1x15 Progress

[5.2/10] As another first officer of note once said, “The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one.” It’s hard to boil all of morality down to one sentence, and if there’s a consistent tack to Star Trek from the beginning, it’s exploring the nuances of ethics and where they intersect with character. But it’s hard for me to connect with “Progress” for the same reason it was hard for me to connect with Star Trek: Insurrection -- the core conflict runs so counter to the ethical ethos of the franchise.

The gist is straightforward. Kira is spearheading an evacuation of settlers on a moon that will provide Bajor with a new source of energy. But one farmer, an escapee from Cardassian camp named Mullibok, refuses to leave, despite the fact that his home will soon be uninhabitable. After efforts to talk him into departing voluntarily, Kira starts to sympathize with the old man, and starts to question which side she should be on.

I like the idea here! I feel like I say that for almost every episode, but it’s true. There are complicated emotions and moral considerations for moving someone from land they’ve cherished for the greater good. Rooting those knotty thoughts in Kira’s struggle to reconcile the fact that she’s used to being the underdog but is now part of the establishment is a canny choice.

But “Progress” puts too much of a thumb on the scale on “the establishment is right” notion for us to be able to sympathize with Mullibok the way Kira does. His only real excuse for not evacuating is, “I’ll die if I leave here” when there’s nothing to support that whatsoever. It feels like an old man’s nonsense superstition. The episode gestures toward the fact that Mullibok basically settled this place under desperate circumstances, and so has an emotional connection to it, but never leans into that. He’s just a stubborn coot, who refuses to go even though he’s giving himself a death sentence.

And not for nothing, he’s also really annoying! I’ll say this, guest actor Brian Keith does a good job in the role. There is lived-in character and personality to Mullibok, which is not true for every guest star in Star Trek. You believe him in the role, and he has a distinctiveness among interlopers of the week, which deserves credit even if the character he plays isn't great.

But good lord, Mullibok is a pain. He starts out by low-key sexually harassing Kira in a bid to upset her. He tells long, rambling, Grampa Simpson stories that go nowhere. He’s rude to just about everybody, and when he thinks he’s being cute, he’s that much more of a pest. I think the show thinks his behavior is endearing, and maybe for some folks it is. But I found him endlessly irksome, which really detracts from how quickly Kira is supposed to grow attached to and defensive of this guy.

His worst quality though is that he basically accuses Kira and the Bajoran Provisional Government and the Federation of being just like the Cardassians. He ascribes what she’s doing to what their occupiers once did. And it just holds no water. We don’t know much about the Cardassians’ actions in Bajor yet (though it’ll come), but suffice it to say their intentions weren’t great and their actions were even worse. The Bajoran government is relocating a couple dozen people to provide energy and a better life to multitudes more, and seemingly does so by providing new opportunities to those relocating rather than just dispossessing them. The episode wants to have a big “Have I become the bad guy?” moment with Kira, and make the viewer question whether this is right, but it’s all one big false equivalence. The very fact that the “uniforms” are indulging Mullibok all this time rather than just forcing him off his land at the first sign of trouble (let alone his mortal threats) is a confirmation of that.

And yet, as much as the main story bothers me, I love the totally unrelated subplot here. In truth, the two stories don’t go together. Kira’s story is one of personal reconciliation with who you are and where you stand in the face of someone who reminds you what you used to be. Nog and Jake’s story is...a wacky tale of teenage hijinks and business deals gone awry. They’re narratively and tonally opposed to one another. But if I could jettison the main tale in favor of the two boys’ interlude, I absolutely would.

In a vaguely If You Give a Mouse a Cookie-style misadventure, Nog and Jake try to spin a palette of Cardassian sauce Quark doesn’t want into a few bars of gold-pressed latinum. Their efforts to trade it for self-sealing stem bolts, which they then flip for land, which they’re then able to sell back to Quark for a tidy profit are a hoot. It sounds simple on paper. But it’s a hoot watching the boys bluff their way through transaction after transaction, each new set of goods seemingly more useless than the last, only for it to get them exactly what they want by some combination of luck and Ferengi-prized “opportunity” in the end.

