True but Garak always seem to hide a metaphor or a hidden true in his stories. You learn about him by looking how he lie. And he definitively like eating with Bashir. This at least was obvious.
Yes, but he said that after literally bombing his own shop because he's such a well-known liar that no one would believe him if he just said, "there's an assassin after me." He possibly said it out of annoyance that Bashir might have a point.
@@ApocalypseNext to be fair if he would have just said it as a question like "I think someone is trying to kill me, could you verify that for me" instead of blow up is shop or just saying it, that would have work, that not a lie as its a question and a question that even Sisco wouldn't ignore out of curiosity
The true lesson of the fable is that you should not appoint people you distrust to a position of responsibility. The child dies and the flock is lost because the moronic adults left him in charge of the livestock after having decided they wouldn't respond to the call for help he is specifically tasked to give in response to wolves.
It really seems like he stretches that 20 so far until not even the bonus can help him with his outlandish inquiries. I think he wants to get past that 20 cap somehow.
Imagine a version of Jack Sparrow as a space pirate. Free booting and plundering in the wild triangle between the Federation, Romulan, and Klingon Empire borders. Imagine An encounter between Garak and Jack at Quark’s bar. Would they hit it off famously? Or immediately distrust each other? Or... BOTH!! 🤣🤣🤣
@@Jokie155 Claustrophobia is by definition not rational, so expecting it to follow rational logic is not either. I have extremely mild claustrophobia, and I've at times had more trouble with larger spaces I wasn't able to leave, than actual small spaces... I'd say it's mostly about the sensation of feeling trapped than the actual amount of space... Put me in a fairly large elevator and I'm more likely to have a problem than if I'm stuck in a cramped closet... It's just not that simple...
@@key539 that's a new one to me, thanks! I have a dislike for being in places where I'm not able to move freely, like if I can't move my feet or legs, or if I can't turn my head. Caving (or potholing, or spelunking) is definitely not for me. It's not a fear, but I feel like it could become one given some bad circumstances.
@@Milamberinx phobias usually come from a need to have control. someone with claustrophobia doesn't really hate tight places as much as they hate places they can't leave at their leisure, on the stairs you can turn around, choose which side you climb on etc. you have complete control over the situation, on an elevator you're stuck in there until the machine decides to let you out and not being able to go: "I am leaving NOW!" is scary to some people. i have a similar thing, i rarely drive to a party or something with other people, i will drive myself so i can leave on my own terms and if i didn't bring my own car i'll sooner walk home than to wait until the designated driver decides it's time to leave.
If there was any more proof why DS9 was the best show, Garak, Nog and Kai Wynn are side characters. Every time they are on screen they steal the screen every time.
@@LancerJak yeah, it’s crazy. they do so much with everyone - you can absolutely tell the writers gave a shit about every single character and making their relationships to each other and the world around them make sense and progress throughout the seven seasons. it’s just so good.
I think that's my favourite bit of Garak dialogue in the entire series. "Even the lies?" "ESPECIALLY the lies." God, he's such a well-written character and Andrew Robinson's performance is just...perfect.
bashier see garak has secrets to hide just he has so they have something in common that's what made there friendship work so well each has his lies to hide secrets
In non cannon they got married. Even the actors did a reading of a script you can youtube. The actors wanted the characters to head that way in the show but it was the 90's and the producers were like NOPE.
@@Grimmers True, not every close historical friendship between same sex folks needs to be reexamined through "Sappho and Erinna" lenses. But in this case, the actors DID approach the characters as two people flirting and stuff. So it's not a retcon for them to be married in a fan fic but an "un erasure".
I just noticed that while Siddig always looks straight at whatever he's focused on, Robinson keeps looking to either side. While it comes across as casual, and it could easily be a personal quirk of the actor, I can't help but think that he's playing Garak as always slightly on the alert for an attack.
He constantly scans his surroundings. It could be a deliberate affectation to give the appearance of a hunted character, or it could be that Robinson is actually paranoid and doing it unconsciously.
Could be both! In the series 'The Blacklist', James Spader always tilts his head when he talks. I thought this was a quirk of his character who is quite like Garak, always telling the wildest stories with a smile on his face and you're never certain whether he's telling the truth. But then I saw a short clip of James Spader in 'Boston Legal' and he tilted his head in the exact same way when he spoke.
