In the fifteenth episode of the second season of Deep Space Nine, Sisko and O’Brien become stranded on THE WORST PLANET EVER. Intrigued? Then it’s time for Mark to watch Star Trek.Â
Trigger Warning: For torture.Â
Well, that was disturbing.
I think that while sometimes, I’m not as genre-literate as I’d like to be, I recognized that something had to be wrong with the utopia presented to us in “Paradise.” Hey, I was commissioned to read “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas” a few years ago, so I KNOW ALL ABOUT HOW FUCKED UP UTOPIAS ARE. Of course, there needed to be a conflict here. How could the world built by Alixus present one of those to Sisko and O’Brien? On the surface, this lifestyle looked to be fair and successful. Which meant that IT HELD SOME DARK AND EVIL SECRET. Right? Nothing’s perfect. And I couldn’t believe that Alixus had somehow found a way to eliminate every negative feature of the human race.
Thus, I wasn’t necessarily surprised that the community she had helped to create wasn’t as squeaky clean as she portrayed. What shocked me was how brutal it was. Look, she was clearly invested in keeping that place untouched and unchanged; that was worthy of suspicion all by itself. But hey, that’s understandable to a point. These outsiders risked spoiling the place, and at the very least, she and the others wanted to stay behind. They had no interest in leaving and returning to a world of technology and Starfleet.
Except that “Paradise” tracks the violent, horrifying ways in which Alixus wields control. Does she consider herself this kind of leader? Absolutely not. While she actively tortures a young man named Stephen (and later, Sisko), she speaks in platitudes, often claiming that it hurts her as much as it hurts those she’s abusing. THIS IS THE WORST THING YOU CAN SAY IF YOU ARE CAUSING REAL HARM TO PEOPLE, but in some warped way, she appears to actually believe it. Her countless treatises about the human condition speak to her narcissistic view of herself as someone who has discovered the “real” meaning of being human by shunning all technology. I don’t know if this episode is making fun of hippies, but I suppose that’s irrelevant to the story as a whole. The point – or at least the one I got from “Paradise” – is that Alixus runs a society that values compliance, conformity, and violence. No matter how many times she claims to have ascended to a new plane of existence, and no matter how often she states that she’s only doing what is best for others, her actions betray her true spirit.
She is a monster.
There’s a brilliant performance tucked into this episode, and I was blown away by Avery Brooks’s portrayal of Sisko’s stubbornness. His quiet protest against everything Alixus represented was the highlight of “Paradise” because it so perfectly fits within the characterization we’ve gotten from him. He’s precisely the kind of character who would refuse to bend to Alixus’s rules, all to prove a point. I love that so much!
I think that’s why the conclusion of this episode feels so weird to me. I suppose that I should take into account Sisko’s status as an outsider. Obviously, he’s far more disturbed by the Box punishment because he wasn’t part of the community. Yet we witness the dawning horror on the villagers faces once they learn that Alixus deliberately crashed them on that planet and kept a duonetic field running the whole time to guarantee that they couldn’t ever escape. What do they do with that information?
They stay behind.
I guess I shouldn’t be that surprised. Upon thinking more about this episode, it kind of makes sense that they’d stay once Alixus left. They can craft their own society out of those who remained without having to worry about Alixus and Vinod. But the image of those two children staring at the spot where everyone transported away… that really messes me up. They were both young enough to have been born in that village, meaning that they believed they never had a choice. Now they do. What are their lives going to be like? Will they get to choose whether to leave or to stay when they are older, or will they be stuck there because of what Alixus had done?
Either way, I am glad that she’s being held accountable for what she did. She’s terrible! Get her away from those people!
The video for “Paradise” can be downloaded here for $0.99.
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