Two Hundred A Day - Episode 116: Star Trek DS9: Our Man Bashir

Episode Date: April 1, 2023

Welcome to Twenty Dollars a Day, the podcast where we explore our favorite holodeck adventures in the Star Trek universe! Nathan and Eppy join the crew of Deep Space 9 for some thrilling spy action in S4E9 Our Man Bashir. Doctor Bashir is enjoying his new holo-adventure as a Bond-esque superspy when Garak crashes the party. Unfortunately, a transporter accident puts the patterns of the bridge crew into the story, and suddenly Bashir and Garak have to contend with the possibility of their actions having real-life consequences. An homage to James Bond, of course, this episode features a refreshing twist on the "stuck on the holodeck" trope while also grounding the romp with nods to long-running DS9 storylines. Happy April, everyone! This is our sixth look at a Star Trek holodeck episode that follows on the themes of our first love, The Rockford FIles. Hope you enjoy it! We have another podcast: Plus Expenses. Covering our non-Rockford media, games and life chatter, Plus Expenses is available via our Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/twohundredaday) at ALL levels of support. Want more Rockford Files trivia, notes and ephemera? Check out the Two Hundred a Day Rockford Files Files (http://tinyurl.com/200files)! We appreciate all of our listeners, but offer a special thanks to our patrons (https://www.patreon.com/twohundredaday). In particular, this episode is supported by the following Gumshoe and Detective-level patrons: * Richard Hatem (https://twitter.com/richardhatem) * Bill Anderson (https://twitter.com/billand88) * Brian Perrera (https://twitter.com/thermoware) * Eric Antener (https://twitter.com/antener) * Jordan Bockelman (https://twitter.com/jordanbockelman) * Michael Zalisco * Joe Greathead * Mitch Hampton's Journey of an Aesthete Podcast (https://www.jouneyofanaesthetepodcast.com) * Dael Norwood wrote a book! Trading Freedom: How Trade with China Defined Early America (https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/T/bo123378154.html) * Chuck from whatchareading.com (http://whatchareading.com) * Paul Townend, who recommends the Fruit Loops podcast (https://fruitloopspod.com) * Shane Liebling's Roll For Your Party dieroller app (https://rollforyour.party/) * Jay Adan's Miniature Painting (http://jayadan.com) * Brian Bernsen's Facebook page of Rockford Files filming locations (https://www.facebook.com/brianrockfordfiles/) * Tom Clancy, Andre Appignani, Pumpkin Jabba Peach Pug, Dave P, Dave Otterson, Kip Holley and Dale Church! Thanks to: * Fireside.fm (https://fireside.fm) for hosting us * Audio Hijack (https://rogueamoeba.com/audiohijack/) for helping us record and capture clips from the show * Spoileralerts.org (http://spoileralerts.org) for the adding machine audio clip * Freesound.org (https://www.freesound.org/) for other audio clips

Welcome to 20 a day, the podcast where we talk about the Star Trek Universe holodeck episodes and all related matters. I am, as always, Nathan Poletta. And I'm Epidaia Ravishaw. And this time we are coming to you from the juicy middle of Star Trek Deep Space Nine with season four, Episode 10, Our Man Bashir. Yeah, I guess this is the point where we talk about why we decided to do this episode. You gave me two options. And I went with the one that was James Bond related because I just recently watched the first two Bond movies. So expect some information from that, I guess.

Yeah, this is very, very much, very much on the nose as a homage to the Bond stuff. I guess, yeah, we've been kind of we've had a bit of a pattern of these where since we've kind of did the real core, you, you know, holodeck episodes, like here, you know, here's a, uh, kind of starting from our origin point with the, uh, with the next generation ones with, uh, Picard's detective character. Dixon Hill? Dixon Hill. Yes.

Yes. Um, so yeah, we've, we've kind of fallen into the, I think, next class of a lot of these, which is the fun one-off homage episode. So we did the Bride of Chaotica from Voyager, Fistful of Datas from Next Generation. So, you know, you have your pulp serial serial stuff uh your western and now we're getting our 60s spy thriller we had a mobster one too right with a rat pack with um uh yeah that was also ds9 um yeah what was it what's his name frankie valentine no no it's a uh vic fontaine vic fontaine that's it yeah yeah. Yeah. So this is a, this is a fun vein. I, I think I do like that.

Uh, our, if I, if I get, I'm going to get a little meta here, we're going to get real meta. Uh, this is a,

after all a holodeck based podcast, right? We're kind of at the point where we're stretching our premise as far as we can. Right. While also following star Trek, stretching its premise as far as we can. Right. While also following Star Trek, stretching its premise as far as it can. Like that's,

which is great. I think that's, we're in it together. When looking at the episodes, you know, so kind of available for us. Uh, I think there is one sub genre that we haven't gotten into yet,

which is the, uh, espionage slash trick. Right. Episode where someone is in a situation where it becomes revealed eventually that they're in a hollow simulation it's not necessarily on a hollow deck but like it's the same you know kind of technology and so those are more usually serious episodes as opposed to the ones we've been doing which tend to be these more fun episodes i just kind of realized looking through that we haven't really done um any of those yet so we still have a little bit of of uh every area to tread have we dipped our toes into voyager i don't know if we have oh brand of we did brand of chaotic which is a fun one um there's

there's a voyager two-parter right that we might want to do at some point which is like uh where i think it's a two-parter i think it even crosses like the end of one season beginning of another season where they're trapped in world war ii on their holodeck and they don't know it um but who knows what the future holds for 20 a day. Right, yeah. We do have a decent amount of material still before us, but it was just a realization I had as looking down the list of, you know, available episodes for our remit. This episode, coming out in November 1995, coming out shortly after the debut of um was it golden eye oh the the video

game no the the movie okay um so yes this episode airs 10 days after the release of golden eye which was the you know the 90s reboot uh with Brosnan. Right, right. Leading to one of the greatest video games of all time, as previously stipulated. But most of the fun facts here are just pulled from the Memory Alpha page. So you know as much as I do in terms of reading a webpage.

But yeah, it was intentionally put in the lineup to try and capitalize on yeah the zeitgeist the zeitgeist yeah yeah this one is written by well it's a teleplay by ronald d moore uh producer and you know later battlestar Galactica, showrunner, etc. Story by Bob Gillen, who was a producer. He produced a bunch of Star Trek, including the First Contact movie and other things. And this is his only writing credit. So I don't know what the story is there, other than he apparently had this idea. And the producers were like, yeah, that sounds good. And then more,

uh, typed it up, may not type it up. That's a little diminutive, uh, more, you know, turn it into the,

the, the screenplay. But, uh, it was a big deal. Um, they spent a ton of money on this episode compared to most deep space nine episodes for locations or yeah,

for locations and sets and costume, I guess. Um, it had the longest production of any single episode in the series. It had a nine day shooting schedule where most of them had, um, seven or eight. Wow. It was both the sets and setups and also stunts and doing reshoots for stunts. I would not have said like, hey, what Star Trek episode has a lot of stunts and thought of this one? But I think that's because the premise of this one, you just accept like, oh, yeah, there's going to be like people flying through windows and stuff like that. When you hear of a Star Trek stunt, you immediately think of like a phaser and then someone falling to the floor or jumping over something and then that's it, right? Like you don't think of that happening with the champagne cork. Yeah, there's a quote here from the director.

A $50,000 set costs $75,000 because there was $25,000 worth of overtime and weekend work. So there you go. That director is Winrich or Win winrick i'm not quite sure how to pronounce his name uh colby uh this is one of his 13 episodes of deep space nine uh he also did a bunch of next year you know ended up in the franchise doing next generation you know has a ton of ton of credits across various tv properties One of his earliest directing credits is for a little series called The Rockford Files, where he directed the series finale of that particular show, Deadlock in Parma. Well, I mean, I've been meaning to check that show out.

