Progress (⭑⭑⭑⭑)

FINALLY!! This is the kind of DS9 that I signed up for: a story about Bajoran problems that has no good or easy solution and doesn’t pretend to, and one that puts one of the show’s most compelling characters in a hell of a personal dilemma and never gives her a way out of it. “Progress” is a pretty simple episode, and I’m not going to try to claim that it’s amazing or riveting from start to finish. It is, however, exactly the kind of story that I want from this show, and a pretty darn good one at that. It’s remarkable, too, for sticking to its guns and not manufacturing some feel-good solution in the end. I only wish that more of this season were made up of episodes along the lines of this one!

Something that I think is important to recognize about this episode is that it is not, I don’t think, really trying to be “about” the ethical dilemma of whether it’s right or appropriate or defensible to forcibly relocate Mullibok. We’re give enough context to understand that there are some stakes to the issue (both for Bajor¹ and for him), but not enough to really chew on in a meaty “issue episode” kind of way—like, is this a case of weighing the good of a whole society against that of one guy, or is it more of a “the march of progress must not be impeded, and damn anyone who stands in its way!” scenario? I do think that we’re mostly meant to see the former, while perhaps still feeling uncomfortable about its surface resemblance to the latter (and even more specifically, to the Cardassians’ treatment of Bajor as merely a source of cheap raw materials, and their disregard for the welfare or self-determination of the people living there). But I don’t think that’s quite the point of the episode. Like, if the show had done a whole running storyline about energy shortages on Bajor, say, and how all other alternatives have been exhausted—and/or if there had been ongoing material about pockets of separatist refugees who fled from Cardassian brutality at some point and are now squatting on de facto land claims in outlying areas, and how the Bajoran government ought to interact with them—then we might have had the material for an episode that dug into the politics and ethics of the dilemma seen here. But as is, that’s not what we have, and as I see it, the episode knows this. The “issue,” then, is really just a backdrop; what the episode is actually about is watching Kira grapple with her feelings about being put in the position of having to enforce her government’s will on this cantankerous moon hermit.

As such, it becomes a piece of a larger character arc for the major—a person who has spent her life as an anti-establishment resistance fighter, and now finds herself making the difficult transition to an administrative role in support of the new order. All of her instincts align her with the underdog fighting a hopeless battle, willing to do whatever it takes to survive and defend an imperiled way of life, but as Sisko (in the episode’s most compelling scene) reminds her, she’s “on the other side now,” and she has to master a whole different set of skills, involving compromise and working within channels and, yes, weighing individual autonomy against the collective good. (One is reminded of a line from Hamilton: “Winning is easy, young man. Governing’s harder.”) Over the course of the episode, she vacillates back and forth a bit over how to respond to this challenge, but in the end, she ends up making the decision that her career, and the trajectory that she’s on as a character, require her to make—and feeling like absolute shit about it. This feels extremely real, and I love that the episode doesn’t try to paint her either as a hero or as a villain at any point, including in the end when she makes her decision. Kira’s arc here is, admittedly, essentially about the same issues the she was grappling with in “Past Prologue,” and even, in a smaller and more subtle way, in “Emissary,” but it doesn’t remotely feel like the show is just being redundant or having her “learn the same lesson” over and over again; it’s a big, complex life transition, and each of these episodes shows her dealing with it in different ways, which is exactly what one would expect.

Mullibok is an interesting character who manages to come across with a reasonable degree of complexity. From one perspective, he exists in a venerable tradition of Trek characters who stubbornly refuse to leave homes from which our people need to evacuate them (“The Ensigns of Command” from TNG’s third season leaps to mind). It can be difficult to prevent this type of character from just seeming like a fucking idiot, but while it’s certainly true that Mullibok has no feasible plan that would actually enable him to stay and survive, I feel like the episode gets away with his pigheadedness by conveying the impression that he fully understands that he can’t stay—yet still refuses to obligingly remove himself as an obstacle. One senses that the knowledge that he has to give up this home that he built for himself and has occupied for 40 years has kind of broken him, but that what “giving up” looks like for him is stubbornly refusing to budge until forced, and making whoever forces him have to live with the unpleasantness of that. When he says that if he leaves this moon, he’ll die, I think he really believes it. (Whether it’s actually true or not, of course, is another question, and one that the episode stops short of answering for us.) Also, if the episode at times seems a little torn between presenting Mullibok as curmudgeonly in an ultimately loveable way, or as actually a bit of a jerk…well, apparently that’s because its makers actually were of multiple minds on this. Specifically, writer Peter Allan Fields meant for the character to be less likeable, and even to come across as sort of manipulative, but the actor’s portrayal ended up softening him in ways that deviated from Fields’s intent. This is interesting, and I must say that I don’t entirely know what to make of it. On one hand, there’s the danger that portraying Mullibok as more of a jerk might have made forcibly relocating him not feel quite as bad…but on the other hand, as filmed, the warmth that develops between him and Kira itself might be said to let her off the hook a little (giving the impression that, yes, he’s probably mad at her in the end, but that he also kind of gets it and may forgive her). Regardless, I enjoy his folksiness, his general cantankerousness, and his obviously exaggerated/half made-up stories about his early days on this moon. (The latter might partly be simply the writers’ way out of having to flesh out his full back story in a plausible way, of course…but I’m mostly fine with that, even if I do also think that his house looks awfully nice for something that he built himself, in the wilderness of an uninhabited moon, without any advanced equipment at all!)

