[7.1/10] We’re back with the same three storylines we had in the season premiere! At base, I feel the same way about them as I did in “Image in the Sand”. Sisko’s is kind of bad and vaguely problematic. Worf’s is solid, if a bit off tonally. Kira’s is great and a wonderful tribute to how far she’s come. Let’s take them in the reverse order we did for the prior episode.
I low key hate the Sisko storyline here, for multiple reasons. The simplest of them is this -- the wormhole closing is a big deal. We should get to see the consequences of it for more than two episodes. Deep Space Nine backtracked on Odo becoming a solid too, but at least we spent a little more time with him in his new state, and truly earned his return transformation. With barely any time for the absence of the wormhole to matter, boom, it’s back up and running again. The quick flip and seeming expulsion of the Pah-wraiths retroactively makes the grand tragedy of last season’s finale suddenly feel very cheap.
But if they were going to open it up again, at least it could be some kind of important spiritual and personal journey for Benjamin! Instead, he’s basically possessed. He goes where he’s told. Dax throws a baseball. He digs and finds the orb. The end. There’s no real personal or moral stakes to it. It’s an almost mechanical solution to a mechanical problem, and one that Captain Sisko does very little to earn.
The closest you can say is that his opening the chest containing the heretofore unknown orb of the Emissary, a narrative Ctrl + Z that allows the writers to summarily undo their big event from the finale, is a big choice from Benny Russell. And hoo boy, I don’t know how to feel about that.
Look, I love “Far Beyond the Stars”. But the part I’ve always had the biggest reservations over is the idea that the events of Deep Space Nine we’ve witnessed for the last several seasons are all just in Benny Russell’s head. As I wrote in my review of his original episode, there is something powerful in the idea that a Black person living under Jim Crow, shattered by the injustices of the system under which he suffers, needs his dreams of a better world to sustain himself. But the more you literalize that scenario, the more you suggest that “none of this is real”, the more you cheapen the in-universe story you’ve tried to tell for the last six years.
Now I want to be charitable. As someone who’s enjoyed elliptical works as varied as Twin Peaks and the Kingdom Hearts series, there can also be power in blurring the lines between a character’s typical reality and what is ostensibly a dream or other plane of existence. The only choice in this storyline that has any power is Benny Russell choosing to continue telling his stories, so I can't say the episode would be better off without it. I won’t pretend there isn't something compelling about the question of whether Benjamin Sisko is a figment of Benny Russell’s imagination, or the other way around, with Sisko’s Prophet-addled mind creating some kind of framework to process his own spiritual indecision or temptation around opening the magic box.
But I don’t know. There is still a novelty to seeing Casey Biggs (Damar) out of his Cardassian makeup. And I know we haven't seen the last of Benny Russell. But part of me wishes the writers had left well enough alone with “Far Beyond the Stars” and not returned to the headtrip concepts that worked best as a standalone story, instead of muddying the waters of whether what we’re watching is “really” happening, or just a story within a story. That tack can quickly start to feel convoluted and ponderous, and more to the point, sap the events we’re seeing of their stakes.
Let’s also mention the good in the story, though. Once again, Avery Brooks does a superb job. His obsession with finding the Orb of the Emissary, and spiritually-induced disregard for his friends and family in the process, is scary, in a good way. It calls to mind the scene of relentless obsession mixed with domestic strife of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and here, as there, has echoes of real life mental breaks suffered by loved ones. Sisko sells the paroxysms of both Benny and Benjamin well enough to almost make this cockamamie plotline work, and it’s a highlight.
The other big highlight is Ezri. She’ll have her day in the limelight soon enough, so I’ll save my extensive comments about her for later outings. But suffice it to say, both Nicole de Boer and the writers walked into an impossible situation with the departure of Jadzia/Terry Farrell, and somehow came up with a new Dax who seamlessly fills the space of the last Trill officer while being a completely different person. It shouldn't work at all, let alone as well as it does. How easily Ezri slots into the ongoing storytelling and character work may be the most impressive part of this episode and maybe the season.
Those positives aside, I hate hate hate the revelation that Captain Sisko’s secret bio mom was actually just possessed by a Prophet who intentionally gravitated Sarah toward Joseph Sisko to produce Benjamin. As with the wormhole, it turns something mystical and mysterious into something mechanical and literal, and the show is worse off for it.
