A Star Trek blog run by theladyem! What to be expected here: Trek of all flavors! And lots of it. All the time. I won't lie though most days it's mostly ds9. About Me Tags Art Blog My Trek Art My Society 6
if there's one thing the ds9 finale did, it was completely convince me that the only satisfying conclusion to julian bashir's arc would be him eventually ending up on cardassia
a small disclaimer: despite believing in garashir wholeheartedly and adoring the romantic undertones that would accompany julian's moving to cardassia, the narrative elements are the things making me so insane about this, and so convinced there can be no other fate for julian.
the focus on the characters who moved on (sisko, odo, o'brien, worf) made it all the more stark just how unmoored julian is in the wake of this episode, and how much of his connection to the station as home was based on the people around him rather than the physical location. he looks absolutely gutted with each departure and, unlike kira with sisko's baseball, he doesn't really have a moment of acceptance or get to fill a role that was left. in fact, the conversation he does have with ezri just emphasises how, for julian, things are never going to be as good as they used to be.
with this in mind (as well as the likelihood of things calming down professionally for him due to the war being over), it would make much more sense for him to leave the station either after helping with war casualties or staying on for longer. so the question is: where would he go?
given what i've argued about his sense of belonging being strongly tied to people, it stands to reason that the places he would feel drawn to would be the places his friends live. o'brien, of course, is on earth, but considering his tenuous relationship with his parents and his past trauma, and how much he has been able to let go of all that and actually be himself on ds9, i can't imagine it being a place he would be drawn to return to long term. what's more, a human dominated post-scarcity planet would hardly be a challenging environment for him medically. turning to his other strongest relationship brings us to garak on cardassia.
i think cardassia itself would appeal to julian somewhat after spending years slowly learning about their literature and culture through garak. i also think an alien planet would be oddly freeing for him, giving him a chance to live among a population who consider him strange by virtue of being human rather than because he's an augment or because he is (unbeknownst to them) quite an odd human so to speak. I've always seen julian and garak as providing each other a space free of the typical judgements they face from everyone else, and i can totally imagine julian having that association with the planet because of it.
my favourite reason, however, goes back to the ds9 pilot and julian's infamous 'frontier medicine' line. because post-war cardassia, with its bombed out infrastructure and millions dead and displaced, is exactly the kind of situation that would challenge him in that way. except now, julian is older, wiser, and has years of combat experience under his belt. his time on ds9 is what changed him into the person he dreamed of being, and while the reality is much grimmer than he ever imagined, he's now ready to be the person who can go to this devastated planet and help them rebuild from the ground up. in the Our Man Bashir episode of the Delta Flyers podcast, alexander siddig mentioned how the show watches julian grow up over its course. ds9 was a transitional period for julian, and moving on to cardassia is exactly the sort of thing that would allow those changes to be put to use.
i haven't properly got into beta canon (yet), but based on watching the show and the vision of bashir and his arc i've been slowly developing over these past 4-5 months of watching, i can't believe there's any other end for him. his professional satisfaction, social liberation, and emotional fulfilment all point in one direction. and if there's anything i've learnt about julian bashir, it's that he has never been put off by 'uncertain times'.
julian comes back from internment camp 371 speaking nearly fluent klingon. mainly because the only way to pass the time during the long, lonely nights is to ask martok to tell him traditional klingon stories and martok insists that julian turns the UT off to preserve the nuance.