I mean, I'm not going to start with the series finale, but I will watch it. He also did an episode of Voyagers!lamation point, which I know is a favorite of yours. And a bunch of Knight Rider before he ends up doing next generation stuff. Oh, did he do the I think he might have done the pilot for Voyagers. Oh, he also directed the series finale for for next generation. He directed all good things if i remember right i'm not looking at his entry right now but i think that so he's he's the director you call if you want to put put something to bed apparently yeah but yeah that's uh kind of

production stuff um i guess we are ready to get into our cold open for the episode. Hey Epi, did you know that we are a 100% listener supported show? I did not know that. Wait, I did. I did. And it is because of our patrons over at patreon.com slash 200 a day. In addition to our

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at 200pod. If you're interested in helping keeping us going, you can do so for as little as a dollar an episode at patreon.com slash 200 a day. Thank you. Thanks so much. This is, I mean, it's a fun episode. I'm just going to lay that out. Spoilers.

I enjoyed watching this episode. I will also say, and I think I've probably brought this up before, I have not rectified the fact that I'm not as familiar with Deep Space Nine as I am with Next Generation or Voyager or the original Star Trek. It's one that eventually I should just watch it during my lunch hour or something like that. It's not come up and i've heard good things

i've enjoyed all the episodes that we've watched here on the show but i there are moments where this one in particular kind of relies on you uh knowing characters yeah yeah a little bit and enjoying the the contrast maybe or so and i picked up that that, but I didn't have the deep knowledge of Deep Space Nine to really. And I still quite enjoyed the episode is what I'm saying. Yeah, I think the main thing is about Garrick, which I'll fill in a little bit about that in a minute. We just have a brief interruption to our 20 a day episode to remind all of our 200 a day listeners that as of when this airs, we will still be running our shirt pre-order. What do you think about these shirts that we've designed? Well, I would say if you're a fan of, uh, Windrich Colby's work, particularly

the series finale of the Rockford files, um, i would absolutely pick up these shirts are lovely these uh we've got two of them should i describe them is that a thing i should do here we got two shirts available one uh as is a a faithful reproduction of the rockford files the jim rockford detective agency yellow page ad except that it's 200 a day the podcast and instead of having uh james gardner's lovely face on it it has our mugs uh which you can enjoy and then the uh other one is the classic four things helen what do we call that what like um i'm calling it the cast shirt so the cash shirt yeah yeah so it's uh's... It's based on that Beatles shirt that became a meme. Right.

Where you just had all four first names of the Beatles. It's the cool Helvetica shirt. Jim and Beth and Dennis and Rocky, and then in parentheses, and Angel. Yes, because you got five. You got to get Angel in there. Jimmy, Jimmy, you got to get Angel in there. Five. You gotta get Angel in there. Jimmy! Jimmy, you gotta get Angel in there. We're running a

short pre-order so that we print to suit for folks who want a shirt. They're $25. You can get one or the other, or both, I suppose, if you really want. And, of course, you should know where to get them, which is ndpdesign.com

slash rockford. We are doing it as a fun thing for us and also as a way for people who enjoy the show to give us you know a little bit of one-time support if uh the patreon is not a good fit for you um so hopefully we'll uh you know be able to outfit some torsos with some sweet podcast related merchandise yeah uh commercialism aside i suppose uh it's time to get back to the far future with 20 a day as one might expect our cold open gets right into the action where we have a slow-mo shot of a man in a leather jacket and an eyepatch come flying backwards through a plate glass window uh which is apparently freestanding in the

middle of a uh like a like a bar like a casino bar and then we go to uh our man bashir uh dr bashir in a tux being handed a bottle of champagne by uh what i describe as a buxom blonde. It's very admiring of his prowess. I would refer to her as a Bashir girl. Ah, yes. Bond women? Bond girls? Let's go with women. He's a Bashir woman. Yeah. In the reflection

of the champagne bottle, he sees this goon get back up and come back towards him with a knife. And so he suddenly turns and shoots the champagne cork into the other eye of the eye-patched goon, taking him down.

And has a classic pithy line, a lot of kick for a 45 dom. The woman asks who he is. Mr. Bashir. Julian Bashir. They have a requisite kiss, and that is when we cut to Garrick, also in a tux, clapping.

I'm going to go ahead and assume that most 20 Day listeners are familiar with the cast of Deep Space Nine. For my benefit. Yeah, for for your benefit in order to illuminate the dynamic here uh garrick is a he's a humble tailor uh on the on the station he's kardassian um but he you know is kind of an exile uh he is not welcome back in kardassia and i think so this is in the middle of the fourth season i forget exactly what the timeline is but one of the subplots uh in these slowly moving um uh storylines is the question about and then and then determination that garrick was a was a spy was an intelligence agent for for the Cardassian agency called the Obsidian Order.

So he refers to that later in the episode. Yes. Yeah, yeah. I got that bit. There was a standing question kind of throughout the series about whether he is still an ex-agent or not. Like, is he still active? And part of his cover is that, i used to be an agent but now i'm not welcome back in cardassia like there's there's a uh an ongoing kind of question mark about where his true loyalties lie and stuff like that that's fun um in addition to that uh his relationship with bashir becomes increasingly intricate g Garak is has a lot

of gay coding in his character or mannerisms. Not so much in this episode, but I think that's one thing that people really took away especially at the time of like, I don't know if representation is right. Again, I came to this later. I didn't watch this when it was originally airing, right? I watched

the whole series a couple times in the last 15 years. But he's kind of like a part of his character and part of his relationship with julian in particular is a little bit of like is there a romantic edge to this right and is that for real or is that part of his affect in order to gain some kind of edge over these people who don't take him seriously, you know, or something like that. So he's actually, he's a pretty complex character throughout the series. Like, I definitely picked up on the

what I'll refer to as the charged moment before a kiss that you see on WWE all the time, right? Like, where the two are facing off very close to each other and you're like there's there's certainly getting sweat on each other yeah yeah i just looked this up because

you you mentioned that he's a tailor which i did not know this is not in the like it made the episode makes it clear that he is a uh a former spy i did not know that he was a tailor and a humble tailor a humble tailor and i wondered if that that was a reference to the Taylor of Panama, the Licari novel that became a movie starring Pierce Bronson as a British spy. The Taylor of Panama is a, it's a fun movie. I,

I, I recommend it. And it, it came out in 2001 and it feels like the movie feels like a send up of James Bond in the same way that we'll see kind of come out in this. Like what real espionage is like versus the feel of what James Bond is. And I don't know if that's that's not the whole point to the Taylor Panama, but it's definitely sits on top of it or whatever. But when I looked it up, it turns out the Licari novel didn't even come out until the year after this. So now I'm wondering if Licari was making reference.

