Rewatcher’s note: There will be no DS9 Rewatch on Friday the 26th of December. We’ll be back on Tuesday the 30th with “It’s Only a Paper Moon.” Happy holidays!
“Covenant”
Written by Rene Echevarria
Directed by John Kretchmer
Season 7, Episode 9
Production episode 40510-559
Original air date: November 25, 1998
Stardate: unknown
Station log: Kira joins Odo, Bashir, and Dax for a drink after services. They talk about faith and religions and stuff for a while, and then Kira goes back to her quarters, where she’s visited by Vedek Fala, who was her religion teacher growing up in the refugee camp. He gives Kira a present, which turns out to be a homing beacon that transports her to Empok Nor. The station has been taken over by the Pah-wraith cult, under the guidance of their new master, Dukat.
Dukat and Kira talk, the former sounding exactly like every cult leader ever, the latter taking even more snotty shots than usual at him. Dukat insists that the Pah-wraiths were cast from the Celestial Temple because they wanted to take a more active role in Bajor’s fate, and the Prophets didn’t like that. Dukat also claims that he’s the Emissary of the Pah-wraiths. He’d become their vessel solely in order to get revenge on Sisko, but now he sees that there’s a greater plan at work.
He brought the Bajorans who worship the Pah-wraiths to Empok Nor so they can cleanse themselves in preparation for the Pah-wraiths’ grand plan for Bajor. Kira is pretty sure that their plan has something to do with Dukat ruling Bajor again. He brought Kira there because he wants her to join them—to join him.
Sisko, Odo, Worf, and O’Brien investigate Kira’s disappearance, but all they know for sure is that a Dominion transporter took her away, and she could be as far as three light-years away in any direction.
On Empok Nor, Fala visits Kira, revealing that he became part of the Pah-wraith cult toward the end of the occupation. He accepted Dukat as their master because he believes the Pah-wraiths washed him clean and allowed him to start anew. He takes her on a tour of the station, where they meet Mika, who’s pregnant and about to give birth. She also meets Benyan, Mika’s husband, who’s painting a mural of Dukat on one of the bulkheads. Kira is appalled to realize that the people there can’t procreate without Dukat’s consent. They all take a vow of abstinence as part of their covenant with Dukat and with the Pah-wraiths.
During services, Kira manages to get her hands on a phaser and holds it on Dukat—but then everyone steps between her and Dukat, willing to die to protect him. She’s quickly subdued, and Dukat takes her to her cabin to tend to her. He brings her food, and she contemplates stabbing him with a fork, but Dukat reminds her that that’ll just make him a martyr.
He insists that the occupation would’ve been much worse without him, and she throws his tryst with her mother in his face. As far as she’s concerned, all she sees is a good-parts version of the occupation: he has the station, he has Bajorans to serve his every whim, and best of all, this time the Bajorans do actually love him. For his part, Dukat thinks Kira was sent as a test to him: if he can convert her, he can convert any Bajoran.
Mika goes into labor. Benyan is thrilled to be the father of the first child born to the community. However, the child she gives birth to is half-Bajoran and half-Cardassian. Dukat spins a bullshit story that the Pah-wraiths have changed the baby in the womb into a symbol of the covenant between him and them.
Kira is stunned that Fala actually believes that this is anything other than Dukat trying to cover up his having had sex with Mika—especially given the look on Mika’s face after she gives birth. When she and Fala talk to Benyan, he’s obviously a bit strained, and reveals that, before Dukat gave permission for them to have children, he prayed with them many times, both together and separately—so yeah, Dukat “prayed” with Mika alone. Wah hey!
Dukat finds Mika at an airlock, and they confirm in their furtive conversation that they did sleep together in what Dukat claims is a moment of weakness. He then closes her in the airlock and opens the other door. However, Kira and Fala arrive and save her. Dukat insists it was an accident, but Kira doesn’t buy that. And when Dukat tries to lead the cultists in prayer, Fala doesn’t join in.