I've been lucky to meet Andrew Robinson twice and he always looked straight at me... 😅 The sideways eyes are what is known in the trade as good acting. Good spot though 👍
I love how much effort DS9 put into making the random extras walking through the background look freaking awesome. Nearly every episode has at least one spectacular costume or prosthetics job in it, from a character with no lines who didn't need to be there at all. And this was a show with constant budget cuts!
Star Trek, the "what cool alien costume do we have legal rights to and how much are we allowed to pay someone to wear it for ten minutes?" franchise of the film industry. I have seen Slestaks from Land of the Lost, Dracs from Enemy Mine, New Comers from Alien Nation and I know there a tons I am missing because I have never seen the shows or movies.
HAHAHAHA Babylon 5 was pushing out it's brilliance with about a 1/4 of the budget. Majel Roddenberry herself stated that, and pointed out the brilliance of what they were doing with such limited resources.
Morn was the main character in an episode and he was barely in it. Him and his blabber mouth, and beating Worf on the holosuite. Fracking Morn. That guy....
@@MichaelJohnson-kq7qg He didn't start out main cast, I agree, but definitely by the time the Dominion War began he was THE Cardassian angle, and thus immensely important as Gul Dukat shifted from Rival to pure Antagonist. And in the end it wasn't just Garak's redemption, but how that journey was echoed by Cardassia itself. That was always a strength of Star Trek as a series, was how sometimes minor, background characters could shift to the forefront. Sometimes (Like Garak) they even stayed there.
"Especially the lies," says that you can learn more about who Garak is by his lies than by the truth you might learn of him. Beautiful scene. I could watch this episode a dozen times just for the Bashir & Garak scenes. They're delightful.
LIES are told for a reason, which tells you something. People tell the truth is they don't have a reason to lie. Thus, the lies tell you more than the truth. However, Garak lies casually about almost everything, so that you can't pick out any one lie to ascertain a motive behind it.
I always loved their conversations, but felt that Dr Bashir was a bit out of his depth with Garak. Dr Bashir was very smart, but not terribly worldly or attuned to certain nuances and subtleties that Garak considered normal conversation.
Captain Sisko : Who's watching Tolar? Garak : I've locked him in his quarters. I've also left him with the distinct impression that if he attempts to force the door open, it may explode. Captain Sisko : I hope that's just an impression. Garak : It's best not to dwell on such minutiae.
The relationship between them is the reason Andy Robinson got the part. Apparently, the writers had no idea what to do with Bashir, who was young, idealistic, naive and getting lost in the episodes. Siddig said that Rick Berman was constantly having to vouch for his continued existence on the show to producers. So they decided that Bashir needed a companion and made Robinson come out to audition (an audition he almost blew off because they made him endure 3 previous auditions for Odo before choosing Rene Aubergonois for the part.) His wife essentially forced him out the door because he needed a job and he did the audition with such charisma that I don't think they even auditioned anyone else. He was expecting to do one, maybe two episodes. The idea was to see if they clicked, if the chemistry was there. That very first scene, Robinson played up Garak's open attraction to Bashir and once said, "...there's this scene where you'd swear that Garak was ready to eat him." Both actors were game for a same-sex interspecies romance between the two, something the show creators were loath to do. So Andy toned down Garak's sexual attraction to Bashir (slightly) and insisted on keeping Garak to be sexually ambiguous and interested in pretty much any attractive bipedal person with humanoid features. Ultimately, it was this remarkable chemistry between them and the love the writers had for Garak that kept him in the series for its entire run. The Wire remains Andy's favorite episode and he has remarked throughout his career that it truly is the best acting he has ever done, before or since.
I always think it was a pity that Andrew Robinson was ordered by Paramount to stop having Garek flirt with Bashir as he originally was doing - always made sense to explain why Garek particularly enjoyed spending time with Bashir. They had great chemistry regardless!
@@TheWyldehart man I wish the romance did happen, I'd want the the two of them to appear in Picard but knowing that show they'd kill the two of them. Though there is always lower decks.
he smiled when he said it, but “especially the lies” actually points to his deep seated guilt and confused loyalties. elim being a friend turned enemy was a lie, but it was also very true.
Think of Elim as a part of Garek. Garek is the separate part from within Elim. Now it makes sense. He's conflicted. Fighting with himself as to who he is. Elim is the more cutthroat personality. Garek is the tailor. It's like saying I killed Bob to save Robert. You would think those are separate people, but no. They are the one and the same. Killing off a personality. Anakin being murdered by Darth Vader.
Why is Alexander Siddig on Game of Thrones, but not Andrew Robinson? Can you imagine Garak in Westeros? He'd have the Iron Throne before you can say "Winter is Coming"!
