Icon from a picrew by grgikau. Call me Tir or Julian. 37. He/They. Queer. Twitter: @tirlaeyn. ao3: tirlaeyn. 18+ Only. Star Trek. Sandman. IwtV. OMFD. Definitionless in this Strict Atmosphere.
Finally just watched DS9 The Wire and hoooly shit. top tier TV. I knew there was a lot of hype about this episode but it totally exceeded by expectations!
Garak’s actor is very good isn’t he? As a recovering addict I was definitely feeling some pretty intense emotions watching his performance, it felt very real. The scene with him losing his shit in his quarters is maybe one of my favourite performances I’ve seen in Trek so far.
ALSO when I go into media already knowing about a prominent ship I’m always kinda expecting the evidence of it to be pretty minimal but good LORD Garak is gay for that little doctor. Like I kinda already knew this from the first time they meet and how he contantly looks like he wants to devour him whole but damn, this episode really upped the ante. Garashir canon tbh.
Wait until By Inferno’s Light/In Purgatory’s Shadow. I sent a scene from that to my psychologist, because we’d been talking about it, and she was floored.
Ok ok I watched “The Wire” from Ds9, and it’s truly just as good as I was led to believe. It’s such a fascinating piece of character study for Garak, especially in the light of all the ground work the show already made with Cardassians.
Now obviously I am only on S2 and I am trying not to spoil myself too much, so half of this is probably going to be disproved later on but eh.
The most obvious side of it is, naturally, the lies. So far we have seen that Cardassians, especially when in the military, rarely tell the truth out loud, preferring to obfuscate it or outright lie. In “Duet”, Marritza presents the lie as a truth to uncover, and the truth as a lie to refuse. And obviously Dukat rarely tells the truth (see his faux concern for the orphans he himself abandoned as a political move in “Cardassians”).
So it’s rather obvious that “just a plain simple tailor” Garak would tell his truths through lies. He tells three lies, three stories that reach the same conclusion. In this, he both mirrors and subverts the structure of the repetitive epic he and Bashir talk about at the beginning of the episode: the story repeats, but rather than ending with serving the State and dying happily, surrounded by family, each story ends with banishment, loneliness, and constant pain.
And I actually believe that the stories were true, as much as Garak is capable of being truthful. The three stories themselves are fake, but the details are true. Garak was a high ranking member of the Obsidian Order; he committed multiple atrocities, including killing and torturing civilians; he was still capable of remorse, and perhaps even acts of compassion; he is Tain’s son (yes I spoiled myself that one); and there was a betrayal involved.
And obviously the most blatant fact, the separation of Garak and Elim - one ruthless, one compassionate, the betrayed and the betrayer. Does Garak deserve to live among people who hate him, where “it’s always too cold and the lights are always too bright?”. Part of Garak seems to think that yes, he does deserve to be in so much pain that he would activate an anti torture device just to make it stop.
Another part yearns for forgiveness - and even asks for it, in an example of vulnerability that I think indicates Garak truly expected to die. Forgiveness for many things at once, I am guessing: for being a murderer and a spy, for being cruel, for betraying Cardassia (through compassion?), for betraying himself, for telling Bashir that he hated him.
(And obviously the fact that Bashir grants that forgiveness is an amazing scene in itself. What’s with Star Trek and grasping hands as a visual representation of intense homo-erotic feelings).
Another part that fascinates me about Cardassians in general, not just this episode, is the double thinking surrounding the concepts of family, State, and the military.
Family is, we are told, everything for a Cardassian. Specifically, biological family is, as a child with no family is of little to no value. Dukat swears to Sisko on his children in “the Maquis”, and Rugal’s father in “Cardassians” would lose his career and social status if it came out that he had abandoned his son on Bajor.
However, we are also repeatedly told that State is everything for a Cardassian. Garak considers betraying family for the State not only the best option, but the only option, and even compares his love for the concept of Cardassia to the feelings of a lover in “Profit and Loss”.
Family is everything and the State is everything, and these two concepts seem to remain separate and equally true.
On top of this, the military pushes the idea that they are the State, like any fascist regime ever.
And if they are the State, and State is everything, then they are everything - which means every atrocity they committed, from the occupation of Bajor to concentration camps to torturing the enemies, it’s all entirely justified, because it was all for Cardassia. And if the military is Cardassia, the military cannot be criticized without it being treason of the highest order - in fact, one could argue that betraying the military, which also means betraying Cardassia, is as close as betraying your own identity as a Cardassian as you can get.
