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Old April 15 2013, 02:28 PM   #25
Re: Was anybody surprised by Dukat striking a deal with the Dominion?

We hear a lot about how Cardassians do two things much better, or at least much more intensely, than any human: family values and loyalty.

It's very difficult to show any of this supposedly alien behavior on screen. How does a man in scaly makeup put a greater value on his daughter than a man without? At least we got some examples of the totalitarian life on Cardassian worlds, with people living in fear of authorities, turning each other in, and so forth, even if we didn't get good examples of anybody actually sacrificing his life (or his fortunes or his future or whatever) for the good of the state. But in the end, we were left with nothing but hearsay on how these two Cardassian passions would balance out when conflicted.

...Until "Tears of the Prophets" and its aftermath, that is. We saw how a philandering and self-centered Cardassian husband went crazy when a young woman who wasn't even fully Cardassian was rightly executed for her atrocities against the Cardassian loyalty code, just because that woman happened to have some genes from said man. It's really an "irresistible force encounters immovable obstacle" type of thing, a fundamentally implausible (or at least alien) situation where all outcomes thus are plausible by default. What we see is what we get, and quite well may be what we'd have gotten had some other Cardassian killed the daughter of yet another Cardassian, regardless of their personality traits and other quirks.

Timo Saloniemi
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