YMMV / Star Trek: Deep Space Nine S01E14 "The Storyteller"

• Esoteric Happy Ending: Both stories supposedly end on a happy note but don't seem that happy when you think about them:
  • Varis might have learned a good lesson on DS9, but she's still a 15-year-old girl with an inherited, completely unearned role of authority over a people and no apparent advisors of her own. She came dangerously close to war through her own incompetence once already. What's going to happen the next time she's screwing up and Sisko isn't around to drive some good sense into her?
  • Unusually for a Star Trek episode, a civilization based on a lie is allowed to continue with its lie intact. Rather than outgrow (or realize that they've already outgrown) the need for the Dal'Rok, the Bajoran villagers continue to live in fear of it and rely on a song-and-dance from an unelected leader to literally save them from destruction.
• Fridge Horror: As Sirah, O'Brien finds himself overwhelmed with gifts from the villagers, including the pick of the local food crops and even offers of sexual favors from the young women — the implication being that this is normal treatment for a Sirah, and that prior incumbents have taken full advantage as they wished. This would be, to say the least, ethically questionable even if the Dal'Rok really were just a dangerous monster from the woods, but once you learn that the position of Sirah is essentially based on a lie, it becomes downright exploitative.
• It's the Same, Now It Sucks!: One of the biggest complaints about the story is that there was another "dying leader deliberately chooses an unlikely successor as a Secret Test of Character for his actual intended successor" story only three episodes ago, with "The Nagus." On top of that, "The Nagus" also had a B-story with a heavy focus on Jake and Nog, much like this one.