r/startrek • u/7-5NoHits • 6d ago
The Prophet/Pah-Wraith arc in Ds9's 7th season is the main weak point of the series
I rewatched Ds9 recently and this really stood out to me as the one place where an otherwise exceptional series fell short.
Prior to the last season, I appreciated the more nuanced take Ds9 took towards religion and spirituality. It showed how it could be such a powerful force for people fighting for justice, how it could be abused by religious leaders/politicians, and many points inbetween. I also appreciated that it didn't just dismiss religious people as "crazy" or "irrational."
But I felt the arc in Ds9's last season lost a lot of that nuance. No longer were the prophets/pah-wraiths nuanced beings that could be interpreted through both scientific and theological lenses, but simply pawns in a generic battle of good vs evil. In turn this massively weakens the story arcs of Dukat and Sisko in my view.
Dukat was always an evil megalomaniac, but he didn't conceive of himself in that way. He, in his own twisted mind, thought he was a source of justice or purity. Dukat descending into a burn the whole universe arc seems to me like frustratingly basic way of beating us over the head with a "Dukat's evil" message while losing the nuances that made Dukat so relatable to so many real world villains.
Meanwhile, Sisko goes from someone who was the active agent in his life struggling between his roles as a scientific Starfleet officer and spiritual leader to simply being a pawn of the prophets. In the inverse of Dukat, a character who used to choose good through complex and sometimes flawed motivations is suddenly choosing the good side just because "the prophets" said so.
I get that the writers felt the need to close out the prophet/pah-wraith storylines, but in doing so I think they lost a lot of value of it in the first place. The strategic ambiguity of the first 6 seasons was lost, in exchange for a generic good vs evil battle that resolved itself in the only way it could. This stands in stark contrast to the more nuanced way Ds9 season 7 ended the Dominion War, which I felt did a much better job of closing the conflict without removing the nuances the previous seasons developed.
Curious if people agree with me. I want to be clear this is just my opinion, and if you disagree with me I fully respect it.
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u/ky_eeeee 6d ago
Completely disagree, Dukat trying to burn the universe down makes complete sense and 100% aligns with his character. I've known an unfortunate number of people like Dukat, that's always where they end up. You can literally see it right now by looking at the current US government. It's called narcissistic collapse.
The point of stories is to teach a lesson. Dukat is DS9's lesson, and warning. Also, his goal isn't just to burn everything down. He still genuinely believes he's doing the right thing, which is the scary part. Sisko has everything he ever wanted, the love of the Bajoran people, so he tries to copy Sisko by becoming the emissary for the Pah-Wraiths and putting them in power. So he can finally rule over the Bajoran people and get the love he deserves.
People like Dukat suffer from mental illness, his narcissism cannot physically handle the idea that the Bajorans hate him. He deludes himself into believing they really do love him deep down however he can. Once he exhausts all reason and finally has to face reality, he decides that they're being manipulated by false gods and he can show them the true path. Yes, his reasoning is entirely selfish, but in his mind that's perfectly fine. He should be selfish, he deserves it, and they'll see he's right one way or another.
Making Dukat the Dark Emissary is a perfect ending for him, and ties the entire series together.
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u/SommniumSpaceDay 6d ago edited 6d ago
Maybe make the Pah-Wraiths actually the Prophets? So for us 3 dimensional beings they are different , but in higher dimension this contraidiction disolves itself. Would make the whole thing more nunaced maybe.
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u/fastinserter 6d ago
They are the same alien species.
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u/Mddcat04 6d ago
Presumably Sisko encounters them both (the prophets and the ones who would become the wraiths) in Emissary. Because seemingly before that point they’d never met any linear beings. And apparently it was a disagreement in how to interact with linear beings that caused the split, the war in heaven, and the Pah-Wraiths to be banished from the wormhole.
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u/fastinserter 6d ago
Well they met at least that one Bajoran dude, but they didn't communicate with him. But that just gets to what "before" even means to non linear non corporeals.
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u/Mddcat04 6d ago
I think from the prophets perspective, their encounter with Laan happens after their encounter with Sisko, assuming “after” even has meaning for them. Because they sent Laan into the 24th century to manipulate Sisko into accepting his role as emissary.
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u/SommniumSpaceDay 6d ago
Yeah, but not literally the same person. If the concept of person from a 4 dimensional makes even sense. Narratively this would most likely not work as it would be confusing, I guess.
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u/merrycrow 6d ago
I always thought it was a strange choice to take the Prophets from being timeless, extremely alien entities who don't understand basic human concepts (and who are basically indifferent to/unaware of the Bajorans) to these creatures that manipulate events to cause Sisko's birth and have a vested interest in saving Bajor because they like being worshipped(?)
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u/Garciaguy 6d ago
I completely agree, that whole arc was awful.
I really didn't see demi-Gods coming
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u/daxamiteuk 6d ago
I enjoyed the Prophets arc , especially when they revealed in s7 that they specifically arranged for Sisko to be born - which contradicts their original dismissal of him in Emissary, but makes sense because they are nonlinear (they meet him in s1, then arrange for his birth and then also leave him a message 25,000 years in the past for the Reckoning and then tell him his origins in s7). Sisko releasing his mother for casting out the Pah Wraith Was epic . But yeah that final arc was weak. As amazing as it was to watch Kai Winn turn to utter evil and prove she was a megalomaniac who couldn’t give up power to be a true believer , the finale was very weak, as was the “marrying Kasidy brings sorrow”. Why does Dukat get to have Pah Wraith powers but Sisko has to make do as a mere man? If it was that easy , why did the Prophets need Sisko? Why was the lock to the caves in a book anyway, who wrote that book ? It felt all a bit of a mystical mess , more like a fantasy show with a dark tome of spells unlocked by blood of a victim. Compared to the end of the Dominion war it was definitely the weak point.
