Episode #13: Battle Lines
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Episode #13: Battle Lines
BATTLE LINES (Prod.#413; first season) Directed by Paul Lynch
written by Hilary J. Bader, Richard Danus and Evan Carlos Somers
This episode featured the return of Kai Opaka, the spiritual leader of the Bajorans, who first appeared in the pilot. She unexpectedly arrives at DS9, taking up Sisko on his offer to give her a tour from a past meeting. Her behavior is a bit puzzling; she's appropriately beatific, mysterious and inscrutable, but there's also a finality about her, like she's expecting something unusual to happen. She seems fascinated by the wormhole and cajoles Sisko into taking her into it (in a runabout, the Rio Grande); Kira & Dr. Bashir accompany them.
The trip through the wormhole seems to fulfill some expectation of Opaka's but things swiftly go bad: they detect a distress signal and, again, though Sisko prefers to avoid this for now, Opaka convinces him to proceed. At a moon surrounded by satellites, their runabout is forced into a crash landing; Kai Opaka is killed in the crash; Kira is overcome with grief. They don't have time to grieve, however; the 3 survivors then immediately encounter the residents of this godforsaken moon, a group of bedraggled fighters who are engaged in an endless war with another group. They had been sent here many years ago as punishment or "as an example" to everyone who engage in war; these people have been altered with nanotechnology so that they automatically resurrect whenever they are killed. This is made most apparent when Kai Opaka suddenly appears, alive again.
The plot of this story bears a strong similarity to the TOS episode, Day of the Dove, my favorite 3rd season episode of that show. It's easy to like such a story - the proposition that two factions are caught in an endless war, neither side able to win permanently. It's an intense scenario. I prefer the older episode; even if this one is more gritty, its background is more vague - why was this particular group(s) selected for this eternal hell? How does this teach anyone the folly of war since these prisoners are out of sight, out of mind to the rest of the galaxy? What actually makes these fighters battle continuously when, at the same time, they wish to be free of their fate? (in Day of the Dove, an alien entity influenced the minds of the combatants).
I'm also a bit annoyed by the mysticism which pops up when the Kai Opaka character is around: she somehow knows that she is not destined to return from this trip (she gives O'Brien a necklace for his daughter just before she leaves). This kind of stuff doesn't sit well for me in a sci-fi series. At the end, her destiny seems to be to live forever on this forsaken moon. It's a grimly chilling denouement but somehow appropriate for the sacrificial aspects of such a religious character - true priests are meant to sacrifice themselves, ideally, in some form or another. Though I haven't seen the later episodes, my understanding is that Kai Opaka does return in a couple of them somehow - as unlikely as it seems at the end of this one. BoG's Score: 6.5 out of 10
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