I never needed to know why Ben Sisko was the Emissary, let alone the process of how. I ragged on Twin Peaks a bit in my write-up for the previous episode, but if there’s one thing that show did right, it's to convey a sense that the gods or demons or other spiritual forces are inscrutable and unknowable. Deep Space Nine is a rough contemporary of that series, and seemed to follow the same tack. As Odo once complained, the Prophets aren’t exactly clear in their messages, and sometimes their methods and aims stretch beyond the cryptic into the opaque.
I like that! Their crypticness can be frustrating sometimes, but it conveys a certain distance between us “corporeals” and these beings who live a separate kind of existence. They feel truly alien, genuinely apart, in a way that Q and the Organians and all the other god-like-beings our Trekkian heroes have run into over the years don’t necessarily. If you’re going to have a show where divine intervention happens on the regular, keeping those gods metaphysically separate from our human affairs, to the point that their wants and wishes are almost unrecognizable, helps prevent their involvement from feeling like a deus ex machina answer to all our heroes’ problems.
Instead, one of them intentionally boinked Benjamin’s dad to produce the Emissary. Why is that necessary? Not to go all Rise of Skywalker with my criticisms, but I liked the idea that there was a certain randomness to Captain Sisko being the Emissary. He’s not Bajoran. He hasn’t led an especially Starfleet career before boarding Deep Space Nine. He’s shown no prior signs of having magic powers or a special connection to the supernatural.
Instead, he just happens to be the right man for the job, both of running the station and being a spiritual focal point for Bajor. The idea that it could have been anybody, and somehow ended up being Benjamin, simply because he rose to the occasion with a strength he didn’t know he had, is a moving idea. The apparent randomness of it is a big part of what gives that blessing and curse its power.
Now, instead, it’s just a quirk of biology. Now, it’s just a bog standard ploy from some hidden god. Now, it is knowable and definable, in a way that trivializes it and takes away much of the mystique. No one ever asked for a technical explanation of how Benjamin became the Emissary. That's not a mystery that needed to be solved. And answering the question detracts from, rather than adds to, the mythos of the series by bringing it down to the level of mortals’ schemes.
The final kick in the pants is that the reveal that Benjamin’s warning from last season -- that he is “of Bajor” and thus probably shouldn't lead the invasion of Cardassia -- was a “false vision” from the Pah-wraiths, rather than a real invocation from the Prophets. Again, why? Why is this something we needed?
As with the presto change-o wormhole switch, it completely neuters the sense of tragedy from last season’s finale. Captain Sisko being torn between his duties as a Starfleet officer and his mystical obligations as the Emissary has long been a strong motif in Deep Space Nine. Benjamin picking the Starfleet side of that and paying a spiritual cost for it is good storytelling.
By contrast, him choosing a side, and it turning out to be the right call because the other side was just trying to trick him the whole time, is cheap and unsatisfying. It magically turns Ben’s wrong into a right, which is way less interesting than him making an error in judgment and having to build himself back up through the wreckage of its consequences. “You were right all along, but for reasons you didn’t even have the faintest inkling of,” does not make for good drama. I can't adequately express my disappointment with the way “Shadows and Symbols” does so much to undo the strongest choices from “Tears of the Prophets”, if not the whole series. It’s really that problematic from a storytelling perspective.
Other than that, Mrs. Karidian, how was the play?
Well, the rest wasn’t bad! The other two storylines have their merits, and if they weren’t paired with an arc-wrecking plot thread, this episode might easily saunter into “very good!” territory.
The Worf material is generally strong. Once again, the overall concept of Jadzia and Worf’s friends banding together, both to honor Jadzia’s memory and help Worf, is heartwarming. Worf feeling affronted by his friends’ presence given their status as rival suitors, only to get another wise pep talk from Martok (pep-Mar-talk?) and turn around to tell Quark, Miles, and Julian how much they meant to Dax is lovely. And Worf completing his mission, saying a prayer in his wife’s name, and finally achieving some peace is cathartic.