Licari, I'm sure a huge, a huge Trek nerd. Well, if anyone knows, let us know. All right. Obviously this is a hollow novel a hollow

simulation it is a new one that bashir has recently acquired garrick is interested because he's been spending all this time in it um and uh bashir of course is miffed that his uh privacy is being intruded upon it's's like, it's illegal. Apparently. Yeah, that was a very interesting note when it comes to entertainment law. Like it's illegal to enter someone. First of all, it seems very easy to enter someone else's holodeck program,

but it's also illegal. This is one of these things where the law and how easy it is may be different on Deep Space Nine than, say, a spacecraft. But it was very interesting to me. Yeah, it's an interesting note in context of DS9 because the holosuites are not Federation. They are part of Quark's bar. So Quark runs the holosuites as a profit concern. So he charges people to you know be in

them uh as opposed to like on the enterprise where you know the whole the holodeck is like you know somewhere you can get assigned or whatever right it's available you know i'm sure you have yeah maybe you have to have some kind of clearance some technical clearance or something for it uh but like there's one thing about how federation starship seem to be is that they have this very communitarian it's all military property so everyone can go everywhere kind of thing uh to their detriment because they have terrible security but anyway that's actually going to be interesting a little bit later on in this particular episode about who owns what and who has access to what yeah and that's one of the fun things about DS9

is because it gives itself the setting with the overlapping realms of influence, these little questions just naturally become part of the texture of the show in a way that makes it feel a little more, I mean, more real, right? For lack of a better term. More grounded, I suppose, in like real world concerns anyway this is a lot of uh a lot of digression during our cold

open um there's a line where garrick uh he's always trying to get under basheer's skin right and so he says like you must be really embarrassed of what you're doing here to have such an extreme reaction is this fantasy of yours true truly revealing of your inner psyche but she says it's just a fantasy well if you have nothing to hide why not let me see and but she's like okay fine during this the lady has left um and garrick says i wonder what scared her away julian gives him a look and we end with uh you know a good boating set of lines i can see i'm gonna regret this don't worry doctor we're going to have a wonderful time after all what could possibly go wrong and we go into our deep space nine credits. One thought I had during this was that at this point in Star Trek's life as a franchise, everyone making the episode knows that everyone watching the episode is going to go, oh, it's a holodeck episode.

Right. Right. I think that line, what could possibly go wrong, is lampshading. Like, all right, everyone, something's going to go wrong. Get ready.shading like all right everyone something's gonna go wrong get ready you know it and we know it yeah that puts a lot of pressure on this that opening the cold opening but i thought like you know like okay we're gonna have a holodeck episode you know it's gonna be a holodeck episode uh but can we intrigue you right with this holodeck episode and uh i think they did a lot of good things there i think like

a lot of fun james bondy things but then also like i said i did not know the the garrick basheer dynamic but i caught enough of it to know so something's gonna happen here all right so we start our episode proper in basheer's uh room uh for lack of a better term, his suite in 1964 Kowloon. We're kind of scene setting visually and also Bashir explaining to Garrick, you know, here's what this premise is. And I think this is a good amount where it's like he said, you know, he specifies the year. He says we're in Kowloon, part of Hong Kong. Our original, you know, that thing we were just in, that was Paris. He he says i'm a jet setter garrick's like a jet setter and then we actually cut off before we get into like and now here's a bunch of ephemera that the viewers of this show

know like we all know what this means so he can stop explaining it to garrick and we can get on with the with the episode garrick did have a good understanding of Earth geography of the time. He understood that Paris and Hong Kong were separated by a good chunk of the planet, which is nice. One thing I like about the decor is that it's a nice, like, it's not purely period. Like, it does feel to me like it's a star trek version of like people who live in this time replicating something they that may be dimly echoed through the centuries but like yeah there's weird there's ways that like the panels have like holes in them and stuff like that where it's like that's star trek like that you know doesn't look like james bond specifically uh the costumes uh are similar where like you know

tuxes and suits and stuff are pretty standard but like we are introduced to bashir's personal valet mona loves it who is wearing a pinstripe short skirt power suit with a low-cut blouse with lots of lots of cleavage the first of our our bondi names our bond desk i think bond desk she has a uh a briefcase that uh bashir has her put away and she touches a button and a big panel revolves and it's covered in guns and other weapons uh garrick asks if she's a valet or an assassin and bashir runs down all of her many skills uh all the languages she speaks all her knowledge areas of knowledge etc and explains that this is his you know he's a spy all this equipment and and his valet have been provided to him by his government as part of his you know operation i work for a government called great britain

and we're in a conflict called the cold war uh garrick upon seeing you know all the splendor of the 60s spy says i think i joined the wrong intelligence service yes this is his uh the beginning of his his whole this is not what espionage is really like, shtick. Of course, we know that something's going to go wrong, so we are going to get to that immediately. Captain Sisko and the rest of the bridge crew is returning in a runabout from some conference, and suddenly there's a fluctuation in the warp core. Oh no! It's going to breach, the ejection module is missing they've been sabotaged

the crew includes o'brien but they have their kind of second engineer uh eddington is on the is on the station eddington is also a character who is he's kind of a secondary character who gains prominence and then ends up having there's a whole storyline about him so i don't remember again exactly when that happens but i think this episode actually is establishing some context for eddington and he gets increasingly important through the rest of the season okay so i don't know if he seemed like someone slightly more elevated than a random other crewman um but he is i didn't recognize him and i would recognize most of the core cast so i was thinking okay but he had enough like lines right right proactive enough that i was like okay so this isn't just like somebody that uh because sometimes you you know they'll there's

someone that they convey orders to or something like that that's not similar to, I mean, he doesn't have the same role, but similar to like a Barkley or something where it's like, oh, this is a character that actually has stories that we see, you know, over time. I do want to say, maybe you're about to talk about when they cut the power to the shuttle, but it's just wonderful how the shuttle or the runner, is that what they call it? Whatever. Runabout, I think is what it's it whatever runabout i think is runabout yeah uh when they cut power it comes to a dead stop because that's what happens when you cut power

to a spaceship is that it stops moving when its engine is no longer working momentum whatever i don't care well fortunately the u-taste 9 is able to beam them off just as it explodes in the nick of time. And then we see them start to materialize on the pad. But then there's a big flash of light and it's just smoke where they were. Uh-oh. Odo is running around with Eddington trying to figure out what happened. We get a bunch of good technobabble about pattern buffers and degradation, etc. What has happened is that the

uh the the transporter still has their patterns but because they're such complex beings because it has their entire pattern including their neurological yeah patterns it can't hold them for long so they're going to degrade they need to put them somewhere else until they can fix the transporter and rematerialize them i just want want to note that this, like, it's clear that this is a, what are we looking for here? This is an excuse to get everything involved in the holodeck and all that. And I don't know if we want to, but, like, it leaves questions of identity that come up with teleporters, Star Trek teleporters anyways.

Like, that always exists but like wow there's like some really big questions here about like continuation of existence and whether or not the what they get at the end of well the nature of consciousness maybe we just just witnessed the death of most of the cast and then it's just a completely different item probably not something for us to tackle but it is amazing how this episode it's just the premise yeah it's just the premise yes this doesn't matter well uh they can't find anywhere big enough to store the patterns yes uh and so eddington tells the computer to override, wipe all memory necessary. Lights go down.

They check one panel that's still on. The patterns have been saved. But where are they? I do like the implication that the nature of the full consciousness of a couple of like four people is more than the entire memory capacity of a space station like right i kind of like that and i i it did have me thinking about the nature of like okay so they have a buffer that can't obviously can store this because that's maybe the point transporters work yeah how transporters work. But it can't store it for long. So something about the nature of that buffer

is they can expand it really fast, fill it with data, but they have to get it out as soon as possible. And I have no need to go into why. I'm willing to accept all that. And so then they have to shove it somewhere else. What's interesting in the context of what you had said earlier is that they have the ability. But we haven't actually gotten to where they've gone.

