Day 29: DS9, Sanctuary

Show: Star Trek; Deep Space Nine

Episode Particulars: S2EP10, “Sanctuary”

 Summary: A damaged ship comes through the wormhole, and four people are beamed aboard DS9. After overcoming the language barrier, the crew learns from the de facto leader, Haneek (Deborah May), that their people, the Skrreeans, have been looking for Kentanna, their promised land, which was supposed to be on the other side of the wormhole. Naturally, the crew wants to help (especially Kira), but they’re going to need to figure out what to do with three million Skrreeans while they find a planet for them to settle on. Tensions inevitably rise, especially when Haneek thinks she’s located Kentanna, which is already occupied and might cause friction between the Skrreeans and the locals. Basically, the episode has a decent setup…but not a lot of payoff.

Standalone Thoughts: Short version; this episode has potential, but its execution is all over the place, and probably the one I’ve liked the least so far this season. Obviously, I’ll discuss this in more detail, but I feel like this is another episode where I need to go into spoiler territory to properly discuss it. Skip down to the next bolded section if you don’t want to be spoiled.

*Extra line for safety’s sake*

My issue is that the episode doesn’t seem to fully know what it’s doing with the Skrreeans. The first part of the episode suggests that the episode will be about overcoming the language barrier, as the universal translator hasn’t ever heard a dialect like Haneek and her family use, but that gets dealt with relatively quickly. Then things start veering dangerously into preachy territory (Haneek reveals that the women are in charge on her planet, as the men are considered “too emotional”, plus Quark and Nog seem incredibly mistrustful of the Skrreeans), but they avoid that pitfall for the most part. It doesn’t help that longtime fans of Star Trek will probably assume that the Skrreeans are up to no good, just based on the fact that it’s one of Trek’s go-to plots, so we keep waiting for the big reveal. That reveal never comes, but it takes over half of the episode for the real plot conflict to show up, which winds up making most of the episode feel like filler, and not necessarily character developing filler.

So about that conflict…the minute Haneek says that their promised land is “a planet of sorrow, where the Skrreean will sow seeds of joy”, pretty much the entire audience knows that Bajor is going to be the planet in question, especially since we saw in the teaser that it’s still having issues rebuilding. But it takes another sixteen minutes before it’s made official, so everything feels like unnecessary padding as we wait for the episode to catch up with us. Given what I wrote up above, that makes things even worse. I feel like the conflict could easily have taken up most of the episode and been well-handled; why the writers chose to do it in this fashion baffles me.

The big reason for the conflict, you see, is that the provisional government doesn’t feel like it’s capable of supporting three million new refugees when they’re in the process of rebuilding and barely have enough supplies for themselves. Haneek argues that the Skrreeans can fend for themselves and won’t require help, but the government insists that if something goes wrong they (the Bajorans) will feel obligated to help, and they just don’t have the resources for that. Both sides have valid points, and in another version of this episode, we could have explored it more. As it stands, no Skrreean ever goes down to the planet to get a look for themselves, which feels like a missed opportunity. Then we get a relatively pointless tragedy and some portentous dialogue that solves the conflict, but not in a satisfactory way.

I said the episode has potential, and allow me to expand on that by offering up my own version. Instead of dedicating several minutes to the translation issues, give it one brief scene (I’d probably cut out a lot of the bit on the promenade and have things start getting resolved in Sickbay). Have Haneek discuss the plight of the Skrreeans and the prophecy, and while Sisko and the others start looking for an appropriate planet, scatter in a scene or two where Kira and Haneek bond over the shared experience of having their homeworlds subjugated. Hearing Kira’s stories makes Haneek figure out (by the second commercial break) that Bajor is the planet they’re looking for. Some ministers from the provisional government come to the station to talk things over, and that’s when we learn about their reservations about letting the Skrreeans stay. Haneek asks if she can see the land for herself, and the ministers agree. It looks barren and unpromising, but Haneek asks for a short trial run; if they can get a crop to grow in a month, they’ll be allowed to stay, which the ministers reluctantly agree to. At that point, the episode can go in a variety of directions. You can bring in the racism angle and have the Bajorans ruin things for the Skrreeans. Or you can have the farmers try their best, but while they almost succeed, something unexpected happens and destroys the crop. Whatever the reason, the Skrreeans conclude that Bajor isn’t ready for them yet, but the ending leaves open the possibility that someday, they might be.

