Sfdebris.net

I felt the plotline to make Sisko into Space Jesus was unnecessary for numerous reasons and made no sense with what we knew of the Prophets.

Unless the Prophets were screwing with Sisko in the Pilot.

The big problem to me is not the effect on Sisko, but the effect on the viewer. Why are we supposed to root for the Prophets at this point? They're assholes manipulating people without any care of or understanding for mortal trivials, such as, allowing someone to make decisions about their own body.

Sarah wasn't just drugged and then raped and then escaped the next day. She lost years of her life, was forcibly used to gestate and create a child, and then she ran far away immediately after-we can only assume it was the horror of having been so violated. The writers also killed her off so the viewers can never have the opportunity of meeting her later on in life so she could tell the truth of her circumstances.

Why should Sisko want to bring back the Prophets at this point? There's no threat from the Gamma Quadrant with the wormhole closed, the Prophets have been revealed to be mendacious assholes. Take the orb of the Emissary, take your phaser, and incinerate that thing and let the Bajorans learn to cope without asshole gods dictating their whims to the people. I can't root for the Prophets any more after learning they intentionally did all that to Sarah.

Really, late DS9 suffers from a lack of critical thinking. It felt like the creative team... wasn't exactly off its game, but had fractured just a bit. This is also the consequence of having a primarily all-male writing team. You have Kira judging and condemning the innocent rape victims of Cardassian officers as "collaborators," which is sadly reminiscent of people today judging WWII rape victims as criminals, and then there's shit like this with Sarah Sisko. And we know there's female fans of speculative fiction, so... maybe they should have added a few female writers to the team. This kind of thing would have then probably been corrected.

I don't really have any evidence to back this up, but to me, it seemed like things started to go off kilter after Robert H. Wolfe left the writing team, making me wonder if he had been kind of a sanity check on Behr & Co's wilder impulses up to that point.

When did he leave?

1998

But around what episode...?

His last episode was Call to Arms. During the battle scene in that episode, he symbolically appeared as one of the extras who got blown off a ledge by the sparks of doom, IIRC.

I know a lot of people like Season 6, and I enjoyed the opening six-parter a lot, but as a whole, that season was, to me, around the time that things started to get a bit... off.

Admiral X wrote: ↑Mon Oct 15, 2018 4:13 am Watching the first episode, it really doesn't make any kind of sense that Sisko or the prophets meeting him was in any way planned. This was a meeting of aliens who couldn't be much more alien to each other, and it comes off as Sisko's ability to think on his feet and do the whole explorer thing combined with his deep pain over the loss of his wife was what interested the prophets in him. If everything had been planned, the prophets would have already known who and what he was.

They are timeless. They met Sisko, then went back and created him. They said that ships going through the wormhole disrupts their existence. It would make sense that this disruption is actually forcing them into a linear existence, but it wasn’t until they met Sisko that they understood what was happening to them.

Of course, that’s just my headcanon.

My big problem with how this was presented is how calmly Joseph took it. Finding out your life's great love was a lie, you were used as a pawn to rape a woman, and you yourself were a victim of rape by deception should be about the most devastating thing a person could experience outside the death of their child, but he just shrugs it off.