shakespearevillain:

amemait:

thebluemeany:

silverelfmage:

thebluemeany:

lieutenant-selar:

“Star Trek: Deep Space Nine” The Die Is Cast

Okay - can I ask everyone: how do you view this line? I’m never know how to read it. 

Does he find it sad because he would have been a good tailor and that’s what Elim should have been rather than a spy/ gul/ tourturer/ powerful man like Tain made him be?

Or is he sad because being a good tailor on DS9 isn’t enough for him? He wants to be the powerful Son of Tain. Being a simple tailor doesn’t match his ambitions but that’s all he’s got left? 

I think this is kind of two-edged sword thing for Garak.  On the one hand, he is a good tailor, and he enjoys it, and had he been a tailor only,  he could have been a very happy man.  He may even wish that he had never been noticed by Tain, that Tain wasn’t his father and that Tolan had in fact been his father.

BUT he was a Son of Tain.  He’d experienced the rush of being a powerful person, who had every comfort imaginable, a very addictive experience (and we’ve already seen that he has problems with addiction). Further, his being on DS9 and being a tailor are part of his punishment for whatever he did that Tain saw as betrayal.  All that power was stripped away, and now he’s spit upon by his fellow Cardassians, when they should have been trembling in fearful respect around him as they had been prior to his exile.  So part of him resents being a tailor now, because he’d once been so powerful, had had influence, even if only from the shadows. 

Thanks! That’s is interesting: a sort of ‘ if I hadn’t seen such riches, I could live with being poor’ view works. 

He’s a complex little lizard isn’t he? What do you do with a character who’s more ashamed of enjoying being a tailor than he is of being a torturer… 

@lacefedora said:  #one of my favorite lines #amemait and I had a delightful discussion once about how more of DS9 is framed like theater than most TV shows#this was one of the prime examples #there’s also a lot to explore int he cardassian mindset of service class vs higher classes like the military #and Elim’s exile and work as a tailor is all service class work that he’s likely been made to feel ashamed of his whole life

It’s true, we did. The focus pull on this scene is entirely on Garak. It’s not entirely obvious from this gifset, but that’s Odo framed in a mirror there.

We don’t see many mirrors in DS9. The most notable mirrors we actively see in DS9 to this point are both in Cardassian hands - this one here, in Garak’s shop, and in the house of Legate Tekeny Ghemor. One of the latter group is in the shape of the Cardassian symbol, which I found absolutely gorgeous.

So. Cardassians like mirrors.

But even though it’s Garak’s mirror, even though he’s literally right in front of it, we can’t see him in it. It’s a comparatively long closeup on Garak’s face, and he doesn’t move from this position for much of the conversation. For most (all?) of this conversation, we don’t see Garak’s face in the mirror. The mirror is his, but he doesn’t look at himself in it.

We can see Odo in it (distorted though he is, but that’s the nature of the focus pull, and that’s some astounding work from whoever it was that day), but Garak’s reflection is hidden in shadow - shadows he’s used to occupying. Yet he himself is well-lit - enough the audience can see him in the light, surrounded by dark and ruined things. In the light, surrounded by shadows. Odo too is framed in light, but he’s also within shadow and indistinct, he’s far away and he is very literally standing within the light at the end of the tunnel. Odo is a shadow who earlier very literally punched him and pulled him away from another shadow, one whom had he stayed beside any longer would probably have resulted in his death.

And yet it’s Odo, despite the betrayal Garak performed (though debatably didn’t mean at the time), who has come to see Garak here in the dark. Shippers might have expected Julian; someone interested in how this now affects the balance of power within the Quadrants might have expected Sisko; but instead we have Odo, who can now say he’s seen Elim Garak at his worst, and has no reason to forgive Garak for his actions. It’s an odd move from Odo, who might have told Sisko et al exactly what Garak did, exactly that all of the rumours are completely true and he realy is a spy, he really will betray them all the moment it becomes convenient…

And he doesn’t. He has, in fact, allowed Garak to return to his shop. To go about his business as though nothing has changed. He even (though he doesn’t eat) starts having breakfasts with Garak.

I’m a very good tailor/Do you know what the sad part is, Odo?

There’s a lot of layers in the concept of the good tailor.

