SDS9 – S3E15: "Destiny" (Audio + Transcript) (Patreon)

Note to Listeners:

Southpaw: Deep Space Nine is back from hiatus!

This episode was recorded months before the Hollywood Writer's Strike, which began in May 2023. But in solidarity with the writers, we stopped releasing new episodes of Southpaw: Deep Space Nine. However, since the increased genocide of Palestinians, Hollywood has lost all of the goodwill it garnered during the strikes. Palestine has been a lens we used for Deep Space Nine since episode one of our watch-along series, but now that it's in everyone's consciousness, it's a great time to bring this series back from hiatus and record new episodes with Palestine in mind. Keep thinking and talking about Palestine.

Episode Description:

On this episode of Southpaw: Deep Space Nine, Sam and Scott delve into "Destiny" and how prophecies are always up for interpretation.

Find seasons 1 and 2 on the Southpaw podcast stream. Find the rest of season 3 on Patreon.

You can also listen to this episode directly from your favorite podcast player by following these instructions: https://support.patreon.com/hc/en-us/articles/212055866-Subscribe-to-your-Audio-RSS-link-on-the-Patreon-app

(Note: Many phone plans come with Paramount+ for free. It can also come with your cable package, credit card, or in a bundle, so make sure to double-check. There are also other ways to watch DS9 that we're sure you internet space explorers can figure out. Otherwise, since Scott does such an excellent job with the play-by-play, you don't have to watch the episodes to enjoy our breakdowns.)

Transcript

[Note: Transcripts are autogenerated and may contain errors.]

This is Southpaw Deep Space Nine Season 3, where we analyze Deep Space Nine and Star Trek from a political and historical lens, episode by episode.

I'm watching DS9 with fresh eyes, and Scott is our veteran Trek fan.

We are discussing Season 3 of DS9, Episode 15 – Destiny.

Scott, tell us about this episode.

I would love to.

So we find out that some Cardassian scientists, Ulani and Baelor, are coming to Deep Space Nine to help develop a relay to make communication through the wormhole possible.

So right now, between the Alpha and the Gamma Quadrant, you can't communicate.

So somewhere, someone, anyone from Deep Space Nine goes to the Gamma, they're in the dark,

until they come back.

So they're hoping that they can do this and this is sort of like the first great act since the peace treaty was signed a couple of episodes ago where Cardassia and Bajor are trying to work together.

So then Vedic Yarka, who's played by an actor who was in an Adam Sandler movie where he said he tried to make a Frosty but it wasn't the same, has arrived and said the prophets have warned them not to work with the Cardassians, that they will bring destruction.

And how does he know that?

Well, he explains that it's an interpretation of religious text shown in Tracor's third prophecy.

which says, When the river wakes, stirred once more to Jenner's side, three vipers will return to their nest in the sky.

When the vipers try to peer through the temple gates, a sword of stars will appear in the heavens.

The temple will burn, and its gates shall be cast open.

And he believes that this is all to be happening right now, that the Cardassians are the vipers and they will destroy the wormhole.

And there was a water dam recently built on Bajor.

But as of now, there's only two Cardassians that are coming.

So Kira worries that these accusations are naive.

But Vedic Yarka is steadfast and his followers will stay on the station and pray and just hope that everyone will see that

This is not good.

Ben has the Bajoran Yarka squad followed and researched to make sure they're not doing anything wrong while the Cardassians are on the ship.

So yes, he's having the Bajorans looked at to make sure the Cardassians are okay.

The Cardassian doctors and scientists are very happy for the idea of working with the Bajoran people and they believe that working with Starfleet will be good for everyone.

They sort of have a different

sort of disposition as many of the Kardashians we've come across.

They really sort of come across as, you know, intellectuals.

They are scientists, they are made nervous by formalities, they're uncomfortable that the government is involved in their science.

They believe in peace and Kira does too.

The teams are hoping that they can build the transceivers between two spots, between the wormholes, and even during the conversation, the scientists accidentally call Deep Space Nine Tarak Nor, and there's some discomfort for a moment.

This hasn't worked before, trying to create a relay, and Miles feels a little insulted by the passive-aggressive science talk of the Cardassian science team.

The Cardassian team does inform them that a third scientist will be coming to aid, and that visually shows Kira worrying that maybe they are the three vipers.

They then find out that Vedic Yakar has been getting in trouble for protesting the treaty, and Odo notes that Ben has been leaning less into his emissary title, and that that act is maybe making him not taking into the possibility that the prophecy has legs.

Kira meets Yakar.

Yakar pleads Kira to change their minds and go against the Cardassian scientists.

Dax and Miles and the scientists talk about Cardassian poetry.

Then Dejar, the third colleague, comes.