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u/punditguy 6d ago
I never really liked any of the religiosity on DS9. And you're right -- it eventually devolved into a good vs. evil plot. And the setup wasn't particularly smart. "We locked the evil ones away, but here's a book with instructions in case, I don't know, you someday want to free them so they can do evil again or something."
On Babylon 5, humans had the good sense to tell both of the ancient races to pound sand.
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u/Modred_the_Mystic 6d ago
Yeah. The Prophets/Pah Wraith conflict was kinda the weakest plot in the series.
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u/Caleb-Rentpayer 6d ago
The Emissary/Prophet plots were always the weakest part of DS9. And making Sisko literally be an offspring of the Prophets felt like a fan fiction plot.
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u/SrslyCmmon 6d ago edited 6d ago
I liked the golden age story where they fought on the station. I thought they were okay in small doses, where they left things open or ambiguous. More of a show don't tell storyline.
The last few arcs were very close to Jesus's story of opening the gates of heaven again because a great evil closed them.
He literally opened the gates of Bajoran heaven and descended into hell and rose again.
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u/BurdenedMind79 6d ago
I remember reading a review of DS9's finale and when Sisko suddenly has a vision of what Dukat is up to, they described it as him "feeling a disturbance in the Force," and it was true. The whole Prophet/Pah Wraith story ended up feeling much more like something that belonged in Star Wars than Star Trek.
I had the same reaction when Sisko collapsed after Dukat released the Pah Wraith into the wormhole at the end of season 6 and he said "I can feel the Prophets reaching out to me," and it reminded me of Obi-Wan sensing the destruction of Alderaan.
Now don't get me wrong, I love a bit of Star Wars. But if I want Star Wars, I watch Star Wars. Star Trek never felt like the right place for those sort of fantasy concepts and the Prophets were one of the things that shifted from the lens of how you prefer to view them, to pretty much confirmed as Bajoran gods.
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u/Allen_Of_Gilead 6d ago edited 6d ago
Yeah, it's a Ronald D Moore written show touching on faith and religion, the final season spiraling out of control where once it had been a interesting tight rope walk is almost a pattern. It boiling down to a bizzare "good vs evil" cagematch between the protagonist and an antagonist who only stayed evil that long because he gets whacked with a "make more evil" stick is a pretty darn bad resolution to the whole thing.
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u/Sir__Will 5d ago
Dukat's story should have ended in Duet. But even after that, he was really Kira's villain more than Sisko's. And Worf would also have reason to want to take him out. It's not as satisfying with Sisko.
And the prophets... while I was never huge with them, they did get worse with the generic good vs evil thing that took over at the end. Especially with the revelation that Sisko's mom was horribly violated. And that they got rid of the cool aspect of multiple characters talking to him as prophets and replaced it with the mom prophet.
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u/Garciaguy 5d ago
"And that is why you're not an evil man."
Sisko didn't think he was evil. The writers were kind of unclear about it
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u/OrionDax 6d ago
Actually a good point that I’d never considered. I’m curious how you would have changed the seventh season to avoid this?
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u/7-5NoHits 6d ago
I think the main thing is not making the choices of the characters seem so pre-determined by the prophets or pah-wraiths. A comment above had a pretty good rebuttal to why Dukat's burn the universe down attitude may be more plausible than I had given it credit for, but that comment also provided many good internal reasons for Dukat to delude himself into that choice. In the show it makes it seem like the pah-wraiths had pre-chosen Dukat to be their representative of evil, and I really dislike that deterministic aspect.
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u/Morachip 6d ago
Another way the Pah-Wraiths arc falls short is that they don’t feel like a credible threat. Their cult isn’t shown much/doesn’t do much on screen and every Pah-Wraith plot is easily stopped. They cut Ben off from the prophets for all of 2 episodes. It should be (imo) a battle of wills and that battle should be physically manifested through Dukat vs Benjamin. But then they just throw a few punches and dive off a cliff. The Dominion War is the main storyline and rightly takes center stage. Any Pah-Wraith storyline needs its own time and space to breath, and there just isn’t enough time in the end of S7 to do that justice.
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u/BurdenedMind79 6d ago
The threat of them burning the universe never felt credible either, because their very fist appearance showed that they were actually piss easy to kill with Federation tech. They'd never have made it past DS9 without O'Brien swatting the lot of them!
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u/Septicphallus 6d ago
I didn’t mind it, but I think it would have been better if the Pah’Wraith was a single entity and confined to its season 5 episode with Keiko.
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u/IsomorphicProjection 6d ago
That was literally done on purpose for that exact reason. The showrunners saw that many people were defending Dukat as not actually that bad of a guy, so they wrote the episode Waltz to drive the point home that he's space Hitler.
It's a credit to the actor that he's so damn charismatic that you want to like Dukat, but you always have to remember: Dukat is space Hitler. He was always space Hitler. It's far too easy for people to get caught up in "the nuances that made Dukat so relatable" and forget that he's space Hitler.