But we all know where they're going to go. There's no question here. Those holodecks are part of Quark's bar. But the space station computer has access to them at a super user level so it can store people in it, which is interesting. Like that's a whole nother like that's entirely possible. It's like as if we had like a lot of cloud computing on like a military platform. And, you know, it was just, just you know offered up via the taxpayers money or whatever but there's like are they spying on people like like what you know like what's the devil's bargain you're making here yeah yeah no there's a lot of input i think this is the fun

thing about most ds9 episodes where it's like there's so many implications about like all this stuff where she's like just don't it's just a show don't implications about all this stuff where she's like, just don't, it's just a show. Don't worry about it. Right. And also like we exist today where we can. We actually have some language around this idea. Yeah. Like offsite computing and stuff, which not 1995.

Yeah. Much more sci-fi. Like a lot of things that we just accept today or make some bones about, but not many. In 95, they would be be like why are you just accepting that you know what i mean like in the same way that i'm doing this like the cell phone i have in my pocket is definitely listening to me talk to you right now like uh yeah and someone in in 95 would be like why would you agree to that and i'm like what i mean i haven't really agreed to it i

just bought the cell phone that's all like but you did it's just the world we live in yeah yeah yeah all right well back into our story uh uh basher and garrick have uh changed out of their tuxes but she's kind of explaining his cover identity but then they hear a noise and his the bar in his suite revolves to reveal a half moon bed that comes out of the wall and on that bed is uh who we know as uh major kira narice but is in this hollow in this hollow simulation in a silk nightdress as a russian agent um i'm going to be calling them their cast names because i don't remember um anesthesia yeah anesthesia come on enough of course at first uh julian glares at uh garrick and says very funny like okay you're really messing with my simulation here.

But he says it's nothing to do with him. And she does not break character as she, you know, they have some dialogue establishing that she's a KGB agent. They clearly have worked with and against each other in the past. She thought that he was dead. And he has a line where he's like, I had a parachute, and there was a submarine waiting for me. He asked the computer to restore the character parameters for her character. And the computer says that it's already correct. And then he says to freeze program and the computer is unable to comply due to shipwide emergency.

As far as error messages go, I can't think of one more ominous than unable to comply due to shipwide emergency. As far as error messages go, I can't think of one more ominous than unable to comply. Like that's the last thing you want to hear on a Starfleet installation. They can contact the bridge and they get, you know, they kind of get the brief, you know, we have a situation here, but they hear Kira, they hear her voice. And so they check and they see, yes, the hollow sweet memory core is holding the patterns of the crew. So they, they want to leave the program running and don't leave because we don't want to disrupt the imaging array. We don't want to take any chances. Uh,

Julian, of course is not going to do anything to endanger his friends uh back i had a hard time phrasing so it's not like back back on the holodeck back in the suite i kind of just say keep saying back in the story yeah yeah because there's clearly a core story which is what's happening in the holodeck and yeah this actually this is one of the few episodes that has no b plot this is an all a plot episode yeah the stuff that feels like a b plot is the stuff that makes the sets the stakes for the a plot and that's it back in the story uh there's a great physical gag where she said she's doing this horrible russian accent the whole time right and then there's this good

physical gag where she uh says she she wishes she could relax him. And she leans back on the bed, but then whips back up holding a file folder and says, but I'm here on business. There's been a string of artificial earthquakes. Garrick starts going, well, those are simple to handle. All you have to do is, and she's like, that's not part of the fiction here. We can't just fix earthquakes in this world, right? Which's like that's not part of the fiction here we we can't just fix earthquakes in this in this world right which i like that too yeah i really dug that little detail in fact it's it was one of those things where the character was doing it just as you were realizing or i

shouldn't just as i was realizing oh yeah star trek can deal with and then right this character is acknowledging that so her her government and his government want them to cooperate to handle this crisis. There's one clue. The leading seismologist, Professor Honey Bear, has vanished. Kidnapped. More good things. She has a headshot, and the headshot, of course, is of Dax wearing glasses. This is important later. of Dax wearing glasses. This is important later. Garrick,

uh, is not sure why, you know, why Bessie is getting so serious about this. And he explains that in the story, if professor honey bear, which I wrote down as honey bear, one word like a honey bear, but in the credits is honey space bear as in naked.

So every bit, the pun, everything it could be. Um, but if she's killed in the story then the computer will erase her pattern and since this is the only copy of their pattern it's essentially killing the real crew member like they will never come back right so our stakes have been established i'm sure it's a holodeck episode but the bridge crew is kind of a nice i think it's a it's a you know it's a holodeck episode but the bridge crew uh it's kind of a nice i think it's a it's a you know it's a first timer in terms of this particular twist where it's not that the people on the holodeck are the ones who are in danger even though they are because of course the

safety controls have been turned off or whatever um but it's these you know the bridge crew who's in the in the the computer are the ones whose fates are at stake i don't know if we've talked about safety controls in earlier episodes i'm i'm sure we have it's just it's just wonderful and thrilling to me that they need safety like there's something about the technology that is inherently violent or horrible that they have to have controls on rather than like sort of the other way around where why not just not add those things that would do harm to you right like well it's it's wild that it's like it's opt uh out instead of opt in right it's not like anything by default could hurt you but the safety controls will be on versus by default it can't hurt you unless you want to

turn on the danger mode right or something like which might be a little better anyway before we go on i think this might be a good spot to play a little game we like to call catch upy up all right so let's talk about uh kira so there's a couple of things that I'm guessing happens here, but I'm probably just filling in some blanks here. Number one, I'm guessing this character is very different than how Kira is normally. So they're playing up for laughs. Like she would never,

if she were to do this, do a holodeck thing, she would never play this character. Yes. Yeah. Does Bashir have a thing for her is that a thing that that has been established are they playing off of that as well or is that uh i don't recall where in the continuity we are with this but the original bashir character was a total horn dog and like hit on everyone. Yeah.

Um, I think at this part, at this point that's been toned down, um, they don't have a relationship. I guess I run it may not ironically, but, uh,

the actors actually, apparently we're in a relationship. Oh, okay. According to memory alpha. Um, but yeah, uh,

uh, Kira and Odo is a relationship that right okay happens i think that happened or there's something about that in an episode that we watched yeah but uh yeah they don't i mean other than being shot down by her like at some point right they have more of a professional relationship he has more of a longing for dax which i think maybe we see okay at the end that's where like we haven't really gotten much of dax's character yet at all uh character within the the plot here right um all right great that's that got me caught up i do have to make a comment that i do like that the implications here, much like how modern computing seems to work, where the graphics card is where all the hardcore computing goes on.

That we have the holodeck is doing stuff far beyond what. Right. Because, again, we have teleporting them on this buffer expands so that we can encapsulate the consciousness of four or five. I can't remember how many there are. I guess there's four. Yeah. Four. But then it degrades quickly. We need to find a place on this entire space station where we can do it. And the best place to hold all of that is the entertainment facility.

It's not like the battle computers or the, you know. No, it's the PS5. The PS5 is the one that can handle it. Absolutely, 100%. That is a believable thing to me. And also, I will probably make concessions to, if the computer has a priority system, it might also be like,

we're obviously not going to replace life support with them. We're not going to replace, you know, the things that keep us in orbit. We're not going to, you know, like you go down this line of things until eventually you end up in Quark's bar. Right. But still, I do like this. Like, yeah. It's a fun problem that is being presented here. Yeah.

Once our stakes are established, the door opens. Oh, yeah. It's a fun problem that is being presented here. Yeah. Once our stakes are established, the door opens. Oh, no. It's Mona, but then she falls forward and there's a knife standing out of her back. Classic. And two goons with guns escort in Chief O'Brien. However, he is wearing the eyepatch. Yes. The eyepatch has a falcon on it.

