[8.1/10] If “Our Man Bashir” had just been a Trekkie-style James Bond parody, it would have been enough. As with the episode featuring Dax’s past hosts inhabiting the bodies of her best friends, there’s something intrinsically fun about getting to see the whole cast act out of character. Putting them in such wild, colorful roles is the icing on the cake.
Don’t get me wrong, some of it is ridiculous. But then again, so is the source material. In truth, there’s elements of this that rub me the wrong way: the sexism, the objectification, the seduction-as-solution methods at play. Thankfully, there’s a few saving graces. For one, these are all, for better or worse, tropes pulled straight from the adventures of 007, so there’s the veneer of plausible deniability to write this off as the over-the-top parody it’s intended to be. For another, lord knows The Original Series and James T. Kirk in particular deployed plenty of these same tropes, so high-minded Star Trek’s clearly not above them. And most importantly, Garak is there to roll his eyes and sneer at the absurdity of these conceits of the genre, which helps give the writers a bit of cover as well, and the audience a bit of relief that someone is saying it.
To that end, the ridiculousness is a feature not a bug, and the fun of the persona-swaps are self-justifying. Kira as a femme fatale with a dodgy Eastern European accent is so far from her no-nonsense persona that it’s inherently amusing to watch her purr and coo. (And given the real life romance between Alexander Siddig and Nana Visitor, there’s some metahumor to their holosuite characters’ flirtation as well.) Watching Avery Books monologue and threaten like he’s Ernest Blofield is almost as much of a treat as seeing him turn into a truly creepy murderer in the Dax episode. Sultry scientist Jadzia, high class henchman Worf, and local goon O’Brien (whose character might be an homage to Brooks’ former role as Hawk?), don’t get as much to do, but are still entertaining outside of their usual personalities.
Along the way, “Our Man Bashir” delivers plenty of good Bond spoofs out the wazoo. The improvised weapon for the eye-patched bad guy. The comely allies and enemies. The globe-trotting adventure (even if it’s basically just four well-done sets). The tense but important card game. The villain trying to destroy the world and remake it in his own image. The suits. The weapons. The lasers. The bad guy monologues. Deep Space Nine does them all with panache long before Austin Powers took the stuffing out of the genre in a major way. And the only thing that makes it all better is getting to hear Garak’s running commentary on the quaint silliness of the whole thing from the perspective of a real spy sticking his nose into such holodeck buffoonery.
To the writers’ credit though, things are pretty exciting in the real world too. Like all “crazy holodeck malfunction” episodes, you kind of have to turn your brain off in order to grant the premise. And yet, “Our Man Bashir” includes arguably the most plausible explanation for how Sisko and company could end up trapped as holodeck characters you could have. The idea of transporter malfunction that requires their patterns to be stored somewhere on the station is a good start. And the notion of their minds taking up residence in DS9’s usual systems, while their physical forms are kept in the holodeck database since it’s used to doing that sort of thing has the whiff of plausibility and even cleverness, which is about all you can ask for from a setup like this.
More to the point, the episode maintains the stakes both inside and outside of the holosuite. In the real world, this is another among Rom’s growing triumphs. Him using his technical to knowhow to not only keep Quark’s entertainment boxes running on shoestrings and bubblegum, but also jury-rig the Defiant to interface with his janked up holosuite tinkering is a big win. With so much focus on the secret agent escapades in the main story, the subplot lets Rom, Odo, and even Eddigton shine with some creativity in how they bring our heroes back from their photonic waystation.
And yet, what really elevates this one isn’t the pastiche or the semi-plausible explanations for how the DS9 crew got stuck in the holodeck and how their comrades can get them out. It’s that writer Ronald D. Moore and company use the setup to explore something deeper about Bashir, Garak, and the relationship between the two of them.
Julian has been Garak’s babe in the woods thus far, an amusing but entertaining curiosity to the savvier Cardassian who helps this little stumbling baby deer through the world of espionage. So something about watching Julian playact his way through a four-color version of the kind of life Garak actually lived bothers him, even if he tries not to let on. Garak’s lines about “entering the wrong intelligence agency” when he sees Agent Bashir’s women and wealth is amusing, but on a deeper level, you can understand the former Obsidian Order operative’s distaste for turning his profession into a cheesy game, one played by the veritable naif who revels in the pageantry while ignoring the hardship and hard decision the real game requires.
Nonetheless, Julian proves himself possessing of more mettle than Garak might have thought. One of the clever things Moore and the writers’ room does here is add stakes to the silly adventure by introducing an “If you die in the Matrix, you die in the real world” conceit. Bashir can’t just blast his way through the bad guys, because if Sisko’s body perishes in the holodeck, the computer might lose it permanently. So when Garak urges Julian to defend himself in lethal terms, or be prepared to have to sacrifice one of his crewmates to save the rest, or himself, Dr. Bashir pushes back.
