The Storyteller
"The people and the land are one."
It was about time we returned to Bajor.
The Widening Gyre
I haven’t really talked all that much about the decision to tie a Starfleet crew to a static location, rather than giving the world a third USS Whatever gallivanting around the stars. It came up with regard to “Emissary”, obviously, but after that, I rather left the idea alone. So let’s backtrack. As it happens, this gets discussed in Judith and Garfield Reed-Stevens’ book, The Making Of Deep Space Nine. I don’t know how I ended up with a copy of the book – I can’t have asked for it; I’d only seen “Emissary” (via a VHS copy taped off of Sky) at the time, and dug it liked it – but I certainly enjoyed reading it. I got a lot from it, too, including a feel for what led to the first TNG spin-off deliberately stepping away from the standard Trek model.
Fundamentally, the book explained, there are only three real choices for a Trek show. You set it on a ship, or on a station, or on a planet. It was agreed early on that they didn’t want two Trek shows running simultaneously that involved starships – it would make the inevitable slew of comparisons between a continually-refined television juggernaut and the new kid on the block even easier and, frankly, lazier. That only left some kind of settlement, either on or near solid ground.
Budget considerations ultimately favoured the latter, and so Paramount plumped for an upgraded Mir for its first and only nacelle-less outing. You can make a solid argument that this was among the most important decisions made in the creation of the show. It’s also arguably one of the absolute least interesting. “Something that doesn’t move” is a negative description, defined only in terms of the options it removes. What made this show truly work – where the positive side of its identity came in – was in the choice of where precisely our crew would find themselves unable to move from.
This answer came in two parts, as we know. First Bajor, then the Celestial Temple. The two are connected, obviously, not just by the Bajorans’ faith, but by the simple fact that it’s the wormhole that guarantees a continuing Federation presence in the system.
Like a pair of cats tied together, though, two things can be connected and yet still pull against each other. Having made the call to set the show in an essentially static habitat, there’s a way in which the wormhole feels like an attempt to have one’s gagh and eat it. Every episode in which our heroes leap into a runabout and explore the Gamma Quadrant is one in which the fundamental immovability of the show’s core can be essentially ignored. As I discussed in my post on “Emissary”, Ira Steven Behr noted early on that one of the advantages of a fixed location is that it prevents the crew from escaping the consequences of their actions. The wormhole (photon) torpedoes that logic. As we saw so clearly last episode, access to the Gamma Quadrant makes it perfectly possible for Starfleet to skip town once they grow tired of meddling.
The more the show relies on stories set in the Gamma Quadrant, in other words, the more it risks losing much of what makes it distinctive. In the first three episodes, it seemed like the creators were fully aware of this fact. “Emissary” and “Past Prologue” both made heavy use of Bajor, exploring its religion and politics respectively, as well as sketching out the withdrawal’s aftermath in both. “A Man Alone” was a little less entangled with the planet, but still took some time to consider the new state of play in its tale of Bajoran spivs and Cardassian collaborators. It wasn’t until the fifth episode that we even met anyone from the Gamma Quadrant.
And then somehow, like the station itself, Deep Space Nine seemed to drift away from the planet once at the centre of its orbit. It’s certainly not the case that the recent run of Bajor-light episodes have all been failures. Several have been pretty good, with the occasional genuine triumph in. These successes though have done nothing to prevent a dissipation in the sense of place. Of permanence. With the exception of parts of “Battle Lines” (and arguably “Dax”), there’s almost nothing in those episodes that couldn’t have been set aboard a Federation starship (though perhaps one with an unusually lax hiring policy regarding bar staff).
The Unreliable Narrator
It’s with “The Storyteller” that the show settles back into its proper orbit. Both the A- and B-plots are entirely tied up in Bajor. More than that, the two (sets of) Bajoran cultures shown here are connected by the common theme of union in the face of an outside agitator. In one case, it’s the removal of this external threat which has brought about the current conflict, with two societies arguing how to deal with the Cardassian occupation’s changes to their shared border. But Bajor needs to be about more than just the occupation. They need an identity beyond being the ones the Cardassians used to oppress [1]. “The Storyteller” understands this, and so offers a Bajoran village which shows not the slightest sign of being affected by the occupation. Its external threat is far older than that, and yet still very much present. That’s a neat way of exploring the devastation left by the Cardassian withdrawal without reducing every Bajoran story to no more than that. It puts the occupation in its historical context of being one threat to Bajorans among many, without bypassing or downplaying its unique horrors.
