Episode 24 - "The Collaborator," or "Bareilghazi"
It's strange how much more comfortable DS9 is with sexuality and implicit nudity. "Crossover" had Mirror-Kira lounging in a bath, concealed from the camera by a fortuitous curtain of fabric. "The Collaborator" has Vedek Bareil and Kira Nerys lounging in an afterglow and murmuring what might be the most embarrassing pillow talk I've certainly ever heard. This is to say nothing of the bizarre, Freudian sex-dreams Bareil explores through his religious hallucinations, one of which involves a hilariously inappropriate erotic dream of Vedek Winn--the Dolores Umbridge of Bajor.
In "The Collaborator," Bajoran politics make their way to Deep Space Nine when Vedek Winn discovers a dark secret in Vedek Bareil's past. Winn, the underdog in an election for Kai (some sort of Bajoran President-Pope. Popident?) wants to use this information to destroy Bareil's campaign and secure the position of Kai for herself. Bareil was supposedly responsible for the massacre of 43 Bajoran rebels by giving away their position to the Cardassians, and Winn conscripts Kira into investigating the truth.
If there was ever an episode that elicited mixed feelings in me, it's "The Collaborator." I went from utterly bored to intrigued to genuinely surprised to utterly bored again. "Collaborator" comes so close to undermining my expectations and breaking free of the necessities of plot. There is a moment in the third act of this episode where the story goes somewhere I never expected it'd go--to an honest and real place. Unfortunately, "Collaborator" only visits that place before circling back to familiar territory. We come so close to seeing some real, genuine ambiguity in Bareil's character.
Bareil and Kira's relationship is strange and uncomfortable for a few reasons, partly because Bareil comes off about as wooden and unemotional as Al Gore. It doesn't help that Bareil's idea of pillow talk is a sultry "So, are you going to vote for me?" Kira's attraction to Bareil feels like puppy love; physical attraction and careless play, not tender enough to humanize Bareil and not meaningful enough to feel romantic. Their sex seems like a diversion--something they do when they're bored.
I really wish Bareil and Kira's relationship were not so explicitly sexual yet, and instead rooted in tension. Because, oddly enough, there is tension between them. A lot of tension. It's so strange to see them consummate that tension but never have it go anywhere. They're tense before they make out and they're tense after they roll off each other in bed. Is this a Bajoran thing? Are they just chronically incapable of living with abandon and putting aside any thoughts of Bajoran politics for a couple of hours?
It doesn't help that Winn comes off like a nun hiding a dagger in her habit. I want to find a reason to at least empathize with Winn. I want to relate with her. I can't. Her mannerisms are so comically scheming that she makes Cruella DeVille feel human. This is the same Vedek Winn that nearly plunged DS9 in sectarian violence. She makes no effort to conceal her naked ambition (I'm not sorry), and her every expression of faith drips with insincerity.
I expected this episode to follow the same beats of any political frame-job. Kira investigates Bareil, convinced he can't possibly have been responsible for the Kendra Valley Massacre; Kira finds sketchy evidence pointing to Bareil; Kira finds even MORE sketchy evidence pointing to Bareil; Kira is momentarily led to beleive Bareil was guilty, until we discover that by some trick, he set himself up or took the fall for someone else, and therefore his fall from grace trampolines into sainthood.
And, for the most part, the episode proceeds exactly like you'd expect. All the evidence (circumstantial as it may be) points to Bareil's guilt.
What I didn't expect was Bareil owning up to his own guilt. There's a point toward the end of Act 3 where Bareil confronts Kira and admits that--yes--he was responsible for the Kendra Valley Massacre.
Why did you do it, she asks him.
Because the Cardassians would have slaughtered every single village in the region until they found the rebels in Kendra Valley. By handing them over to the Cardassians, Bareil saved lives. He traded 43 lives for thousands.
And I wanted the episode to just end there. Just stop right there. Let Bareil have some blood on his hands. Let him participate in the cruel arithmetic of war. Let his soul be tarnished by calculating the weight of one life against many. I wanted one episode where all the evidence pointed to Bareil, and the evidence was correct, and he was guilty. In a show about ambiguity and uncertainty, Vedek Bareil (and the Bajorans generally) are so unambiguously archetypal that they actually turn me off.
But the episode didn't end there. We discover that the previous Kai was responsible for the Massacre at Kendra Valley, and sacrificed her own son to the Cardassians. The Judeo-Christian undertones are not lost on me. But with this unsubtle and obvious twist, Bareil washes his hands of the blood that stained them for all of ten minutes.
Bareil went from a casualty of war to just another martyr. I would have respected him more if he had sacrificed forty-three Bajorans to save thousands. That decision, I think, is much harder than sacrificing his future as Kai in order to preserve the Bajoran's faith in their own society.
It's possible I am being a little too harsh on poor Bareil. He's a subtle character, outwardly pious but inwardly practical. He understands politics and understands that if Bajorans knew that the previous Kai was responsible for the Massacre, the damage to Bajoran society would have been irreparable.
It's just a shame that the subtle implications of this episode are drowned out by the frankly bizarre and unintentionally hilarious Freudian dreams.
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