Miles O'Brien is scheduled to pilot Julian Bashir down to the surface of Bajor so the good doctor can treat some medical calamity in a remote village. Bashir is enthusiastic about using the trip to get to know O'Brien, but the chief's pained expression when his last-minute attempt to duck the mission fails suggests that he's not relishing the idea.
Back on the station, Sisko is negotiating a complicated land dispute with two Bajoran clans, the Paqu and the Navot. During the Cardassian occupation, the river that marked the boundary between their lands was altered by Cardassian miners, shifting 20 kilometers of land to Paqu control. The negotiator for the Paqu is Varis Sul, a very hard-nosed 15-year-old girl who refuses to budge in the negotiations. And when Nog catches sight of her, it's Love at First Sight.
Back on Bajor, O'Brien and Bashir find out only one person in the village is ill — an old man called the Sirah (Kay E. Kuter). He's dying, and he declares O'Brien as his chosen replacement. The Sirah is the eponymous storyteller. Once a year, for five days, the village is attacked by a mysterious entity called the Dal'Rok. The Sirah rallies the will of his people to drive it away. The problem is, the Sirah is dying of old age, something Bashir can't stop.
Back on the station, Nog and Jake attempt to make friends with Varis. Nog however is a stuttering mess, leaving Jake to do most of the talking.
That night on Bajor, the Sirah leads his usual fight against the Dal'Rok. However, he collapses before he can complete his task. With the Dal'Rok assaulting the village, Sirah calls on O'Brien to assist him. Together, they drive the Dal'Rok away. The Sirah then dies, leaving a very reluctant Miles in the position.
The negotiations still haven't gone anywhere. Varis just refuses to compromise on anything. Noticing how bummed out she is, Nog and Jake lead her in a little mischief: stealing Odo's bucket from his office. After Nog fills it with oatmeal and spills it all over Jake as a prank, the three have a good laugh... just long enough for Odo to walk in and bust the three of them.
Sirah O'Brien is overwhelmed by the adoration and of the villagers, complete with gifts, requests for blessings, and offers of some nubile "company." And things just get worse when Sirah's apprentice, Hovath, attempts to stab him.
After Julian helps stop him, Hovath reveals exactly what the Dal'Rok is: fear given form. Years ago, the village was divided by hatred and mistrust, so a rather unusual way was devised to bring them together. Using a fragment of one of the Orbs, the Dal'Rok was born, forcing the people to rally together to drive it away. It united the village. The problem is, Hovath blew his attempt three days ago, and now the villagers don't trust him.
Back on DS9, Varis reveals why she's such a hardass: because she's just some girl. Her father could safely make compromises and not appear weak, but she doesn't believe she can do the same. After talking with Sisko, she finally realizes compromise isn't a bad thing and works out a fair deal with the Navot.
In the village, it's night five of the Dal'Rok, and O'Brien is doing a spectacular...ly bad job. After some thinking, Bashir figures that was the idea: stick O'Brien up on the rock, and have him lay an egg against the Dal'Rok, thus leaving Hovath with the chance to step in and save the village. He does just that, allowing Miles and Bashir to take their leave.
Tropes:
- An Aesop: Compromise isn't a bad thing sometimes.
- Brick Joke: At the end of the episode, Odo takes Nog and Jake by the shoulders and says they're going to clean the security office until it shines.
- Central Theme: Both plots revolve around an Inadequate Inheritor.
- Chekhov's Gunman: Hovath spends a few acts of the episode glaring in the background before he becomes relevant.
- A Child Shall Lead Them: The young tetrarch, Varis Sul, has been put in this position. A bit of a deconstruction, as she's attempting to compensate for her youth by refusing to compromise.
- Deliberately Bad Example: Invoked by the Sirah to allow Hovath to succeed him—by showing the villagers an unworthy successor in O'Brien, he gave Hovath another chance to gain the villagers' trust.
- Early-Installment Weirdness:
- The way Nog interacts with Varis is completely at odds with established Ferengi attitudes towards women. In his defense, he is still a boy at this point.
- Bashir and O'Brien are unable to overpower Hovath until O'Brien summons a burst of energy. It's unclear when the writers had decided that Bashir is an augment, but there's no indication (just like the last time Bashir was in a fight) that he's holding back.
- Fantastic Legal Weirdness: The drafters of the Paqu-Navot treaty probably didn't anticipate the Cardassians tampering with the course of the river used to define their border.
- First-Name Basis: In the beginning of the episode, Bashir asks O'Brien to call him "Julian," which O'Brien reluctantly does. In the end, Bashir tells him that he doesn't actually have to.
- Freeze-Frame Bonus: Scans of the Buck Bokai baseball card
on Sisko's desk show that he played for a team called the "Gotham City Bats". - The Gadfly: Bashir is clearly having the time of his life watching O'Brien squirm, although he doesn't hesitate to help him when he needs it, for example in the fight against Hovath.
- Genghis Gambit: The Dal'Rok was created to unite an otherwise warring village under the threat of a common foe.
- Inadequate Inheritor:
- Varis is a young girl put in charge of the Paqu. She feels that she won't be taken seriously in the role unless she's an uncompromising hard-ass, which might result in an unnecessary war. The Siskos help her figure out that compromise doesn't make her look weak.
- Hovath screwed up his first attempt to take over as Sirah, forcing him to watch O'Brien take his place, but he gets a second opportunity and manages to succeed.
- Karma Houdini: Hovath attempts to murder O'Brien and yet gets everything he wants by the end of the episode.
- Love at First Sight: Nog is smitten with Varis the moment he sees her.
- Mistaken for Transformed: Exploited. Odo needs to periodically revert to his liquid state and sleep in a bucket, so Nog pulls a prank on Jake and Varis by stealing the bucket, filling it with oatmeal, putting it back, and "accidentally" spilling the oatmeal onto Jake, leaving Jake with the impression that he's just gotten the liquefied Odo all over him.
- Regional Redecoration: In the Backstory to Sisko's plot, Cardassian miners diverted the route of the River Glyrhond for their own purposes, disrupting a treaty between two local tribes that had set the river as their border.
- Seduction-Proof Marriage: O'Brien is given an easy opportunity to cheat on Keiko. He's not even slightly tempted.
- This Is Gonna Suck: O'Brien, when he's unable to wriggle out of taking a trip to Bajor with Bashir. The doctor, chirpy as ever, is only too eager to tell O'Brien how much he's been looking forward to having a chance to get to know him better. As soon as his back is turned, O'Brien's face lets us know he really, really hasn't.
- Too Dumb to Live:
- The Bajoran village. Somehow, no one has ever realized that this mythical creature attacks on an annual basis and is always easily defeated by one man.
- The first Sirah. He saw that the people of the village tended to quarrel, and so decided to resolve it by creating a "monster" powerful enough to completely destroy the village if anything went wrong with the ceremony to dispel it. Though this was in part due to an intended detail from the story — the original Dal'Rok was actually harmless, but the villagers' fear of it grew among the generations, which correspondingly made the Dal'Rok itself much more powerful — not making it to the finished episode.
