I think the problem is on Star Trek or on most Sci-Fi/Drama Shows is that nearly all of the actors start out as Single and it is not very realistic compared to what the real world is.
Julian/Jadzia
- Thread starter Reece L101
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I though the leeeta thing was her flirting with him and the Doctor thing being essentially a joke. Melhora wasn’t his patient as such...she only really became a patient as an aside while he got excited about possibly using his medical skills to provide something he thought was wanted/needed. I don’t remember anything with Kira outside the Lwxana ep...
Bashir is always gonna be involved with a patient though, he’s basically the only Doctor on the station. Should he become a monk or only have a long distance relationship? Perhaps nip to Bajor?
His character was not well served in the romance arena in the writing, but he doesn’t seem particularly offensive. If anything, he’s in danger of being an ‘unlucky in love’ sitcom character, or a stereotype of the socially clumsy geek, running off into video games. Of course there’s a chunk of fandom that pairs him with Garak...but isn’t Garak his patient too? Does he not also harass Garak when Garak told him to pee off? Albeit usually about something other than whether he’s free for dinner.
Bashir was the ladies choice on DS9 back the day. Plenty of the female viewers in my experience were very pro Bashir. (Ladies choice is a jokey term, but am sure you get the gist.) This backlash seems to come later. For context, the same ladies also quite liked Giles over on Buffy and O’Neill over on SG1. The younger cohort also got behind Tom Paris on Voy as it were, and some had been quite fond of Will Riker and in one or two cases Wesley over on TNG. Picard was a bit of an outlier. Many of them, breaking with fan legend, preferred Kirk to Spock, and thought the Grok Spock crowd were nuts. Anecdotal, but there you are. The nineties were a great time for equality, we could all perv on our Trek characters of choice, and only the fanfic archives would ever truly know...
I give them joint first with Tom and Belz.
That’s the show I want to see. The Paris and O’Brien neighbours show.
Bashir just came off as unprofessional. I really don’t think the lingering and “come ons” were to his character’s benefit. He just seemed like the kind of guy who couldn’t take a hint. There’s nothing more annoying or unattractive in a man (or woman, to be fair) than desperation or the inability to take no for an answer, especially after like 6 seasons of it. I was hoping at some point he would simmer down around season 4 and learn something from it, then organically meet someone.
I didn’t dislike him because of this, I still like Bashir, but it was kind of cringey.
I didn’t dislike him because of this, I still like Bashir, but it was kind of cringey.
I seriously hope if that's how you saw those interactions you aren't a health professional!
Unless I am misremembering the events as shown in the episode, it’s been a while. Melora didn’t have anything wrong with her, she was a patient in the sense everyone was, and Bashir got on with her on an intellectual level first. After they started dating he came up with the medical solution to her mobility problem, but that wasn’t a health situation.
Only thing I remember with Leeta was all her ‘oh my I have such a sore throat *fake cough* Doctor what do you think’ stuff. Cheesey fifties comedy stuff, and she chased him. Like I said I may be misremembering. I dislike the Serena relationship for bunches of reasons, but one positive excuse it does have is that in all the universe, Bashir and the Jack Pack were almost a subspecies unto themselves...there’s finally literally one person in the universe with experiences he can somewhat directly relate to. Apart from that it’s icky, and I never liked it, the way it was written, presented or it’s continuation in the novels.
The biggest problem of course is that it’s all fiction. Sisko meets his wife on the beach, then again at a BBQ. Romance novel coincidences that are rare in real life. Episodic TV means people have to meet, fall in love, then resolve to never see each other again in the space of 45 mins our time, maybe a week theirs. And these are the big relationships. Edith Keeler is the love of Kirk life after a few days, and there’s the Tragedy of his life as Kirok. We can’t apply real world norms to some of these things....we don’t live on space stations, and our lif isn’t defined by episodic chunks as such. *shrug*
Bashir by the standards of his time and place just isn’t bad. As a character by the standards of the time and place, he isn’t either. Nor is Worf and Jadzias teen movie Klingon courtship. Or Bashir, Quark etc going with Worf to see Jadzias soul into Sto’Vokor.
I have been something like a health professional, but unlike Bashir, the entire population where I worked wasn’t a patient one way or another. He’s also an officer on board the station. Funny how the Kira Odo relationship doesn’t get sideyed....she’s his direct superior in the militia after all. Some of the Bashir stuff is indeed cringe, but it’s usually the kind where you end up feeling sorry for unlucky Bashir. He even went into holodeck sims about getting shot down in flames it happened to him so often.
But real life, it’s not like Star Trek. Sometimes that’s a bad thing, sometimes a good thing.
@jaime I never noticed an issue with Odo and Kira, maybe on his end, because of everything that happened with the Shakaar, but she didn’t seem to do anything that would have been line crossing.
I’m actually not a fan of Kira because I felt that her sexual prowess was a little overboard otherwise. She reminded me a lot of Kirk, there was always someone new and her love life was a revolving door until her and Odo got together. He was the best thing for her. IMO, Odo was one of the only relationships she had that wasn’t fleeting and insubstantial. They actually had something real that wasn’t rushed into one episode. Him joining the link in the finale broke my heart.
