the Bajorans and the local universe. (This despite the fact that the aliens had never once shown any direct interest in linear, corporeal beings outside of the Bajorans and even then their interest seemed inconsistent.) Before this point, I'd have expected Sisko to treat such revelations with a deeply skeptical eye, and that he'd have attributed any foresight to the ability of the aliens to see all points in the past and future.
I'm not sure that I like it. It led, of course, to the great good-versus-evil conflicts of the final two seasons, notably between the "good" Prophets and the "evil" Pah Wraiths. But what the writers almost steadfastly refused to do was address issue of predetermination (save for the episode in which a Pah Wraith and Prophet face off in the "Kost Amojan" and fail to fulfill a prophecy) and how Sisko's future seems already written. I'm not normally a deep-thinker when it comes to fantasy, but this one is really sticking in my craw.
For me, though, this is a striking tonal shift for the show. Until this point, even with the introduction of Pah Wraiths in the Keiko/Miles episode earlier in the season, the Trek writers had tried to keep a separation between religion and science. At this point, though, it's as though they wanted to intentionally blur the lines between the two. And, even after all these years having watched the show, I'm bothered by the shift.
Once Sisko was mentally damaged (or "enhanced," if you will) by his accident, he became almost zealously committed to the visions presented to him. Rather than seeing them as a side-effect of the non-linear nature of the wormhole aliens' existence, suddenly he saw a "grand plan" that was laid out for the Bajorans and the local universe. (This despite the fact that the aliens had never once shown any direct interest in linear, corporeal beings outside of the Bajorans and even then their interest seemed inconsistent.) Before this point, I'd have expected Sisko to treat such revelations with a deeply skeptical eye, and that he'd have attributed any foresight to the ability of the aliens to see all points in the past and future.
I'm not sure that I like it. It led, of course, to the great good-versus-evil conflicts of the final two seasons, notably between the "good" Prophets and the "evil" Pah Wraiths. But what the writers almost steadfastly refused to do was address issue of predetermination (save for the episode in which a Pah Wraith and Prophet face off in the "Kost Amojan" and fail to fulfill a prophecy) and how Sisko's future seems already written. I'm not normally a deep-thinker when it comes to fantasy, but this one is really sticking in my craw.