Unfortunately, we run into some of the same tonal problems from the prior episode. It’s hard to take this material as seriously as it deserves to be when there’s a layer of goofiness over the interactions between and among Worf, Julian, Miles, and Quark. And why-oh-why are we still doing the “pining after Dax” thing with Quark and Dr. Bashir at this stage? It should have been left behind in season 1, to be frank. And it weakens Worf’s character arc because he has a right to be mad if they’re framing their devotion to this cause in the guise of “Gee, I wish I’d gotten to schtup Dax.” It’s an odd tack to take for what is, on paper, a strong narrative and emotional throughline.
A much more minor complaint is that destroying a Dominion shipyard by triggering a sunburst doesn’t seem like the kind of glorious battle that would earn dead Klingons a place in Sto-vo-kor. But they do eventually get into a desperate skirmish with the Jem’Hadar, which seems close enough to pass muster, even if it’s convenient that the same solar explosion that wrecks the Jem’Hadar ships leaves Martok’s ship completely unscathed. A little perfunctory, but good enough for me under the circumstances.
(As an aside, remember when Jem’Hadar vessels absolutely wrecked a galaxy class starship like it was nothing? Now two of them can't seem to handle a single Klingon ship. Maybe we can credit the proximity to the sun’s surface or something.)
Connected to the skirmish with the Jem’Hadar, I realized that I’d neglected to mention the continuing adventures of Weyoun and Damar. The idea that Damar has taken to drinking, to womanizing, to barely listening to his Dominion supervisor, is an intriguing development. I remain continually impressed at how much shading Deep Space Nine gives to practically every character, and seeing more dimension in Damar is of a piece with that approach.
Jeffrey Combs’ Weyoun shines in every scene as always, and the suggestion of infighting and mistrust among the Dominion and its Alpha Quadrant allies is a promising story thread. As much as I dislike the wormhole just popping back open like it was nothing, the threat of Dominion ships coming back through the wormhole to change the balance of power adds an ominous tone to everything else going on.
That just leaves Kira’s story which, once again, is great. “Shadows and Symbols” aptly continues the tense dynamic from the last episode. The sense of this as a game of chicken between Kira and Cretak, with both waiting for the other to blink, builds tension like gangbusters. I particularly appreciate the way we cut between the two of them -- Kira being counseled by a supportive but apprehensive Odo, Cretak being talked down by a concerned Admiral Ross -- that shows the parallels between them and makes each seem like formidable players. The question of whether Kira will risk personal destruction or Cretak will risk damaging the Federation alliance puts a lot at stake in the personal standoff.
I like where it lands. Kira is as steely as ever. Her history as a rebel and a Bajoran partisan gives her the credibility for opponents to think that she’s crazy enough to fire on any ship trying to run her blockade. And I love the fact that the wormhole reopening is, implicitly, taken by her as a sign from the Prophets that she’s doing right and protecting Bajor. It’s the kind of vaguer intervention I can appreciate. And it’s nice to see this as the final consecration for Kira as a leader, proof that she has not just the mettle but the discernment to sit in the big chair, make the hard calls, and win the day. Once again, you love to see it.
And I’ll say this much. From a production standpoint, as much as shake my head at the Sisko business, the show makes great hay from adopting the Return of the Jedi approach and cutting between three different climaxes at the same time. On their own, Worf and company fighting off some Dominion goons and Sisko opening a box isn’t that big a deal. But mashing it up with Kira’s standoff, letting the tension rise before jumping to another vantage point, lets each storyline draft off the other and helps give the sense of these moments as one grand crescendo rather than three distinct plots. The results are legitimately thrilling.
Now we’re back to normal. Sisko is back on DS9, with his two-episode absence making his departure seem less interesting, but with his comrades having risen to multiple challenges without his guidance. The status quo is king, even in 1990s Trek’s boldest and most serialized series. Give or take a new Dax to shake things up.
I want to say the future is bright. Her arrival means a great reshaping of the dynamics among our heroes. Kira has a supportive partner and is more than ready to rise to the occasion. The rest of the crew has come together in the toughest of times, and Sisko is back where he belongs. The Dominion War rages on, but everyone’s where they ought to be, give or take Jadzia,
But when the show dips into the mythos it’s been building for six seasons, and fumbles it this hard, there’s reason for pause. In DS9 we trust. Six years of quality have earned that. But despite being solid enough, these two inaugural episodes of the final season are not an auspicious start.