In his quarters, Dukat kneels before an altar and apologizes to the Pah-wraiths for his moment of weakness with Mika, and he fears that Mika will reveal the truth when she awakens, and so he asks them for guidance.
Then he rings the bell for services, albeit not at the usual time. Dukat announces that he received his final vision from the Pah-wraiths, who have asked them all to join the Pah-wraiths in their battle against the Prophets. They will all abandon their corporeal bodies in the morning to join this battle. Kira realizes that Dukat’s killing them all to avoid losing all his followers and having them turn on him. He’s using a drug the Obsidian Order developed that kills quickly and turns the body to dust—and he insists to Kira that he’s happy to do it. He’s also sent a message to DS9 so that they can come fetch her when it’s all over.
Kira manages to break out of her cabin just as Dukat starts his little mass suicide. Kira attacks him before he takes his pill, and he drops it onto the floor as he knocks over a plate of the pills. Dukat has lost the pill he was going to take, and he hesitates, unwilling to pick up another pill. Fala hands him another, but he refuses to take it. Kira realizes that his own pill was a placebo that her attack made him lose. He is forced to admit that he never intended to die, as he needs to continue his work. The faithful turn on him, and Dukat angrily rips off his earring and beams away.
Fala takes the pill and dies, to Kira’s shock and disgust. He still had his faith, despite Dukat’s betrayal.
Can’t we just reverse the polarity? Empok Nor has only one working fusion reactor, so the station’s on minimal power. They don’t have enough for replicators, so they grow their own food in a converted cargo bay (it’s unclear what they ate before the hydroponics stuff was up and running, nor is it clear where they get water from—though that’s actually an easy fix, as there’s ice in comets that could easily be melted, but that’s never mentioned). Somehow, though, they have enough power for a Dominion transporter.
Don’t ask my opinion next time: Kira is her usual takes-no-crap self, never once giving an inch to Dukat or to Fala when she’s captured, and her constant poking with a stick eventually pays off, as the doubts her skepticism sows bear fruit when Dukat proves to be a lying asshole.
Preservation of mass and energy is for wimps: Odo is sorry that he doesn’t believe in the Prophets, because it means he can’t go to services with Kira, and he wants to share things with her.
The slug in your belly: Dax thinks it’s sweet that Odo wants to be able to go to services with Kira. She feels sufficiently strongly about this that she says it twice.
For Cardassia! Dukat has managed to get his hands on some useful stuff from the Dominion-occupied Cardassian Union, including a Dominion transporter and at least fifty Obsidian Order suicide pills.
Victory is life: The Dominion transporter that can send people over long distances, not seen since “The Jem’Hadar,” is put to use by both Fala and Dukat in this episode.
No sex, please, we’re Starfleet: Dukat’s prayer meetings to see if Benyan and Mika were worthy of having children were apparently quite hot and heavy, since he and Mika conceived a child during it…
Keep your ears open: “That was a long time ago, before he felt the kiss of the Pah-wraiths.”
“That was some kiss.”
Fala defending Dukat and Kira not buying it.
Welcome aboard: Marc Alaimo is back as Dukat, while Jason Leland Adams, Maureen Flannigan, Miriam Flynn, Norman Parker, and Mark Piateli play the various and sundry Bajorans he’s hoodwinked.
Trivial matters: Dukat became a vessel of the Pah-wraiths (and killed Jadzia) in “Tears of the Prophets,” and wanted revenge on Sisko after the events of “Waltz.”
Fala says that the boy who attacked Sisko on Earth in “Image in the Sand” operated on his own without the consent of the rest of the Pah-wraith cult. He also reminds Kira of the miracle of making an entire Dominion fleet disappear in “Sacrifice of Angels.”
Kira learned that Dukat took her mother as a comfort woman in “Wrongs Darker than Death or Night.”
Mika, Benyan, and their baby are seen again in the Mission: Gamma novel Cathedral by Andy Mangels & Michael A. Martin, defending Kira, whom they credit with saving their lives.
