Read my recap and review of Part I here.
At the end of Part 1, Sisko encounters the wormhole aliens. Back on Deep Space Nine, things are getting tense. Dax has just been thrown back by the wormhole aliens and they know they have to go after Sisko, but they’ve also got a bunch more Cardassians breathing down their necks.
They have to claim the wormhole for Bajor, but that means moving Deep Space Nine to the wormhole before the Cardassians get there. Already we see a great team dynamic developing, with everyone – Bashir, Dax, Odo and O’Brien – working together under Kira, who is directing their strategy.
I couldn’t help comparing the way Kira was introduced to the first few episodes of Voyager with B’Elanna Torres. They both start out angry and suspicious about fitting into the Federation. But I think it takes the Voyager writers longer to give B’Elanna the same amount of depth. Further, B’Elanna’s anger definitely seems like more of a liaibility – something she has to fix – than Kira’s.
Back inside the wormhole, Sisko is communicating with “The Prophets” of Bajor, aka the wormhole aliens, who are taking the form of people from his memory, including Jennifer, Picard, Jake and Kai Opaka.
The conversation is made difficult because the aliens are “non-corporeal” beings with no concept of linear time. What we get from these scenes is an even deeper understanding of Sisko’s character and how it’s been influenced by his past. We also get some golden lines that encapsulate some classic Star Trek messages:
“That may be the most important thing to understand about humans. It is the unknown that defines our existence. We are constantly searching, not just for answers to our questions, but for new questions. We are explorers. We explore our lives, day by day, and we explore the galaxy, trying to expand the boundaries of our knowledge. And that is why I am here. Not to conquer you either with weapons or with ideas, but to co-exist and learn.”
On the station Kira is the master of tactics. She gets O’Brien to create the illusion that Deep Space Nine has massive defensive capabilities and fires all six of their photon torpedoes in an ingenious gambit to get the Cardassians thinking twice about attacking.
“If you want a war, I’ll give you one,” she says, intimidating Gul Jasad and impressing everyone around her in Ops.
At the end, once Sisko has reconciled with the more painful parts of his past and returned from his encounter with the Prophets and after the Cardassians have been chased home, there’s a little scene where Kira tells Quark: “If you don’t take that hand off my hip, you’ll never be able to raise a glass with it again.” As she walks away, Quark says, “Oh, I love a woman in uniform.” So I’ll be keeping my eye out for more lines from Quark and other characters commenting on women crew members’ attractiveness in future reviews.
What We Learned from This Episode:
- We can expect much greater emphasis on religion and spirituality in Deep Space Nine compared to the more secular/humanist Trek series that came before
- The quest for knowledge is one of the most important things for humanity, at least in the future
- We need to process our feelings about the past in order to move forward.
Bechdel-Wallace Test: Pass. There are some short exchanges between Kira and Dax during the fight with the Cardassians.
