In the seventeenth episode of the sixth season of Deep Space Nine, Dukat tests Kira by revealing a secret of her past. Intrigued? Then it’s time for Mark to watch Star Trek.Â
Trigger Warning: For discussion of occupation, genocide, starvation, sex work, rape, and sexual assault.
Good lord, this was a difficult one. I know that it was supposed to be, too, and as unbelievably challenging as it was to watch this unfold, the story is a worthy one. I was interested to see how Deep Space Nine would deal with a very direct form of time travel. As far as I understood it, the Orb of Time would transport a person to any point in time (and give them period-appropriate garb, apparently), and the Prophets would guide them as was necessary. Given that we know the Prophets are aliens who live inside the wormhole, I figured that their perception of time as non-linear would affect the story. Yet I can’t figure out the logistics. Did Kira just assume that the Prophets would stop her as necessary? Did they pull her out at the end because she’d affected the timeline enough already? Does Gul Dukat now recognize her as a time traveler, or was the timeline wiped once the bomb went off?
I don’t know, but I’m willing to discard these concerns to discuss the greater story within “Wrongs Darker than Death or Night.” I got a little worried towards the end of the episode that Deep Space Nine‘s usual sense of moral ambiguity was getting shoved into an easy-to-digest dichotomy, but the strength of this lies in that final scene: Gul Dukat told his version of the truth. In that version, Kira’s mother was his lover. And while there’s a semblance of honesty to this, Kira discovers that the truth is relative, that it’s complex, that the world is a million times messier than she ever imagined.
And for me, that makes all the difference. This glimpse of the early occupation days is horrifying, of course, and the show is unflinching in its portrayal of how violent and cruel the Cardassian occupation was. Lives were ruined, stolen, ended. The Cardassians brought the Bajorans to starvation, and then leveraged that against them. I can’t get over how much hunger played into their system, and it’s why so many people probably turned into “collaborators.” How can you blame people for just wanting to eat a full meal every once in a while? The Cardassians specifically exploited the women by starving them, and then offering them luxurious accommodations (in comparison, of course) in exchange for a further exploitation.
Make no mistake: what happens to the comfort women of the Cardassians is an exploitation. While Kira Meru may have rationalized what was done to her in her own way (more on that later), these women were still repeatedly assaulted and raped, and the Cardassians did this while hanging the threat of murder over their heads. Or the threat of their families starving to death. Gul Dukat is no exception, and his behavior has an extra level of creepy layered on top of it: he believes he was doing something moral. Whether he knew it or not (and come on, he knew), that same threat of bodily harm and destruction sat over all of those women. It doesn’t matter that he “saved” Meru from sexual assault. It’s part of a performance meant to make these women think that he’s not so bad. They’re surrounded by savages all the time; certainly, by contrast, he’s not like them, is he?
We can debate whether he loved or cherished Meru forever, but I don’t think that matters all that much. The man exerted his influence and power to “win” over his favorites, and with that sort of power dynamic at hand, I can’t see him as anything else than a rapist. I don’t believe that a full, meaningful consent can be given in the midst of wartime, in the midst of the Cardassians committing genocide of the Bajorans, in the midst of Meru knowing that the second she shows Gul Dukat anything other than “love” and “respect,” her family will be ended. Destroyed. Eliminated.
Yet this episode is about Kira’s feelings on her mother. Was Dukat telling the truth? I suppose, but what did this mean for Meru? Did she gleefully submit? Was the whole thing a narrative construction from Dukat? As I said earlier, this is a messy affair. Meru was never deluded about what the arrangement was, and even if she tried to defend herself to Kira, I never got the sense that Meru really believed that there was love in that relationship. Sure, she may have come to enjoy aspects of her relationship – the food, the quarters, the ability to get whatever she wanted. And I think it’s fair that Kira felt that her mother got the “better” deal compared to many other people in the occupation. There’s that truly disturbing moment where she tries to deny that a genocide is taking place, and it’s definitely the closest that Meru comes to being a collaborator in Kira’s mind.
But I have to have some sympathy for the women forced into this nightmarish relationships. That haunting message from Meru’s husband fucked me up so much because Meru’s facade was gone. In that instant, she was the wife who was dedicated to save her family. Her husband knew that she’d been compelled to stay with Gul Dukat in order to guarantee her family’s safety.
Meru is multiple things all at once. She was under the control of a eerily domineering leader in the very force that was exterminating her people. She enjoyed the things that others were deprived of by the Cardassians. She wanted to go home and be with her family. She was able to do things that seemed monstrous to Kira because they were for some greater good. Does that make her a collaborator? Maybe, but the cost of not being one would have been death and the death of her family. Is that a cost that we should expect people to pay?
“Wrongs Darker than Death or Night” presents us with zero answers, just complicated questions. Even at the end, in Sisko’s office, Kira wishes she had killed her mother, all while admitting in the same breath that she could never do something like that to her mother. Reality is much sloppier than Kira was prepared for.
The video for “Wrongs Darker than Death or Night” can be downloaded here for $0.99.
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