This is the, yeah, this is the moment when I realized that. Oh, that's such a good touch. Chief. No, it's falcon. Nice to see you, Mr. Bashir. Now, I think we have a little unfinished business. Cut to commercial. We are going to take a little break in the middle of our episode here so that we can stretch, maybe get a beverage or a snack and talk about the other places that you can find us on the Internet.

Epi, if our listeners want more Epi, where can they go to get maximum Epi? You can find me at my website website dig a thousand holes.com that's dig one zero zero zero holes.com or you can get my sword and sorcery fiction and games at worlds without master.com that's worlds plural master singular if you want to engage with me on the social medias the best place to go right now is mastodon at epidia at dice dot camp. Nathan, if they want to get Maximum Nathan, where do they have to go for that? I should have gone Maximum Nathan. Maximum Nathan can be found at my website, ndpdesign.com.

That's the hub for all my stuff on the Internet including all my uh role-playing games zines and other podcasts uh so if you're interested in pro wrestling detectives or zines about pro wrestling among other things um those are all at my website it also has links to contact me in other ways currently i'm still um posting on Instagram at ndpayoletta. That's where I'm posting pictures of my dog. You can also find me at cohost, cohost.org slash ndp. That is a fun, small-scale social media site that I'm enjoying quite a lot. And now we return to the continuing adventures of Jimbo Rockfish.

So O'Brien has been cast into this character that we'd already technically seen. Right. We're seeing the full import of, or I guess the full extent of the changes to the program. We're starting to see that these characters aren't all going to be on his side too, which is a nice complication. Yeah. Well, and that causes the actual drama of the episode yeah so yeah because back from commercial he clarifies for for us just in case we weren't paying attention uh should have used something a little more lethal than a champagne cork

kira wants him to wait uh let us have one last kiss and he says why? I've always been a romantic at heart. They do have a prolonged kiss. And we see Bashir palm the earring off of one of her ears. And then just as Falcon is getting impatient, he tosses it. It explodes. And there's a brief brawl. And I noticed here that we have the music here is very 007. Yes, it's really, really hitting it. Our spies win, of course.

Garak is bleeding, so this is how they know that apparently the safeties are off. Kira and her character is going to kill Falcon, and Beshir says no. He's been trying to kill you for nine years garrick isn't so sure that he shouldn't uh because as a practical man here's our first kind of uh confrontation of his sensibility as a quote real spy versus bashir so he's saying this isn't a game that's all going to be all right in the end you have to act like this is real and if it comes down to you or him you need to choose you uh and by implication me right like of course bashir says that he'll he's willing to make that choice but now isn't the time he'll wait until you know it becomes necessary uh kira fills in more about the one lead they have to go on apparently 60 scientists and artisans

have disappeared in the last few years all having to do something with with this enigmatic dr noah so they think it's behind this the name is very good yeah and the only lead they have is that before disappearing they went to a to this particular nightclub. And Bashir, of course, knows that it's time to go back to Paris. In Quark's bar, they're looking at the guts of the Holosuites. Rom, Quark's brother, is, of course, the engineer who actually keeps everything running. Apparently, he's been using all kinds of hacks, including a spatula, because it's the right kind of material

for bridging, blah, blah, blah. But Eddington finds the memory core in there and scans it and is relieved that all their patterns are there intact. However, he's not reading any neural energy. Where are their brain patterns? And Quark supposes

and is later borne out uh they must be everywhere else they must be they're so big that they're what's taking up all of the station systems um and that's why nothing is working like the lights are still off like everything is in like minimal like support mode so we have a tense odo how do we get them back we have a tense Odo. How do we get them back? We have a great establishing shot of go-go dancers in this Paris nightclub. Yes. There's a note in the Memory Alpha write-up that apparently this particular scene was like really extravagantly staged. Like if you look at the people in the background, like the costumes are were really they really went gung-ho but it turned out that it just wasn't on screen very much and it's kind of a shame

like they're not really in focus and they're not there for very long maybe you know if you do another watch pay attention to the background because it's apparently very cool um bashir claims that he has an invitation to see dr noah and so he is led to wharf wearing a fully white suit he is duchamp dr noah's associate turns out he does not have an invitation uh so why does he want to see dr noah wharf enjoys a fine cigar while they tell him a cover story that bashir is a leading geologist uh kira is his wife uh mr garrick is his associate he's a leading geologist and he knows that dr noah is interested in the sciences and he doesn't want to be left out wharf says a meeting can be arranged for a price five billion francs bashir drops a bill on the table so this

is all occurring wharf is sitting behind it's a baccarat table I guess and there's like the the shuffler with the cards and the big stack of cash in front of him so he drops a bill and says no problem I do not understand where's the rest of your money right in front of you

shall we begin I feel like there's a probably appropriate for this story lack of understanding of what in front of you. Shall we begin? I feel like there's a probably appropriate for this story lack of understanding of what the worth of currency is. 5 million francs in 1964, I think.

That's an extravagant amount of money to win at a table. Or to demand for this. Yeah, exactly. Equivalent, I don't know, gatekeeping scenes in bond movies the money isn't the point right right it's like sitting at the table and like winning or losing might be the point but the amount of money doesn't matter right yeah so it is kind of an interesting like echoing through the eras yes this is some detail that's like, of course this is in this story.

Back on the station, they have learned that a Cardassian separatist group has claimed responsibility for the sabotage to the runabout. This is also dropping some information that is going to be built on later for later storylines. This is the first mention of the separatist group, and then it becomes a whole thing later in the season. They confirm that Quark was right. Their neural patterns are throughout the station. They need to reintegrate the neurological and physical pattern. To do so, they can use the systems

on the Defiant, which is the starship that they have at their disposal, since they're independent of the station. But ROM systems aren't meant to interface with Starfleet, so he's going to have to make modifications now this introduces i mean i guess i guess their technicians know better than i do well there's a third yeah there's a there's a third um uh sphere of influence

here because the station systems are um cardassian because it's a cardassian station right okay and the hollow suites were there before starfleet took over so the station systems are integrated right like this i mean i guess the logic here as someone who's seen the show yeah the cardassian systems and the whatever the hollow suite systems those are already integrated right but now the star fleet systems that's a separate entity and those are the ones that need to get engineered right so i get okay so this is this is my thing and like we don't have to dwell on this in the slightest but uh the introduction of this other ship nearby yeah hanging out uh made me wonder you've got them in the buffer you need to put them

somewhere why not just transport them to this other ship right off the bat right like that was the like if if we're unloading a car and you suddenly hand me something that's too heavy for me to carry i can either spread it all out on the ground or put it in the car right next you know like on the in a wheelbarrow or in the car. You know, like it's so it just had this like, again, they're the technicians. They understand their technology better than I do. But it would seem like the choice that doesn't make this story go forward. Right, right.

Yeah. I think there's two reasons. One is, you know, it's an emergency situation. They don't have time to integrate with the Defiant. Maybe no one's on the defiant, right? It could be there. Answer number two is because then we don't have the story. Exactly. Yeah, yeah. in franks so you know i being a red-blooded american male i've seen my share of uh james bond movies i have fond memories of um in the pre-streaming era of i think maybe tbs i don't know one one of the like cable channels would have a thanksgiving james bond marathon every year and many thanksgivings i would be at like a relative's house where they had cable. So I would like watch a bunch of Bond movies all night, like that kind of thing. So I've certainly seen my share of Bond. And I have looked up Baccarat because I'm like, what is this game? And it seems incredibly opaque.

time i've watched a bond film that's had it in there i have thought to myself when we're done with this i'm going to bring up a youtube video that'll teach me how to play which is the exact same feeling i have whenever i see something that mentions cricket and in both cases i never do like whenever i'm done with the thing i move on with my day and i forget it um but yeah it yeah baccarat is i think oh man i'm probably gonna get my my vague memory and i this is just from reading wikipedia probably years ago is that it's basically blackjack but yeah nine is the best hand yeah that's what you're trying to get um and maybe the cards only go to nine or something like that in in bond movies they always have these very stylized cards right right and here they just use playing cards which i guess is so that the audience knows what they are i do think it's a

missed opportunity that missed opportunity to use like fancy cards that have like a star trek you look to them instead of like you know something just like i don't know this is what a card could look like but this is neither here nor there but it I think the joke, I think, with Baccarat and Bond specifically is that it's kind of like craps. It's almost entirely chance. There's very little strategy. It's like it is almost entirely a game of just like, do you get the cards or don't you? So, okay. Here we go.