Sisko’s role in this episode, while small, is awesome. When he goes to the moon to talk to Kira, the episode sets us up to expect a chewing-out by her commanding officer of a subordinate who’s not doing her job. Certainly, for example, that’s what Mullibok expects, when he remarks to Kira that the commander doesn’t seem to have much faith in her. But Sisko doesn’t play into this expectation. I love, first, the bit where Mullibok starts to launch into Kira’s “story about a tree,” fully expecting Sisko to get frustrated and impatient with his bullshit, but Sisko just calmly prompts him to continue when he pauses, causing Mullibok to lost interest and give up. It reminds me of the first scene between Sisko and Kira in “Emissary,” in which she greets him with a hostile, confrontational attitude, but he (as my site’s biggest fan, WeeRogue, put it, in a comment on my review) “just kind of skillfully moves aside and refuses to become her enemy.” Repeatedly, what we see is that Sisko showed up to his assignment on Deep Space Nine fully prepared to be an ally to Bajor, but also understanding that Bajor might be hesitant to accept him in that role, and consistently demonstrating the patience required to navigate that conundrum. So, here, he takes Kira aside, and yes, he reminds her that she has a job to do, but he also recognizes that a lecture about duty, or the importance of that job, isn’t going to be helpful; after all, Kira is presumably more invested than he is in what’s at stake for Bajor! Instead, then, he makes a personal appeal to her: acknowledging the obvious parallels between Mullibok’s situation and her own life history, empathizing with how she must feel being “on the other side now,” and focusing on his concern for her, as a coworker and a friend. Watching Kira’s face throughout this scene, we can tell that this approach from her commander catches her off-guard; we watch it put her in touch with the core of what she’s struggling with emotionally, and we see just how deeply moved she is by his olive-branch-in-place-of-lecture. It’s a great moment of connection for the two of them, and I fully believe in her heartfelt “thank you” at the end of the scene.

(I do kind of wish, though, that this all had occurred in the context of a season that had been more consistently fleshing out their relationship over multiple episodes. The show got off to a really good start with this, both in “Emissary” and (especially) “Past Prologue,” but between then and now, pretty much every episode has basically ignored questions about their working relationship—very much to its detriment, I feel. But that’s not the fault of this episode, which represents a huge step in the right direction (“progress,” you might even call it).)

I don’t really have a lot to say about the Jake/Nog subplot in this episode. I like Jake, and I see value in the overall idea of his friendship with Nog, and I have no real complaints about their antics here, but there’s also nothing particularly riveting about them. Is it a little weird that Nog proves so easily discouraged in their little business venture, and Jake is the one who repeatedly has to push him from one step to the next? Yes. Is the way they luck into something, in the end, that is actually substantially profitable (enough to have interested Quark, at any rate) a bit of a stretch? Also yes. But neither of these points is really fatal. There’s some entertainment value to this little story…just, you know, not all that much.

Final tidbit: The exchange between Kira and Dax about Morn, early on in this episode, strikes me as a glimmer of the show starting to figure out what to do with Dax. She has, I feel, been a bit slow to come together as a character so far, but in this exchange, she feels more like the Dax we’ll know in later seasons than she mostly has up until now.

1. Well, sort of. This is a minor quibble, but I did a bit of a double-take when the Bajoran minister said that they were counting on energy from the moon to heat “a few hundred thousand homes this winter.” Uh…just what is the population of Bajor? Because here on late-twentieth-century and early-twenty-first-century Earth, a “few hundred thousand homes” equates to, like, a single decent-sized metropolitan area. Did the writers really intend to limit the stakes to so small a scale? ↩︎