There seems to be some unease between the three.

Quark brings them Cardassian food, but the scientists don't really like Cardassian food.

Again, they're sort of like intellectuals, they're sort of elitists, so they're sort of like, we don't like the food from where we come from, we want other food.

Though Dejar throws shade about the other scientists' tastes.

The next day, the scientists and Miles are arguing about backup systems and protocol.

Miles is feeling increasingly insulted.

The team go to the relay to deploy the comm system.

Ben goes to talk to Kira, who makes allusions to the prophecy on the ship, and Ben asks Kira if she believes the prophecy is happening, and she does.

Kira reveals that she does believe that Ben is the emissary to the prophets,

which for those listening obviously probably know, but if you don't, the non-corporeal beings outside of time that exist in the wormhole that the Bajorans revere, some people call them the aliens within the wormhole, some call them the prophets.

Kira posits that maybe the prophecy was created by the prophets who again, they live outside of time, they don't look at time as linear, so they could

Ben points out that translation of ancient texts can prove to be problematic as they are poetic tomes that are translated and translated and translated and translated and so they can be hard to totally understand.

Back on the station, Gloria and Miles are working on something and Gloria, one of the scientists, doesn't understand why Miles made changes to the engineering.

So it turns out that some of the miscommunication comes out that on Cardassia, women are considered to be the superior scientists and have been giving Miles guff because he's a dude.

The squad initiate the pilot conversation between the wormholes.

The carrier wave creates a neutrino surge in the wormhole.

Because of this, it creates a comet which may be heading towards the wormhole which would destroy the wormhole.

The scientists reveal they knew that this was a possibility.

but chose not to reveal it as it posed a 2% chance and the bureaucracy said not to give any negative credence to any ideas.

The Cardassian science team is under the jurisdiction of the military and they run differently.

They also worry that they will lose their jobs.

But they have to stop the comet.

And this certainly feels like the prophecy.

Miles and Galora are working on fixing things and bypassing plasma emitters and science stuff.

Galora tries to make a pass at Miles.

She believes that his arguments were flirting, and she was into it.

Cross-cultural misunderstanding.

In Cardassian culture, angry arguments and down-talking and aggressive banter is a way of spitting game.

Ben is reading Bajoran prophecy, wondering if ever they have been correct.

This is unclear.

Dax and Ben agree to work on the relay and not get scared of prophecy and to act how they would act normally.

Ben, emboldened, has the science team meet him on the Defiant.

They go to the wormhole and use their phasers to attack the comets using a special phaser array that Miles did.

But this creates something different.

All defensive mechanisms are down.

The wrong weapons were used to blast the defiant.

So instead of vaporizing the comet, it's turning into three pieces of comet, and it's continuing to go.

The science team then revealed that Desjardins, the third supposed scientist who's been given side-eye to people,

is part of the Obsidian Order, which is the Cardassian Intelligence Agency, which is increasingly having more power on Cardassia.

So she actually is part of the sabotage because the Obsidian Order is against the treaty and she figured that if the first order was a failure, it would end the treaty and it just would look bad.

The team believe that they can make a subspace bubble using a shuttle pod

During warp, which could contain the comet, Ben will go on the shuttle with Kira, who believes she is there to help the emissary.

The Defiant goes through the wormhole.

Ben and Kira at the wormhole create a subspace field to stop the comet and will turn off some power to drift through the wormhole with the comets.

Now, everything is okay, but a couple comet fragments

in the wormhole have actually created a way to talk through the wormhole.

The prophecy was actually probably correct, but misinterpreted.

The three daggers were the comets and the temple just meant that we'd be open to communication.

It just wasn't what people thought they were.

This is what Kira and Ben believe.

Miles and Galora have a nice talk, she calls Keiko a lovely woman that she's slightly jealous of, aren't we all?

The Vedic says that he let his distrust of Cardassia blind him and make him interpret prophecy with his own bias, which never happens in religion, and tells Ben about another fiery trial the Emissary must go through.

I love the 34th rule of acquisition, that war is good for business.

It's the capitalist truism that capitalist economists will freely admit to.

The quiet part you can't say out loud is that this incentivizes war.

But what they will say, as a more broad general statement, is that incentives create behavior.

Now this is one of those DS9 episodes that blends sci-fi with fantasy where myth and religion and more of the mystical elements are also real but seems also to be commentary about how you can interpret religion based on motivated reasoning and confirmation bias so you can take it however you want.

Because religious texts are all open-ended metaphors, so if you want to use it to be a good neighbor or as an oppressor, it's all up to you.

Odo basically says as much.

The episode is rooted in trying to understand the scripture.

Scott, you began talking about this, so do you have some thoughts about this?

Oh, I absolutely do.