Maybe I'm wrong. No, no, no. You're right. So I think nine is what you're going for. But this is how it works. Two through nine are worth their face value. Ten, jack, queen, and king have no value. They're zero.

And there's a reason for that, which I'll get to in a moment. Aces are worth one point, and jokers are not used. But here's the thing. The hands are valued at modulo ten, which means you're just looking at the ones digit on it, which is why 10, Jack, Queen, King have no point value because they're – add 10 to something, it never changes the ones digit. So you're trying to get as close to 9, but if you go over, you end up with a lower number, right? Like if you go to 12. It's a 2. Yeah, it's a two yeah it's a two i wonder if you can keep going or if you go over 10 you can no longer because yeah it has to be it has to

stop somewhere otherwise you would just go through the whole deck until you maybe it's like blackjack where like you have to get in the minimum like if you get whoever gets it in less cards right yeah it could be yeah I don't know. Again, we're now reading Wikipedia to our listening audience. It's good radio. I remember seeing the observation at some point, similar to how, like, you know, Bond wants his martinis shaken, not stirred. And that actually weakens the martini because it crushes the ice and waters it down. the martini because it like crushes the the ice and waters it down uh and so that's actually kind of like a affectation so that he doesn't get so drunk or like whatever um the fact that he's like

so good at back rat is just like he's just lucky he's just a very lucky man um i i mean i started this episode saying that i'd recently watched the first two bond films and it's it's it's funny to watch uh a character a franchise an ip a crew it's iconic right yeah right um because those are what dr no and dr no yes or dr noah right uh and then uh thunderball in, you know, Bond is like a like a bit of a playboy or whatever. But it's it's not over the top. It's not weird until later in the movie. It's almost like he's on like a normal detective sleuthing mission. Right, right. Yeah.

And then the the sort of reveal or whatever is like a everyone's afraid of this dragon that's on this island that turns out to be a flamethrowing tank and then you get into the the layer of the uh the villain and then it really gets bondy at that point but it feels a bit like or bond desk but it feels like that bond desk ishness is meant to be uh like drawing the audience into a weirder weirder world kind of thing there's a there's a point where you're in the dr no's lair he's having dinner with dr no they're under there's some the part of the layers uh under steel level and they have these big glass walls and you can see all these fish but the glass walls are designed to magnify the fish because you think bond villain this is going to be like all these deadly fish or whatever and

no it's just like regular tropical fish but magnified so they look bigger and that's it like like in the story he explains that they're magnified to look bigger and more impressive you go to the second one and in the second one he immediately uses a jet pack to escape right right and like that's the one that has like a villain that has a swimming pool full of sharks they go all all out but uh the thing i was going to mention was in that first i think it's the first one where before he gets assigned to the mission they change his gun they give him the walter ppk which is the the gun that yeah the iconic gun the iconic and he hates he hates it right he doesn't want it he wants the gun he was using and they're like that's not

you know the one that we issue double o's or whatever the deal is and it's just kind of funny to just like in the beginning he's like i don't want this gun and then it's like this is the this is the gun that bond uses yeah yeah yeah absolutely i'll say i think dr no stands up better than a lot of them just because it is so weird yeah and style like it has the great um opening credit design yes with like the dots and stuff and i guess that's maurice binder it reminds me of salt bass but uh yeah you know it's a different guy anyway um yeah i i i find that one pretty rewatchable yeah personally anyhow back in our story uh after best year wins the five million francs he says baccarat and geology are my life. We see Worf take a special cigar out of his cigar case. And when they ask, when do we leave?

He says, right now. And then he shoots knockout gas through the cigar into all of their faces, which is a wonderful bad guy bond thing. Yes. We cut to an opulent stateroom, somewhere obviously cold. There's snow outside.

Garrick looks around and says, another decorator's nightmare. Yes, I do like his disdain for the period pieces. Yeah. Captain Sisko appears. He is here in the role of Hippocrates Noah. Such a good name. which is extremely good and i think he's his his costume is a direct dr no yeah uh it appears to be homage i think the like it's it's like the narrow jacket with like the little buttons looks good i will say avery brooks

looks good in a dr no jacket i'm gonna i'm gonna say this now uh before we get into it but like avery brooks is amazing in this role he all of the ones where he gets to like go kind of wild yeah yeah are extremely good i mean he he's a really interesting actor it's really interesting him in the role in this captain cisco role because he's very not like other captains. I don't know. We don't need to go down a whole nother digression. But his energy often is a little manic, but it has to be very restrained in his like as Captain Sisko. Yeah.

So when he gets to just like lean into it, it's really fun to watch. And he leans and it's so good. He kind of gives Bashir like a little test for his cover story with this like Jim encrusted bowl thing and he's like Bashir runs down all the jewels that are in it ending with like

in these judging from the carbonization of these emeralds they must come from the Tibetan region which is no surprise as I say we're on the southeastern slope of Mount everest at about 22 000 feet 25 actually uh he's handing out cigars all around noah and his friends value their privacy and don't welcome for example men from world governments who disagree with his philosophy and what is your philosophy are you some kind of anarchist quite the opposite i believe in an orderly world a far cry from the chaos we find ourselves in

today we are building a new future here a new beginning for mankind a new chapter in human history will open right here on my island island forgive me sometimes i do get ahead of myself allow me to explain so we get the the uh iconic bond villain explanation um where he hits a button and the whole back wall slides up into the ceiling and the computer console turns around and there's a big world map with dots on it and Dax as Dr. Honeybear walking around back there

doing things with the computer. They have seeded the world with lasers in these critical points that can penetrate the earth's crust and so their tests have been was being creating these artificial earthquakes when they all go off together it will create a worldwide earthquake um they you know talk through the horror that that will create uh you know, that that will kill everyone on the planet. Dr. Noah says that there comes a time when a house is so infested by termites that you must burn down the house. I keep calling him Dr. Noah as opposed to Cisco because it is such a great inhabitation.

But that's just a side effect. The lasers will release magma to the uh of the world and all these places and what happens next you know geologist bashir uh with dawning horror he says that the tectonic plates will settle shrinking the surface of the earth and so the oceans will expand except for the top of mount everest it'll be the only island where they can repopulate the human race but it's a pity that you won't be around to join us mr bashir obviously his cover was not good enough for a man of dr noah's intellect he's hired the greatest protection that money can buy he presses a button and falcon joins them

oh so good uh we uh have a brief moment on the station where rom and eddington are working feverishly to connect things he needs another hour and eddington says o'brien's gonna kill me when he gets back because there's just like stuff everywhere there's hoses yeah and like tools and yeah that's a scene of chaos back in our story g Garak and Bashir are tied to two legs of one of the lasers in an underground chamber that is apparently close to their location. When it fires, the cave is going to fill with molten lava. They ask where Kira's character is. She's a woman with spirit and she's young and healthy. We'll need women like her to propagate

the second human race. He flips the switch for the five-minute countdown that even he can't stop and ends with a great, try to stay cool, Mr. Bashir. Hitting all the high points of our genre here. We come back from commercial on

seeing that there's 345 left in the countdown garrick doesn't want to die tied to a 20th century laser he wants to call for the exit like we can stop this we can get out of this but bashir understands they can't disrupt the program because that will kill all of their you know all their friends yeah that's when uh dax comes back in to again vaguely check something on the computer. And Bashir says, this is our ticket out of here. And so we get the Bond, I don't know. I don't find him particularly seductive in this moment, but he's playing up the...

