If You Could Rewrite DS9
- Thread starter Refuge
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This might sound slightly juvenile, but instead of Sisko sending Dukat straight to Hell, I'd have liked to see Ezri, Worf and Kira flip a coin and/or team up to kill Dukat themselves. "You killed me," " you took my mother away from me, " and "you killed my wife" are very good reasons for them to take him down.
I'd loved to have seen Kira take Dukat down. Even with the powers of the Pah-wraiths behind him he wouldn't stand much of a chance
I'd loved to have seen Kira take Dukat down. Even with the powers of the Pah-wraiths behind him he wouldn't stand much of a chance
Well, Kira took Damar down rather easily and he then killed Zihal who was a very good friend and protegee of Kira, still they patched things up in the end, right before Damar became a martyr for his people... Dukat, on the other hand, became a paroxysm of villainousness.
- NO PAH WRAITHS!!! Everything they touched turned to shit. They weren't needed for the end of the series arc at all. DS9 got ten IQ points dumber for shoehorning in a good/evil fantasy plotline into the series.
- Develop a better closing arc for Sisko than being destined to be the guy who tackles a man with a book and pushes him into a lake of fire. His destiny as The Emissary of the Prophets was to save Bajor, not the entire Alpha Quadrant from the Pah Wraiths. A cool final reveal would be if the Prophets were Bajorans all along. Basically since they live outside of time, they are actually the hyper-evolved descendants of present-day Bajorans, which propagated back through time when they colonized the wormhole.
- I'd make Kasidy Yates a Bajoran instead of a human. This is mostly because it would help root Sisko as a character more to Bajor, and make her agreement to a planned settlement on planet more understandable. This would change her story role a bit, as she displayed skepticism for his role as The Emissary. But this could be given to Jake, as his character would have benefited from a stronger role later in the show, and the father-son bond was perhaps the only thing that trumped Sisko's commitments.
- No Section 31. I thought it worked okay in DS9 - except for SLOAN's BRAIN - but it did too much damage to the franchise elsewhere, and the story could have worked just as well with Sloan being a rogue agent in Starfleet Intelligence.
- Entirely avoid the closing arc that Dukat was given after Sacrifice of Angels. He was a gloriously flawed, complicated antagonist, and the writers wrongly took away his ambiguity because they hated he had an online fandom. I would have really enjoyed seeing a full-fledged redemption arc, but even just dropping him as a character would have been preferable to what we had gotten/
- I feel like DS9 suffered quite a bit from "small quadrant" syndrome, with too many big characters popping in, and too many characters ending the show in positions of power. While I think the Klingon arc was inevitable given TNG established that Gowron personally knew Worf, I would argue for massively downgrading Zek in importance, from Grand Negus to just some modestly powerful Ferengi businessman. It made zero sense that a potentate of an empire with tens of billions of inhabitants would pester Quark at least once a year, ultimately start dating his mother, and name his brother as his heir.
Much of what Eschaton writes above mirrors my own preferences.
I'm definitely on the pro Section 31 side though
- Redemption of Dukat - probably one of the biggest missed opportunities given Mark Alaimo's wonderful job playing this character. What they did with Damar should have been done with Dukat - think of how much more meaningful it would have been for him to become the face of Cardassian resistance with Kira's help.
- Clearer and more meaningful character arc for Sisko as Emissary.
- Clearer and more meaningful purpose for all the prophet stuff in general. whether the pah wraiths are still an element would depend on setting that stuff up far earlier than they did.
- Minimize Ferengi socio-politics
- No mirror universe stuff (or at least diminished and with a different overall storyline)
- Keep the father-son relationship between Ben and Jake one of the core elements of the show (it seemed to me this aspect of it sort of diminished a bit as Lofton grew older and the introduction of Kassidy Yates brought a more standard 'romance' angle into the show that I could've done without)
- Have Jake go to starfleet to follow in his father's footsteps and possibly be placed in mortal jeopardy during the war requiring Sisko to reject duty for the sake of family.
I'm definitely on the pro Section 31 side though
It'd be fun, though seeing Ezri do it, particularly when Dukat was masquerading as a Bajoran man, would be brilliant. She could end him, but I'm not sure if a Klingon dagger or one of the guns like the Vulcan serial killer used would be her weapon. "You killed me, Dukat."I'd loved to have seen Kira take Dukat down. Even with the powers of the Pah-wraiths behind him he wouldn't stand much of a chance
"Who are you?"
"I am Dax..."
[Close up on Dax, face expressionless, as we hear the sound or TR-116 firing]
[As Dukat slumps to the ground, Dax blows a puff of smoke rising from the barrel of the rifle]
She also could've said...
"I am Groot..."
"I'm Batman."
"I'm your worst nightmare."
"I am Groot..."
"I'm Batman."
"I'm your worst nightmare."
Have him be an enlisted crewman (a few weeks of basic training) rather than a long-term cadet. They need manpower now, not in four years. This allows him to have a view from the front lines and still have time to write when he's off shift.
They didn't do much with that writer thing anyway. Sure there was "the visitor" which is aces, but he didn't need to a writer for that episode to work. He could have been some famous person being interviewed for that reason and it would have worked as well. The other episodes where his being a writer is used, are meh at best or his part is so short as to be insignificant.
What about "The Muse"?
I don't like it.
It's just that they have the whole "Dad as Benny Russell, who is also a writer" connection. And they wanted him to choose something else to do as a career that he could still pursue on DS9.
What I liked about this episode is that we got to see the regular cast without make-up (Odo, Worf, Quark, Martok, Nog, Dukat, and Weyoun, I think I got them all), beyond that, I thought it was a rather weak episode.
"Far Beyond The Stars" is a great episode, it highlights just how far humanity has come in the last fifty years alone, as well as just how much further we've still got to go given the inequalities and bigotries that still exist.
It also shows how far back we've gone in the last three years.
I don't deny that that was its intent but as Sisko once said, "The road to Hell is paved with good intentions." For believability's sake, if a struggling Black writer is striving to have his first novel published, it makes no sense for him to add obstacles by imposing to a prejudiced publisher that the hero of the book be a black man as well" When I went to my first job interview, I didn't mention the fact that I hated the way the guy's office was decorated! I said it much later in a cocktail party with a joking tone, that allowed me some deniability, in spite of the fact that I was telling the truth. People who are in the struggling phase of their life usually know that you need to crawl before you can walk and walk before you can run!
We're sinking fast and there are not enough lifeboats for everybody!
And you are equating this experience with 400 years of established cultural bigotry.......ooookkkkk
Or better yet the people standing on your back preventing one from running and causing the struggles just need to stop stepping on folks back...
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