Why Star Trek's most important relationship is Garak and Bashir

Star Trek is full of incredible odd couple friendships, starting with the hot-headed Captain James T. Kirk (William Shatner) and the stoic half-volcano Commander Spock (Leonard Nimoy). Kirk and Spock were a great couple as they balanced each other out and learned from each other, showing the deep bonds that can form between very different people. Ghost is even the one who helps Kirk begins to understand his racism against the Klingons in “Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country,” showing that even after decades together, the two still have a lot to teach each other. Their friendship is a truly beautiful thing, but there is one notable factor: they are both Starfleet and Federation planets. They can be very different, but they're never really contradictory (unless something weird happens, like that whole Mr. Farr thing).

Then there's Dr. Julian Bashir (Alexander Siddig) and Elim Garak (Andrew Robinson) from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. The two are unlikely friends on the space station Deep Space Nine. The station was formerly called Terok Nor and was run by the Cardassians occupying the nearby planet Bajor, which had just regained its independence. Garak is the only Cardassian left on the station: a tailor and possibly an outcast spy. Bashir is the Golden Boy of the Federation: a (genetically enhanced) human doctor whose work is so impressive that he is being used as a model for new Starfleet medical holograms. Garak and Bashir have a complex friendship with great depth, and despite their differences, they have the most important and powerful relationship in all of Star Trek.

Gene Roddenberry's vision of Star Trek was a utopian future, and the Federation was supposed to represent the best of humanity. Deep Space Nine, long considered a strange, dark offshoot of the franchise, sees the aliens on Deep Space Nine portray humanity's ugly reality. Not only that, but the aliens were often at odds: even though Roddenberry never wanted Star Trek to be about war, the show did deal with the harsh truths of the conflict with the Dominion Wars that forced Captain Benjamin Sisko discard his Starfleet morale to save millions and millions of lives.

Aliens like it Ferengi bartender Quark (Armin Shimerman), Garak, and the shape-shifter Odo (René Auberjunois) provided a very different perspective on Starfleet in shades of moral gray that were well outside the range of other “Star Trek” shows. No one represented moral ambiguity quite like Garak, who was supposed to be utterly despicable simply because he was: a member of the Obsidian Order, a Cardassian spy organization, something of a reptilian space Nazi. However, he was never overtly evil, and over the course of the series and his friendship with Bashir, he began to do things for seemingly selfless reasons, lying to his true nature.

In an interview with TrekMovie.comRobinson explained that he likened Garak's exile in Deep Space Nine to a Nazi officer remaining in Jerusalem, asking himself, “What is this guy doing here, where is he even hated?” to connect with the character. As we begin to learn more about Garak and his past, he becomes less villainous and more tragic, and he's the perfect husband for the almost-too-perfect Dr. Julian Bashir.

Dr. Bashir is young, hopeful, and a bit naive when we first meet him in “Deep Space Nine,” and he meets Garak in episode three. The two immediately struck up a sort of flirtatious and rambunctious friendship, with Bashir desperately trying to solve the mystery of Garak's true identity and Garak trying to get into Bashir's pants (more on that later). Bashir is a bit cocky, but understandably so, as we later find out that he is genetically enhanced and is smarter, stronger, faster and more agile than most humans, although he had to hide this fact as genetic modification is forbidden in Starfleet. He's more human than human—an earnest and sincere young man who loves a good mystery and has a holosuite program in which he impersonates a character who is essentially James Bond. His best friend in the world is Engineer Miles O'Brien (Colm Meaney), the most important man in Starfleet history, and together they truly represent the best man the Federation has to offer.

Bashir and Garak's friendship begins because of Bashir's curiosity as he tries to learn as much as possible about the eternally enigmatic Garak. He is quite convinced that Garak is actually a Cardassian spy, and he often chooses Garak's words to try to coax him into details about the art of espionage. It's only after Garak nearly dies from addiction to a device in his brain that the Order has implanted to silence him during torture in the Season 2 episode “The Wire” that the two become friends and their bond runs deep.

In “The Wire”, some of Garak's walls begin to crumble slightly as they are removed from the chemicals produced by the device, and he tells Bashir, “Being on this station is torture for me, Doctor.” He reveals that he was sent to Terok Nor and abandoned there because he showed mercy to Bajor's prisoners of war, mostly women and children, allowing them to go free. However, he still has to lie a bit, and the leader of the Obsidian Order, Enabran Thane (Paul Dooley), explains to the investigating Bashir that Garak has an incredible power of obfuscation, and that most of his lies have a grain of truth in them. .

