DS9 - The Collaborator

[Yukaphile]

I could buy Bareil's nobility leading Bajor to becoming a bigger target for the Dominion. I mean, for example, would he even have signed a non-aggression pact?

[bronnt]

Bareil, no matter how corrupt he got, would probably not have shacked up with Dukat and tried to free the Pah Wraiths. Maybe the Prophets wanted to make sure that the magic book/key got thrown in with the cell so that the door could never be reopened, permanently sealing away their enemy.

Well that really just highlights how idiotic the build-up to the defeat of the Pah Wraiths was (and how the show should have kept the Bajoran religion from becoming a significant arc). What we learn at the end of that is that the only thing needed to defeat the Pah Wraiths was to have someone burn some book. Maybe if Bareil was Kai, he could have just defeated the Pah Wraiths with some kerosene and a match.

Then again, there's no reason why they couldn't have told Sisko this weeks in advance. "There's a dangerous book that hosts spirits of demonic energy. Can you come vaporize it with a phaser?"

The Prophets are such assholes in this show.

[Fianna]

Well, they've got the "existing outside of time" thing as an excuse. From their perspective, Sisko has already defeated the Pah-Wraiths, so why do they need to do anything more?

[bronnt]

Well, they've got the "existing outside of time" thing as an excuse. From their perspective, Sisko has already defeated the Pah-Wraiths, so why do they need to do anything more?

From that perspective, why do anything? Why talk to anyone? Why mind-control Sisko's mom so they could use her body as an incubator to give birth to Sisko? Why do they care if he gets married or not? Why get on his case about leaving DS9 to fight the Dominion at the end of Season Six?

The Prophets are just assholes. Sometimes they dick with you, sometimes they give helpful information, and sometimes they fail to give you information that would prevent your best friend from being murdered by Dukat.

[Fianna]

Well, they've got the "existing outside of time" thing as an excuse. From their perspective, Sisko has already defeated the Pah-Wraiths, so why do they need to do anything more?

From that perspective, why do anything? Why talk to anyone? Why mind-control Sisko's mom so they could use her body as an incubator to give birth to Sisko? Why do they care if he gets married or not? Why get on his case about leaving DS9 to fight the Dominion at the end of Season Six?

Because they've already done/are doing those things.

Experiencing time out of order sort of precludes the idea of free will. See: Billy Pilgrim in Slaughterhouse-Five, or Doctor Manhattan in Watchmen.

[bronnt]

Because they've already done/are doing those things.

Experiencing time out of order sort of precludes the idea of free will. See: Billy Pilgrim in Slaughterhouse-Five, or Doctor Manhattan in Watchmen.

That's such an insane hack-job to explain why your characters are taking inexplicable actions. You do realize that, don't you?

Fan: "Wait, why did your characters choose to do THIS instead of literally anything else that would make more sense?"

Writer: "Because they were destined to do this."

Fan: "But you wrote this! Why did you write this instead of something structured more logically?"

Writer: "I was destined to write it this way."

[Fianna]

Fan: "Wait, why did your character choose to do THIS instead of literally anything else that would make more sense?"

Writer: "If all their actions made sense to us, they wouldn't be incomprehensible alien beings, now would they?"

[bronnt]

See, I'm fine with them being incomprehensible and weird. We don't get to understand their motivation and they're enigmatic and mysterious.

But there's a lot of major problems with how it's executed. The first is what we learn in season seven: One of the Prophets spent literal YEARS inside of a human body and reliably passing as human. So somehow she knew enough about how to act like a human in order to pass as one, yes? Which means it should be so freaking easy for them to communicate with an actual human in ways that ARE comprehensible.

The second problem is that them being mysterious and enigmatic means it's very hard to root for them. If we're not supposed to understand their goals and how they work, why should we care about what happens to them at all? There's no framework for identifying with them. All you're left with is a general appreciation for life and not wanting it to be destroyed, but for some reason we're supposed to root for the destruction of the Pah Wraiths but not the Prophets who are also mysterious.

And the third is that being enigmatic and mysterious in no way precludes them from being assholes. You've got magic beings mucking around with corporeal and temporally-restricted life forms and asking these inferior life forms to do things. They're taking over the bodies of these people, using them to get into battles to the death, and also using them to have sex with other people in order to breed Sisko. That level of personal involvement makes them like Michael Vick-an abusive dogowner breeding pitbulls that are forced to fight to the death, and Sisko unable to understand any of the reasons they're doing it. Assholes.

You can't just solve all these problems with the writing copout of, "This is how things were destined to work, duh!" It robs the universe of any agency. It's like the resolution of Lost: "All these things are happening because a wizard made some very arbitrary rules!"

[Deledrius]

It's like the resolution of Lost: "All these things are happening because a wizard made some very arbitrary rules!"

Which, just like DS9, are never communicated even by the end, and in LOST's case we find out the wizard didn't even make them up, he got them from someone else and we still don't know where any of it came from or whether any of it is even true.

[Rocketboy1313]

I feel like people are looking at the Prophets a little distorted.

Like, you can talk about destiny, relics, and whatever else but you really don't have to.

We the audience are free to ascribe motives to the Prophets based on what we see. They are not, as was shown on the show, unstoppable godlike beings. They are ethereal, can possesses people, experience time in a non-linear fashion, and seem to have a fascination with the Bajorians, the Pah Wraith have telekinetic powers and want to cause destruction, and that is pretty much the only the only difference they have from the Prophets.

To point to any instance of, "Why don't they just do..." when it comes to inscrutable aliens you kind of just have to shrug and say, "I don't know." You know, like how people talk about gods in real life.

Don't point to time travel paradoxes and say, "That is bad writing because it doesn't make sense." Like, of course it doesn't make sense. It is a time travel paradox. It is an entire sub category of Star Trek episodes.