Dukat must have been in place at the station for at least five or six months, since the Bajoran gestation period (established in “Body Parts”) is five months.
This is the third use of Empok Nor, following the station’s eponymous episode and “The Magnificent Ferengi.” It’ll next be seen in your humble rewatcher’s Starfleet Corps of Engineers novella Cold Fusion.
The episode’s conception came from former investigative reporter David Weddle, who had written about cults for both the San Jose Mercury News and L.A. Weekly. In particular, the collective on Empok Nor was inspired by Marshal Applewhite’s “Heaven’s Gate” cult who also committed mass suicide to abandon their corporeal bodies for a journey to the stars, in this case to the spaceship that was allegedly hiding behind the Hale-Bopp comet in 1997. (The Heaven’s Gate web site is still live, and maintained by two members of the cult, though the design makes it clear that it hasn’t been updated since ’97…)
Walk with the Prophets: “Our covenant is broken!” I have gone on the record as saying how much I despise the entire concept of the Pah-wraiths, but I will say that this particular episode is the one and only time it completely works. The fact that this is also the only Pah-wraith episode that doesn’t have alien possession, glowing eyes, and people firing ray-beams out of their fingers is not a coincidence.
What this episode addresses is faith, and when DS9 deals with faith in an intelligent manner (to wit, one that doesn’t involve the special effects crew), it’s usually well done: “In the Hands of the Prophets” and “Rapture” spring to mind as a couple of the best examples.
And this is another. One of the great contradictions of faith is how you can believe in a kind, benevolent, merciful deity when there’s so much suffering in the world. Yet there are so many cases of the strongest faith being found in those who suffer the most, whether it’s the Jews who lived and died under Nazi Germany or the Africans and their descendants who were enslaved by white people in the United States—or the Bajorans who lived under the Cardassian occupation. But then there are also those who can’t handle the notion that their deity loves them and cares for them yet lets them suffer so much, and so they reject the deity—but the need is still there, the faith is still there, just looking for a target, as it were.
Into that breach steps Dukat, a most charismatic man, who has the perfect tale of redemption. The villain of the occupation redeemed by the “true Prophets,” the ones who were cast out of the Celestial Temple for trying to help Bajor. Given the actual history—Pah-wraiths cast out, the Prophets themselves being incredibly vague and hard to comprehend, Bajor’s long suffering under Cardassian rule—the road taken by Fala and the rest of the cult is completely understandable. There’s a great speech from Michael J. Fox’s character in The American President, when he says that people are so desperate for leadership that they’ll crawl across a desert toward a mirage, and when they get there, they’re so thirsty that they drink the sand.
Of course, Michael Douglas’s president retorts that people don’t drink the sand because they’re thirsty, they drink it because they don’t know any better, which certainly applies here. It’s impossible to feel completely sorry for Fala and Benyan and Mika because they fall for Dukat’s entire line despite all the evidence that suggests that Kira’s absolutely right. While Fala has a point about how the beings that live in the wormhole have provided miracles in the past, it’s still kinda disheartening that Kira’s the only one who applies Occam’s Razor to deduce that Dukat had sex with Mika. (Of course I say that while living in a world where people still believe that the Earth is only 6000 years old, so—yeah.)
Either way, Dukat is getting everything he wants out of this: Bajorans serving him, Bajorans loving him, and Bajoran women boinking him, with the added bonus of not being answerable to Central Command, the Detapa Council, or the Obsidian Order, just a bunch of beings of pure energy who apparently only talk to him (if they talk at all).
And yet, the script is sufficiently vague that Kira’s interpretation at the end—that Dukat is still a bastard, but he actually believes what he’s spouting, which is supported in part by Dukat’s solitary prayer—is also valid. So, sadly, is Odo’s: that Dukat really is a vessel of the Pah-wraiths, which sets up Dukat’s absolutely dreadful story in the series’ closing arc.
