If Wishes Were Horses DS9: 1-15

Synopsis

Quark and Odo at the bar discuss imagination and the future of family entertainment while referencing Quark's holosuites.  Julian and Jadzia are having dinner while Dr. Bashir professes his infatuation for her.  While Dax clearly discourages his attention, she is amused by the reaction she is causing. 

On the bridge, Major Kira and Commander Sisko are studying an unusual energy reading, Elevated thoron emissions in the plasma field.  Meanwhile, Miles O'Brien is putting his daughter Molly to bed with a story about Rumplestiltskin. A minute later, the small evil dwarf does, indeed, appear in the O'Brien's living quarters, "offering his services, if you should need them."

O'Brien calls Sisko to his quarters to report the situation but Ben is stopped by Jake, who has an issue of his own: a famous baseball player "followed him home" from the holosuite.  Dr. Bashir, sleeping after his dinner with Dax, is dreaming about her when he is awakened by what appears to be Jadzia herself.  Without any way to tell that this isn't the real Dax, he is surprised when she begins kissing him.

Ben calls the senior staff to the Operations center and it becomes apparent that these manifestations of imagination are appearing throughout the station.  Odo reports that it is snowing on the Promenade, while Quark is losing heavily at his gambling tables.  Dax says she's picking up a subspace disruption, with energy disappearing into its core. "I was afraid of this," Dax complains. "The proximity of the wormhole is amplifying the rupture."  The computer finds a match with a similar disruption in the Hanoli system. That system was destroyed when the rupture completely engulfed it.

Rumplestiltskin:  And  yet you can't deny how this imagination of your empowers me, can you?  Empowers me in a way that somehow terrifies you.

About halfway through the episode, however, we find the three main Figments, Rumplestiltskin, Dax2, and Buck talking privately with each other.  It is revealed that these three are more than just projections of imagination, and that they have an agenda.  "We don't know any more than when we started."

Following Dax' advice, Sisko decides to use the strategy of the Vulcans at Hanoli and explode a pulse-wave torpedo at the mouth of the rift, despite the fact that the Vulcans were spectacularly unsuccessful and the entire Hanoli system was destroyed.

As the torpedo is being prepared, others of the crew, including Kira and Odo experience Figments of their own.  Finally the torpedo is launched, but it seems to only have a momentary effect on the rift, before it begins expanding again.  At this point, Rumplestiltskin offers to use his magic powers to make the rift go away, in exchange for Miles' firstborn (Molly).

Caught in the dilemma between saving millions on Bajor and losing his daughter, Miles hesitates and Sisko comes to the realization that the rift itself is a manifestation of their imaginations. By convincing the staff to believe this as well, Sisko makes the rift disappear.

Back in his office, Sisko is visited by one of the Figments.  Bokai confesses that the three figments are an alien life form, "on an extended mission exploring the galaxy."  They use non-confrontational methods to learn about other species.  Human imaginations are unlike anything they have ever encountered before.

Sisko: Was it really necessary to put the whole station in jeopardy?
Bokai: But we didn't, Ben.  It was you.  It was your imaginations that created everything.  We were just watching you to see where it took you.

Ultimately, the Figments leave the station without revealing anything about their own species.

Analysis

Story by Nell and William Crawford.  It's only right that the guilty parties be named up front. The Star Trek storytelling system frequently employes devices for encountering the unknown.  As explorers, anything could be lurking on the next planet, anything could wander through the wormhole.  The premise of the show is about solving mysteries.

When this is done well, the crew slowly assemble clues that point toward a solution to the mystery. The audience begins to put the pieces together and eventually everything begins to make sense. Slowly, the unknown begins to take a recognizable shape.  When this is done poorly, the clues never add up to anything but more questions and the unknown remains an enigma.  This is a less satisfying outcome because the resolution is not based on the development.

So let's talk about the definition of a story.  A story consists of 5 elements:  A character is placed in a setting, from which a conflict emerges that is developed and eventually resolved.  Each of these pieces interact to form an overall story that conveys meaning to an audience that leaves them with a feeling of satisfaction.  When a narrative is lacking any of these core elements, it remains just that: a narrative.  And the audience is plagued will all kinds of 'fridge logic' about inconsistencies and loose threads and slowly the story begins to fall apart.

In the most rewarding stories, the elements have a definite interaction, so that the conflict emerges from an interaction between the character and the setting.  There's something about the past experiences of Major Kira that leads her to sympathize with the stubborn Mullibok in the previous episode, Progress.  A generic security officer would have simply completed the relocation, probably with a forced teleport, and there would be no episode to write about.

Similarly, the development is guided by an interaction between the character and the conflict. In the example above, the security officer would have dispassionately moved Mullibok back to the home world.  That's what Sisko would have done.  There would be no opportunity for any soul-searching and character building on the part of the officer because we don't know anything about him.

Kira has a soul to search, a soul we've become familiar with over the course of the season. The conflict is the arbitrary use of authority to dispossess a countryman, and it is Kira's relation to Cardassian authority (her character's past) that makes this conflict ironic; Kira is being asked to act in the same way that she despises the Cardassians for acting.  If she didn't despise the Cardassians, we would not care about Mullibok.

The resolution is based on things that happened in the development.  If, after agonizing over her role in the relocation even to the point of losing her position on DS9, Kira didn't have to make a choice in the end (because the moon suddenly exploded on its own, for example)  then that struggle would lose most of its meaning for us.  In the end, it wouldn't matter.  We have terms like Deus ex machina, to express how that diminishes the value of the story.  We would say it weakened the ending.

This episode suffers a bit from this last problem.  We spend the entire development of the story creating and implementing a plan to explode a torpedo in the mouth of a rift, programming and adjusting and waiting anxiously for its completion and worrying anxiously that the scheme might backfire and destroy the entire system, and finally the resolution of the story is based on magic that has nothing to do with any of those things.  There is a disorienting plot whiplash that occurs in the minds of the audience.

In the meantime, we have amusing but unrelated scenes of snowing on the Promenade and Odo with an emu that don't provide any support to the resolution.  They are just there for spectacle, or to put things less pejoratively, for color.  Half the stations residents are experiencing manifestations, Sisko tells the station log.  Does each of the residents have an alien observer, or is it just these three?  Did the figments merely create an environment where imagination becomes real and anyone can participate?  Why then do they seem to be so closely connected with the form of the leprechaun, the ball player, and the Trill?  Each of these little details, rather than pointing the audience toward an answer, instead confuses the story.

When the resolution comes, we should be able to look back over the development and see it all line up into one supporting structure.  Everything should fall into place.  The character, the setting, the conflict, the development and the resolution should all, in hindsight, look like a cohesive whole.