There's a thing happening here, right? I was thinking about the um the tensions in this episode right because we have we have a bunch of different stakes here some are more real than others right right like the the doomsday device no stakes at all that that is just an imaginary world that is going to you know if if you were playing this hollow novel and nothing else was going on and they didn't end up with the rest of the crew stuck inside, he could have lost, he could have failed this and he would just feel bad about failing. It wouldn't have actually cost any

actual lives or anything. Then you have the stakes of the lives of our crews that are suspended in the holodeck. And so you have to like be careful about how you handle your enemies and all of that and that's that's great and then you have your stakes of like the the sort of outside that's also working those aren't separate stakes but they're working towards the same stakes but what what's also fun is that you have different levels of um i'm going to say gameplay yeah outside they're doing this technical thing on the inside based on these imaginary stakes of the earthquakes you get into the bond uh story but what's actually happening in air quotes uh is bashir is playing a video game right right and

he's like this is the point in the video game where i have to go through the romance dialogue right right in order to continue so he's just selecting the let's get those glasses off of you and see what you look like under yeah like these very uh corny yeah they're corny it's totally corny like even for a bond, this would be too probably. Yeah. Too corny. But Garrick still doesn't really have the full context. So he's like, what are you doing? That's not going to work.

And she's like, shut up. Yeah. Like I need to select the dialogue. Yeah. It does kick off with a man like Dr. Noah only appreciates you for your brain. He can't appreciate your beauty. I have a last request. Take off those glasses.

She takes off her glasses. And you have such wonderful hair. I think it would look so beautiful if you let it flow free. And she lets down her hair. Garrick cuts in with, you know, doctor, this is much more than I ever wanted to know about your fantasy life. Seeing her like that is the last thing he wants to remember before he dies and she says thank you and walks away then turns and comes back and gives him a kiss and then she leaves and garrick's like uh what yeah but you see

that is when bashir stole the key for the handcuffs off of her while she was close to him. Ha ha. Oh, kiss the girl, get the key. They never taught me that in the Obsidian Order. I will admit to being slightly disappointed that the glasses weren't the secret. Like he wasn't able to like use the glasses to focus the laser beam somewhere. Sure. You know, because he was asking for the glasses. It just felt like, but then once we saw what the laser beams were there was no way they're cutting through the court like the yeah yeah the crust of the earth like they're pretty serious yeah

yeah uh they run through the cave as uh it starts to shake and rocks are falling around them um they need to get to the control room uh again getting back to the game aspect the finale to the story is that either uh ramam manamana either kira's character or dax's character yes dies one of them turns on dr noah and right or yeah one of them ends up with with beshir and one of them dies uh so they need to make sure that they both survive. And he's putting together his tiny gun, which I think is a is supposed to be a Walter PPK that he had all the pieces for in his jacket. As he tells Garrick that this is my fantasy. Trust me. This leads to the the emotional core of our episode where Garrick turns to him and says and says no you're just putting us all into danger we have no guarantee this will work we should just quit yeah but there comes a time when the odds

are against you and the only reasonable course of action is to quit quit yes is that what they taught you at the obsidian order to give up when things get tough as a matter of fact they did that's why i've managed to stay alive while most of my colleagues are dead because i know when to walk away and that time is now now and you know that doctor if you were a real intelligence agent bashir uh confronts him says am i bruising your ego by play acting at something you take so very seriously a real intelligence agent has no ego, no conscience,

no remorse, only a sense of professionalism. And my says, it's time to go. So he starts to call for the exit and Bashir pulls his gun on him and says, he's not going to let Cisco and the others die. Garrick, you won't pull the trigger.

You dream of being a hero because deep down, you know, you're not, which is in context of the journey of bashir throughout the show is a fairly insightful oh good this conversation hooks into both of their characters as we see them in other parts of the show oh that's great bashir says that uh like i may not be a hero but i know how to make a choice yeah garrick shouts for the computer, but Bashir shoots, wings him in the neck, and he goes down bleeding. It's quite the shot.

And then he goes and checks and says, oh, it's just a flesh wound. You're going to be okay. What if you killed me? What makes you think I wasn't trying? And we end with, Doctor, I do believe there's hope for you yet. hope for you yet i really do like this uh this this aspect of it the uh slightly dangerous but and like hardened spy real spy like making he's he's lying the there's a time when the odds are against you and there's no reasonable course of action but to quit it'll get echoed in just in a little bit and uh it's it's a great, I don't know.

I think it's very well handled. And it makes the characters more interesting to me, I guess. Like I don't already have stakes in these characters. So the show does a great job of giving me those stakes by setting them at odds with each other there. It's also at this point when I realized that Julian Brasashier's initials are jb james bond and i don't know why that didn't occur to me throughout but i actually had not uh put that together myself very nice um yeah i think there is you know like so much of ds9 there's like these things where if you are a franchise viewer right you know, it does reward you

for knowing about the characters and even knowing about how they're going to end up. Because some of this stuff echoes through later events for both of these characters. Garrick in particular is interesting because he has this quality, and I think a lot of it is, you know, credit to the actor, Andrew Robinson.

He has this quality where you feel like you've you finally settled on what his deal is and then he flips a little bit and you're like oh okay so there is more there he has another deal uh so like this this thing at the end was like there's hope for you yet it's kind of like was this whole conversation just like push julian to like get him more committed right yeah to making hard decisions or something like at least i i i have that thought um and it's uh it's good stuff well he does he definitely plays with because he could call for the exit at any time right and uh there's this moment where they're tied to the lasers when he doesn't but specifically asks basheer to do it and so like he's 100 pressuring basheer into making the decisions right even when he goes to call it's because he's putting it in basheer's court to stop him and

that's great yeah like you can see it happening and you're like oh okay all right and with him it hooks into a lot of his other stuff where it's like his style is to get other people to do things is that because he wanted you to do it in the first place or is because he's taking advantage of an opportunity and are you doing it because it's what what garrick wants you to do or are you doing it because garrick wants you to know that you have done a thing. He doesn't care what it was, but he wants you to have done it so that, you know,

going forward, like it's, there's layers, there's good stuff. Good. That's good. But yes, Bashir leads onto the control room.

They burst in. There's a nice detail where, uh, Garrick takes down Falcon. Yes. Um, Julian frees Kira. She wants to kill Dr. Noah, but Julian says it's not this time.