Review by Andrew BloomVIP 9BlockedParentSpoilers2024-05-16T00:10:32Z
[7.1/10] We’re back with the same three storylines we had in the season premiere! At base, I feel the same way about them as I did in “Image in the Sand”. Sisko’s is kind of bad and vaguely problematic. Worf’s is solid, if a bit off tonally. Kira’s is great and a wonderful tribute to how far she’s come. Let’s take them in the reverse order we did for the prior episode.
I low key hate the Sisko storyline here, for multiple reasons. The simplest of them is this -- the wormhole closing is a big deal. We should get to see the consequences of it for more than two episodes. Deep Space Nine backtracked on Odo becoming a solid too, but at least we spent a little more time with him in his new state, and truly earned his return transformation. With barely any time for the absence of the wormhole to matter, boom, it’s back up and running again. The quick flip and seeming expulsion of the Pah-wraiths retroactively makes the grand tragedy of last season’s finale suddenly feel very cheap.
But if they were going to open it up again, at least it could be some kind of important spiritual and personal journey for Benjamin! Instead, he’s basically possessed. He goes where he’s told. Dax throws a baseball. He digs and finds the orb. The end. There’s no real personal or moral stakes to it. It’s an almost mechanical solution to a mechanical problem, and one that Captain Sisko does very little to earn.
The closest you can say is that his opening the chest containing the heretofore unknown orb of the Emissary, a narrative Ctrl + Z that allows the writers to summarily undo their big event from the finale, is a big choice from Benny Russell. And hoo boy, I don’t know how to feel about that.
Look, I love “Far Beyond the Stars”. But the part I’ve always had the biggest reservations over is the idea that the events of Deep Space Nine we’ve witnessed for the last several seasons are all just in Benny Russell’s head. As I wrote in my review of his original episode, there is something powerful in the idea that a Black person living under Jim Crow, shattered by the injustices of the system under which he suffers, needs his dreams of a better world to sustain himself. But the more you literalize that scenario, the more you suggest that “none of this is real”, the more you cheapen the in-universe story you’ve tried to tell for the last six years.
Now I want to be charitable. As someone who’s enjoyed elliptical works as varied as Twin Peaks and the Kingdom Hearts series, there can also be power in blurring the lines between a character’s typical reality and what is ostensibly a dream or other plane of existence. The only choice in this storyline that has any power is Benny Russell choosing to continue telling his stories, so I can't say the episode would be better off without it. I won’t pretend there isn't something compelling about the question of whether Benjamin Sisko is a figment of Benny Russell’s imagination, or the other way around, with Sisko’s Prophet-addled mind creating some kind of framework to process his own spiritual indecision or temptation around opening the magic box.
But I don’t know. There is still a novelty to seeing Casey Biggs (Damar) out of his Cardassian makeup. And I know we haven't seen the last of Benny Russell. But part of me wishes the writers had left well enough alone with “Far Beyond the Stars” and not returned to the headtrip concepts that worked best as a standalone story, instead of muddying the waters of whether what we’re watching is “really” happening, or just a story within a story. That tack can quickly start to feel convoluted and ponderous, and more to the point, sap the events we’re seeing of their stakes.
Let’s also mention the good in the story, though. Once again, Avery Brooks does a superb job. His obsession with finding the Orb of the Emissary, and spiritually-induced disregard for his friends and family in the process, is scary, in a good way. It calls to mind the scene of relentless obsession mixed with domestic strife of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and here, as there, has echoes of real life mental breaks suffered by loved ones. Sisko sells the paroxysms of both Benny and Benjamin well enough to almost make this cockamamie plotline work, and it’s a highlight.
The other big highlight is Ezri. She’ll have her day in the limelight soon enough, so I’ll save my extensive comments about her for later outings. But suffice it to say, both Nicole de Boer and the writers walked into an impossible situation with the departure of Jadzia/Terry Farrell, and somehow came up with a new Dax who seamlessly fills the space of the last Trill officer while being a completely different person. It shouldn't work at all, let alone as well as it does. How easily Ezri slots into the ongoing storytelling and character work may be the most impressive part of this episode and maybe the season.
Those positives aside, I hate hate hate the revelation that Captain Sisko’s secret bio mom was actually just possessed by a Prophet who intentionally gravitated Sarah toward Joseph Sisko to produce Benjamin. As with the wormhole, it turns something mystical and mysterious into something mechanical and literal, and the show is worse off for it.