It’s the best Nog and Jake story this side of the human helping the Ferengi learn how to read. The show finds the humor in their little quest for a little scratch without ever getting too broad, and the sense of the pair of young entrepreneurs getting in way over their heads with various flavors of useless junk is endearing as all hell.

Would that the same could be said for Mullibok’s nonsense. What bothers me isn’t that Mullibok’s in the wrong. There’s a good story to be told about someone who’s wrong but for understandable reasons. You get a sense of what the man has been through, why he has a distrust for authority, how much he has a connection to this land through the hard work over decades he did to cultivate it. He’s being totally unreasonable (and with his death prediction, irrational), but you can understand why he feels this way.

What bothers me is that the show seems to agree with him, or at least think it’s a real moral gray area whether he should get to stay or not, whether the Federation and the Bajoran government and Kira individually have just become new “bullies” to replace the old Cardassian ones. And there’s just nothing to back that up. They give this guy every opportunity, every bit of leeway, to make peace with his departure, and are only moving him to provide for countless more of his countrymen.

I don’t want to say this is a no-brainer. I half expected Kira to make some Mr. Smith Goes to Washington-esque plea that the energy project wait a year to implement the alternative so that he could stay. There’s at least some trade-offs worth being discussed. But that’s not what “Progress” delves into. Instead, it stands firm on the idea of Mullibok taking an arguably reasonable position, rather than an asinine one that would not only result in his own premature death, but deny greater benefits to scores of his fellow men and women if he had his druthers.

The most frustrating part of all of this is that one of Deep Space Nine’s most fertile avenues to explore in season 1 is Kira having to reckon with her place as an administrator and not a freedom fighter anymore. It’s not an easy adjustment to make, and there would inevitably be situations in which you’re the authority telling the little guy what to do rather than the other way around in a way that would give you pause in light of how you got started. Putting Kira into that type of situation is rich with narrative possibilities.

Here, though, she just goes soft for this pestersome crank who has no real argument beyond “I don’t wanna!” If this was about some spiritual connection to the land, or questions of whether the government would truly set him up right on Bajor, or something other than, “I’ll die (for some reason) if I leave!”, his accusations of “You’re one of them now” to Kira might carry weight. But with the story as it stands, her willingness to give up her career to, I don’t know, breathe toxic fumes with some unreasonable codger doesn’t have the plausibility or emotional force “Progress” desperately needs it to.

I’ll give the episode this bit of credit though -- it commits to Kira making the hard choice. I’ll confess, late in the episode, when Kira woke up and couldn’t find Mullibok, I assumed he had died in the night, thereby absolving the Major of having to make a tough decision while still getting to wonder if the stress of all this contributed to his death and was therefore all wrong. It would have been an easy out.

Instead, he’s alive, and Kira gives him one last chance to leave, one chance to stop and say goodbye. And when he refuses, she blows up the kiln he’s been laboring to build, torches his home, and refuses to “be a friend” and kill him rather than beam him away. The act clearly pains her, and yet she does it anyway, convinced of what he must do even though it’s unbearably difficult. There is power in that -- in choosing what you know is right, even when it comes at a cost, both to others and to yourself -- even if the road to get to that point is rocky as all hell.

What I love about Deep Space Nine, and frankly what sets it apart from most of the rest of Star Trek, is its willingness to accept those moral gray areas, the sorts of choices that make you ethically queasy but which are for the best, or at least necessary under the circumstances. Sometimes there’s something worse than a no-win scenario. Sometimes they’re situations where the right choice is clear, but it’s a hard choice to live with, because whatever good it may do also comes with red in your own ledger or emotional hardship.

I like taking that tack with Kira. More than anyone else aboard the station, she has to deal with what it means to be suddenly in charge rather than fighting those in charge. The burdens of leadership, of balancing interests, of discerning the greater good from your group’s immediate needs, are not easy. But there are times when the needs of the many win out. “Progress” doesn’t so much explore the contours of that idea as it out and out ignores them. Kira’s journey, and Mullibok’s, would be stronger if it gave them a dilemma worthy of the complex morality the series and the franchise is known for, rather than one that undercuts the personal and political point the episode seems to be trying to convey.