IMO, now that I've actually watched DS9 the entire way through, I think the major issue with the whole Emissary plotline is of wanting to have cake and eat it (I know that cliche is silly but I like it): they wanted the opportunity to have plots that revolve around religion, but there is an issue when you give them a clearly science fiction origin: you either have to ignore that they are just other aliens who inhabit the universe like us, or else you have to accept they aren't really akin to capital-G God.FaxModem1 wrote:The problem is, for all intents and purposes, the great threat they will unleash are the Pah Wraiths. But, the Pah Wraiths are a paper tiger. We've seen the extent of their powers, and it boils down to possessing a middle aged botanist, with O'Brien able to kill one, Kai Winn able to make them run away by typing into a console. Dukat trying to conquer the galaxy with them just seemed silly.
It'd be darkly hilarious if the events of the finale happened, and instead of Sisko going alone with a phaser, he had the crew of the Defiant set up the same gas from the Reckoning and pumped it into the caves, with the device modifications from The Assignment, ending their reign of terror with SCIENCE!,
Prophets then say that the Sisko has fulfilled his destiny, yadda yadda yadda.
It feels really strange that the comparison ISN'T drawn more often; so far as I know it's only brought up a little bit whenever Sisko's father talks about them. As it is it feels like the interesting issues weren't really addressed:
- Do the Prophets make mistakes? This happens in a few episodes where they're convinced to change their minds on certain matters, but it's never brought into the theology; in fact it's often precluded from it. What kind of mistakes are they actually capable of making? How do we know this whole Prophet thing isn't a mistake? Or the entire Bajoran religion?
- What are the Prophets' actual motive? It also taken as a given that the Prophets are good. But if they're always interested in playing the long game and tend to overlook when individual mortals occasionally get run over in the process, how can we be so sure? The Pah Wraiths were the big misstep here, largely because once they're cemented as The Devil, suddenly all their "criticisms" of the Prophets become Obviously Wrong.
There's a lot of opportunities for a story about a Crisis of Faith but it wasn't taken with the gusto it could have had. The closest it got was in the story Rapture, where Sisko gets his Phenomenon Disease But For Space Jesus, where the issue of how this was *actually affecting people* got brought to the forefront, for all the good and bad that came with it. And if you want to make it so that the Prophets are a force for good all along despite everyone's doubts, that's fine! But it still felt like there was room for nuance, especially in a show like DS9 which THRIVED on nuance, and instead just turned it into a black-and-white slugfest between Good and Evil.
I think it's part of the issue of wanting to tell religious stories but not wanting to step on toes, i.e. suggest to the viewers at home that Kira might be an idiot for having faith if we hint too hard the Prophets might not actually have her interests at heart. But that could create its own nuance: the difference between The Prophets (the actual aliens in the wormhole) and The Prophets (the concept at the core of their religion) which, again, wasn't ever taken.
That'd actually have been an interesting starting point for an episode? Like, Sisko's contact with the Prophets retroactively makes them becomes the gods of Bajor, except in order to do so, Sisko still has to actually arrive at the celestial temple the same way so his influence on them isn't erased--so the Prophets basically had to rearrange history in such a way so that Sisko would still arrive at their doorstep. Which would explain an inherent limitation in their power; they can change things but they're very reluctant to change certain events because of how interconnected everything is, once you change one thing you have to change THIS and THAT and so on just to make sure the right events are still happening.Mickey_Rat15 wrote: Don't examine that too hard. You will just give everyone a headache. However, the nature of their existence suggests that contact with time bound beings retcons their whole history. Basically, by contacting the Prophets in Emissary, Sisko caused the Prophets to make sure he was born and create the Orbs which created the Bajoran religion.
