Just had a thought...what if DS9/TNG had been reimagined so that when Picard was tortured in Chain of Command, Garak had been the torturer? How might DS9 (and Chain of Command) have been different?
A slight reimagining of Garak
- Thread starter Sisko_is_my_captain
- Start date
That's a good point - we'd no longer have "plain simple Garak,", but I think it might add some interesting conflicts to the character. Imagine Sisko having to work alongside a man who'd tortured one of the most respected captains in the Fleet. O'Brian would certainly hold him in contempt.
I see what you mean, Sisko is, but I agree with Spyone, and I think the negatives outweigh the potential positives. I think Garak is at his best when he's at his most enigmatic - when we can't figure out what he's going to do or why he's doing it. We had one genuinely interesting, genuinely bad guy in the shape of Dukat, and frankly, I think that was enough. One Dukat - one bad guy who had some good qualities and good moments - was great, two would have been at least one too many.
Withers
Captain
We wouldn't be allowed to like him because, at the onset, he'd be responsible for torturing Picard. That doesn't leave a lot of leeway to make the character enigmatic. That just straight up makes him a bad guy. It's an interesting notion but they would have gotten a lot less mileage out of Garak if they directly made him responsible for something like that (that was established and undeniable.)
He was an amazing, complex, complicated character. That, however, does not change the fact that he was a terrible man.
Please elaborate. How? Garak is only known to have enjoyed his work as an agent in an organization which was created specifically to do what he did. For all we know he only ever tortured people who deserved it. Dukat, on the other hand, openly admitted to mass murder of Bajorans, told Sisko he should have turned their planet into a graveyard the likes of which the galaxy had never seen, released a Pah Wraith into the wormhole in what could be considered an attempted genocide, beat Sisko with a metal pipe even though he posed no threat, is responsible for allowing the Dominion into the Alpha Quadrant in the first place and that's to say nothing of his ultimate duping of the Kai, murder of Jadzia Dax, or abandoning of Sisko and crew in what was then hostile Klingon territory.
He was an amazing, complex, complicated character. That, however, does not change the fact that he was a terrible man.
-Withers-
Pretty much everything you said there is Waltz and post, which I like to dismiss as him being insane after Ziyal dying. In reality, Ira Steven Behr couldn't seem to handle the idea of him not necessarily being evil. Which ultimately led up to the shark jump right in the last episode in the fire caves. That was an embarrassment to the 7 years before.
Withers
Captain
Alright, abandon Waltz (which, in my opinion, is really cutting out some excellent stuff that added a whole lot to the characters complexity), Garak still never did anything as awful as sit as Prefect over the mass murder of a species. They let Garak have a station on the Defiant bridge. They put Dukat in the brig. I mean what does that say?
-Withers-
Well, you may dismiss Dukat's claims of implementing policy rather than forming it as the Nuremberg defence, but it seems to me he used what give he had in his position to make life better. Raising rations and living conditions (or whatever it was, it's been a while since I've seen much DS9). If he wasn't prefect, there likely would have been someone a good deal worse. That's not to say it wasn't his ego that drove him as much as anything, but I don't think his position is so clear cut as him just being the baddie at the top of it all.
Hey, a lot of people like Magneto too, and he's guilty of more than a couple genocidal crimes.
Under such circumstances, I wonder what it would have been like for Sisko to meet the man who tortured "Locutus" prior to meeting the Prophets in Emissary.
Similar threads
- Poll