garak tells himself that this is Fine, even though julian hasn’t bothered to learn kardasi. in the five years they’ve known each other. even though julian and martok are laughing and joking together in the runabout back. it’s good to know more languages, of course. what is not Fine is julian insisting from that point on that they only read klingon stories for their book club. ”they’re so engaging”, julian says. ”so romantic and muti-facetted! so much better that that last play you forced on me-”
and this is where garak decides that sto’vo’kor might be a good place for general martok to go, actually
I dont think they have had sex I think garak is responsible for leaking his nudes 50 times/exposing his affairs/blackmailing him whenever he gets bored. Dukat isnt interesting enough for garak to hatefuck
Star Trek Captains in order of how fast they kill Tuvix:
1. Archer (does not feel bad)
2. Burnham (feels a Little Bad)
3. Janeway (we personally witnessed the devastation in them big ol I Had to Kill Somebody eyes, but she recovers quickly due to personal love of Tuvok and Neelix)
4. Sisko (spends awhile confirming every single possible alternative, does Not Feel Bad except when Tuvix directly calls him murderer)
5. Kirk (tries to Kobayashi Maru it. Dealer’s choice on if this results in a Tuvix AND Neelix and Tuvok live, or if it becomes one of those things that he carries foreverrr)
6. Picard (this could be a two parter episode with how much he would need to soliloquize on identity and the rights of the individual and the authority limits of a captain. But yeah, he’s killing Tuvix).
This doesn’t even touch on how the non-Janeway captains would react if their Tuvix was ALSO made up of one half Their Best Friend and Moral Compass.
when bashir asked dax out in the first episode and sisko was like "i wonder if he'd be interested if you were still some old man" What no one realised is the answer was probably yes
The grimy, unpatrolled streets of Laket are a dark and dangerous place. Inspector Levok of the Ministry of Justice is one of the few men standing in the way of total anarchy.
When the industrialist and philanthropist Pravet is found brutally slain in his opulent mansion in a room locked from the inside, it is just one item too many on Levok’s docket. In a city full of drugs, gangs, theft, and mysterious disappearances, the murder stands out because of its victim’s prominence. His civilian supervisor advises him to close it quickly, but the deeper he digs, the less the case makes sense.
The wealth on display in the family's townhome doesn't match the numbers in his account books. His grieving widow is desperate to protect the family's reputation. His eldest son stands to inherit a fortune but from where? His younger daughter harbored a bitter feud against her father, while the man's ambitious brother insists his business is above reproach. The missing nephew is not mentioned at all.
Worse still, Levok's on-again, off-again lover, a streetwalker named Saraol, was with the industrialist the night he died, but despite leaving while he was still alive, Saraol confesses to the murder the moment she's brought in for questioning.
As contradictions mount and powerful interests close ranks, levok finds himself trapped between family secrets, political pressure, and a crime behind a locked door that should be impossible.
Who is Saraol protecting? Where did the eldest son’s fortune come from? What happened to the missing nephew? And most of all, how did Pravet die, and who killed him?
The reason I reached for genre romance novels for Star Trek is Ive read so so so many of them and I know roughly how most of them convey something about the culture that produced them, in content and structure and what it means for what a culture values in a partner, and in themselves. It’s somewhat easy to use the scaffolding I already know to use existing genre conventions to explain something about the aliens in Star Trek.
I have not read enough murder and thriller novels to articulate what the genre is establishing about culture and values so I can’t be like ‘this is the dime airport novel about women getting sexy murdered but in Vulcan’ because I don’t know which genre conventions are load bearing and which are just more traditional. The murder mysteries i HAVE read are literally just Agatha Christie and maybe a handful of others that are directly inspired by her. I’ve watched a lot of murder television, but that is nottttt the same medium.
Bringing out those tags because so, so interesting, perhaps one of my favourite things, to mess around with patterns of story*. When I sat down with Spock to transcribe his autobiography, we came up with a form for what Vulcan memoir might look like, which he subverts. (There’s some of Sarek’s poetry too.)
Meditations on a Crimson Shadow is described as being set during a future war, so is a Cardassian sf novel. I figured it would surely, at least superficially, tell the story of Cardassian supremacy and permanent conquest, like Orwell’s boot stamping on a human face forever. Except maybe if you were reading it in the basement of your father’s home as your whole civilization implodes around you. Then I thought it might read differently. Or at least you would start the previously unimaginable work of imagining differently.