This episode itself, though, works very nicely. This is the last time we get the complex Kira-Dukat pas-de-deux that Marc Alaimo and Nana Visitor do so amazingly well, in so many different permutations, and it remains magnificent. Plus we get a good character study of the tragic cultist in Fala, who has had his faith shredded by circumstance, but who can’t bring himself to give it up, and so drinks the sand.
Warp factor rating: 7
Keith R.A. DeCandido wishes everyone the great joy of the solstice season, as the sun renews itself, giving us hope for the coming year. Happy Holidays.
I can’t argue with your analysis, even including the fact that the Bajorans’ religious extremism is (sadly) believable. But I lack your enthusiasm for the result. Perhaps it just lacks the nuance I want to see in a Star Trek episode, even if real suicide-level cultists don’t have much nuance.
I do find it baffling how you can find this nutcase-Dukat more interesting than the nutcase-Dukat from Waltz. I thought his madness was much more entertaining there.
I found this one painful, and surprised to see such positivity. The cult theme felt like it was designed to hit all of the right beats in reminding us the Dukat is a bad bad man (and stupid too).
If he’s already called his cult to a meeting and told them there will be a special announcement, wouldn’t it be clear that his followers would be there? Why broadcast the announcement over the comm system?
He knows he’s potentially impregnated his follower, and he doesn’t have some sort of Dominion RU486? Was there any prenatal care? Wouldn’t someone have noticed Cardassian physiology in the fetus? And the best he could come up with was “magic God baby” is why he looks like the baby daddy?
As a faith-focused individual, I am wary of how religion will get toyed with in the media, and I think DS9 has generally done well. As a often called cultist, I’m even more concerned with how someone will try to take my beliefs and portay them in a cult setting. This is something that mostly handled cleanly here, but I am bothered that the well that they went to was “cult leader splits families to bump uglies with the hot lady”. That fear and assumption is one that leads to crazy travel policies (on church related travel, I can’t travel alone with a woman; I also can’t have a closed door meeting with a woman).
The Dukat I expected would have believed with both feet. it feels like they started that way, but they wanted to end the episode with an ambiguous “does he believe or is he preying on the silly beliefs of these folks” takeaway. Tack on the weak meanwhile back at the ranch station story, and I’m just generally disappointed.
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I never cared for this one much. I was never that fond of the late-series approach to Dukat, and the cult-leader stuff was kind of predictable and heavy-handed. At least when Dukat was an uneasy ally in the middle seasons, there was some legitimate tension and ambiguity to his interactions with Kira, a possibility that she could find some redeeming qualities in him while never forgiving him for his past crimes or giving him the relationship he wanted. By the time he became full-on bugnuts, though, there was nowhere for that “pas de deux” to go, because there was no chance Kira would shift in her attitudes toward the one-dimensional character he’d become. So it’s just going through the motions by this point. This episode felt like an afterthought to an arc that was already over. (And the reminders of the awful “Wrongs Darker…” didn’t help at all.)
The Empok Nor setting felt like a rather blatant money-saving cheat (it’s just the DS9 sets lit and dressed differently), although I guess it can be justified in terms of Dukat wanting to recreate what he once had. And it’s annoying when they take a gamechanging technology like interstellar transporters and just use it as a throwaway plot point when it’s convenient and later forget it (see also TNG: “Bloodlines”).
I found parts of this episode really predictable. As soon as Fala mentioned that the couple needed permission from Dukat to have a baby, and that they were the only ones that got it, I knew the baby was going to end up being Dukat’s. It was kind of hard to swallow that they believed Dukat’s story about the baby-changing, and it kind of also made it hard to believe that they then would not believe/forgive Dukat about not dying with them at the end. I mean, if they’d had that much Kool-Aid…. I found Benyan’s sudden realization of “This IS his child!” to be really laughably delivered.
Oh, and Benyan’s painting of Dukat kept reminding me of Janosz’s painting of Vigo from Ghostbusters II, so I also kept cracking up at that.
First of all, why do meetings happen in airlocks? Just…why???
