In The Hands Of The Prophets
Here’s something new. Well, new for IDFC, anyway. We arrive, at last, at our very first season finale.
Waystations
“Season finale” is a distinct category from “last episode of a season”, naturally. We’ve seen out the first years of The Animated Series and Voyager already. But the word “finale” points toward more than there not being a new episode the week after. It suggests a rest stop, rather than simply running out of road.
It’s appropriate, then that the de facto port city of Deep Space Nine gets to be our first exposure to the concept, with The Animated Series written in a period where assuming episodes would be shown in any particular order was discouraged, and Voyager’s intended finale to its first year held back to open the second season for desperately uninteresting promotional reasons.
Even were we to engage in some kind of hilariously quixotic attempt to consider this franchise chronologically, though, “In The Hands Of The Prophets” stands out. The original crew’s live-action seasons lack finales for the same reason their animated ones do. As for TNG, well, “Shades Of Grey” didn’t so much bring the second season home as collapse by the side of a random road, retching up blood. After that, “Best Of Both Worlds” worked so well as a cliffhanger the show was still trying yearly to re-bottle that lightning by the time this episode aired. Only “The Neutral Zone” can be fairly considered to be a forerunner to what “In The Hands Of The Prophets” is doing here, and even there the comparison soon breaks down.
I don’t mean that in the sense of a yawning gulf between the two season one closers in terms of their quality, although that’s there too. It’s the concept that matters here, much more than the execution. To the extent the writer’s strike allowed “The Neutral Zone” to be about anything, it’s fundamentally concerned with expanding the sandbox its show is playing in. From the opening mystery (in which the show attempts to salvage what it can from the wreckage of “Coming Of Age” and “Conspiracy”) to the return of the Romulans in the final minutes, the first season finale of TNG wants you to believe that the show is entering a new phase [1]. Something bigger, something more complicated, something more dangerous, whatever. These aren’t going to be your previous Next Generation episodes.
I’ll wait until I actually reach “The Neutral Zone” to talk in detail about how well this works. What’s important right now is how Deep Space Nine eschews both the “Romulan Reveal” and “Cybernetic Cliff-hanger” models, in favour of something different. Not something aimed at making you excited about what’s coming next. Something designed to remind you everything you’ve seen up until now has been Pretty Damn Good.
The Political Is Personal
It would be ridiculous to argue this episode doesn’t gesture toward the future, I realise. It would be just as foolish to argue that “…Prophets” doesn’t ultimately function as an expansion of the show’s world. This is where we meet Vedeks Bareil and Winn, who between them appear in twenty-one more episodes. Nor is it as though the contest to be the next Kai doesn’t end up making a non-trivial difference to where the show ends up.
Crucially, though, that’s not the intention behind their arrival. “The Neutral Zone” spends the entire run-time of one of its two plots building up to the Federation’s first interaction with the Romulans in decades. Tebok’s last line before cutting comms, “We are back”, and Picard’s response that “our lives just became a lot more complicated”, make it clear that this is a signpost to where the show is (intended to be) going [2]. In contrast, there’s almost nothing about our first meetings with Bareil Antos and Winn Adami that point us toward the future. Winn is an outsider in the race, and her attempt here to have a competitor killed fails absolutely. It’s not even apparent that her briefly successful propaganda campaign on the station has been a net positive for her bid. That isn’t an oversight, either. It’s because the episode isn’t actually invested in the race itself. “…Prophets” ends not with our heroes chewing their lips over the possibility of Winn becoming Kai and ushering in a new age of Bajoran isolationism, but with Kira and Sisko talking about how far they’ve come over the last year.
That’s what this episode is interested in. Not in how Bajoran religious extremism and/or political machinations might cause problems in the future, but in how what’s arguably the largest clash between Bajoran and Federation interests since “Past Prologue” – an episode, let’s remember, where Kira contacts a Starfleet Admiral in an attempt to have them reverse one of Sisko’s decisions – causes the station’s commander and his first officer to recognise how far they’ve come since the Cardassian withdrawal.
And it works gloriously – so well in fact that it has taken me over twenty years to notice Winn’s plan makes absolutely no sense at all [3]. In part, this success stems from some smart use of mirroring. The first season opens with Sisko meeting the Kai that helped hold her people together during a horrifyingly violent and oppressive past, and it ends with him meeting the two most prominent candidates to replace that Kai, and lead Bajor into an uncertain future. Kira gave the Federation a week before they were chased out-system by whichever faction brought down the Provisional Government, and now sits marvelling at the fact that months have gone by, long-term stability is looking more and more likely, and – most importantly – that the people who most threaten that stability are those following a conservative isolationist philosophy she once subscribed to.
