Covenant

DVD, DS9 S7 (Covenant)

I couldn't remember if the followers survived or not, so that added a tragic kind of tension to proceedings. But for the big comeback episode of Dukat I felt it was lacking. It had moments, such as Dukat's total belief, or the business with Mika and the child, and I always loved Empok Nor as a setting. Somehow the setting wasn't creepy any more - in the past we've had Dominion prisoner exchanges and murdering Cardassian assassins hunting people through the halls, and I can see what they were trying to do in making this the cult's base... The only creepiness was in those Bajorans believing Dukat so totally and without question, and the fact that, as cult leaders do, he only wanted to destroy them as he felt that was what he was supposed to do.

Cults are creepy and nasty, and I suppose it's logical, as the series heads towards the ultimate conclusion, that the battle between Prophets and Pah-wraiths would spread into the physical realm. It's the perfect end collision course for Dukat to be the exact opposite to Sisko, as the supposed emissary for the Pah-wraiths. It's unclear whether they really had done all this, or whether this was all Dukat's desperate attempt to be used by them, so he goes to all this trouble to organise the cult into a segment that follows him. Or whether it was all the writer's desperate attempt to use Dukat! You can sympathise a bit, because it must be hard to get a madman, an insane murderer, who killed off one of the main characters, into a story and have him play an important role that makes sense. Being mad, he is driven, but that wouldn't necessarily leave him driven into the kinds of story you would expect on the series.

So they probably did the only thing they could think of, and progressed his fascination and involvement with the Pah-wraiths in this manner. But as a story it's not the best, mainly because it's hard to accept the way these people have turned to the enemies of their former gods, and yet aren't vengeful. They happily go about preaching peace and love, and painting pictures, and they don't explain why they stopped being on the side of the Prophets. It's all a jolly little time with Dukat as the leader... until he goes against the very rules he's laid down, and so ends up deciding to kill them all! The same with Fala - Kira never finds out about what drove him to abandon his faith for this.

For an episode that tries to be complex, it takes a long time not to get very far into the issues. At first it seems to be one of those, 'things are not as they seem, and the character [Kira] learns to understand the opposing view', but it couldn't do that because the cult and Dukat are evil. It was obvious that wasn't going to happen. It also seemed a bit hard to swallow that Kira could be beamed such a distance away with the aid of a tiny transponder! If that was so, then why aren't changelings infiltrating all the top positions and simply slapping a transponder onto people like Sisko or Ross, so they can capture them?

And Dukat being mad, you're never fully sure about his purposes. Did he want to recreate life on DS9 when he was Prefect of Bajor? Did he want to get the Pah-wraith's attention simply in an effort to oppose Sisko? Did he have no plan and was just carrying out a perceived instruction from the Pah-wraiths? As I said, you can see that they were trying to do a creepy cult story, get Dukat back into the storyline, and throw up some questions about faith, but in the end it feels like a muddled mess with only the answers that we knew from the beginning: cults are a Very Bad Thing.

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