6x21 The Reckoning

[7.3/10] I don’t mind the spiritual elements of Deep Space Nine, but the truth is that we’ve dealt with a lot of them already. Sisko’s uncomfortable with his role as the Emissary? Now he embraces it and wants to make his home on Bajor. Kira is a true believer in the way few others in the main cast are? Now she’s reckoned with her faith and her connection to the Starfleet officers in a pretty thorough fashion. Kai Winn is mercenary in her attitude toward Benjamin? Now (or at least, in her last appearance), she seemed to accept him as an instrument of the Prophets. Are those Prophets honest to goodness gods who prophesize and punish, or are they mere “wormhole aliens” whose effects have rational explanations? Well, whatever you want to term them, they know the future and, as we saw at the end of the Dominion occupation arc, will actively intervene in major events when it suits them.

There’s a few dangling threads out there. The Prophets promised Sisko that they’d extract some penance from him for destroying the Dominion fleet. How their prophecies will play out is an open question. Not every circle has been square. But many of the spiritual mysteries the show started with have been sorted, and the personal issues that fell out of them have been resolved.

In that, “The Reckoning” is something of a relaunch of that part of the show, providing supernatural fodder for the show to chew on between here and the end of the series. There is a new prophecy! And the Prophets, not just the Pah-wraiths, possess people now. And each side has champions locked in a battle to determine the fate of Bajor!

And the truth is I don’t love it. Some of that is the pure aesthetics of it. I’m always inclined to forgive Star Trek for the effects of its eras, but something about a possessed Kira absorbing lightning, a red-eyed Jake speaking in an echo-y voice, mysterious wind blowing at each of them, and the duo shooting orange and blue energy beams at one another comes off as downright silly. I can appreciate the show’s production team trying to represent the larger-than-life epicness of this battle using the tools at their disposal, but it’s hard not to roll your eyes a bit at the cheesiness of it all.

More than that, though, I’m not a fan of the form this new religious element of the show takes. Contrary to popular belief, Star Trek has long had a penchant for the spiritual and the supernatural. (Other writers used to joke about how many of Gene Roddenberry’s stories ended with some kind of god.) But there tends to be something unknowable, inscrutable, even downright weird about the more metaphysical entities Starfleet officers interact with. Their role is often to remind us of how much lies beyond human comprehension, to make us reflect on human existence and ethics, and deepen our appreciation for the countless mysteries of the universe.

The titular reckoning between the uber-Prophet possessing Kira and the demonic Kosst Amojan possessing Jake, is a bog standard good guy vs. bad guy conflict. Star Trek has rarely gone in for that sort of Manichean, good vs. evil-type deal. To the point, with its outsized heroes and villains doing battle with positive and negative energies, “The Reckoning” feels more like Star Wars than Star Trek. And I love Star Wars! But its brand of superpowered battles between light and dark doesn’t necessarily fit well within Star Trek’s general framework, let alone Deep Space Nine’s tendency toward gray areas and more committed moral complexities.

And yet, strangely, I like what comes before the supernatural showdown and what comes after it.

The before is a chance to take stock, and something of a referendum, on all the spiritual elements of the show that have sunk in so far. Dax gets to joke about whether, in Ben’s next vision, he should ask for a dictionary. Quark gets to talk about how the religious fervor is hurting business (and institutes a constant happy hour in response). Julian gets to play the skeptic about the doom and gloom prophecy, while others debate whether the wormhole instability and natural disasters on Bajor are some version of a biblical plague.

Most importantly, Jake gets to talk about how hard it’s been to see his dad incapacitated by such “visions” not once but twice over the last year. There’s a story-related reason for giving him and Benjamin a scene to ahs that out, but even if there weren’t, I’m glad that Deep Space Nine is delving into what all of this must be like for Jake. Whether you believe or not, seeing your last living parent put through the wringer, and almost lose him on multiple occasions because he seems to care about his spiritual duties more than you now and then, would be tough to take. Exploring that, and having Benjamin affirm his connection to his son, is good stuff.

I’m more mixed on what the episode does with Kai Winn. I don’t mind her being a villain, but in her last appearance, she’d seemed to not only accept Sisko’s role as the Emissary in earnest for the first time, but was contrite about the resistance she’d put up in the past. We even got to hear her explain why she thought her form of resistance and suffering was no less meaningful than Kira’s in a way that deepened and softened the character.

Now she’s back to being the stubborn, passive aggressive social-climber she was before. She gripes at Sisko for taking the Bajoran artifact du jour. (And her motives may be impure, but she’s not wrong that he probably should have consulted the Bajoran government before absconding with a recently-discovered archeological relic!) She seems to want to undermine him and supplant him at every turn. This reversion to her velvet-gloved jerk characterization feels like the show back-tracking.