I've thought the same thing. I honestly think DS9 was a forerunner of shows like Game of Thrones, with all the series-spanning stories, intrigue within intrigue, sympathetic villains, heroes who have to do very bad things, and characters like Garak who you're never sure where to place on the spectrum.
Garak would find the Stark's endearing but frustrating due to their nobility, would get along well with Tyrion but the rest of his family would drive him nuts and Dany....he'd be very careful around Dany.
Game of thrones can't even stand in the shadow of DS9. The earlier seasons had some merit and interesting plots, great television. 4 was decent, but 5 and 6 is outright terrible.
"Who wins" "What do you think" "Don't tell me, I don't want you to spoil the ending" C'mon Bashir, like Earth literature isn't full of that exact same thing, don't be that guy
Very true, but it goes in cycles. Some generations the author's culture / society / government wins and then a generation or two later they lose and a generation after that the winner is inevitable because it's all about the "friends we made along the way" and a generation after that the author's side wins again. Based off what Jake writes when the Muses messes with him, I am getting Start Trek DS9 takes place is Phase 3 of the writing cycle.
I could easily see Garak being the type who, upon meeting you the first time, compliments you on your taste in clothes, offers you a discount at his shop just to get your business, and then, still smiling and hail fellow well met, looks you straight in the eye and says (and it's impossible to tell if he's joking or being dead serious) "Oh by the way, in case it ever comes up. You shouldn't ever trust me." :D
Garak would never say such a thing outright. He knows he doesn't ever have to. If you're even remotely worth his respect and intrigue, you'd already know that the moment you laid eyes on him.
@@MasteringJohn Get along may be a stretch, I could see them being very cordial to the point a light banter. Don't let that fool you though. Behind that veneer are two master manipulators looking for an advantage.
I always loved Garak. He was the most enigmatic character to step foot on DS9. I also loved Gul Dukat. These two were in my opinion the best Cardassians.
Their characters were put to good use to expose what it was like to be a Cardassian. A society that had seen and was still in many ways very hard times. That had been molded into the State they were currently in. One of projecting strength at all costs with Dukat. Having a duplicitous backstabbing culture just to survive that represents what Garak does. Though knowing from the way Garak romanticizes Cardassia that it wasn't always this way. It brings meaning as to how they are now.
don't know the guy's name, but you know he's underrated? why not just say amazing or excellent, it makes sense to your point......underrated means taht you're aware of his performances, his history, and the general response or reception he's received based on those factors.....which you clearly aren't
@@Bjorick Jeez dude, why are you being such a jerk? You clearly don't know his name, either, so don't pull that smarmy, holier than thou act. By the way, his name is Andrew Robinson. I bet dollars to donuts you had to Google that, too. Garak is brilliantly played, and yes, Robinson certainly is underrated.
@@WobblesandBean actually, i'm a fairly big fan of the people in the series, such as armin sherman plays quark. What else was he in? Not a clue, i don't follow actors. However, my point remains, unless you've viewed his full body of work and saw how it was received, saying he's underrated doesn't apply. Saying he's amazing in the role makes much more sense.
They ar half truths are the worst because you have the build in that fact is true t make it harder disproving them. So truths that just twist the truth instead just making stuff up, the worst or best, depending what you want.
Every single thing about DS9 was spot on. I legit did not like television until I watched DS9. I've watched it through probably 5 times now in just two years.
Garak is one of my favorite ST characters, because he is not a good person. But he's also not a bad person. He's just a person with one hell of a charisma score.
I think DS9 represents a different kind of trek- an ideological trek. While all Star Trek series include elements of these treks (particularly when and when not to violate the Prime Directive), DS9 has multiple treks woven throughout the series. Each character has their own journey (trek), be it spiritual, political, etc. The show has always been a journey of the mind.
I think Garak saw him that way to be honest, I don't know if he was aware of Bashir's origins, but I think, that he found him to be one of the only humans capable/worthy of being 'brought up' in a Cardassian fashion.
dardo1201 Yes, he always had this superior smug attitude when he delt with humans but dropped it when dealing with dictorship type worlds. It reminds me of smug Americans who look down at America but idolize the government's of foreign countries with dictorships.
Garak was my absolute favorite character in all of the Star Trek shows, and Andrew Robinson was, in my opinion, one of the great, if underappreciated, actors of the time. How many of you remember he was also the psycho killer in 'Dirty Harry'?