However unprecedented the horrors of the Occupation were, though, matters are pretty messed-up in the village Bashir and O’Brien go to help. The idea of inventing an external threat to quell internal dissent is a trick straight out of The Fascist Cookbook. And that’s before we consider the fact that this external enemy actually is dangerous. It kills people, or at least it tries. It’s true that the current Sirah isn’t responsible for the situation he inherited – and given my identity, I could hardly place myself in opposition to the idea that one might have a duty to deal with a problem one’s ancestors created. Once he agreed to keep the secret, though, he became complicit. You can’t right a wrong you refuse to accept exists. Worse, the latest Sirah proves willing to take his dirty secret to his grave, risking his entire village’s safety on a Hail Mary involving a failed apprentice and some visiting aliens, rather than opt for a deathbed confession.
The failings of the Sirahs aren’t automatically a problem for the episode, of course, even if Miles and Julian fail to push back against them – they do, after all, have bigger and more immediate problems. I think though that given this story’s interest in the power and necessity of a people’s story, rooting the delivery of that story in fascist soil is actually kind of a big deal [2[l. I can’t brush it away as an irrelevance. What I can do, though, is compartmentalise it. I’m just going to classify it as a bum note, played for the reason most bum notes are – a mistake made in a scrabble to get somewhere interesting.
And for sure, the rest of “The Storyteller” plays a fascinating tune. It absolutely sings, in fact. We can start with the decision to send Bashir and O’Brien on a mission together. It’s rather remarkable, given how much the show will go on to make of the O’Brien-Bashir bromance, that Siddig and Meaney have reached the thirteenth episode of this show without exchanging more than two or three lines of dialogue apiece in any given story (doubtless this is partly due to the shooting conflicts that kept Colm Meaney off the board for so long in early season one). Now that the pairing is tried, though, it’s clear just how well both the characters and actors work together. I can’t decide which part of the combination works best, actually; the way Siddig purposefully makes Bashir irritating but softens the impact by flooding the screen with charm, or how totally Meaney refuses to let that charm make a dent in O’Brien’s curmudgeonly, increasingly flustered pragmatism.
Either way, the combination of brash charm and introvert distemper is an obvious hit. The episode itself notes this, when our heroes meet the terminally-ill Sirah for the first time. Let’s assume Bashir’s theory is correct, and the Sirah’s plan was to deliberately set up a newcomer to fail as his successor so the village would give Hovath another try. Given that, the fact he immediately rejects Bashir is almost certainly a comment that the young doctor’s effortless charm making him unsuitable. By which I mean unsuitable for the plan. He’d probably do very well as the new Sirah, which is precisely what the old Sirah doesn’t want. Instead, then, he notes the man awkwardly lurking at the entrance, and passes the job to him.
There’s a lot to be said about the Sirah’s gambit here, and how it shakes out. First, it’s rather amusing that having come to the frontier as part of his need to play the hero, Bashir has now seen two Starfleet officers hailed as Prophet-sent messiah figures, neither of them himself.
There’s a more serious point made here too. There was always something problematic in the idea of Sisko – a visitor from a more technologically advanced culture come to “help the natives” – becoming the emissary. The issues with the white saviour trope can’t be totally erased by making the saviour black. “Storytelling” subtly acknowledges this problem by setting O’Brien up as a similar figure, only for it to turn out to be a feint so that the village can save itself. This is exactly the role that Starfleet needs to be playing in this show. They’re not here to be the saviours of Bajor. They’re here to provide Bajor with any support it asks for while it saves itself.
This also mitigates the issue of generations of Sirah lying to their people about the nature of the Dal’Rok. As much as the deception suggests the Sirah don’t trust those they ostensibly protect, it’s clear the current office holder knows that the solution to the current crisis can only come from within. You can’t just take someone else’s story and expect it to work. You can’t maintain an oral history by stealing it. This isn’t just a story about the power of stories. It’s about the limitations and dangers of cultural appropriation.