Matters Of Timing
This isn’t just about the distance between these points, of course. It’s about the journey between them. As such, “Emissary” is not the only episode being built on. I’ve already mentioned how “…Prophets” draws on Kira and Sisko’s clash in “Past Prologue”, but it also takes its cues from interactions in “Progress”, “Dramatis Personae”, and “Duet” as well. All three of episodes also put in the work of showing how the pair’s relationship has grown over time. “Progress” shows how far their mutual respect has grown, “Duet” demonstrates the two have learned how to disagree on issues related to the Occupation without their dialogue going off the rails, and “Dramatis Personae” argues that, while the underlying tensions still exist, it now takes something as serious as an attack by brain-altering alien energy for their relationship to break down completely. When Sisko pushes back against Winn’s insistence that multiculturalism isn’t just unwise, but actively evil, his argument that you can disagree with someone – even fight with them – and it actually strengthen your understanding of and appreciation for them, it’s these stories he’s referring to. His argument hits home not just because Brooks is an accomplished actor, but because we’ve seen the truth of what Sisko is saying over the course of these nineteen episodes.
While we’re on the subject of earlier episodes, I don’t think we can fully consider “…Prophets” without talking about “Battle Lines”. After all, that’s the episode which means there’s a competition on to be next Kai in the first place. It also forms the middle part of a loose trilogy, starting with “Emissary” and ending here. We might call it the “Kai Trilogy”, given these three episodes are the only ones in the first season that even use the word. More links them than just that, though what that link is takes a little unpacking. The obvious suggestion would be that, since “Emissary” discusses what the Kai meant to the Bajorans during their time under the Cardassians, and “…Prophets” being about the uncertain role the next Kai will have in shaping their people’s post-Occupation, that “Battlelines” represents the present. That feels a little like a cheat, though, given how completely that episode is rooted in the past, and Kira’s failure to come to terms with it. I mean, almost every episode is about the present, if the only qualification is some stuff happens during the time the show is set.
Still, we can take the idea at least a little further. We can see “Battle Lines” represents a present avoided, rather than being experienced. The bloody civil war between the Ennis and Nol-Ennis brutally depicts what Kira (and Picard) feared was just days away from being her homeworld’s fate when the Federation first arrived. What we see in that episode is an image of an alternate present, a reminder of where Bajor might have been right then if not for Kai Opaka, who Kira was sure represented the only hope her people had for a post-Occupation peace
.
And that mattered, because it underlined the political importance of the Kai in the same episode Bajor effectively finds itself cut off from her. That in turn presented Kira with a choice, whether or not she realised the fact consciously. She could blame Sisko for allowing the Kai to travel through the wormhole into almost entirely unexplored space, resulting in her death. Or she could celebrate the fact that Sisko’s role as the Emissary gave Kira the chance to not just meet the spiritual leader of her people, but for them to help her end her own personal civil war, one that had been raging inside her since she first picked up a phaser.
Those are not necessarily mutually exclusive options, I realise. Still, “Battle Lines” gave Kira a far better justification for turning against Sisko than a clash over a curriculum in a school with barely a dozen students [4]. There probably was a time when Winn could have got to Kira – in fact the idea Winn thought she could count on the Major as a potential ally is the closest we can get to making any sense of using the station as the location for Bareil’s intended assassination. To restate Sisko’s argument, though, Winn has arrived too late. Familiarity doesn’t breed contempt, it breeds community. Ben might have been able to pinpoint the precise moment Winn made her first tactical mistake, but her first mistake strategically came much, much sooner. Like all reactionaries, it just never occurred to her that anyone else could truly feel differently.
It never occurred to her that anyone else could ever truly grow.
Spinning In Infinity
The result is an episode that highlights how a semi-derelict mining station awash with the blood of slave labour has become not just a symbol of the future, but a vibrant community in the present. It does so not just by showing how far our protagonists have come, but by throwing them into the ring with an adversary incapable of the very growth “…Prophets” celebrates.
All of which is a fine approach for the season finale. Crucially, though, “…Prophets” shows its makers have learned just as much as its characters. Structurally, the episode is rock solid. Its three plots – Winn’s visit, the missing Ensign Akino, and O’Brien struggling with his attraction for a junior co-worker – are all entirely watchable on their own terms, but all then dovetail beautifully in the final minutes. The regulars are now all fully settled into their roles, and the writers aware of how to get the best out of them. There aren’t many actors who could deliver the line “Apparently, he was getting murdered” so that it’s funny without seeming callous, but Auberjonois nails it perfectly.
And we mustn’t forget Sisko, given we’ve spent so much time on Kira. The poor guy does an absolutely phenomenal job here, torn between the roles of station commander, Emissary, and a dad who wants his kid to be able to go to school without having to refight Tennessee vs Scopes. Perhaps surprisingly, I’m not terribly inclined to pick through the ins and outs of the central dilemma here. It’s clearly to the show’s credit that this is (for now, at least) its idea of a major incident. No warships, no photon torpedoes, and only one explosion, which happens off-screen. The only person who dies does so before the episode even begins. What we get instead is simply an outsider who holds our show’s community in no regard, and who tries to ram a wedge as far and hard as they can into one of its fault-lines.
