All of this is fine, and for the first six season of the show, this was how they were written. Things about what they do aren't supposed to make perfect sense, but to add a bit of enigmatic alien presence to the show.Rocketboy1313 wrote: ↑Fri Jun 07, 2019 10:47 pm 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.
Then, starting at the end of season six and especially with the finishing arc of the show, we're supposed to start rooting for them. This is after they possessed a woman and made her hook up with Joe Sisko so she could be used as a walking incubator to carry the baby that became Benjamin Sisko. Additionally, during this time, she spent two years inhabiting the body of a human woman on earth, which means she should have some clearer way to communicate with humans since she PASSED as a human for years.
If these are inscrutable aliens we can't understand, fine. It's when they're asking our characters to do stuff based on the shit we can't understand and we're supposed to side with them like they're the good guys that it becomes problematic; I can't root for the prophets because their actions are, from my perspective, morally bankrupt. If they were forced to answer for those actions and perhaps gained some insight into how humanoids worked, perhaps I'd feel better about them.
But the end of the show we're supposed to be satisfied with our protagonist sacrificing himself to save the Prophets when they haven't shown they're worth that sacrifice (based on being enigmatic, unknowable, and doing some things that are really assholish).
EDIT:
I'll also add, for example, Q is also an asshole. He got like a dozen people killed in Q-Who just to prove a point. He's basically an antagonist early on in the show. But Q gets called out for his bullshit and there's not an entire religion based about him. During the time Q is forced to be human, he experiences character growth. Some of that is lost a bit later, but we learn enough about him as a character that we can empathize with him. He continues to be a nuisance, and this doesn't absolve him of his earlier actions where he's an asshole, but it's enough to make the audience identify with him.
