I don't know if it was previously established if they could or could not, but once the Defiant reached DS9 after Dukat and co. destroyed the mine field, couldn't Sisko have just fired upon the wormhole causing it to collapse like in the "Search part 2"? I remember in "Purgatory's Shadow" they needed to fire a particle beam into the wormhole causing it to seal and not kill the Prophets, but would a photon torpedo have still done it in "Sacrifice of the Angels"?Prophets or not. I just saw sacrifice the other day and there was another thread earlier concerning the remaining Dominon ships at DS9 that could have fired on the Defiant instead of the station that sparked me to ask this. Did Sisko enter the wormhole hoping the prophets would contact him or was he indeed going in to die doing everything he could. If he thought the latter then the Dominon would have walked over him and proceeded to the AQ. If this was the reason whyhe chose to enter it, wouldn't collapsing the wormhole and preventing the Dominon to come thru be the best decision? It makes sense on the other hand that he was "hoping" for them to contact him and that being the reason why he went in, however the conversation with the prophets indicate that he was there to die, thus giving him crap for trying to control the game. I loved the way it all turned out but i was curious. I really don't know, I am just looking for some insight. Thanks for your thoughts. Anyone?
Changling-Bashir in "Purgatory's Shadow" sabotaged that same particle beam to strengthen the wormhole. Not even a tricobalt device device would destroy it after that event.
Sisko knew that the Prophets could interfere, but that they wouldn't - they weren't really concerned, this wasn't their fight, etc. But he also knew that they really, really wanted to keep their emissary. So he gambled that if he forced them to chose between intervening and losing their emissary, they'd do the former. Yeah, that was a pretty insane risk to take and he could have lost. But frankly, had the Dominion free reign of the wormhole, the whole Alpha Quadrant would have become overrun anyway. So it was worth that one desperate chance. After that point, the Prophets kept the Dominion from traversing the wormhole for the remainder of the war, so there was no need to close it. Before that point... they tried, failed, and then lost the station. They weren't in a position to try again until they no longer had to. They didn't do it immediately in season three because, well, blowing up the Bajoran's Gods is bad PR. They didn't absolutely have to try until late season five, by which point a God-friendly method was devised. Which got sabotaged and somehow made it impossible to try again, IIRC... not that they needed to after "Sacrifice of Angels", as I said. Made sense to me... only in retrospect, had Sisko guilt tripped the Prophets into shutting out the Dominion in "The Search", it woulda made things a lot easier...
Cool, thank makes sense to me. In Sacrifice there is no way to close it at that point. The Particle beam from earlier made it impossible. So he did do the right thing regardless if he wanted to fight or if he was hoping for an intervention from the prophets.
The script seemed to suggest that Sisko was only going into the wormhole to try to shoot down as many Dominion ships as possible, and that he was actually annoyed when the Prophets interrupted. I agree that it would have made more sense for them to make it clearer that Sisko had planned all along to go into the wormhole and beg for the Prophets' help (in fact, that's what I thought the scene in "Favor the Bold" - reading the prophecies for "guidance, insights, loopholes" - was a setup for). And that's what he ended up doing once the Prophets contactd him. But that's not what they seemed to be implying at first.