We eventually learn that Tyne was Garak's father (though he never publicly admitted it because Garak was illegitimate), and he was as ruthless as you'd expect. In fact, Garak has a severe case of claustrophobia, possibly stemming from being locked in a closet by Thane for hours as a child. However, it's clear that all he ever wanted was to earn his father's approval. So while Garak has done some pretty terrible thingshe was raised by one of the most horrible people in the galaxy and didn't really know anything else until he was sent into exile and met Bashir and the other people from Deep Space Nine.

Bashir helps Garak to some extent learn to be a better person with a little more focus and empathy. He begins to do things to help others, even at his own expense, such as helping Quark's Cardassian dissident ex-girlfriend escape. After having lunch together once a week for years, the Cardassian and the human begin to rub off on each other. In the season 3 episode “The Die is Cast”, Bashir tells Miles that Garak has made him think of lunch as an “arena for philosophical debate”. Many friends will never challenge each other the way Bashir and Garak do, but their relationship pushes them both to become fuller, more complex people.

So Bashir helps Garak become a better person and form meaningful relationships, but what does the good doctor get out of it—besides the fun of trying to figure out the sneaky Cardassian? Along with brain training, Garak actually helps Bashir develop a bit of a survival instinct and sharpen his espionage skills. In the episode “Our Man Bashir”, in which the two characters get stuck in Bashir's James Bond-style holosuite program with no security protocols, Bashir even prevents Garak from potentially killing the other crew members in order to survive himself by shooting Garak and grazing him. . For the first time, Bashir proves to be as dangerous as Garak, and this elevates him to the spy's esteem. It's pretty funny, but it works out for Bashir in the end, as he later confronts Starfleet's own version of the Obsidian Order, Chapter 31and Garak's hard lessons help him endure.

Bashir and Garak's understanding of the world is best shown in their conversations about literature. Garak prefers Cardassian epics where people live dedicated lives in service of the state, while Bashir appreciates mysteries and tragedies like Shakespeare's Julius Caesar. However, Garach cannot understand this because he concluded so early that Brutus would betray Caesar. Bashir tries to explain that the tragedy lies in the idea that Caesar couldn't imagine that his best friend would try to kill him, and Garak is amused, saying that it's a farce instead of a tragedy. In Garaka's world, those closest to you are more likely to stab you in the back. But he learns to trust Bashir and vice versa, which is a powerful thing.

There's quite a bit of flirting between Garak and Bashir throughout Deep Space Nine, but it's never fully fleshed out because TV just wasn't ready for sexy alien love in the 90s. Robinson found Garak to be “sexually ambiguous” and believed that his motivation for getting to know Bashir was initially sexual. TrekMovie.com:

“In the very first scene when he meets Dr. Bashir, it's clear as a bell — and it was my choice — that he was sexually attracted to this handsome young Starfleet doctor. And even though they didn't explicitly follow through on that gay character, this the ambiguity about Garak remained and it goes with what they had written about his ambiguity, is he a tailor, a spy, what is he?

Although Robinson says he was never told to tone it down, producer Rick Berman infamously did, too prevented Garak from being overtly weird in the series. However, in the year since, Siddig and Robinson have done just that performed fanfiction together For the SidCity YouTube channel, Garak and Bashir are romantically involved in the readings. (The two actors are good friends in real life.) In Season 5 of Star Trek: Lower Decks, the alternate universe hologram versions of Garak and Bashir are married to each other, and the actors reprized their roles (in cartoon form). . It was very satisfying for fans who had always wanted to see them together as a romantic couple, but didn't make any assumptions or changes to the original “Deep Space Nine” timeline, making it the perfect way to say goodbye. two deeply complex characters.

Even if you're not a “Garashir” (as the couple is called), there's no denying the power of their friendship. Garak was unlike any other Star Trek protagonist—a morally ambiguous alien with an allergy to honesty—but he and Starfleet's most perfect doctor shared as deep a bond as any other member of the franchise. Star Trek is about finding common ground and seeing yourself in each other, and Garak and Bashir are its strongest and best examples of this idea.