So translation of holy texts is something that I'm very fascinated in.

Oh yeah, there's the translation aspect of it too.

It's translated and then interpreted.

Exactly.

So, in fact, I'm actually holding in my hand Ursula K. Le Guin's translation of the Tao Te Ching.

which again, I know that this version, I'm biased towards it because Ursula K. Le Guin is one of my favorite fantasy writers and she had politics and beliefs that worked with me.

So when I read her translation and her interpretation of the Tao, I'm like, I know that it is affecting me differently than if I didn't know who she was.

Though I don't find her translations to be that different than other translations, but I also have a copy.

There's a historian and linguist named Robert Alter, who's been working on the Old Testament, the Jewish Bible.

for 30 years and he just gives historical context and translation context and history context to every single piece so you get to know a better idea of what it might be alluding to because of what was happening around the world at the time when these pieces were written.

So when Ben is talking about these are translations of translations of translations, that was very relatable to me because this is how people of all faiths, they argue about translations of translations of poetic text.

So there's a lot of confusion there.

And people often feel emboldened

And then you also have in this episode, different factions that oppose peace.

For DS9 plot, we don't yet know what those reasons are.

But I mean,

Who wouldn't want peace, right?

But in real life, we know many people don't.

Which Quark explained as to reasons why in the Rules of Acquisition.

Or should we say Rules of Extraction.

That would be the version here in reality.

Now,

There seems to be some kind of criticism about how people can be tempted to put religious faith above duty, but the blind spot is that happens all the time with capitalist beliefs, American exceptionalism, anti-communism, racism, patriotism, and so on.

It's just that some beliefs aren't considered beliefs, but just fixtures of reality, and not just biases in your head.

I thought it was a

very well acted scene by two great actors that was quite good for developing Kira and letting her understand how faith has been guiding her in her life and in the way that she's taken on this role.

And I thought it was a good conversation even though

I thought that Vedic Yarka was being a little… Manipulative?

Manipulative, absolutely, yes.

But I just felt that he was, yeah, even before he realized that he was blinded by his own biases, he had these biases that were keeping him from thinking that there could be other interpretations of the scripture.

Now with Orion we see him again in a sort of romantic situation with another science officer.

Previously we saw this with a Bajoran woman and now it's a Cardassian woman which could be taken as a bit of a twist of expectations because last time the Bajoran woman was the saboteur and this time

Maybe we were supposed to think she might be the saboteur, but she ended up being the one to expose the saboteur.

And in another flip of the script, it's women who are the science officers, not men in Cardassia.

We've had this in a previous episode where politicians and negotiators were all women because men get too angry, which is a contrast to reality that's male-dominated.

but also to Starfleet because the casting of Starfleet is also male-dominated.

So what does that say about Starfleet or even reality?

Even Cardassians at least elevate women, it seems to be saying.

Scott, give me your read of this.

What do you think the writers were trying to say with this scene?

I think the writers are just trying to show that they're good at writing and like they're

They do that with Cisco, right?

Where he's often the racist against the Ferengi.

Black people in the future can be the racist!

Exactly.

Then there's the flip of the script with courtship.

where fighting is a sort of flirting, which isn't all that wrong either.

There's all sorts of courtship, and sometimes people who butt heads can like each other.

Scott, did you ever have an experience of falling for someone you were butting heads with?

Um, yeah, yes.

Yeah, yeah, my first, my first girlfriend.

Um,

I would say there was a time in my life when I was younger, right?

There was something exciting about that, I think, right?

That somebody you had a lot of tension and conflict with

But, you know, maybe that is the part of being young is adventurism.

And then you're like, oh, yeah, I don't like that.

Maybe even when you're young, you think toxic relationships are good or codependent relationships are good, right?

We all kind of have to learn the hard way through trial and error and then have to learn about what is a healthy relationship, what is good communication.

And these are not fixed points where we get to.

It's something we're constantly working towards.

So

That type of courtship I saw that she interpreted it as is like the typical standard courtship you see in like teenage TV dramas.

And also, you know, there's comes to a certain point where I just don't want, like, where are we going for brunch to turn into a battle of wits and... You know what I mean?

Now, I do like the courtship misunderstanding because

It to me connects back to misinterpreting the scripture or perhaps suggesting meaning is always in the minds of the interpreter and it's not a real tangible thing.

I mean, it's real to you, but that doesn't mean it's real to everyone.

So Scott, how often is personal or interpersonal conflict just a result of miscommunication?

All of it.