The specific mechanics of how Winn is attempting this interest me rather less. The problem with repurposing the Scopes trial is that the issue there wasn’t that people couldn’t agree on whether evolution should be taught about in schools. It was that the dominant religious force in the county possessed enough power to make doing so illegal. Replacing conservative Christianity in 1920s Tennessee with the religion of a people just barely out from under a jackboot-heel that ground them down for half a century mutates the metaphor into something unusable at best, and harmful at worst. It confuses religious identity with religious power, a category error which almost always leads to terrible conclusions – take for example the standard Islamophobic argument that says we shouldn’t trust Muslims in Britain because of how awful the Saudi regime is.
Nor am I completely sold by Ben’s defence of the Bajoran religion to his son. I can see why it was felt the scene needed slotting in – the problem is that Winn is exclusionary, not that she disagrees with Keiko. The problem is in execution rather than concept. The damage done to Bajor by the Cardassians as is a good reason for questioning the wisdom of using Winn as a metaphor for America’s religious right. It’s not a good reason for choosing to respect Bajoran spirituality. Or rather, if it’s your only reason for choosing to respect it, you’ve gone badly wrong. Using suffering as a prerequisite to respect is what led to this franchise deciding the only human religions still operating during the 24th century are those that belong to Native American tribes, and we’re already aware of the mess that approach caused. Even without that knowledge, though, telling someone you respect their beliefs because of how they must have needed to cling to them during hard times isn’t accepting. It’s patronising. “I can see why it’s important to you to need to believe that”.
Even this is forgivable here, though. Because Ben is still growing. Still learning about Bajor, and the beliefs of its people, and how he fits into that as the Emissary of the Prophets. A year ago I’d have Put down latinum against him even being able to point to Bajor on a star-map. Now he’s using their religion as a case study in the need to recognise the validity of other people’s viewpoints. It’s still coming from a place of Federation-instilled privilege, but by definition, you can hardly criticise a journey for the fact it doesn’t all take place at its destination.
The common reference here would be the road to Damascus. That’s not really quite right, though. Ben isn’t having his mind changed, he’s realising how much the last year has changed his mind already. Which is how it goes, as a general rule. Most of us don’t get to see the heavens open and the voice of God ring in our head as They say “Look, mate”. Generally our revelations are about what we see in the rear-view mirror. When we realise just what it is we’ve realised. Ben is seeing the first of these, but certainly not the last. Because there never truly is a destination on this, not really. We just keep travelling our whole lives, glancing back at what we’ve passed and suddenly recognising what was blurred and indistinct while we were coming up on it. We drive with our windscreen smeared in mud, and our mirrors cut from diamond. And we never actually arrive in Damascus, we circle it, changing with each circuit. If we’re very lucky, we can, like Ben, claim that those changes are for the better.
Deep Space Nine itself is based on a circle, of course. Where Ben goes, so goes the show that centres him. I’ve mentioned how this isn’t a story about showcasing what’s coming next season. In a way, of course, that couldn’t be more wrong. Of course this is about what’s coming next. It’s just that what’s being or teased isn’t some new threat or swing into puerile grimdark. What we’re seeing instead is a glimpse of a show that has fulfilled so much of its early promise, and that is ready to bloom into something truly special. The cast, the writers, the setting, everything Deep Space Nine has to offer has been building on itself and each other over this last year, like a shanty town boiling upward and outward into a centre of trade and exchange and learning, and community above all.
A vision of the future, then, and the infinite potential it offers. What more perfect way could there be to honour both the Prophets and the best Starfleet has to offer?
Winn will one day become Kai, but even so, her day is already done.
Ordering
1. In The Hands Of The Prophets 2. Heart Of Glory 3. Tomorrow Is Yesterday
4. (The Infinite Vulcan)
[1] We should note in passing here that the “Neutral Zone” blueprint gets pressed into service for Deep Space Nine finales after this one. This is most obvious with regards to “The Jem’Hadar”, but the closest this show ever gets to ending a season on an actual cliffhanger is “Call To Arms”, and even that lacks the immediacy of “Best Of Both Worlds”, or “Descent”.
[2] As indeed was the original plan, but again, more on that when we actually reach the episode itself.
[3] Seriously, Winn can install an assassin on a Federation-run space station with sufficient technical know-how to almost get away with shutting down a series of security forcefields and stealing a spacecraft, but she can’t get someone into Bareil’s monastary?
[4] I suppose Winn might also have an issue with Sisko for commanding the mission which saw Opaka lost to Bajor. Certainly, it would be lazy to assume the fact she’s so desperate to replace Opaka implies she wasn’t bothered by her predecessor’s fate. And she clearly believes in the Prophets, otherwise Dukat wouldn’t have been able to do her so much damage in the show’s final season. If she does blame Sisko for what happened to Opaka, though, her decision to pile on the obsequiousness with the Emissary until she sees some tactical advantage to condemning him arguably becomes even more objectionable.