One of my favourite scenes showing how the war has changed the characters.

#I’ve always liked this scene for just this reason #Julian’s lose of naivete is so flawlessly done

And that’s one of the things I like about DS9, one of the ways in which it’s so cohesive - among other things, it’s the story of Julian Bashir growing into a man.

A man who, in the future, might make things quite difficult for the Federation.

Not that the Federation is in itself fatally flawed (despite being set up by four races who didn’t particularly like or trust each other), but that it seems to be an empire or commonwealth that has overextended itself, scraped itself like butter over too much bread, and in the next few years the situation seems very ripe to become unstable. A person like Julian with a mentor like Garak could be something of a game-changer - even if he doesn’t seek power for himself his combination of idealism and increasing day-to-day pragmatism could lead him to put himself about.

COME ON THERE IS SUCH A GOOD SERIES JUST WAITING TO BE HAD, OKAY SO IT WOULD BE DARK FOR STAR TREK BUT IT WOULD BE A GOOD FLIPPING STORY.

I wonder how much of this I could spin together with my ‘League of Artificial Life/LAL’ idea.

Because what about Augments? There aren’t a lot of them, but they are around, and some of them are even sane enough to form coherent plans. And what about the increasing number of sentient artificial intelligences? And how is humanity going to handle the fact that it may have created the forms that will, perhaps gradually, perhaps through revolution, replace it?

MORIARTY’S GOING TO GET OUT OF HIS BOX YOU KNOW.

Oh hell yes, believe me after the Destiny Pocket Book the Federation has a lot of hard time to recover. Also they got to damage/destroy a lot places at the end of that. Hope you weren’t too attached to Acamar Risa or Deneva or the city of Shri'Khar or certain portions of the Klingon Homeworld. Hell one of the founding races seceeded a the end of the current “Typhon Pact” Novels (oh yeah the Romulans, Breen, Tholians, Tzenkethi and Kinshaya formed a political, economic and military pact called the Typhon Pact meant to Rival the Federation).

DS9 is also the first one to really paint some interesting Dark Secrets for the Federation, like the ban on Augments, Section 31 and Dominion-War driven fear and paranoia.