Fascination: Kira and Bashir subconscious root?

Okay so in Fascination Lxawana catches the Betazoid cold and causes everybody to go summer midnight crazy.

Bashir states that these affections have roots in the subconscious of the individuals affected.

What might cause said attraction between Kira and Bashir?

I think the others make sense Jadzia would have some feeling for Sisko, Jake probably thinks Kira is a hot older(by his age) woman. And Lxawana just really likes Odo.

What aspects of their characterizations allow you(or not) to make sense of the scene?

What might Kira who has previously held Julian in disdain and even some contempt secretly like about him?

Vice versa?

Note: I know this isn't a popular episode and can get pretty silly but I do think it raises questions about subconscious feeling and how that can be harmonized with (conscious) characterization?

 

Kira might secretly like his boyish charm and naïveté (before he got too jaded of course).

She probably never saw a lot of that sort of thing, living in an occupied society her entire life.

 

I look at it as just a commentary on the actors' real life relationship and marriage. I think that there are several moments in the series that take on added humor when you realize that Visitor and Siddig were committed to one another, for instance when Bashir spies on O'Brien fighting with Kira.

Unfortunately, the fondling they do in Fascination is quite awkward ... you would never know they were together.

 

I wonder if it might go back to when they first met. Yeah Bashir was attracted to Dax, but when Kira is lecturing him about the wilderness and DS9 being her home, I wonder if Bashir actually (secretly?) liked how strong she was against him.

Of course that episode itself was full of craziness so maybe it was the whole opposites attract kind of thing.

 

Finding someone aesthetically pleasing is not uncommon, it doesn't need to be more complicated than that.

 

Weren't they not dating yet?

 

Kira strikes me as someone who has a secret mental catalog of the attractiveness of all the people around her even if she doesn't like their personality enough to date.

 

Side note: in another episode, Kira says "this is still your fault" to Bashier while stroking her very pregnant belly. That becomes funny if you know that Siddig WAS the father of Visitor's child. The writers were totally messing with them.

 

Yeah but their whole make out scene in Fascination was before they were dating.

 

How much before? Do we have a timeline? Maybe making out while filming Fascination inspired them

 

We really don't know when they started to become intimate. They only announced their relationship when Visitor became pregnant. I assume that we could say there was some sort of relationship before that, no?

 

Fascination was a season 1 or 2 episode? Wasn't it?

Anyway I'm pretty sure it was before the actors started dating, my question originally was how do you explain the attraction between the characters?

 

As far as in-universe, it's hard not to see that Kira is a very fit, attractive woman, and that Bashir was the same as a man. That may have been all that was needed for Mrs. Troi's condition to bring out a subconscious attraction.

 

Season 3, but you are correct, the episode occurred well before they announced their relationship. My mistake,

 

Visitor and Siddig were a couple???
We'll knock me over with a feather!

 

Sid has said previously they got together during the filming of "Our Man Bashir", a whole year after "Fascination" was produced, so no, they weren't a couple at that time.

 

And have an adult son together. Cripes I feel old.

 

Well gag me with a spoon.
If I was her if have jumped Avery Brooks.
Way hotter, weird but hotter.
Well assuming he wasn't involved or married or what ever at the time.

 

Maybe I am imagining this, but I seem to recall either Nana Visitor or Alexander Siddig discussing in interviews how he had fallen in love with her long before she knew he had any feelings for her, and so this episode was kind of torture for him -- he's pining away and feeling like he can't express it, and then this script is handed to him.

It stuck with me because every time I had skepticism about some beat of the Odo/Kira story not being believable, I would think: well, apparently it is realistic because the same basic thing happened with two actors on this show...

Anyway else remember this?