And don’t airlock door controls have some kind of sensor that’s like WOAH THERE IS A LIVE PERSON IN THIS AIRLOCK!
Anyway, I can echo some of Rancho’s concerns about religion in the media although this particular episode I didn’t mind too much (maybe because I just like to see Dukat ham it up). I think Fala’s story is actually quite interesting and I also want to know what his last words actually meant! I’m also kind of interested in what they believe about the pah-Wraiths (especially the ones before Dukat got to them). Were they all like the guy who tried to kill Sisko? There have been a few references to ‘hate and anger’ regarding the pah-Wraith cultists, but I wonder what that cult actually looked like before Dukat took over with his story about the pah-Wraiths being kicked out for wanting to interfere with Bajor (or if that was always a part of the cult).
Actually, I was thinking it would have been kind of a neat twist if it turned out the pah-wraiths actually WERE on the Bajoran’s side and the aggrieved party (and even more of a twist of Dukat actually did have a true redemption, but I like redemption stories) – although that’s not the kind of twist you pull in your 7th season, in my opinion. It does seem like Dukat does truly believe he’s doing the pah-wraith’s bidding (although what their true aim is, who knows) and is probably also crazy enough to think he knows what’s best for the Bajorans and sees himself as some kind of loving, indulgent father figure. But he’s crazy.
But I can see where some of the frustration between the good vs evil wormhole aliens comes in. I can actually buy that, as sentient beings, there may very well have been different ‘factions’ and conflicts amongst them we know nothing about (or probably couldn’t even comprehend). But we don’t really get that, we just get good gods and bad gods.
But I still maintain that it would have been more interesting for, instead of the Dominion War, the series to focus on Bajor and Cardassia rebuilding and trying to move past the occupation, and Dukat being a more ambiguous character.
“since he and Mike conceived a child”
Wow, DS9 was more progressive than I thought! (kidding) That said, an interesting episode and yeah I think the Pah-wraith thing was handled the best way the series has so far. It sure as hell beats the Dragonball-Z-esque Beam Of War earlier…or the finale…
Icchan: GAH! I kept mistyping Mika as Mike, and I thought I corrected all of them. *headdesk*
—Keith R.A. DeCandido, grateful as always for the mighty mighty edit function
I thought it was pretty clever of Echevarria to take Dukat down the Jim Jones route for this one. This episode makes good use of the Pah’ Wraiths concept.
And it fits naturally with Dukat’s character journey. This is a Cardassian who’s always pursued the acceptance and admiration of the Bajoran people, not to mention the interspecies sexual attraction. Making him a Pah’ Wraith cult leader seems like a natural fit for this kind of story.
As Keith pointed out, Faith makes for a juicy story, especially misplaced hardcore faith like Vedek Fala’s. This one worked pretty well to me, especially that final act.
Rancho Unicorno @2:
I was far more under the impression that the baby was intentional on Dukat’s part, or at least that once her pregnancy was revealed, he knew it could be his and decided to use it to his advantage. He wouldn’t have wanted an abortion, because he could use the baby. Everyone knew she was pregnant, so presumably there was prenatal care, though perhaps not advanced enough on Empok Nor to detect the Cardassian features. I read “magic god-baby” as the reason he had been waiting to give all along, not an excuse.
Odo wanting to go to services with Kira represents an issue for a lot of couples who are of different faith backgrounds. I think it was depicted quite well here – the interest in sharing that part of your partner’s life, but being unable to.
@9 I don’t know. Between the pregnant pause, the seeking forgiveness from his Gods, and the airlock conversation, i thought he was surprised by the baby. i agree that if he was aware of it he would have kept the baby and found a way to use it (and maybe not sound like he was caught with his pants around his ankles), and could even see value in eventually having admitted kids with some of the women.
What would have been a stroke of genius would have been getting that face life he has coming, and then starting the cult. Could you imagine how he could have played that as a sign of Bajorans and Cardassians being ready to become closer partners, and nobody would have been the wiser?