Explorers...

[jmiller]

I was listening to the "Rules of Acquisiton" podcast today (my favorite DS9 podcast) on iTunes. It made me think of how good that episode is overall. There are many firsts in the episode:

Sisko's Goatee
Leeta
The mention of a certain "freighter captain" who Jake wants Commander Sisko to meet

However, the B plot raises a major plot hole for me. I'm hoping that someone who has a more distinct knowledge of the episode can help me with this.

When the subject arises that Dr. Elizabeth Lense is coming aboard DS9 from the Lexington, Dr. Bashir stops what he's doing, including hitting on the lovely Leeta, and researches everything she's been up to since he graduated salutatorian to her valedictorian due to his flub on the Post-Ganglionic nerve.

Here's what just grind my gears:

When he finally approaches her, she's never met him in her life, and even thought he was an Andorian. First, what Andorian has an Earth name from Colonial India? Second, how on Earth is it possible they never crossed paths during medical school?! In what I imagine is three years at the academy, the top two students in the entire program never had a class or lab together? When she was backstage waiting to give her valedictorian speech, they never shared the same room? Again, I love this episode because of the Sisko/Jake dynamic, and even quite enjoyed the B plot, especially when O'Brien and Bashir got hammered together. But I just cannot comprehend why the writers thought the Lense/Bashir encounter could work like that.

Please let me know your thoughts, and if you can explain it, I'd love to hear a logical rationale.

 

[kkt]

The kind of Andorian whose mom married a human? And I guess Starfleet Academy medical school is huge, training tens of thousands of doctors to serve on the thousands of planets in the UFP.

 

[jmiller]

I have read a few sources that indicate only about 200 students enroll annually... that is why I question this. And it's established that she mistook Bashir for a friend of his who was Andorian at a party... even if it was interspecies as you say, the result would've likely been a blue child haha. It just seems very far fetched.

 

[MacLeod]

Who knows perhaps she was too focused on being top of her class to pay too close attentoion to who are classmates where. She might also not be that good when it comes to putting names to faces.

 

[Bry_Sinclair]

They were both too focused on their studies to really notice one another?

If you look at fan Sims there are a number of alien characters with human names . Bashir could be an uncommon family name on Andor and someone could've been named 'Julian' in honour of a family friend or someone who did something great for a parent.

 

[Timo]

Or then Lense has never heard of anybody named Bashir on Earth. Not an unlikely assumption - there are hundreds of millions of names around on Earth, past, present, fictional, and nobody named Bashir had crossed my sphere of existence yet when the Doctor made his debut. There need not be any Andorian Bashirs, either - Lense could be even more ignorant about Andorian names. It's not the name that creates the association with Andorians, after all: it's the far more explicit pointing of a finger.

It's not as if the setup would require Lense to have seen the spelling of the name or anything. Spoken out loud, "Bashir" could well warrant three apostrophes and one wholly alien squiggle, and any resemblance between the given name and Earth's July Ann could be dismissed as coincidental.

As for how many classmates the two had, there's no telling. If it was neck to neck and Bashir deliberately blew an entire answer in order to ensure his defeat and still got silver, this suggests a teeny weeny group, or then a group where all the others were irrelevant losers and Bashir and Lense should both stand out like sore middle fingers.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[jmiller]

As for how many classmates the two had, there's no telling. If it was neck to neck and Bashir deliberately blew an entire answer in order to ensure his defeat and still got silver, this suggests a teeny weeny group, or then a group where all the others were irrelevant losers and Bashir and Lense should both stand out like sore middle fingers.

I guess this is why it irks me. I wonder if anybody on the forum has inside knowledge on the thought process involved with writing it like it was written.

 

[Bad Thoughts]

It bothered me, but never for too long. The whole story was another manifestation of the conceit that everyone goes to the Academy (unless, of course,you are O'Brien).

 

[UnknownSample]

They're all very, very busy becoming doctors. Possibly NO socializing as they reach the finish line. They may not have studied physically close to each other. It may not have occurred to either to seek each other out, or find personal pictures or information.
============
So many of these supposedly far fetched things are resolvable with very ordinary, mundane answers.

 

[Bad Thoughts]

I have read a few sources that indicate only about 200 students enroll annually... that is why I question this.

200 is still a lot, comparable to the size of a class in many US high schools. When you add the exigencies of medical education into the picture, it becomes more apparent that some people might be anonymous to one another. If Starfleet Academy's medical school is anything like the typical American medical school, students spend three of four years doing clinical work in what could only be described as major hospitals.

Let's take the example of the medical school at my alma mater, UCLA. There are maybe 800 medical students, but there are 5,000 doctors and nurses. The hospital has 500 beds, but that might be far fewer than the number of patients served in any given day. Add to that being on the UCLA campus, where there are 40,000 students and 5,000 faculty. Unless associating closely either in amity or in collaboration, there might not be any reason for two people to accurately recognize one another, except maybe in passing.

Add three years out of medical school ...

 

[Timo]

I guess this is why it irks me.

We could always argue it was a big group (Starfleet needs a lot of doctors annually) but Bashir was such a superman that he could calculate exactly how good Lense was and how good the next competitor would be, thereby ending up with forfeiting exactly one question (and perhaps 4.7 points from another or whatever) to hit Goldilocks.

I wonder if anybody on the forum has inside knowledge on the thought process involved with writing it like it was written.

As per tidbits from the obligatory "making of" book, the original line about Bashir missing one thing in the finals, from "Q-Less", was written as a cute element in Bashir's seduction routine, without much thought (but quite possibly as the equivalent of Han Solo's Kessel Run thing, i.e. bullshit intended to impress the mark, with purely coincidental truth value).

By "Distant Voices", the writers had realized it was an implausible mistake to make, and lampshaded it (but the telepathic assailant "mistook" it as Bashir's basic insecurity, as the writers still had not invented the fact that it was Bashir trying to hide his superpowers). In "Explorers", a couple of eps later, the lampshading continued, although perhaps with undertones that Bashir and Lense both realized it was not a "simple mistake" at all, but rather an "issue".

And of course with "Dr Bashir, I Presume", it all suddenly made perfect sense, but that was never explicitly stated. The audience could simply decide on their own that any instance of Bashir being less than perfect (say, annoying the hell out of Kira or Dax to escape the otherwise inevitable and inconvenient romance; losing to O'Brien in raquetball or darts; being outwitted by Garak) was part of his act.

Timo Saloniemi