Until he doesn’t. Julian may not be willing to drop his own friends to save himself, even if their supervillain doppelgangers are coming after him. But he is willing to pull the trigger on Garak (as a warning or worse) to stop him from exiting the holosuite and potentially compromising the program. It’s a sign that for however much exaggerated flair Dr. Bashir might enjoy in this little fantasy world, when it comes to the real one, he’s ready, willing, and able to make the hard calls, even with his erstwhile compadre, to stand up for his values and his friends.
But he also shows that he understands Garak’s values too. The former spook’s speech to Julian serves as a deconstruction of the James Bond archetype. Becoming a successful spy in the real world (or at least, a different fictional world) isn’t about mere derring-do or courage. If anything, the opposite is true on Garak’s account. It’s about knowing when to quit, knowing when to accept collateral losses in the name of a greater goal or simple survival. It’s accepting when you’ve been beaten and slithering away to fight another day. Garak’s survived this long on the back of that principle, and while he’s chastened by Julian’s convictions, he’s still a walking tribute to the seedy underbelly underlying that naive exaggerations of the spy story genre.
It’s clever, then, when Julian mirrors Garak’s speech in his conversation with the big bad here. The monologue not only allows him to stall for time, but also provide a plausible explanation as to why a committed spy like him (in-universe of course) would give up and switch sides. There’s poetry in Dr. Bashir using Garak’s own words about needing to give up in the face of impossible odds to do just the opposite, while giving the patina of plausibility to his own ploy.
It works of course! I especially love the fact that “Our Man Bashir” does what a real James Bond film could never do -- let the villain succeed in their scheme of global domination. Dr. Bashir wins the day by breaking the rules of the genre, a clever solution as to how to vamp for long enough that Rom and company can extricate their friends’ bodies from the holodeck. Moore and company offer a creative solution to an unusual problem.
They didn’t have to though! That's what’s so impressive about this one. You could have had a simple holodeck malfunction romp, featuring everyone acting out of character in a heightened reality, and this one would still be a blast. Instead, Deep Space Nine goes a step further, with insights into character, a series of moral questions, and a story with real stakes despite the silliness at its core. It’s the perfect melding of Bond’s outsized adventures, with the commitment to delving one step deeper into everything that became the calling card of this seminal Star Trek series.
Review by Andrew BloomVIP 9BlockedParentSpoilers2023-02-01T00:51:55Z
[8.1/10] If “Our Man Bashir” had just been a Trekkie-style James Bond parody, it would have been enough. As with the episode featuring Dax’s past hosts inhabiting the bodies of her best friends, there’s something intrinsically fun about getting to see the whole cast act out of character. Putting them in such wild, colorful roles is the icing on the cake.
Don’t get me wrong, some of it is ridiculous. But then again, so is the source material. In truth, there’s elements of this that rub me the wrong way: the sexism, the objectification, the seduction-as-solution methods at play. Thankfully, there’s a few saving graces. For one, these are all, for better or worse, tropes pulled straight from the adventures of 007, so there’s the veneer of plausible deniability to write this off as the over-the-top parody it’s intended to be. For another, lord knows The Original Series and James T. Kirk in particular deployed plenty of these same tropes, so high-minded Star Trek’s clearly not above them. And most importantly, Garak is there to roll his eyes and sneer at the absurdity of these conceits of the genre, which helps give the writers a bit of cover as well, and the audience a bit of relief that someone is saying it.
To that end, the ridiculousness is a feature not a bug, and the fun of the persona-swaps are self-justifying. Kira as a femme fatale with a dodgy Eastern European accent is so far from her no-nonsense persona that it’s inherently amusing to watch her purr and coo. (And given the real life romance between Alexander Siddig and Nana Visitor, there’s some metahumor to their holosuite characters’ flirtation as well.) Watching Avery Books monologue and threaten like he’s Ernest Blofield is almost as much of a treat as seeing him turn into a truly creepy murderer in the Dax episode. Sultry scientist Jadzia, high class henchman Worf, and local goon O’Brien (whose character might be an homage to Brooks’ former role as Hawk?), don’t get as much to do, but are still entertaining outside of their usual personalities.
Along the way, “Our Man Bashir” delivers plenty of good Bond spoofs out the wazoo. The improvised weapon for the eye-patched bad guy. The comely allies and enemies. The globe-trotting adventure (even if it’s basically just four well-done sets). The tense but important card game. The villain trying to destroy the world and remake it in his own image. The suits. The weapons. The lasers. The bad guy monologues. Deep Space Nine does them all with panache long before Austin Powers took the stuffing out of the genre in a major way. And the only thing that makes it all better is getting to hear Garak’s running commentary on the quaint silliness of the whole thing from the perspective of a real spy sticking his nose into such holodeck buffoonery.