I’m actually not a fan of Kira because I felt that her sexual prowess was a little overboard otherwise. She reminded me a lot of Kirk, there was always someone new and her love life was a revolving door until her and Odo got together. He was the best thing for her. IMO, Odo was one of the only relationships she had that wasn’t fleeting and insubstantial. They actually had something real that wasn’t rushed into one episode. Him joining the link in the finale broke my heart.
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I did t notice anything either. On either end. The writers did struggle finding her a relationship, they clearly wanted her to have one, and it did make her a bit Kirkaslegendtastic, and made her look like she had weird Daddy issues (to use the common parlance) to boot. Thankfully they moved past that whole Shakaar thing pretty quick. I only point it out because she and Odo are both sometimes in a similar boat as Bashir. Particularly Odo...he’s responsible for Kiras safety and well-being, he’s a friend and confidant, he carries a torch for her which means he could well end up acting unprofessionally (and doesn’t altered timeline Odo on the time hopping planet do so?) and later uses the holosuite (shades of the controversy around Geordi and Leah Brahms..) to express that or pursue his interest. It all turns out well, and we all like it. Bashir seems to get shorter shrift than Odo (who also has a romance with a visitor to the station he must work closely with, and one morally compromising one with someone who is finally just like him...just to draw further parallels.) for some reason. Possibly precisely he was the pretty boy character on DS9, who Knows. And Doctors in Romance...such a sub genre, he practically wrote himself.
It was pretty clear to me that Leeta was approaching Bashir to flirt. If she had wanted him to act like a medical professional and treat her (fake) cough, she would have made an appointment to see him in the infirmary. Since she wanted to flirt, she accidentally-on-purpose ran into him at Quarks and faked a cough to start a conversation. Kinda stupid and high school, but not a breach of medical ethics.
Sabrina and Melora, I find harder to watch.
The same situation applies to Sisko. The show writers took a lot of care for him not to get involved with anyone who was under his command, so brought in Kassidy who didn't even live on the station at the beginning of their relationship.
No cringing!
Sabrina and Melora, I find harder to watch.
The same situation applies to Sisko. The show writers took a lot of care for him not to get involved with anyone who was under his command, so brought in Kassidy who didn't even live on the station at the beginning of their relationship.
No cringing!
I'm fine with the fact that they explored complicated emotional issues that surround medical professionals, which went beyond Bashir's romantic pursuits to his friendships with colleagues, like O'Brien in Hard Time and Nog in Paper Moon. The problem was that Bashir started out being too eager, and it became too difficult to turn his character around. OTOH, Farrell wanted a relationship between Dax and Worf to develop, telegraphing her wishes through her performance. Indeed, Dr Boers did the exact same thing.
Bashir was creepy AF. But I guess that was par for course in 90s Trek. And, no, he never got any better. Chrysalis was just as bad as anything he did with Jadzia/Leeta/whomever.
Was Bashir worse than Hawkeye Pierce, Trapper John or Frank Burns? Adam Bricker?
Who who and who? Who?
Is it mash? I bet it’s mash.
I am a bit out on American culture.
Regardless of him being a creep, they just didn’t seem compatible. He was a little too lighthearted for Dax. She was a complex person. He didn’t seem like he had a ton of relationship experience and she had memories from like five marriages.
She needed someone strong minded like Worf that could handle her, reel her in a little.
She needed someone strong minded like Worf that could handle her, reel her in a little.
MASH and Love Boat--not trying to exonerate the behavior, but I think a little context might be helpful.
It was a very fake cough. Very. Like a Marilyn Monroe movie *cough cough* ‘oh Doctor!’ *swoon* which was basically the joke.
O’Brien got hit on by the Cardassian lady for discussing engineering.
Yup. By the standards of real life and nineties TV, and what you have to work with in 45 mins, Bashir really wasn’t bad. It’s not like he was drugging people or anything weird like that. Serena gets a bit close to a dodgy scenario, but I think the episode itself addresses that, and that ultimately he’s a bit broken too, he just functions better than the Jack Pack usually. He tends to get blinkered and tight focused, throwing himself at helping people particularly...we see it with Garak and the Jem Hadar too. Sometimes this is a good thing, sometimes not. He’s also extremely lonely it seems.
It’s why I wish the relaunch novels had stuck with Bashir/Ezri. Was more wholesome in a lot of ways for both of them.
In some ways that’s the point of the characters, Bashir is perfect for Jadzia in a lot of ways, Dax not so much. It’s Jadzia who is similar to him. Worf is basically marrying a hot Curzon, not Jadzia. It doesn’t fall into place until Ezri, who isn’t as strongly self assured, and is in some ways less Dax and more Ezri. But then...it may just be history repeating, and Bashir hooked up with a more emotional Jadzia echo. *shrug*
When DS9 started, Julian was a child. He wanted to have fun and breeze through things. Jadzia was an adult. She still knew how to have fun, but she was experienced and more mature.
If season 1 Julian was more like season 7 Julian, a romance would have made more sense. Truly, I don't think that season 1 Julian would have had the first clue how to handle a woman like Jadzia. I am imagining a funny episode of him trying. I think that Worf and Jadzia complimented each other better than Ja/ Ju could've.
If season 1 Julian was more like season 7 Julian, a romance would have made more sense. Truly, I don't think that season 1 Julian would have had the first clue how to handle a woman like Jadzia. I am imagining a funny episode of him trying. I think that Worf and Jadzia complimented each other better than Ja/ Ju could've.
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