@avclub-0c3e626d1a287cdc48c77515c8dcc243:disqus is incorrect.

It's unclear. I tend to think they erased them from history, myself. (Which, yes, makes the Prophets fucking terrifying, but the show has always been comfortable implying that they're scary motherfuckers.)

It's actually genuinely weird that they don't step in earlier. What's the entire purpose of the Orbs, from their perspective? I mean, there is that fanwank that they are the future evolution of the Bajorans… so does that mean that their non-intervention would have led to the same outcome?

Verily.

The show is really driving at relating Sisko not to Jesus or Moses, but Abraham. Sisko becomes not a man who negotiates, and not a man deliberately driven towards sacrifice, but one who becomes sacrificial because it's all he has left to believe.

It's a better episode than it has any right to be, in part because it's more about Dax and Worf's relations to their friends than their romance.

Akerman and Whitford have a surprisingly good chemistry here, which makes me think this show just may work out.

I mean, I guess if you cast Whitford (and I'm a HUGE fan) he has to be in it a lot. On the other hand, the title works better if we rarely see him and the first wife is the main POV character. Since Akerman's the protagonist, it's just fucking weird.

I'm actually going to assume it's because Kale grows in the dead of winter and it's cold there.

I like this in theory, but isn't setting him up as Lin's cop-buddy apprentice kind of a big step away from this?

I agree. A big part of the character's appeal for me is that her struggle is not to accept that she's the Avatar, but to determine how to BE the Avatar. Which is a much more challenging narrative.

The thing that's also weird about it is that the show hasn't entirely abandoned the idea of the Nog-Jake friendship driving stories and won't even waaaaay into season 7, but they keep having to make up other people to flesh out that Jake and Nog have social lives outside one another.

Not only have they been treating her with kid gloves, but she also doesn't seem to have BASIC knowledge about things like current technology (Asami taught her how to drive, right?) or international geopolitics.

It does point up how keeping her isolated at the South Pole makes her
poorly suited for her role in complicated, fast-changing global
politics. And really naive: her power isolated her within her little
pond.

Agree. They're foreshadowing a Korra/Mako breakup really, really hard here.

@avclub-adb4c903674d579c1a43dbf3ae93f077:disqus  Actually, earlier in the series than "The Search", we start to hear legends about Changelings that makes it seem like pre-Dominion, the Changelings didn't have a Great Link and lived as galactic refugees by impersonating other species until discovered and then hunted…

This is a great insight, well phrased.

Man, I am marrying this idea.

He does indeed, though he's still thinking of resigning to civilian life.

Belatedly, I really like the idea that Alexander and Jake could have been friends. This show had a LOT of missed opportunities with the younger cohort never much hanging out with one another.