The obvious: He is good at being a tailor. A service class position - which is sad for him to be, because he’s exiled, and because he very nearly had his position back, except that Tain had been tricked. And he’s failed to save Tain (as far as he knows), but had Tain lived? There was a non-zero chance that Mila would have been killed. Mila, Elim Garak’s mother, would have been killed by Tain or by Tain’s orders. It’s entirely possible that Tain would have ordered Garak kill Mila as a show of loyalty (which is fucked up on a multitude of levels).

The also damned obvious: He’s a good tailor. Emphasis on the good - not merely in his craftsmanship, but in his character. The act of being a tailor rather than being a spy has made him into a better person.

The terrible puns set in the IRL: He’s a tailor because of The Man From U.N.C.L.E., the entrance to which was cunningly disguised as a tailor shop. I’m personally willing to stretch this a little to include the pun on le Carre’s ‘Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy’, as of course his Mirror is a Soldier, and he has been a Spy. Now all we need is a Tinker to round this out, and I’ve seen that in a couple of fic.

The potential for a terrible pun set within universe: Bashir does like his spy novels, it’s only a matter of time before he suggests le Carre’s Smiley series.

The sad part: He’s now dependent on Odo’s silence, rather than Tain’s fickle praise and decisions, to be something he’s good at.

I’m going to go a bit further with this based on my own personal experience.

There is a certain sense of loss when you’ve had to change career paths for the worse. I’ve had two career paths that required something close to Obsidian Order levels of commitment. My father is a lawyer and, throughout my childhood, I worked as his assistant. I knew more about law at the age of ten than most paralegals knew at the age of thirty. I had all the training and makings to be an excellent lawyer, but I didn’t have the stomach for it. After that, I began working in theatre. I had the drive and passion for theatre, as well as a resume as long as my arm, but I couldn’t deal with the poverty. From there, I worked as a temp in an office. 

The saddest thing, for me, about working in an office was that I was good at it. Every office I went into became cleaner and more organized by the time I left it. I had a talent for organization born of having to put the right document in my father’s hand at exactly the right time and of running shows from behind the scenes. I’d get things done with an almost military precision and then ask for more work because being huddled at my desk and staring into florescent lights was more than I could bear without something to keep me occupied. And, all that time, I was desperately lonely. After living a life of power and passion, I could barely relate to the accountants and office managers that surrounded me, and they had a hard time relating to me. I may not be a Cardassian, but I am autistic and, when forced to be under too bright lights for hours upon hours in a chilly office with very little stimulation, I became very quiet and very literal. My speech and behavioral oddities that worked to my advantage in law and theatre were ostracizing in an office setting. I became the weird one who worked insanely hard and didn’t speak to anyone, not really out of unfriendliness, but because I knew people didn’t like how strange I was and because my mind was slowly being worn down by too much sensory input and too little intellectual input. Despite all of this, I was a favorite at the temp agency, often being offered multiple jobs at once. From my bosses’ perspectives, I was the perfect worker. For my part, I was perfectly miserable. 

Garak’s “I’m a very good tailor” is him acknowledging the bitter irony of doing well in a situation that’s not the right fit. Of succeeding and being miserable despite the success. Weirdly enough, I’ve done some tailoring as part of theatre, and, although I can never claim to have been good at it, I know that making a dress or a vest is hard work that requires bursts of brain power and long hours of repetitive sewing and pinning. While there may be a class thing involved, I think the bigger problem for Garak is that tailoring just isn’t exciting and intellectually stimulating enough for him. He’s used to playing 3D chess with lives on the line. Sewing on buttons may have been a welcome relief for the first week, but, after that, I bet he started to go stir-crazy. If he weren’t any good at his job, that would give him an excuse to try something else as his cover or, to be more relevant to the episode, have forced his hand so that he did something that would make going back to the station impossible, such as killing Odo. Instead, he saves Odo and goes back to his torturous life on the station, the same one that had him turning to drugs a few seasons ago. As @amemait pointed out above, he has been pulled out of the shadows where he was comfortable by the Federation and is now forced to stand in the light. Maybe he can find a bit of joy in designing a new outfit or doing a particularly hard bit of detail work, but it will never give him the same thrill and rush of adrenaline that spy work gave him. It will never be as intellectually stimulating as having to juggle dozens of different stories while putting together scraps of information to form a much larger picture. It will never be as challenging as having to know just the right amount of pressure to apply to make a person spill every secret they know. As of this scene, Garak thinks that Tain will get his wish. That Garak will “live a long, miserable life” and “grow old on that station, surrounded by people who hate him, knowing that he’ll never come home again.”

And, worst of all, he’ll be good at it.