DS9 S3.E15 - Destiny

Season 3, Episode 15 - "Destiny," or "How To Turn a Prophet"

I swear, Erick Avari is the face of The Actor With A Face I Can Never Place. I've seen him everywhere but I can never remember exactly where and when, until I consult Wikipedia or IMDB, and a light turns on and I go, "Oooh yeah, you DID have exactly three lines in that one episode of West Wing!"

Avari is an effective Vedek Yarka. Like Kai Winn, he's manipulative and zealous. And, also like Kai Winn, he's occasionally right. Yarka arrives on DS9 with a prophecy of doom. Three vipers will return to their nest in the sky and burn the gates of the temple. Yarka believes this prophecy describes the arrival of two Cardassian scientists aboard DS9 as they attempt to set up a communication relay through the wormhole.

It doesn't really matter that there are two scientists, not three. Yarka's conviction and narrative necessity means a third shortly arrives, and she does. When a third "unannounced" Cardassian scientist shows up on DS9, Major Kira starts to believe.

Prophecies always work this way. The best prophecies are like riddles: couched in metaphorical language and open to multiple interpretations, they take on an air of inevitability when events fit into their interpretive mold in retrospect. The most effective prophetic expressions rely on a combination of the listener's faith, multiplied by their capacity for creative interpretation. Humans are pattern-makers. It isn't enough that we receive data; we also synthesize, correlate, measure and interpret data. It's in our nature to create meaning.

There's an entire fascinating subset of study that involves our attraction toward (and need for) prophecy, astrology, and prediction. We're always looking for signs, even if our activities are decidedly secular. We have an entire system of speculation called the stock market, which fluctuates based on (at least in theory) our habit of reading into the tea leaves of contemporary politics. Some people have lucky numbers. Some people go to seances. Some people like to have their palm read. I've personally known people who lived and died based on their faith in prophecy, effectively gambling away huge sums of money on the words of an astrologer.

But that's neither here nor there. This episode is a fairly bland episode wrapped around a pretty interesting question, which is: What was Trakor's Third Prophecy actually trying to say? The question isn't "Was Trakor's prophecy valid?" because we know the answer. The answer is yes. Yes, Trakor had prophetic power; in the Star Trek universe, multi-dimensional aliens who can see the past, present, and future exist. They are called the Prophets and Trakor was one of them.

By the end of the episode, we discover that Trakor's prophecy was true, but cleverly misinterpreted. Yes, there were three vipers--but they were not the three scientists. The three vipers were three comet fragments hurtling toward the wormhole, threatening to destroy it. The "burning" of the wormhole was not its destruction but the physical reaction between the Silithium element and the wormhole itself.

But the bigger question to me is this. If Trakor is a prophet who can see past, present, and future, then how does he benefit from delivering opaque, cryptic prophecies? It makes more sense that he'd just tell you exactly what's going to happen, when it's going to happen, and how to stop it.

So it occurs to me that Trakor probably couched his language in metaphor intentionally, because he knew it would be misinterpreted, and its misinterpretation would set into motion a series of necessary events. Or maybe this is Agnes Nutter all over again, and Trakor's prophecies survived three thousand years because Bajorans, like humans, much prefer the opaque and the cryptic to the clear and direct. Nobody wants an accurate prophecy. Those aren't any fun.

Overall, Destiny was a merely okay episode reminiscent of some of TNG's decent one-shots. I really liked our three scientists (or rather, our two scientists and one Obsidian Order representative). Why is there always a representative of the Obsidian Order in every group? Two's company, but Three's being spied on by the Obsidian Order? Is it like that old WoW guild, <And Two Stealthed Rogues>, except it's <And One Obsidian Order Spy>? If the Cardassians had Christmas, would they have their own version of Twelve Days of Christmas where the refrain was "And an Obsidian Order spy in a pear tree"?