I never needed to know why Ben Sisko was the Emissary, let alone the process of how. I ragged on Twin Peaks a bit in my write-up for the previous episode, but if there’s one thing that show did right, it's to convey a sense that the gods or demons or other spiritual forces are inscrutable and unknowable. Deep Space Nine is a rough contemporary of that series, and seemed to follow the same tack. As Odo once complained, the Prophets aren’t exactly clear in their messages, and sometimes their methods and aims stretch beyond the cryptic into the opaque.
I like that! Their crypticness can be frustrating sometimes, but it conveys a certain distance between us “corporeals” and these beings who live a separate kind of existence. They feel truly alien, genuinely apart, in a way that Q and the Organians and all the other god-like-beings our Trekkian heroes have run into over the years don’t necessarily. If you’re going to have a show where divine intervention happens on the regular, keeping those gods metaphysically separate from our human affairs, to the point that their wants and wishes are almost unrecognizable, helps prevent their involvement from feeling like a deus ex machina answer to all our heroes’ problems.
Instead, one of them intentionally boinked Benjamin’s dad to produce the Emissary. Why is that necessary? Not to go all Rise of Skywalker with my criticisms, but I liked the idea that there was a certain randomness to Captain Sisko being the Emissary. He’s not Bajoran. He hasn’t led an especially Starfleet career before boarding Deep Space Nine. He’s shown no prior signs of having magic powers or a special connection to the supernatural.
Instead, he just happens to be the right man for the job, both of running the station and being a spiritual focal point for Bajor. The idea that it could have been anybody, and somehow ended up being Benjamin, simply because he rose to the occasion with a strength he didn’t know he had, is a moving idea. The apparent randomness of it is a big part of what gives that blessing and curse its power.
Now, instead, it’s just a quirk of biology. Now, it’s just a bog standard ploy from some hidden god. Now, it is knowable and definable, in a way that trivializes it and takes away much of the mystique. No one ever asked for a technical explanation of how Benjamin became the Emissary. That's not a mystery that needed to be solved. And answering the question detracts from, rather than adds to, the mythos of the series by bringing it down to the level of mortals’ schemes.
The final kick in the pants is that the reveal that Benjamin’s warning from last season -- that he is “of Bajor” and thus probably shouldn't lead the invasion of Cardassia -- was a “false vision” from the Pah-wraiths, rather than a real invocation from the Prophets. Again, why? Why is this something we needed?
As with the presto change-o wormhole switch, it completely neuters the sense of tragedy from last season’s finale. Captain Sisko being torn between his duties as a Starfleet officer and his mystical obligations as the Emissary has long been a strong motif in Deep Space Nine. Benjamin picking the Starfleet side of that and paying a spiritual cost for it is good storytelling.
By contrast, him choosing a side, and it turning out to be the right call because the other side was just trying to trick him the whole time, is cheap and unsatisfying. It magically turns Ben’s wrong into a right, which is way less interesting than him making an error in judgment and having to build himself back up through the wreckage of its consequences. “You were right all along, but for reasons you didn’t even have the faintest inkling of,” does not make for good drama. I can't adequately express my disappointment with the way “Shadows and Symbols” does so much to undo the strongest choices from “Tears of the Prophets”, if not the whole series. It’s really that problematic from a storytelling perspective.
Other than that, Mrs. Karidian, how was the play?
Well, the rest wasn’t bad! The other two storylines have their merits, and if they weren’t paired with an arc-wrecking plot thread, this episode might easily saunter into “very good!” territory.
The Worf material is generally strong. Once again, the overall concept of Jadzia and Worf’s friends banding together, both to honor Jadzia’s memory and help Worf, is heartwarming. Worf feeling affronted by his friends’ presence given their status as rival suitors, only to get another wise pep talk from Martok (pep-Mar-talk?) and turn around to tell Quark, Miles, and Julian how much they meant to Dax is lovely. And Worf completing his mission, saying a prayer in his wife’s name, and finally achieving some peace is cathartic.
