Worst of Star Trek: DS9---The Storyteller

"The Storyteller" is a silly episode, not so much for it's story involving the negotiations on the station between to rival factions on Bajor over a land dispute, but the one on Bajor with Dr. Bashir and Chief O'Brien.

Both men go down to the planet's surface in response to an emergency call. An elderly man is dying of old age. Dr. Bashir tells the villagers there's not much left to do for him except make him comfortable in his final hours. BUT, if he dies, the whole village is doomed!

Why? Well, something called Dal-Rok appears at this time every year and shakes the hell out of the place until the villagers prove themselves stronger and makes the thing go away. This thing resembles a big puffy cloud that grows to intensity and causes atmospheric disturbances.

The old man relates the story of how the villagers can defeat it while holding his arms up like Moses. Trouble is, he is too old and frail and proclaims Chief O'Brien as the new community leader to keep the thing at bay.

The best thing about this episode is O'Brien's reaction to it all (expertly played by Colm Meaney) who is having none of it. Reluctantly he goes along with it as a means of figuring out what to hell this thing really is.

After the old man's apprentice tries to kill O'Brien behind his back for taking his job, O'Brien calms the man down and asks him to explain how this thing appears, why, and how to stop it.

The thing is actually a creation of the villagers collective minds. It's generated by a piece of one of the alien orbs that the Cardassians are fighting the Bajorans over. Many years before, two tribes were fighting and this brings them together in a common purpose. The storyteller revs up the collective mental fighting power of the villagers which makes the Dal-Rok disappear until the next year when they do it all over again.

It's both funny and painful to watch O'Brien attempt to hold this thing at bay, but his lack of confidence and obvious reluctance arent' lost on the villagers. The Dal-Rok grows larger and things start going to shit. The apprentice saves the day in the last minute and is proclaimed as the new Sirah (village wise man).

Watching humanoids act like superstitious simpletons out of the stone age in the age of space travel and computer generated graphics is just embarrassing.