#ds9 documentary

I'll be perfectly honest: I think that a (purely hypothetical at this point) DS9 sequel that canonized Jezri Married Forever but tried to make up for it by having some other queer relationship would still be deeply unsatisfying and frustrating for me and a lot of other queer viewers. I appreciate that Star Trek now is trying to do more to include queer and trans characters, but I think that fully making things up to queer fans requires acknowledging and trying to right the past wrongs, too. And Garashir is one of the biggest of those, if not the biggest. For something where that was unintentional it is eerie how much it mimics the story beats of a budding romance, or at least something that is going to become more serious than the close but complicated friendship that it already is, and then that ends abruptly after the Dominion prison camp escape. It's maybe the most glaring example I've ever seen of the "mystery story model" of gay subtext (where it feels like you're reading a mystery novel but with the ending that gives you the "answers" ripped out -- read the article, it's good and explains it well), and that's coming from someone with no lack of exposure to homoerotic subtext in old movies and TV shows, lol. So it's not surprising to me that a lot of LGBTQ+ viewers processed it, at the time and even more so in the years since, as a flashing red "You Don't Belong Here" sign, regardless of what was or wasn't intended. As a result of that, a lot of the frustration now isn't just about the lack of same-sex relationships in DS9 and related media, but the lack of that specific one, and I think any future media involving either of those characters needs to be aware of that. That's the reason (well, one of several reasons, not all of which were related to Garak and/or Bashir) that the "20 years later" story idea in the documentary pissed off so many, even, perhaps especially after the solid acknowledgement by the writers of how they screwed up by not exploring that relationship as a queer one and Garak as a queer character. It made that earlier mea culpa feel hollow, like they had missed the point, at least to Me as a Homosexual (TM) but also a decent number of other queer people I've talked to about or read posts by reacting to the doc. It was a weird sour note in a film I otherwise really enjoyed, which is also how the lack of queer representation outside of one (wonderful, but not flawless) episode makes me feel about DS9 as a whole.

Besides, what is so worth preserving in Jezri, really? I get "sticking to the story that was told," but what is the story with them that so insistently must be stuck to? (I know in the documentary there was something about "keeping at least one couple together," but as plenty of fans pointed out at the time, that's already the case with both Miles/Keiko and Rom/Leeta.) There's a reason that both generations of fanfiction writers and the writers of the official post-canon books have found Julian and Ezri so easy to break up: because there's not much there. At the very end of the story, they are suddenly attracted to each other for contrived, told-not-shown reasons and get together quickly. Voyager did that too with Seven/Chakotay and Picard broke them up without fanfare and put Seven in a different relationship, which was the right move, and not just because it made her officially bi. Why you can't do the same thing for Bashir and Ezri is beyond me. There are obvious issues with the relationship -- like to what degree Bashir is still hung up on Jadzia and letting that influence his feelings for Ezri -- that are entirely sidestepped by the show, even though they naturally would cause problems if not addressed (especially since that was why Ezri/Worf failed) that could be reasons why it didn't work out. Or the Trill re-association rules that were established in "Rejoined" and promptly forgotten about afterward. Or if Bashir is indeed in Section 31 (much as I hate that but whatever) and doesn't tell Ezri, but she finds out later and feels betrayed enough to end things. But you also don't even need to give a reason, especially if you're setting your sequel 20 years later. Plenty of relationships naturally run their course in that amount of time; not that they’re any model for how relationships should be, but the time between when my parents met and their divorce was under 20 years. For another TV example that I thought worked, Skins had the main couple of the first two seasons broken up without explanation in its "distant finale" that was only four years later. And from there it wouldn't be hard to write Garak and Bashir finding each other again and making it work this time, Bennifer-style (sorry not sorry). Or again, just have Garashir already together without going too much into how exactly they got there, since Star Trek isn't a romance-focused franchise anyway.

(I have a lot of quibbles with what the post-canon books do and I don't think any potential sequel shows should have to emulate them -- in fact, I'd generally prefer if they didn't do that -- but I did like what I heard of the way the books solved the Jezri break-up: with Bashir realizing he's more into Dax than its individual hosts, and the side-effect of that meaning he can't really be in a relationship with a host who wants to be seen as more than their symbiont. That feels both accurate to me and a fascinating story in itself: there is a lot of interesting Julian Bashir character study you could do about why he's so attracted to the concept of joined Trill, which I think is the obvious subtext of being "more into Dax." What is it about joining that intrigues and beguiles him so? Might he even envy or long for the experience himself? Or just what it says about what a weird lil xenophile he is, in love with the worm 🪱 Edit: it also allows some interesting exploration of joined Trill and the range of feelings they have about their relationship to their symbiont and previous hosts. For instance, I could see someone like Jadzia being ok with a romantic partner who is more into Dax than her as an individual; she defined herself a lot around the joined aspect of her and the memories of previous hosts. But for Ezri, it’s very important to her to be seen as separate from Dax and its previous hosts, as she states throughout season 7. So that’s a dealbreaker for her, and represents her maturation in understanding where she ends and Dax begins when she’s able to recognize and end her relationship with Julian over that.)

Obviously, anybody can and should write whatever they want, and I'm generally an advocate for official content creators not paying too much attention to fandom opinions about the stuff they create. (Also, we're talking about an entirely hypothetical show that's unlikely to happen.) But I do think there's been a failure by some of the many people involved with the show -- one that, to be fair, I think isn't uncommon with cis straight creators interacting with LGBTQ+ fanbases more generally -- to understand why so many people are so invested in Garashir, why it's more than just "I want my ship to become canon," and why you can't really sub in just any other queer relationship in its place. And I think the crux of it is: we don't just want to see that we are allowed in now. We want to see that we've always been there, among the characters and relationships that we've known and loved for years. That's how you make up for 50 years of the "inclusive post-discrimination future" not including us. And with the amount of shit that LGBTQ+ fans have had to put up with from the Star Trek franchise for decades, why not solve one of its most egregious missteps by giving us our happy ending?

I have Opinions about the s8 opener from the DS9 Doc, so I rewrote it.

Jezri is no more, Garashir is back, Julian's a doctor, Ben returned to watch his son grow up, Kira trusts her friends and has a wife, Nog doesn't die... I didn't go back and rewatch the entire thing so I might not hit all the plot points, I left out some stuff on purpose, and tried to make the things I kept make sense. This ends just about where the doc ends.