Above all else, though, this is about the power of a people’s story to destroy monsters. The justification for why the monster itself exists might be politically problematic, but the basic idea of a community coming together to listen to the story of the strength they gain from their unity and their shared history is utterly glorious. Even the timing makes perfect sense. The Dal’Rok arrives after the harvest. The struggle against it comes each year at the point when the village has just been reminded both of what they can do when they are unified, and thereby the necessity of remaining unified going forwards.
The story that defeats the Dal’Rok is the story that allows the village to continue. To allow them to tell more stories. “The Storyteller” literalises the ineluctable truth that to survive, a culture must be able to tell stories to and about itself. To create tales about how they live, and through living, create more tales. Of course the possibility of losing the ability to tell stories constitutes an existential threat. Of course the fight back against that threat means telling more stories.
And of course the only way for those from outside to help is to give space and support for those stories to be told once again, by those that have the right to tell them.
The Monster At The End Of This Book
Meanwhile, back on the station…
I think it would be hard to argue with the idea that the plot strand about the negotiations between the Paqu and the Navot struggles to stand up in comparison to the Bashir/O’Brien plot. That though says rather more about the latter than the former. The harshest criticism I have about the station-based plot is that Cirroc Lofton and Gina Philips are both too early into their acting careers to carry the weight put upon them here, and that Aaron Eisenberg is still too busy figuring out how to play Nog from beneath the make-up to help out too much.
Aside from that – and the implication that horny male teenagers in the twenty-fourth century are no better at respecting the boundaries of their crushes than their twentieth century equivalents – there’s a lot to enjoy here. The basic issue of two groups of people arguing how to deal with their former oppressors having literally altered the land they lived on is solid – another reminder that the chaos caused by an occupation doesn’t end the moment the troops leave. This is further demonstrated by Varis Sul herself – someone very young thrust into a position of power because years of brutal occupation and exploitation have left Bajor with insufficient adults to get done everything that needs doing. The moment she and Jake exchange the summaries of how they lost their parent(s) is quietly heart-breaking, the performers’ inexperience notwithstanding.
It’s these little moments that sell the station-bound story. The way Sisko never, not once, patronises Sul, even as he’s savaging her intransigence or advising her to reconsider her assumptions. How he remains exasperated when Kira squares up to offer unsolicited advice, but now tempers that with the knowledge that she’s his best ally when dealing with Bajorans. Then there’s Kira’s exhausted bar order, which does more to colour her relationship with Quark in three lines than the whole series had managed by that point. And finally, there’s the lovely detail of seeing how, after Odo orders Nog and Jake to stand on a walkway rather than dangle over it, Nog returns to exactly where he was once the constable leaves, whilst Jake can’t quite bring himself to do the same.
Each of these moments are nice enough on their own terms. In combination, though, they make it clear how far the show has come in figuring out who its characters are, and how to use them. How to tell their stories. This was a necessary part of the show’s evolution, obviously. As vital as Bajor is to Deep Space Nine, and as crucial it was that we returned to it, this fundamentally remains the story of a few hundred inhabitants of concentric circles, spinning in space.
“Storytelling” hits home not just because of the tale it tells of a lonely Bajoran village, but because it demonstrates how adept the show has become at telling its own tales. The characters have begun to drive their stories, rather than the other way round.
The story of these people has begun, in other words. The monster against which that tale will be tested has yet to arrive.
But it is coming.
Ordering
1. The Conscience Of the King
2. The Storyteller
3. Angel One
4. The Ambergris Element
[1] It’s interesting to note that the Navot never make the obvious point that the Paqu are insisting they directly benefit from the actions of their former oppressors, at an equivalent cost to another group of victims of the oppression.
[2] This is particularly an issue given the more general setting of a world recovering from a recent fascist invasion. The ways in which reactions to fascism can themselves be fascist are considered multiple times in the show’s run – “Past Prologue”, “The Homecoming/Circle/Siege”, and arguably much of Kai Winn’s storyline. That isn’t what’s going on here, though; here, the fascist attitudes both predate the Occupation, and are presented entirely unproblematised.