And then Worf reappears. He has the drop on everyone. Eddington calls in and says they're going to try rematerializing in two minutes. So he has a two-minute countdown. In what is perhaps the most accurate engineering time estimate in all of Star Trek. Yeah, start the clock. Noah has no pretensions about the idea of being a hero. And he levels a gun at Bashir. And then Bashir says, maybe I'm tired of being a hero. I've been thinking it over in your way, maybe the only way. Yeah. So we have some good dialogue here. you expect me to believe that a man who's devoted

his whole life to working against people like me and he says what sense is there in defending a doomed planet and here he immediately repeats all of garrick's lines that he had just rejected i'm an intelligence agent and if there's any one thing i've learned it is that there comes a point when the odds are against you and there is no reasonable course of action but to quit how do you think i've managed to stay alive so long when all of my compatriots are dead it is because i have known when to walk away that's that's a very like what's his name the most recent um daniel craig yeah that's a very like daniel craig bond yeah kind of kind of vibe and the recontextualization of all of it is great that that's good that's good craftsmanship we have tense music as they cut back to rom we see them

starting the the the data transfer we go back into our world dr Dr. Noah says he makes a compelling argument, but I've been looking forward to killing you for a long time. While Julia has been talking, he's moved over to the computer console and says, you may need someone like me. Dr. Noah says, what? Like, you can't stop the computer or something like that. Yeah. And he says, that's not what I want to do. And he hits the button himself to shoot the lasers. Kira goes, you've destroyed the world uh and on the screen behind them we see the sea level rising

and all the continents disappearing underneath the graphic it's an incredibly fast and calming apocalypse it's it's very satisfying to watch the sea levels rise and there's no like alarm bells going off. The world's not shaking from their point of view. It's very like, ah, yeah, it's like they talked about how the earthquakes are going to kill everyone. But apparently,

uh, you know, the sea level rises quickly enough that yeah, yeah, we're all done. Yep. It's working just as you planned. You've done it,

doctor. Yes. But somehow, I didn't expect to win. I guess the last thing to do now is kill you. And that's when they finally beam out our cast right before Dr. Noah pulls the trigger. And now they can leave the hollow suite safely. We end our episode with a final exchange between Bashir and Garrick. Garrick says, interesting.

You saved the day by destroying the world. He says there's lots of things they didn't teach him in the Obsidian Order, like how indulging in fantasy can keep the mind creative. Oh, yeah. Lunch tomorrow. That's the thing. They have lunch every day. That's like, oh, so lunch tomorrow.

Yes, but at your place in Hong Kong, unless this was your last mission, I think it's safe to say that Julian Bashir secret agent will return. I love that ending line. That's great. That's perfect. My question is, did he? There are a couple other episodes

where they're in this world, but they're not about it in this way it's more like part of the like background or like where's bashir and they like are the b plot is that he like there's one where he's like miles i need you to come be in my program he's like oh i don't do i have to be falcon again right uh yeah i don't remember how often it happens but there's one or two other bits where uh gets to put the tux back on. Obviously, it's heavily inspired by homage to, etc. They apparently did receive an angry letter from MGM about how close it was to their property.

Wow. Nothing ever came of it, but they were scolded for getting too close, too close apparently oh that's how you know you've made it right exactly uh apparently mgm did not find imitation to be the sincerest form of flattery is a quote yeah there's a fifth season episode where they go back to some of this stuff yeah it was a lot of fun like i said at the beginning like i didn't have a lot of the contextual information to see how like some of the more, what I assume were really fun bits of how the bond, uh,

tropes mushed on top of deep space, nine characters and whatnot. But with that, even without that, the whole episode, uh, played out in a very very entertaining way and got across like a lot of the stuff that it needed to get across uh which is

good it was i think it was fairly well crafted my only like thing and this isn't a complaint it's just they had a nice tension there where there's this race between what's happening in the story and then what the the um technical work happening outside the story right and uh they could have leaned into that just a little bit more right but i guess the best way to fail to do that is by leaning on the bond story more which is what they did here and that yeah it's like i'm not sure what of that i would you know want to trim out so that i could see more of like rom yeah i mean i like rom but yeah but there could have been like some uh uh made-up drama well it's all made-up drama so it doesn't matter but like like oh we need this from we need to quick negotiate

with this person to get this thing so that we can you know we don't have a coupling or whatever uh like the defiance transporters are on a uh maintenance cycle and yeah we need to wait for them to finish or something like that yeah and the way to interweave that with the inner one is to first tell them, we'll have this done in 10 minutes. And so you get to like, okay, we'll just luxuriate and enjoy the gambling scene. Because why not?

That'll be fun and it'll take up some time. Yeah, no one's going to die while we're playing Baccarat because that's not what happens in this kind of story. And then they're like, well, our 10 minutes are up. Let just uh win this game because i really want to win this game against wharf and they do and then suddenly they get the call that says you got to stall for more time you know like that kind of sure yeah yeah drama i mean the the emphasis is

clearly on having fun with the bond stuff yeah yeah exactly and like all the this is one of those i think some similar to fistful of data is where it was like everyone was having a ton of fun everyone yeah you know they love like playing dress up right and like having silly accents and all that stuff let them do that i do think it's funny how like so everyone really like gets into character um except and i think this is in character that that Worf is just Worf wearing a suit. Right. Like, he doesn't do an accent. He doesn't, like, act weird. I mean, he smokes a cigar, I guess.

Yeah. But, like, his affect is exactly the same. The way he delivers lines is exactly the same. And I think that's actually very Worf. So, that's fun. And there's also an aspect to to o'brien in falcon you know i mean o'brien is the most abused character in all of star trek he has all kinds of crazy stories where he uh he goes undercover uh for federation intelligence uh on this planet and

i forget exactly what the the situation is but he like has to deal with all these like criminals and stuff and there's like another episode where he gets stuck in a prison and he's like the prison is like for the mind and he lives an entire life that happens like actually happens in like five minutes or something but like it's like he's lived his entire life uh in a prison and he like totally changes all these really horrible experiences he's taken over by different entities all the time so like he's always doing stuff like he's always acting in different situations and so he was the least out of place to me because it was like oh brian is just acting

differently this is a tuesday right yeah he gets to do a thing where he wears an eyepatch um okay but yeah fun to watch everyone have fun and uh i know i hadn't really remembered this that this particular premise this particular twist and you know nice to see another another oh no they're stuck on the holodeck episode that has like that tension and those stakes that feels natural and makes you know gives a reason to watch this one in particular over any of the other ones yeah at the beginning i had a little bit of an eye roll thing because i was like oh okay they're gonna kill off they're going to kill off four members of the cast like they're you just know that they're not

even if it's one member of the cast but like but but then when the when it became obvious that the conceit was there each one of them is going to inhabit a different character then you're like oh right that's why we that's why we took four members of the main cast and did that with it like we uh wait for five no it's five members. I'm counting this wrong. O'Brien, Worf, Sisko, Dax and Kira. Oh, you're right. There is five. I keep not counting O'Brien or Worf when I count through all of them. Yeah.

Because they're in like totally different scenes. And I mean, like, I remember thinking at the very beginning when we saw the runabout with all of them in it, I was like, why did they shove all of the command crew right. Right. Into a single roundabout. It's like, ah, for just this reason. Yes.

Yeah. Oh, this was a fun one. I'm glad you picked it. Um, we will continue surveying our options for our, our next episodes and, continue to explore all of the things that the holodeck has to,

has to offer us do you have any any any other thoughts on our man bashir uh i am looking forward to uh i insert star trek thunderball pun here and uh uh god what would be a good Star Trek James Bond live and let transport? It'd be something like The Ferengi Who Loved Me. Yeah, there you go. I look forward to The Ferengi Who Loved Me. Or The Ferengi Who Came Out of the Cold. But that's not Bond.

That's Smiley. The Cardassian Who Came Out of the Cold is kind of Garak. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Well, we will see if there's more little illusions in other episodes. But I think we have, you know, earned our 20 bars of gold press latinum for today. But we will be back next time to talk about another holodeck episode of Star Trek. Got a break character. Just do the rock for file. of Star Trek. Beep! Beep! Beep! Beep!

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