DS9 2x22 The Wire thoughts (I'm re-watching, so there may be future spoilers)
I'm so excited to watch this again!
I guess we don't know that Julian had the choice to "entertain one of his lady friends" the night before, but I certainly choose to believe he did, he wanted to finish Garak's book more :p
Garak's stammering in "Doctor, what do you think you're doing?" :3
"In my expert medical opinion, I'd say it's sick." XD
"Keiko would be proud of you." Hah - the thing is I can imagine the overly-excited Julian telling her about this at some point and her just sweetly saying "well done, I'm impressed" but in her teacher voice she uses for seven year olds
"It's not like you two are really friends." Julian is NOT being subtle here that at the very least he WANTS to be real friends 😅 this man and lying...
Okay and now he's stabbing the plant with the hypospray because he's so frustrated with not being able to help Garak
VERY dramatic entrance, doctor.
😬😂That looked suspiciously like Quark was miming giving Julian oomax while saying "maybe a late night session in a holosuite".
"Try not to yell at any more admirals for a while." "I wasn't yelling. I was just expressing my feelings. Loudly." Gotta love Sisko
Oh, his poor dejected face at the information recurring taking weeks :3
Love how Julian is called to take care of Garak - this isn't Dr Bashir being called, it's not a medical emergency. It's Julian being Garak's only known friend who's requested.
Is it just me or did Julian check Garak or when he said "We'll go to my quarters"?
That drink exchange was VERY smooth of Quark and Julian
"I routinely monitor all of Quark's subspace communications." "Is that legal?" XD
"I see your point"... That's actually the exact same phrase as altered!Julian uses in Dramatis Personae - only this time it's ihm agreeing to do something questionable with Odo, last time it was to do something reasonable with him.
" I hope you don't have one of those little bugs hidden in my quarters." "Should I?" What's the betting Julian's going to be paranoid about this for a few weeks?
Julian's "What?! *sigh*" after being told Garak had left the infirmary. Idk it gave me feels.
I'm here for his Angry Pacing
"Doctor, did anyone ever tell you that you are an infuriating pest" "Chief O'Brien all the time, and I don't pay any attention to him either." That answer came SO quickly, he didn't even have to think about it
"I'm a doctor. You're my patient. That's all I need to know" JULIAN I CANNOT WITH YOU
Ohh, his sad looking downness <3 <3
Endless endless compassion, I love you so much
"Right now I'm not concerned with what you did in the past. I'm simply not going to walk out of here and let you die. We need to turn that implant off and whatever withdrawal symptoms or side effects you may experience, I promise I'll help you through them." Is he really not in love with Garak?! Because this is some gay shit Julian Subatoi Bashir. GAY I tell you
"In that case I want to talk to him now. Wake him up." "I'll do no such thing." "Doctor, these are murder cases and Garak may be a suspect." "That may be so, but he's still my patient and I won't have him disturbed." I am WILD about calmly resolute Doctor Bashir
I love a sleepy Julian :3
Garak's manic speech is incredible. WHAT a performance. My word. I couldn't look away.
" I can't believe that I actually enjoyed ... staring into your smug, sanctimonious face." Staring into Julian's face sounds pretty gay to me, Garak. (Who wouldn't enjoy staring at it though?)
Ah yes, wrestling on the floor with your alien crush while he is out of his mind. Definitely never happened before in Trek. No parallels here to be drawn.........
"I don't want to hurt you." And presumably he actually could.
Julian whizzing through all the samples, brining one back having seen it for all of 2 seconds and immediately knowing which one to overlay it with. THAT SEEMS PRETTY GENETICALLY ENGINEERED TO ME. I swear I don't know how that crackpot retcon worked so well, but it DOES
"More than I deserve." Oooh, callback to earlier int he episode when he said "Has it ever occurred to you that I might be getting exactly what I deserve?" .... My HEART
"I've about given up on learning the truth from you, Garak."I The FONDNESS with which he SAYS this!
"We were closer than brothers...."Sons of Train" welp, that's the 'true' bit
Holding handsssss!!!
There's no way Sisko sanctioned this, right? Did Julian just steal the shuttle craft?!
