"You're not the true Sirah!
You won't get any argument from me!"
Hovath and O'Brien
"Mum! Grandads been at the weed again. He now thinks he's Charlton Heston. It was bad enough when he had his "Yul Brinner" in Tesco!"Synopsis
In which a bunch of idiotic villagers are threatened by a monster thats scary nature is somewhat spoilt by looking like a huge blob of custard pie foam. And some boring land dispute involving a fierce clan led by a standard 14 year old American kid, and a middle manager from Telford. What fun!
Because when I hear the word "Clan leader of rugged harsh territory and people." I always picture this guy.
and this girl as well.Review
I'm going to break tradition with my review narative for this one, and start with the B plot of this episode which revolves around two remote clans (The Navat and the Paqu) on Bajor who are having some boring land dispute about their territory being all screwed up because the Cardassians redirected the river Glyrhond (the natural border between their respective territories) for one of their mines. Now one side has more land than they used to have, but the other wants (I can't remember which was which. I lost interest in the first 5 minutes.) the pre occupation territory. Now Kira says that the two sides are some of the sturdiest and most tribalistic people from the harshest land in all of Bajor, and that these negotiations will go badly. So who are the leaders of these rough tough people? Who would make the warlords of rural Afghanistan look like Sacha Baran Cohens Bruno? Of course! A paunchy middle aged man who looks like a middle manager of a polystyrene firm in Telford (The Navats guy), and a 14 year old girl. (Paqu) I shit ye not! It would honestly be like Hannah Montanna being a rural chieftain in Bangladesh (I.e not very likely.) Now I'm not saying young women haven't headed these sorts of societies. But Varis Sul (The Paqu leader) suffers from that old telly mistake of acting just like a young contemporary Western teenager in a supposedly uncontemporary non-Western one (Most noticeable in Disney cartoon films like "The Little Mermaid and Alladin". I once read that there is a remote clan of Pushtan warriors in the mountains of Pakistan who every year play the traditional local sport of kicking a donkey to death. That's how the Paqu should be portrayed (not that i approve of animal cruelty btw). Not as being headed by a teenager who probably timed the negotiations so they wouldn't clash with "Glee". When Quark patronised her with that drink, she shouldn't have just thrown it in his face. She should have disemboweled him! So to cut a long and not very interesting B story short. Sul ends up befriending Nog (who fancies her) and Jake. She feels she can't live up to her father, who was the last leader of the Paqu, (who was shot by the Cardies) and that she has never had a proper childhood. Blah blah. And the negotiations sort of get sorted off screen. The moral of this all ties in with the main plot of the burdens of being thrust into a role you never volunteered for, and that is weighed down with so much expectation from others. Look this isn't really Tolstoy!
So now we have all that idiocy out of the way, to the main plot. This episode began the ongoing blokey O'Brien Bashir relationship. As we know, they grew to become close friends throughout the course of the show. Well this the first time we see them put together properly and O'Brien certainly doesn't show any affection towards his future best pal at this point. He unsuccessfully tries to wriggle out of chauffeuring Bashir to a village on Bajor that needs urgent medical help or they all might die! Yes going out of your way to not do your bit to help people survive is preferable to spending a few hours with Bashir in a runabout! After the awkward trip and Bashirs unsuccessful attempts at small talk - they beam down to the village - which seems remarkably calm for the supposed medical emergency, and the local magistrate (who looks suspiciously like the space X-Files guy off "Trials and Tribbleations"!) takes them to some old bloke who is sick. He is the Sirah, and if he dies they all die.
The Sirah takes an interest in O'Brien, and he and Bashir learn of the Dal'rok, a creature that appears from the forest every harvest and tries to destroy the village. Only the sirah has the ability to rally the people with his storytelling and allow them to collectively drive the Dal'rok away. So if he croaks they're all a bit screwed. That night the Dal'rok appears in the village. I suspect they wanted to go for a fantastic ethereal look for the monster (a bit like in the manner of the Balrog off LOTR. Hence the name?) but the Dal'Rok just ends up looking like a huge blob of custard pie foam instead. The Sirah; despite Bashirs protestations - leaves his bedside to rally the villagers, who emit a magic brainwave field or something - that seem to repel the Dal'rok, but the old bloke collapses halfway through. The Dal-rok blasts the village perimeter wall and he appoints O'Brien as his successor, and is just about able to help the Chief manage to complete the ritual and drive the Dalrok off. Unfortunately the strain kills the elderly Sirah. The villagers however appoint Chief O'Brien the new Sirah much to the chagrin of Hovath, the young man who was supposed to take over.