I’m not saying my version is perfect, but it would get to the heart of the matter a lot quicker, and would probably offer up more engaging material than “Nog pranks some young Skrreeans because he doesn’t like them.” But this is what we got, so there’s not much we can do other than wonder what might have been.

How it Relates to the Whole: We get another mention of the Dominion, but conveniently, the Skrreeans don’t know much about them. It’s hard to tell if that’s deliberate or if the writers still weren’t quite sure where they were going yet. Besides that, there’s not much. We see that Kira is still deeply invested in the restoration of Bajor and that the provisional government still exists (though we still haven’t gotten much follow up from the events of the three-parter), but that’s about it. I don’t think the Skrreeans come back (though as I said, there was potential there), so this is a story that provides background information more than truly essential information.

Other: *Sisko’s command style of firm but fair makes another appearance here. However, he kind of comes across as a patient dad more than a Starfleet Commander, which, while amusing, doesn’t quite strike me as the effect they were going for.

*Quark requests that the Bajoran musician Kira asked him to give a trial run to play music “with a little more…bounce to it.” My immediate thought was of this, and I wondered if we had another homage situation. It seems unlikely, though, since this episode aired on November 28^th, 1993, and The Lion King came out on June 15^th, 1994. Since I highly doubt The Lion King stole that line and intonation from here, this is just one of those after-the-fact coincidences.

*I like this little detail here;

Based on the tiny amount of English words, this appears to be a mall directory. Given that the promenade mostly consists of shops and restaurants, that seems very appropriate.

*This is petty, but I have to admit, I don’t like the makeup for the Skrreeans. I’ll give the makeup department credit for trying something besides rubber masks and what I’ve heard some people describe as “forehead aliens”, but this…

…just makes them all look like they need to apply a lot of moisturizer. Quark even mentions that they’re shedding skin flakes all over the bar. I think this is one case where just using different clothes and hairstyles would have been an improvement.

Best Line/Exchange: Given how much I keep hinting that I’ll eventually be talking about Federation fashions, this exchange got me smirking;

(Kira has brought Haneek a dress she’d been pointing at earlier in the episode)

Kira: You seemed to like it.

Haneek: I’m sorry, I…think you misunderstood.

Kira: What do you mean?

Haneek: I-I thought this was the most hideous thing I’d ever seen.

Kira (after a pause): Well that makes two of us.

Haneek: It’s awful.

Kira: It’s horrible. (They both start laughing) Who would wear that?

For the record, this is the dress they’re talking about;

While this isn’t as bad as other outfits we see, the metal bra thing on the front of the dress definitely doesn’t need to be there.

As for the exchange, it’s not only appropriate for me, but makes me feel like the universe is telling me to put my money where my mouth is. Ok, fine. Tomorrow, regardless of if there are any particularly hideous examples, I’ll write something up. I’ll pull in examples from previous episodes if I have to. So fair warning; tomorrow’s entry’s probably going to get pretty image heavy. Let’s just hope it proves my point.

After the Fact Update: Apparently the “bad skin” look was a deliberate choice, in an attempt to make the Skrreeans look scruffy and, in the words of Ira Steven Behr, “It’s something that people instinctively don’t seem to like, so if you give this trait to a species, and you can’t understand them, and then they say ‘Help us’, you’re automatically going to want to say ‘No!’” While I see where he’s coming from, I never got the impression that the DS9 crew wanted to say “no”, so unless the intent was to unsettle the audience, it still seems like an odd choice to me.

The DS9 Companion also says that they went with the “language barrier” thing because they wanted to delay the reveal that there were three million Skrreeans, which apparently they thought made for a great pre-commercial break moment. Like I said, I don’t think that’s the thing they should have been focusing on.