Okay then, just beam into the house of someone you know to be extremely dangerous and start poking around?! Your curiosity, Julian, I swear...
*wide smile* "I always drink Tarkalian! ..." -suddenly realises that this is VERY personal information Tain has on him- "...Tea."
Did he just GIGGLE? *rewatches* Yep, it's definitely there - "Are all the Starfleet Lieutenants as brash as you are?" "I couldn't say - hehe - though I doubt it."
"I thought you were his friend." "I suppose I am." YES HE SAID IT that's the first step
"Information is your business." Julian you are bold as BRASS
"he'll never come home again" oof, knowing the double meaning of home as Cardassia and to Tain
The disappointment in Julian's face at the answer to his "Who was Elim?" question
Ohhh, that last conversation. Julian's so damn fond of him. That smile at the end. They ARE in love.
Well this was delightful. What a good episode. I had forgotten, and wasn't sure if it had just been hyped up. But no. Truly phenomenal. Thanks, DS9!
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“I forgive you. for whatever it is you did.” is such an insane line.
like imagine going your whole life believing that you’re only worth as much as you’re useful, doing things you know deep down are horrible just to serve the interests of a man who won’t even acknowledge you as his son and then after he exiles you 2 years later you find yourself on your deathbed, all your crimes finally caught up with you, the young doctor who at this point you believe could not have a more different experience of life than you decides against everything you’ve been taught about yourself that you’re worth saving.
and no matter how much you tell him you’re horrible, how wretched you make yourself look in front of him, he doesn’t care. he doesn’t care about your past. you’re forgiven. you’re worth saving, just by virtue of being alive. and he’s not saving you out of pity or even kindness, he’s doing it because he genuinely believes that. and for the first time since you were a small child, perhaps even ever, you feel like you have intrinsic worth.
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Ever since watching The Wire for the first time, my brain has doggedly kept working away at the Especially the lies of it all, and specifically at how much the structure beneath the different stories Garak tells contributes to the overall meaning of what he’s trying to say. While the contradicting narratives of course expertly obscure the factual circumstances of his getting exiled, using them also allows him to tell aspects and facets of the emotional truth I don’t think he ever could have, if he’d simply told the actual story of what happened. (It’s very Varric-core of him honestly.)
The first story — the ‘oh, you think you know me?’ story — says I have done things that would sicken you if you knew any detail of it. It’s clearly meant to scare Bashir away so he’ll leave him to die shamefully in peace already lol. But it’s also one of his (probably much-needed lbr) little lessons to Julian that are so frequent in the beginning, given while Garak still has some hold on himself — “Don’t be so quick to forgive me if you don’t even know what I’ve done; what would you do if this really were the sum total of what I am?” (And Julian seems to surprise him by going ‘Well, exactly the same thing, because no matter who you are I am a doctor. But I sort of take your point.’)
The second story — the letting the orphans go story — says I have failed to smother my soul in its cradle when it was required of me, and I regret that more than anything I’ve done. To my ears this is the one most shot through with active self-loathing too, which is interesting. He’s officially lost the control he’s been clinging to and it’s about to get ugly. His TL;DR is ‘Sentiment is the greatest weakness of all’, even all the way back here. (Which is the one lesson Julian steadfastly refuses to learn, which I think in turn does some serious rearrangement of Garak’s soul over the course of the show haha. Get uno reversed into the process of loving and being loved without shame asshole.) This is also where he builds up to admitting to having any sort of need for companionship or closeness at all and — so much worse — that Julian’s role in his life actually has fulfilled some of that need, and he’s DRIPPING with defensive venom over it b/c well I get it Garak vulnerability is scary it can take a person like that.
(I also feel there’s something honest and forbidden in ‘Suddenly the whole exercise seemed utterly meaningless’. I suspect ‘actually… why the fuck are we even doing this???’ is not a welcome sentiment in an Obsidian Order water cooler environment, no matter what you’re saying it about lmao. The very first seeds of him deconstructing the things he’s been taught about Cardassia and his work might be hinted at here, though they of course take a looong time to come to any real fruition.)