To the writers’ credit though, things are pretty exciting in the real world too. Like all “crazy holodeck malfunction” episodes, you kind of have to turn your brain off in order to grant the premise. And yet, “Our Man Bashir” includes arguably the most plausible explanation for how Sisko and company could end up trapped as holodeck characters you could have. The idea of transporter malfunction that requires their patterns to be stored somewhere on the station is a good start. And the notion of their minds taking up residence in DS9’s usual systems, while their physical forms are kept in the holodeck database since it’s used to doing that sort of thing has the whiff of plausibility and even cleverness, which is about all you can ask for from a setup like this.
More to the point, the episode maintains the stakes both inside and outside of the holosuite. In the real world, this is another among Rom’s growing triumphs. Him using his technical to knowhow to not only keep Quark’s entertainment boxes running on shoestrings and bubblegum, but also jury-rig the Defiant to interface with his janked up holosuite tinkering is a big win. With so much focus on the secret agent escapades in the main story, the subplot lets Rom, Odo, and even Eddigton shine with some creativity in how they bring our heroes back from their photonic waystation.
And yet, what really elevates this one isn’t the pastiche or the semi-plausible explanations for how the DS9 crew got stuck in the holodeck and how their comrades can get them out. It’s that writer Ronald D. Moore and company use the setup to explore something deeper about Bashir, Garak, and the relationship between the two of them.
Julian has been Garak’s babe in the woods thus far, an amusing but entertaining curiosity to the savvier Cardassian who helps this little stumbling baby deer through the world of espionage. So something about watching Julian playact his way through a four-color version of the kind of life Garak actually lived bothers him, even if he tries not to let on. Garak’s lines about “entering the wrong intelligence agency” when he sees Agent Bashir’s women and wealth is amusing, but on a deeper level, you can understand the former Obsidian Order operative’s distaste for turning his profession into a cheesy game, one played by the veritable naif who revels in the pageantry while ignoring the hardship and hard decision the real game requires.
Nonetheless, Julian proves himself possessing of more mettle than Garak might have thought. One of the clever things Moore and the writers’ room does here is add stakes to the silly adventure by introducing an “If you die in the Matrix, you die in the real world” conceit. Bashir can’t just blast his way through the bad guys, because if Sisko’s body perishes in the holodeck, the computer might lose it permanently. So when Garak urges Julian to defend himself in lethal terms, or be prepared to have to sacrifice one of his crewmates to save the rest, or himself, Dr. Bashir pushes back.
Until he doesn’t. Julian may not be willing to drop his own friends to save himself, even if their supervillain doppelgangers are coming after him. But he is willing to pull the trigger on Garak (as a warning or worse) to stop him from exiting the holosuite and potentially compromising the program. It’s a sign that for however much exaggerated flair Dr. Bashir might enjoy in this little fantasy world, when it comes to the real one, he’s ready, willing, and able to make the hard calls, even with his erstwhile compadre, to stand up for his values and his friends.
But he also shows that he understands Garak’s values too. The former spook’s speech to Julian serves as a deconstruction of the James Bond archetype. Becoming a successful spy in the real world (or at least, a different fictional world) isn’t about mere derring-do or courage. If anything, the opposite is true on Garak’s account. It’s about knowing when to quit, knowing when to accept collateral losses in the name of a greater goal or simple survival. It’s accepting when you’ve been beaten and slithering away to fight another day. Garak’s survived this long on the back of that principle, and while he’s chastened by Julian’s convictions, he’s still a walking tribute to the seedy underbelly underlying that naive exaggerations of the spy story genre.
It’s clever, then, when Julian mirrors Garak’s speech in his conversation with the big bad here. The monologue not only allows him to stall for time, but also provide a plausible explanation as to why a committed spy like him (in-universe of course) would give up and switch sides. There’s poetry in Dr. Bashir using Garak’s own words about needing to give up in the face of impossible odds to do just the opposite, while giving the patina of plausibility to his own ploy.
It works of course! I especially love the fact that “Our Man Bashir” does what a real James Bond film could never do -- let the villain succeed in their scheme of global domination. Dr. Bashir wins the day by breaking the rules of the genre, a clever solution as to how to vamp for long enough that Rom and company can extricate their friends’ bodies from the holodeck. Moore and company offer a creative solution to an unusual problem.
They didn’t have to though! That's what’s so impressive about this one. You could have had a simple holodeck malfunction romp, featuring everyone acting out of character in a heightened reality, and this one would still be a blast. Instead, Deep Space Nine goes a step further, with insights into character, a series of moral questions, and a story with real stakes despite the silliness at its core. It’s the perfect melding of Bond’s outsized adventures, with the commitment to delving one step deeper into everything that became the calling card of this seminal Star Trek series.