I would say that most conflict stems from miscommunication.

to see what people are actually trying to say and to see if this ultimately is about speaking past each other and probably part of the reason why the community has been so chill and you know we haven't had that many problems is because oftentimes we find or I try to get to the bottom of it it is people just speaking past each other and that's why I often recommend people check out Wittgenstein as a philosopher who talked a lot about linguistic games and how people are constantly speaking past each other

and also could be even suffering from personal interpersonal suffering from misinterpreting or misunderstanding something that happened or not understanding where a person was coming from or maybe even misunderstanding yourself there's just a lot of misunderstanding happening and because language zooms everything into words because

We're sharing words.

Words are public and we all have access to and we are perhaps using the same words, the same terminology.

We think we're on the same page when we might be not only on different pages of the same book, might be on different pages of two different books and think we're fighting over something when it's not even something.

It's

And there's also like language has power that we don't always take into account for.

There's a type of modality of therapy and counseling called nonviolent communication that just is based off the idea that a lot of people use

on not on purpose a lot of aggressive language in the way they talk and that you're all you're setting you're setting yourself up for miscommunication because if let's say you you're I'm upset because you were late right and I instead of me saying I'm upset because you're late which would be the most direct way to to do it most people would say

You don't care about my time, right?

Now I've already created a very different premise that has more aggression to it, and it's making an assumption.

So that's why I say that most things are miscommunication, because we're not

Now do you think they are also implying the Bajoran-Cardassian conflict was all just misunderstanding

Or do you think the writers have done a good job laying down enough groundwork that it was not about that, but about extraction?

I don't think that they're really trying to say that the Cardassians were misunderstood in this situation.

It's just that Ben is being so political in making sure that Bajorans see Cardassians in a good light, which just rubs me the wrong way.

Now, speaking of Cisco, what's interesting to watch is how Cisco seems now open to prophecies and their legitimacy.

Kira was getting too faithful in this episode, but now is Cisco also becoming a man of faith?

Even asking Yarka about more prophecies?

Does he want to head down that road?

These are all interesting developments.

And there's Kira's views about Cisco.

They seem to be changing.

Yeah.

is not just about him being her commanding officer, but also her religious leader.

And also the episode seemed to start off from position that faith is bad, but then with Cisco, we're learning, hey, faith isn't a bad thing, right?

He seems to be embracing faith.

So Cisco is developing as a character.

Scott, speaking of that, Cisco's development in this episode.

Going more towards fate.

How important was this episode for that?

I think it remains to be seen.

I think, you know, I think Ben sort of uses the am I or am I not the emissary to his advantage when it suits him.

Am I joking or am I being honest?

So I think he will use it to his advantage.

And what about Kira's views about Cisco?

I mean, it's already been changing, but she's never really said much if she actually thinks he's the emissary.

So her thinking that he is the emissary will affect her ability to see things and does affect her relationship.

Because now he's not just her boss, he's also a prophet.

Well, not a prophet, a religious figure.

Then we find out Dejar is part of the CIA here to sabotage peace.

Gilora, who had feelings for O'Brien, is the one to reveal it.

Now Scott, do you think that would have happened if she didn't develop feelings for O'Brien?

Yes, because I believe that they were really trying to paint the two scientists as people that

were sort of above the bullshit and were annoyed about, they were throwing subs at Cardassia a lot.

So yeah, I don't, they were like, they were like how normal scientists are, like their allegiance is to science, not to a country or a planet.

Well, I think we wish scientists had allegiance just to science, but that too can be biased.

And then we get another reminder that Kira is also a cop as she is the one who arrests Dejar.

But here's the thing, they're all cops.

Being a cop isn't a title, it's a power structure, a chain of command, and top-down authority.

You need to know this to recognize other cops that exist in the world, like a CEO is a cop,

A landlord is a cop, a manager is a cop, the military are cops, the president is a cop, and so on.

Being a cop isn't black and white, but they are symptoms of an oppressive capitalist colonial system.

Under this same system, you could create some kind of community-centered safety patrol.

But so long as it's the same system, whether you call a safety patrol or not, they're going to end up becoming cops again, right?

Whereas if the system has changed, whether you call them a cop or something else, they will also be different because it is all contextual.

Also in this episode, we are seeing there are people on Cardassia who are serious about peace.

We've seen that before as well.

So they keep investing in that storyline.

Now, Scott,

How do you rate this episode and how important was it for mythology?

Um, so I'm going to, I'm going to rate this episode a three and a half most episodes I'm going to rate as a three and a half.

And I, because I think it's important in that it positions Kira, but aside from that, it, it doesn't.

But I thought it was a well-acted episode, a well-written episode, and it does push the story forward a little bit.

And if I just may, to just piggyback on the importance of translation when it comes to religious texts and what really, like, got me excited about this episode is that even

Scott,

Can you tell us about the next episode?

Oh, well, yes, I can.

It is it is a Ferengi adventure where Zach is back and acting a little different.

Until then.