The third story — the ‘Elim was my best friend’ story — says hey, remember that thing you said once, about how sometimes, you have to be loyal to yourself before you can be loyal to anything else? Well. guess what. I couldn’t even be that lmao. It also furthers that thread of being divided from yourself, split, that having ‘Elim’ as a separate person around in all versions of the story brings in. He’s in control of himself again, but he essentially hands his life and soul over to Julian to decide what should be done with them.
I’ve done horrible things and it finally caught up with me, I’m getting what I deserve → I let sentiment master me and the fact that I’m too weak to do what’s needed of me shames me more than the evil I’ve done → I fucked up. I betrayed myself and everything I held to, all for nothing, and I have no one to blame for it but myself. But it’s very nice that you’re here anyway, Doctor. (Wow. I didn’t realize quite how isolated and lonely that last one was before right now. The way Tain has shaped him really has just… locked him completely into himself, huh.) We can also see a movement through from a completely professional context in the first story, to an intensely interpersonal and internal context in the last one — even his fake stories spiral in towards intimacy, which I think is what he longs for here even if he can’t quite like. Touch that without the stories as a buffer yet, it’s clearly like touching a hot stove for him to interact with it too directly.
And you know what I find incredibly interesting the whole way through? Even on his deathbed, where he’s dying from the thing Tain had put in his head, he’s protecting Tain. He puts all the blame for where he is on himself (‘My future was limitless, until I threw it away’), even if he has to employ a strange twisty logic where he’s split himself into two to do it. Don’t get me wrong, Garak has done horrific things all on his own haha, but it’s notable that he almost isolates Tain from that. ‘Tain was the Obsidian Order. Not even the Central Command dared challenge him. And I was his right hand.’ Tain in Garak’s stories is this infallible implacable weirdly distant figure, even now. Indeed, as will make a lot of sense with the revelations further down the line, more than anything it seems the gaze of an abused child desperate for recognition looking up at an idealized (if not in any way nurturing) parent.‘He was retired at that point; he couldn't protect me’, Garak says, as if what he’d need protection from in the first place isn’t Tain himself lmao, as if Tain had no active part in any of this. He never lets blame touch Tain at all. At this stage he would rather consider himself a broken flawed tool than accept that the hands that have wrought and wielded him have ever had any fault in them. AND in the middle of it all, with plausible deniability, on death’s door and knocking meekly to be let in before he must finish the mortifying ordeal of being known and test the even more daunting possibility of being loved, Garak at the same time manages to drop the breadcrumb trail of clues to make it possible for Julian to find Tain if he so chooses and gets in the ‘sons of Tain’ thing too for future dramatic irony purposes. Truly he is the Michelangelo of lying. Every falsehood a multifaceted masterpiece. Elim ‘achieving a state of intertextuality in real life is possible if you work hard and believe in yourself’ Garak. I love him so much.
I think all of this is why “I forgive you. For whatever it is you did,” works so well, because it too works on a structural level. It’s such a deceptively multilayered response — it has the syntax of a joke, in a way, and it is kind of funny even under the circumstances, but delivered with such earnest warmth and fondness. It’s both recognition and acceptance (forgiveness!). It’s saying ‘I finally understand enough of what you’re trying to tell me beneath and through all that, in whatever way you’re capable of, I see you’ and ‘my answer hasn’t changed (bitch)’. The forgiveness Julian offers here is complete — on principle, and out of personal feeling and empathy (only one of which Garak deigns to respond to during the second story, where he calls it ‘smug Federation sympathy’, placing it more completely on the principle side than it probably is. ‘Dude you’re my friend please don’t just lie down and die in a completely avoidable way on me, who else is going to not only tolerate but actually gleefully enjoy me being annoying as fuck over lunch’ seems to be the subtext that’s a lot harder to acknowledge and invite in for both of them. And yet Tain seems perfectly clear on the fact that Julian is Garak’s friend, which, y’know. Must be fun living with the knowledge that Tain has eyes everywhere looming over you every day haha guess you’d just have to tune that out.)
Most of all — ’Don’t give up on me now, Doctor’... and he didn’t! He didn’t. Augh. Ow.
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