Unfortunately, we run into some of the same tonal problems from the prior episode. It’s hard to take this material as seriously as it deserves to be when there’s a layer of goofiness over the interactions between and among Worf, Julian, Miles, and Quark. And why-oh-why are we still doing the “pining after Dax” thing with Quark and Dr. Bashir at this stage? It should have been left behind in season 1, to be frank. And it weakens Worf’s character arc because he has a right to be mad if they’re framing their devotion to this cause in the guise of “Gee, I wish I’d gotten to schtup Dax.” It’s an odd tack to take for what is, on paper, a strong narrative and emotional throughline.
A much more minor complaint is that destroying a Dominion shipyard by triggering a sunburst doesn’t seem like the kind of glorious battle that would earn dead Klingons a place in Sto-vo-kor. But they do eventually get into a desperate skirmish with the Jem’Hadar, which seems close enough to pass muster, even if it’s convenient that the same solar explosion that wrecks the Jem’Hadar ships leaves Martok’s ship completely unscathed. A little perfunctory, but good enough for me under the circumstances.
(As an aside, remember when Jem’Hadar vessels absolutely wrecked a galaxy class starship like it was nothing? Now two of them can't seem to handle a single Klingon ship. Maybe we can credit the proximity to the sun’s surface or something.)
Connected to the skirmish with the Jem’Hadar, I realized that I’d neglected to mention the continuing adventures of Weyoun and Damar. The idea that Damar has taken to drinking, to womanizing, to barely listening to his Dominion supervisor, is an intriguing development. I remain continually impressed at how much shading Deep Space Nine gives to practically every character, and seeing more dimension in Damar is of a piece with that approach.
Jeffrey Combs’ Weyoun shines in every scene as always, and the suggestion of infighting and mistrust among the Dominion and its Alpha Quadrant allies is a promising story thread. As much as I dislike the wormhole just popping back open like it was nothing, the threat of Dominion ships coming back through the wormhole to change the balance of power adds an ominous tone to everything else going on.
That just leaves Kira’s story which, once again, is great. “Shadows and Symbols” aptly continues the tense dynamic from the last episode. The sense of this as a game of chicken between Kira and Cretak, with both waiting for the other to blink, builds tension like gangbusters. I particularly appreciate the way we cut between the two of them -- Kira being counseled by a supportive but apprehensive Odo, Cretak being talked down by a concerned Admiral Ross -- that shows the parallels between them and makes each seem like formidable players. The question of whether Kira will risk personal destruction or Cretak will risk damaging the Federation alliance puts a lot at stake in the personal standoff.
I like where it lands. Kira is as steely as ever. Her history as a rebel and a Bajoran partisan gives her the credibility for opponents to think that she’s crazy enough to fire on any ship trying to run her blockade. And I love the fact that the wormhole reopening is, implicitly, taken by her as a sign from the Prophets that she’s doing right and protecting Bajor. It’s the kind of vaguer intervention I can appreciate. And it’s nice to see this as the final consecration for Kira as a leader, proof that she has not just the mettle but the discernment to sit in the big chair, make the hard calls, and win the day. Once again, you love to see it.
And I’ll say this much. From a production standpoint, as much as shake my head at the Sisko business, the show makes great hay from adopting the Return of the Jedi approach and cutting between three different climaxes at the same time. On their own, Worf and company fighting off some Dominion goons and Sisko opening a box isn’t that big a deal. But mashing it up with Kira’s standoff, letting the tension rise before jumping to another vantage point, lets each storyline draft off the other and helps give the sense of these moments as one grand crescendo rather than three distinct plots. The results are legitimately thrilling.
Now we’re back to normal. Sisko is back on DS9, with his two-episode absence making his departure seem less interesting, but with his comrades having risen to multiple challenges without his guidance. The status quo is king, even in 1990s Trek’s boldest and most serialized series. Give or take a new Dax to shake things up.
I want to say the future is bright. Her arrival means a great reshaping of the dynamics among our heroes. Kira has a supportive partner and is more than ready to rise to the occasion. The rest of the crew has come together in the toughest of times, and Sisko is back where he belongs. The Dominion War rages on, but everyone’s where they ought to be, give or take Jadzia,
But when the show dips into the mythos it’s been building for six seasons, and fumbles it this hard, there’s reason for pause. In DS9 we trust. Six years of quality have earned that. But despite being solid enough, these two inaugural episodes of the final season are not an auspicious start.