DS9 - The Collaborator

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bronnt
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Re: DS9 - The Collaborator

Post by bronnt »

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.
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.

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.
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Re: DS9 - The Collaborator

Post by Rocketboy1313 »

bronnt wrote: Fri Jun 07, 2019 11:30 pm 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.
I don't know. We kind of have to measure their behavior against the Founders (False Gods) who are burning the universe to establish their theocratic empire, and the Pah Wraiths... Who are Lovecraftian fire ghosts that are pretty evil. Yeah, the Bajorian Yahweh might have made that woman give birth to Sisko (Bajorian Jesus) but it also contributed to the end of the Pah Wraith and the Dominion. I still think they are the "good" guys.

I am sure Section 31 thinks of the Prophets as more helpful than Q or the Organians when it comes to peace and prosperity for the Federation.
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Deledrius
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Re: DS9 - The Collaborator

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Exactly, bronnt!
Rocketboy1313 wrote: Fri Jun 07, 2019 10:47 pm 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.
Well, both are examples of bad writing. It's weak when people use that as an excuse for problems in their religion, too, but writers have control over that when writing a show. You can choose to not make things an unmotivated mess. Same with Time Travel. People treat it like it's impossible to write it well, just because it's frequently used as a crutch and writers know the audience will "shut off their brain" and they can get away with it. I'm not a zombie. I can tell when someone's trying to pull one over on me, and I don't enjoy it. Some time travel stories actually make sense, because someone cared enough to make it do so. You can write a paradox that makes sense. There's a difference.
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Re: DS9 - The Collaborator

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Rocketboy1313 wrote: Sat Jun 08, 2019 3:49 am Yeah, the Bajorian Yahweh might have made that woman give birth to Sisko (Bajorian Jesus) but it also contributed to the end of the Pah Wraith and the Dominion. I still think they are the "good" guys.
Maybe if they were shown as people having to make difficult decisions when pushed to the brink. The show did this excellently for the war plot, after all: We still recognize Sisko as a protagonist and even a heroic character after his dirty actions in "In the Pale Moonlight." (Though his actions in "For the Uniform" are even worse and for more petty reasons).

The problem is that the absolute defeat of the Pah Wraiths was SO easy: Someone just had to burn a book. Even if we assume that, for some reason, the book could only be destroyed in the fire caves (which wasn't established at all), it's still something that could have been done easily because people can freely just walk down into them. Keiko went to check them out on a whim, and she's a woman who had her school firebombed by Bajoran fundamentalists.

If the Prophets being assholes, at least show us that these are difficult actions taken in response to hard problems. Why didn't Opaka, with her deep connection to the Prophets, get a vision telling her to defeat the Pah Wraiths by burning a single book decades ago?
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Re: DS9 - The Collaborator

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The Prophets had to be arm-twisted to get involved in the Dominion War. Besides that, they're guilty of rape. Against two people. To conceive life. That hardly makes somebody a good guy.
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Re: DS9 - The Collaborator

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bronnt wrote: Sat Jun 08, 2019 5:22 am The problem is that the absolute defeat of the Pah Wraiths was SO easy: Someone just had to burn a book. Even if we assume that, for some reason, the book could only be destroyed in the fire caves (which wasn't established at all), it's still something that could have been done easily because people can freely just walk down into them. Keiko went to check them out on a whim, and she's a woman who had her school firebombed by Bajoran fundamentalists.
It's not directly stated, but I kinda always had the impression that it was the supernatural fire which was capable of burning the book (at least in a way that seals them away forever, since the book was the doorway for them), and they weren't going to do that on purpose, hence the sacrifce by Sisko to make it happen. But I really have nothing I can recall from the actual episode to back this up.

Whether destroying the book in a mundane way would have had the same effect, who knows? We were never given any rules for any of it, outside of the specific threat in an individual episode's confrontation (Keiko's, Jake's, and finally Dukat's possessions).
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Re: DS9 - The Collaborator

Post by Fianna »

Are we supposed to root for the Prophets in the final season? Or are we just supposed to root against the Pah-Wraiths (who want to burn down the whole universe), and the Prophets happen to be on the same side as us on that?
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Re: DS9 - The Collaborator

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I honestly think a lot of it is owing to Ron D. Moore's influence and them being turned into a more traditional-style religion.
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Re: DS9 - The Collaborator

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Yeah, because using a woman's body to conceive a child against her will is classic religion, isn't it? And I mean that unironically. Either A) Moore wasn't thinking about it or B) He was deliberately taking a shot at religion. Which seems unlikely given Sisko himself never calls out the Prophets on this.
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Re: DS9 - The Collaborator

Post by Darth Wedgius »

GIven that this was DS9, should anyone be surprised that the Prophets might be in a gray area? This is the Trek series where the main hero is an accomplice to murder.

The Prophets are implied to be responsible for the alpha quandrant forces doing better against the Dominion; when the wormhole collapsed after Dukat let a Pah Wraith out, the alpha quadrant forces started to lose ground. When the wormhole came back, that reversed. The Prophets ate a bunch of Dominion ships in the wormhole (after Sisko forced them into it). The Prophets are heroic.

The prophets also took control of a woman's life. For years, IIRC. The Prophets are villainous.

Maybe the Prophets are just so alien that they really can't understand what we would object to.
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