Obviously not everyone seems to agree with this particular equivalency. The excellent “Duet” shows this through Marritza, a man who was willing to die in an attempt to purge the military and the atrocities they committed from Cardassia. If he could expose Cardassians atrocities, those atrocities could be atoned, and the planet would begin healing. And in “Profit and Loss”, as poorly written as I found it, we find out that there is at least one political movement that wants the military out of Cardassia’s government, which marks them as traitors of the State.
And all of this brings me back to Garak. Garak, who was a member of the Obsidian Order, who was the military, and whose biological father was the head of the Order.
(I didn’t spoil it for myself, but I am guessing from the lack of family names that Garak was illegitimate).
For young Garak, there would have been no distinction between family, State and military, no divided loyalties, because for him they would’ve been one and the same. Tain says Garak never needed to be ordered to do anything- and why there would have been the need to give orders? With the three great loves of any self-respecting Cardassian in one neat package, I bet Garak would have done, and has done, everything he needed to do. Be it murder, spy, torture, or go under invasive medical procedures.
Which makes particularly fascinating that, as indicated in “Profit and Loss”, the Garak we meet on Ds9 doesn’t believe that the military has the best interests of Cardassia in mind (but will still act as if he believes it if it means he could get home).
And it’s particularly interesting in the light of the two last stories he tells Bashir in “the Wire”: he went against his orders in one (because he was miserable or because he was compassionate, or perhaps both), and he betrayed (or was betrayed by) someone who was “like family” in the other. I daresay Tain is the closest thing to family Garak would have had, at least with the information I got so far. Tain, who was the Obsidian Order.
And well, if Garak would sacrifice family at the altar of State every time, and if he doesn’t believe that State and military are the same, I am going to conclude that something really big and really bad happened between Tain and Garak. And because of how Cardassian’s double thinking works, they would both believe that the other has betrayed Cardassia, this beloved ideal of theirs (which to me explains why Garak is both the betrayer and the betrayed in the last story he tells).
Unless, as a last addendum, we consider the possibility that part of Garak does still believe in the military/State dichotomy, and a betrayal of that dichotomy is what earned his “deserved exile” in the first place. Or perhaps he thinks he deserves it for the atrocities he committed, and that guilt is by itself a betrayal of Cardassia.
Especially the lies, indeed.
(Goddammit I told I would not write Ds9 meta but characters who lie are a weakness of mine and the fascist space lizards won. I’ll go hide in a corner now).
We can all agree that Garak walking up to Julian at the replimat like “Hey, sexy, I see you’re new in town and I just want you to know I’m down to fuck if you’re interested” is hilarious, but it makes me wonder if he’d had the same approach if he weren’t high as a fucking kite at the time. After the wire is disabled, does Garak wake up in a cold sweat thinking about how he introduced himself to Julian and how horrendously wrong that could have gone, potentially depriving him of his only friend on the station? Is he a little extra sweet to Julian, not only because of their friendship, but because he realizes that — somehow, some way — this man accepted him when he was dulled down and not as capable as he normally would have been?
The thing I like about the Wire reveal is that it actually adds more balance to their relationship then it takes away. like there was somewhat of a power imbalance between them at first glance.
like Garak manipulating the naïve young vulnerable Doctor to do things for him and basically be his mouth peace in ops.
BUT it turns out that Garak was just as vulnerable as Julian was at the beginning, he was alone and exiled (like how Julian was new and finding his barring’s),
but Garak was also in a diminished state of mind, That Julian could have taken advantage of (in what way we will never truly know, but I’m should Garak had looked back at that time in fear, of what he knows he would have let Julian do).
So I just think its neat that they actually had equal power over each other in the beginning, but either of them really know how much until later on, and they remained equal (more or less) through out most of their relationship.
one thing I love about Garak is he goes thru all the events of The Wire, brain nearly kills him, aaaaaaaaaarg pain, he begs for forgiveness for sins that extend beyond redress, tries to take so much medicine it’ll probably kill him, screams, yells, coma, etc And at the end of all of that, he’s like, “I had a rough day” so first thing he goes out and gets a pudding
If Garak had come out to Julian in The Wire like they mention in the doc, I think he would have done so indirectly by claiming that Elim was his lover in one of his stories.
IMO the juiciest interpretation of the third story garak tells in the wire + tain’s remark that he “never had to order garak to do anything [and] that’s what made him so special” is that garak turned himself in for whatever got exiled over because he was just that crazy conditioned
although knowing garak “turning himself in” probably entailed spinning a complex web of lies forgeries cover ups and blackmail with just enough subtle errors to ultimately implicate himself but in such a way that any good operative could telll he made those errors on purpose. twisty brained little overachiever