O'Brien and Bashir manage to shake off the villagers who treat him like a celebrity (much to Bashirs amusement as O'Brien hates his newfound status. Nice touch to how their relationship would evolve.) , long enough to discover that the Dal'Rok doesn't seem to be a natural phenomena. Hovath comes to meet his "rival" and tries to kill O'Brien, but he and Bashir overpower him. Hovath explains that he was supposed to be the new Sirah, but couldn't rally the crowd. The Dal'rok inflicted harm on some of the villagers, and they don't have faith in his abilities anymore. O'Brien says he can have the position as far as he is concerned, and appoints him the new Sirah, but the magistrate says there is no way in hell Havath is getting another stab after last times fiasco. Now this highlights a particularly blatant flaw in the premise of this episode. In order for the story to work, the villagers have to act especially dumb, and I'm not even getting at things like how they fail to notice all that brain energy wave thing above their heads, and why hadn't someone had the individual insight to investigate this phenomena and rumble at least part of the mystery behind the Dal'rok (I'll reveal it in a bit.)? Think how silly the magistrates logic is for a minute. Yeah Hovath screwed up, and people got hurt. But Hovath is also the most qualified person to deal with the Dal'rok threat. O'Brien knows literally nothing about this thing. He is totally unqualified to deal with it. He hadn't even heard of it before he beamed down. Hell, he can't even fucking pronounce its name right at the beginning. Why are you so willing to 100 % put all this faith in him. If O'Brien fails YOUR VILLAGE WILL BE DESTROYED! This is serious shit. Why are you so confident in putting your life in the hands of a man who clearly is out of his depth? You NEED Hovath.
Hovath reveals the secret behind the Dal'rok. The village was riven with sectarianism a hundred years ago. The first Sirah had access to a ring (which all Sirahs have on them) which has a stone made from a piece of an orb of the prophets. To unite his people, the Sirah used the stone to create the Dal'rok from the villagers negative feelings. Thus with an external threat, they would band together and use the positive feelings (the brain energy field) to drive the negative (Dal'rok) ones away. The villagers say it is time for O'Brien to drive the Dal'rok off. O'Brien of course makes a complete hash of the storytelling and the Dal'rok strikes. Hovath realises he has to intervene or the great foamy thing will do more than coat them in cack. He manages to drive the Dal'rok off. The old Sirah you see knew this would happen. That O'Brien would be so monumentally terrible as Sirah, Hovath would have to step in, and the people would have renewed faith in thier true Sirah. O'Brien and Bashir make a sly escape whilst all the commotion is going on, just in case they make O'Briens job offer permanent!
Mistakes and Questions
I do have to agree with Phil Farrand of the "Nitpickers Guide." Yeah I don't doubt that the Dal'rok could have been effective (a bit too much. Would you have made it that arbitrarily physically dangerous, as opposed to superficially and demonstratively dangerous?) in what it was set out to do in the beginning. But wouldn't the villagers get desensitised to this thing showing up every year, then the empowerment speech, then it gets driven away. All repeated again ad nauseum the following year?
Summary
The Dal'rok plot was a proposed TNG script that never got made, but Michael Piller liked the premise and used it for the basis of this episode, and it shows. You could have stuck any alien of the week in here for the Dal'rok to threaten and it would have made little difference to the story. Meany is good at being humorously rubbish and out of his depth in the scene with the Dal'rok. "Once upon a time there was this Dal'rok.....!" There is some good banter between Bashir and O'Brien, with the former relishing his colleagues irritation at his new found fame, and it is not hard to see why the friendship between them was set up in later episodes. However it all relies on the villagers being total morons, and the whole monster thing is really pretty silly when you think about it. The negotiations are also just boring, and the Nog / Jake / Sul story isn't great either. The practical joke scene is quite funny though. So overall, it has good scenes in here. But it really isn't anything special.
Rating 6 / 10
Rating 6 / 10
Next Time
Kira has to try to get Anthony Hopkins to evacuate a habitable Bajoran moon which no one else apparently ever bothered to settle on. It's not like Bajor is short of resources, or was occupied by brutal oppressors was it?
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