I Really Do Want To See What The Alpha Quadrant Yelp Reviews For Quark's Bar Are Like. Do They Fuck With

This plays like a really nice ending at first like "aw yeah Garak's a good guy in his own way after all :)" and then you rotate the events of the episode in your head a minute and realize that the only way any of this makes sense is if he was genuinely ready to turn them over to the military dictatorship and only changed course after Gul Dipshit was like "we can murder them and it will be epic and based" and Garak's mental calculus was "the terrorists are less of a threat to the military dictatorship alive than they would be as martyrs".

The quadrant's most charming and affable spook.

“return to old trek,” but it’s the return of 20+ episode seasons, of bringing contemporary scifi writers to write episodes, of doing social commentary so acute it blasts the “it’s just escapism” argument to bloody bits, and most important, the return of silly costumes and camp

bbygirls...Thank you @wellntruly for taking this very anime-esque screenshot:

Original:

deep space nine

Oh. Okay. At one point the studio literally forbade Siddig and Andy from talking about Garak and Bashir gay stuff. Wow.

(from an old and dated and uhhhhh pretty insulting and homophobic 1998 article about fanfic - https://www.metroactive.com/papers/metro/05.07.98/tv-9818.html)

Like duh, it was the 90s, it seems obvious this must have happened and I heard the rumour, and I know this article must be infamous, but damn - seeing that confirmed? Wow.

Lol at Sid and Andy winning all the time. And thank you to Sid and Andy for persisting anyways. ❤️

Thinking of Deep Space Nine as "the Dark Star Trek" without digging into what made Deep Space Nine work is so reductive. Like when people discuss Star Trek being "dark" now people bring up "DS9 was Dark and you loved that! Trekkies would hate it now!"

Deep Space Nine didn't work bc it was Dark and it wasn't Dark out of nowhere. Deep Space Nine is intimately tied to TNG in a way no other series is with another (Voyager could've been just as rooted in DS9, but. Y'know. Wasn't). Not only in characters, but that the show is so devoted to exploring deep cuts from TNG: the Bajorans, but also the Ferengi, long dismissed as failed villains, and the Trill, one-off aliens-of-the-week who DS9's writers turned into one of Trek's major species. The central thesis of DS9 isn't that the Trek Universe Is Fucked Up Actually. It's that things get more messy and complicated when Starfleet has to stick around and not dash off to another planet at the end of the episode

DS9 is darker than other Treks, yes, but DS9 is also the warmest, with the most grounded, human characters, not in spite of the fact that two-thirds of the cast are aliens but because of it. The writers treat alien characters as not representatives, but individuals. They treat everyone as individuals, with foibles and flaws, not as perfect, straitlaced future people. DS9's dark episodes are darker than other Treks, but also it's more willing to get silly and emotional. Only DS9 could do the "Sisko confesses to a conspiracy to get the Romulans in the war" episode, but also only DS9 could do the "a holographic lounge singer tries to get Odo and Kira together" episode right after it. Boiling the entire series down to "Deep Space Nine was the Dark Star Trek! Grimdark!" is...just not it

And here we see baby Julian definitely not checking out the weirdly forward alien Miles just brought past the infirmary:

Look at him! The way he does a little double take. The look of wonder in his eyes. The surrepititious down-up glance as Tosk walks away :3

Pool Series: The whole painting

GARASHIR in LOWER DECKS 5.09 “Fissure Quest”