Yet, she may also be the most interesting character in the piece. I think the show means to damn her with her choices and disposition here. But when none other than Kira speculates that after striving her whole life to become the spiritual leader of Bajor, it must be hard for Kai Winn to have to share that role with the Emissary, and an outsider to the faith no less, you sympathize with her. When Kai Winn kneels before the uber-Prophet inhabiting Kira and practically begs to be her servant, and the uber-Prophet just ignores her, it’s quietly devastating.

Imagine living your whole life as a true believer, who could only dream of speaking with your god, only to go unregarded and unheeded when you’re finally face to face with them. Kai Winn is in the running for Star Trek’s greatest villain. (Her only disadvantage is sitting side-by-side with Dukat.) But Heaven help me, I felt for her in that moment. Something like that would be shattering.

That feeling leads to the most clever part of the episode. The turn in the story comes when Jake walks onto the promenade, imbued with the spirit of a Pah-Wraith. Suddenly, Benjamin’s calculus changes. Over the warnings of his officers, he wanted to let this reckoning play out. He’ll evacuate the station to protect civilians and officers alike, but he believes in the Prophets’ plan now, and he won’t stand in their way. Until, suddenly, it’s his son standing there. Especially after their tender scene earlier, you might reasonably expect that he’ll damn Bajor to protect Jake.

Except he doesn’t. “The Reckoning” flips your (or at least my) expectations on their head. You’d expect that it’d be Captain Sisko who’d flood the promenade with chroniton radiation to stop the showdown and save his son. You’d expect the erstwhile Pope of Bajor to let the will of the Prophets play out, and damn the consequences.

And yet, it’s Sisko who trusts that the Prophets would protect his son, that Kira would want to be their vessel, and that this is what’s intended to happen, it’s not his place to stand in their way. He has gone from the man uncomfortable with his role in these outsiders’ religion, to a man embracing their precepts and spirituality. And it’s Kai Winn who deploys the chroniton radiation, prematurely ending the divine battle, regardless of what the prophecy says. Whatever she believes, she cares about her position in this biblical drama more.

The script says as much through Kira, who accuses Kai Winn of not being able to stand that their gods would choose Sisko and disregard her. But I’m also compelled by Winn’s statement that if the Prophets defeat the Pah-wraiths, and indeed usher in a new “golden age” for Bajor, there’d be no need for Kais or Vedeks. Regardless of Benjamin, she’s scratched and clawed and schemed to get where she is. To postpone the arrival of paradise, or even scuttle it entirely, because if it came you’d have to serve rather than lead, is as damning and compelling a motivation for Kai Winn as there could be.

At the same time, there’s something truly wholesome that emerges from this situation between Kira and Odo. Having finally coupled up, they’re adorable together, flirting after a wardroom meeting and nuzzling one another, with Kira acknowledging Odo’s softer side that he keeps from the world. All’s not perfect in paradise though. This prophecy allows Odo to politely cluck his tongue a bit, at why the Prophets are so cryptic, about how if this is so important, they really ought to be more clear. He has a point!

But he tells her that he does believe in something -- her, and it’s one of the sweetest little moments on the show. Odo doesn’t just talk the talk. When push comes to shove, and Kira is being inhabited and put at risk by the Prophet possessing her, he acknowledges it’s what she’d want. She accepted it willingly, and even if Odo loves her, even if he doesn’t buy into the cryptic nature of the Prophets, even though he doesn’t share her beliefs, he respects her and gets her. That’s enough.

Choices like that are why Odo/Kira make so much more sense than Worf/Dax ever have. There are different people in many ways, but there’s a respect and appreciation for where the other is coming from, that seems all but absent from Worf in DS9. There’s lots of series arc-heavy stuff going on in “The Reckoning”, but the part I like best may be how these monumental events also serve to reinforce the bond within a new relationship.

Despite that, “The Reckoning” is, as the Prophets riddle us once more, as much of a beginning as an ending. These two supernatural forces have been unleashed in the world, with little suggestion that they’ve been vanquished or defended for good. Kira the believer is prompted to contemplate the fact that she was chosen by her gods, and had an experience as up close and personal with them as one’s likely to have. And the closing lines of dialogue suggest that we’re officially in uncharted territory, even for gods, to where for all their wisdom, the Prophets don’t know what’s coming next. Who knows when or if the tears of the Prophets will drown the gateway to the temple.

Some of that’s probably necessary. Considering the last major event featured a deus ex machina solution (albeit an earned one), checking in with the Wormhole Aliens, factoring them into the proceedings of the ongoing Dominion war, changing Captain Sisko and Kai Winn’s connections to them leaves the board open for more to come in the show’s final season. But it also flattens and simplifies the inscrutable demigods who affected our heroes’ lives to this point.

Nevertheless, I’m still compelled by those lives, and the impact that the spiritual aspects of the show have on them. More so than arguably any other Star Trek series, Deep Space Nine is concerned with religion, and prophecy, and the divine. But it remains a show focused on its characters, as invested in the people reacting to these supernatural events, as it is in the beings who make them their playthings.