If historical fiction tries to reconfigure what we think was possible for people in the past, sf tries to configure what we think can be possible to us in the future. They feel very close, in my mind. Can we find sources or traditions in the past that give us succour or hope? What visions of the future are available to us, or do we need to imagine, and how do we map our way there? I think about these things all the time.
Walter Benjamin, On the Concept of History, VI
* Patterns of Story was the title of my MA creative writing module where we read 6 novels and mucked around with them in as many ways as possible. This week we’ll go through one scene in Madame Bovary and see how meticulously it’s constructed. This week we’ll read some post-apocalyptic Kentish dialect and I’ll do my party piece from Ulysses. This week I’ll tell you why Moll Flanders is like the Doctor Who Hartnell-era story “The Sensorites”. This week I’ll explain what I think are the two distinctive modes in the crime novel. And this week we’ll read a modernist novel that you’ll doubt at best or hate at worst but ten years later you’ll email me to ask the title because you haven’t been able to get it out of your head. I loved teaching that class. What an amazing technology novels are. I really do like them, probably nothing nicer than novels.
Oh, just to add that if we go with Harold Bloom (wait! come back!) and read Shakespeare as "inventing" the human, then Garak's blustering that Shakespeare is rubbish and pointless can of course be taken as yet another crock of performative bullshit - not only does he QUOTE HIM TO TAIN (let me throw words learned from my beloved in your fucking face), but Shakespeare represents his encounter with humanity by which we mean Bashir by which we mean the crumbling of Garak's belief in Cardassian supremacy. Shakespeare by which we mean the human by which we mean Bashir rewires (see what I did there) Garak's brain to such an extent that I would not be surprised if Garak regularly catches himself thinking in blank verse.
I think the concept of crimson shadow as a example of sci-fi literary fiction is genuinely fascinating, bc now I am thinking about the terrible copy cats after Orwell of pulpy shoot em up sci fi dystopias. (Also can’t believe how often I fall for The Canonical Liar who Lies. I’m genuinely so easy to trick.) Novels about surveillance robots and scantily clad beautiful reptilian women, and the concrete pillar of patriotism and nationalism you will always be able to build your identity around. I’m not gonna lie when I was first thinking about crimson shadow I didn’t make this leap of science fiction, I believe I was thinking about the Norse legend of ragnarok, where it’s spoken of in concrete future tense as though it both has happened before and will happen again in a cyclical nature of conquest.
I’ve done a piece before of rugal and ziyal and Jake discussing Star wars franchise as a piece of cardassian literature, with decades of one family either serving or destroying the state, with the filial obligations to the generation before as a repetitive epic, now I really want to revisit it with your incredible class lens of Patterns of Story.
I know there’s something on the bones of murder mystery thriller pulp that could be translated to Vulcan, something probably closer to the Detective kosuke kindaichi books, where it takes you through every single clue and a diagram of the house so you can see the logical leaps and make them yourself, as opposed to a Sherlock Holmes where you only really get the clues after they’ve amounted to a solution. The elements of murder mystery undertone of an empire in decline and a new era struggling to establish itself while ancient secrets come unburied that’s in both Agatha Christie and in Yokomizo is really the part that I cannot figure out how to change for Vulcan culture itself.
The other somewhat silly book genres I’ve been thinking about as I stretch a little outside my comfort zone is medieval travel writing (Marco polo, Ibn Battutaʼs Journeys,etc) as it would appear in really really early warp and pre warp cultures, and hard supernatural horror to lean into fears and anxieties
i do think that bashir and garak could play a sherlock holmes hologame together but ONLY if they're playing as holmes and moriarty respectively. there is no watson.
[ID: A Facebook post edited to be by T'Pring from Star Trek TOS which says, "If y'all see my betrothed at pride DO NOT INBOX ME.. I already know 🙄😒". End ID]
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