ihamtmus
why don’t people talk about the ds9 episode “the quickening”??
i see people going around calling bashir arrogant and immature but have you?? actually??? seen that episode???????
i mean. he was arrogant. but the character development in this episode was incredible and how anyone can dislike bashir after that is beyond me
clarasghosts
Actually, yeah, let’s talk about this episode because it is a work of art. I kind of see The Quickening as a sort of sequel to The Wire because they mirror each other in a way. The Wire took so many of Julian’s qualities that other characters (and viewers) didn’t like about him - his persistence, his arrogance, his unending optimism - and made those things the exact reason why he saves the day.
and The Quickening does that too, but it subverts the whole thing so it doesn’t feel all that victorious anymore. He’s persistent, he’s arrogant, he’s optimistic, and… people die. It’s not his fault, really, he had no way of knowing what would happen, but you can be damn sure he blames himself for it. The Quickening takes this slowly developing Julian, takes the whole victory from The Wire and tears it down. You learn how Julian views death, how he clings to this one bear from his childhood as a source of comfort. You see him alone, you see him lose all his allies in some way or another, and you see him succeed. But it isn’t a success for Julian. I see Julian as someone, however arrogant, who really doesn’t like himself, and I see that come through probably the most at the end of The Quickening. People died, he didn’t get the results he wanted, and he will hold himself responsible, running sequence after sequence, until he finds the solution he was looking for. Because maybe if he can find that solution, the loss will feel more worth it.
Julian Bashir is an incredible character, full of wonder and complexity.
a-stitch-in-time-and-space
I talk about this on and off, but Julian’s arrogance is like the other side of a coin, it’s that - to an outsider - annoying self-confidence that comes with knowing he’s great at what he does and talking about that a lot, because take away this thing and what has he got to show for himself (he thinks)?
I really wish that the showrunners had taken these ideas built in The Wire and The Quickening and combined them with the later seasons reveal of his augmentations and the meeting of the other augments.
Suddenly we’re faced with a whole new side to that arrogance, that stay-up-all-night night-after-night persistence - his insecurities don’t just stem from a feeling of lack of self because he was a gifted child with awful parents (although that is a part of the allegory, even if the showrunners didn’t seem to do this on purpose) - they stem from feeling of lack of self, because he had non-consensual surgeries performed on him and they altered his way of functioning in a way that on the surface changed him as a human to the point that others perceive people like him as monstrous.
this was some of the potential that I felt was lost in writing him in the final season: exploration of how his “arrogance” covers his insecurities, exploration of how he is a full person and the augmentations didn’t take away the core of him (this is spoken about briefly by O’Brien, but then never properly delved into again), exploration of his internalised ableism with the other augments, further exploration of how he can’t allow himself to be wrong or to “lose” as a form of triptych to The Wire and The Quickening, but in this case he allows himself to breathe, to get the help he needs, to be a flawed person - also I personally would’ve loved more exploration into the bigotry against augments
There are moments of this - statistical probabilities and chrysalis, siege of ar-558, but in the end it feels kind of dropped in favour of section 31 episodes (which could’ve tied into this as well, but didn’t really - not complaining about them as such, I think they’re good episodes, but I’m not a fan of “action-hero bashir”) and surface level solutions in the shape of a very badly thought-out “romance” with Ezri (who deserved better on that front)