And he hated how it typecast him for years as everyone wanted him to play the crazed killer. Of course then ds9 came along... And then they did that episode on Empok Nor where Garak was exposed to drugs that made him a crazed killer.
When I saw Garak for the first time in DS9, very quick I recknognised his voice and then I realised it's Scorpio from Dirty Harry. To me one of the best characters in DS9, the best of all the Star Trek tv series.
@@john.premose Quark couldn't guarantee the Romulans would join the war against the Dominion. Garak could guarantee that at the low cost of one Romulan Senator's life, one criminal's life, and one Starfleet Officer's self respect. Quite a bargain.
@@john.premosequark asks questions. Like what is he getting paid to do, then checks what hes doing to make sure its profitable to do. He also has a conscious. Something I do not think Garak struggles with.
@@hiveinsider9122 - Wow, 8 years on, and I'm still coming back to this scene from time to time. Totally forgot I had made this comment, and yes, the amusement might fade if one watches the scene too many times, but I find that the occasional rewatch does not reduce the appreciation I am finding!
Funny how Bashir seemed to enjoy Garak's company, despite knowing what he really was, yet at the same time he was always so combative with Sloan, who was not really so different from Garak.
***** Because Garak was sort of like a 'lost soul' to him, or an oddity from another culture. Sloan was human, of the federation...What he did and represented was like an ideological threat to everything Bashir believed in. Hit too close to home. Part of his confidence in even engaging Garak was in the smug confidence of his moral superiority. Sloan undermined all that moral superiority just by being who he was, and Bashir could never accept that. Plus, you know, Garak was fucking awesome and they had more in common than he realized.
Azindath I think the other reason is that Garak's spy days were behind him, and he never did genocide-level activities. Sloan was actively doing skullduggery.
Michael Blanchard Well, when you're in a war, and the death toll is getting into the *billions*, it could just as easily be argued that would-be "idealists" are nothing more than selfish jerks who prize their own egos more than they do the lives of other people! Section 31 comes across as a *lot* less evil in DS9 than in the reboot movies at least partly because got through TNG with little evidence that they had ever done any large-scale harm to anybody, even those the Federation had fought wars with (such as the Cardassians). They mostly seemed to just counter the actions of their rival espionage agencies from the other powers. It wasn't until the Founders (who already believed in genocidal biowarfare by the way) brought an army of drug-addicted clones brainwashed into thinking they are gods into the Alpha Quadrant to conquer, or kill any who refused to be conquered, that Section 31 really had to start playing dirty on a large scale.
Well ignoring Enterprise (Which I do on a daily basis) I agree with you. But the measure they deemed caused by necessity were a lot more overboard. And I think a better comparison to Sloan would be Enebran Tain, as both are leaders of the respective agencies. Garak was just an agent.
Michael Blanchard As was Sloan. We don't really see who runs Section 31. Now, while infecting Founders with a lethal disease might seem pretty hardcore. But consider that they were basically a non-mechanical version of the Borg. The Great Link was basically a collective too, albeit one where individuals could come and go rather than being permanently wired into it. But that means that the decisions made by the Founders were effectively reached by consensus. They *chose* to commit atrocities (including genocide) and the *only* crime they recognized was anyone doing harm to *them*, even if they initiated the hostilities in the first place. It was probably for that reason that the Augments' psychohistorical projections calculated that the allied powers would ultimately lose the war. They were basing their numbers on the assumption that the Federation would never compromise its ideals, and thus would never be able to beat the amoral Founders. Section 31 willing to play the game by the same rules as the Founders changed the equation entirely.
Tain's words from a previous scene in this episode are the best description for Garak I've come across, "never tell the truth when a lie will do". Imagine trying to interrogate the guy, he'd talk non-stop for hours and confess to all sorts of things without going off-topic once and you still wouldn't find out anything useful.
That's ok, in EaFP in TNG, the courtroom bailiffs sport Harkonnen tech armor, Borgish machine guns, and Ketracel cocaine tubes. Yeah, they reused early concepts over and over again, until they were completely enfleshed as the people we've grown to know.
***** I belive at this point the obsidian order was already destoyed by the romulans and the cardassian empire was in a civil war. I meant the Klingons wouldn't stand a chance if both empires were in their prime.
There's a very very good hidden meaning to this I think a lot of people miss garak uses his jobs and covers as a mask to his real purposes. He was a gardener and various people died. You could say he weeded them out and being a tailer. He takes the measure of people's getting to know things about them and their personal details. "Especially the lies" he's encouraging him to look past the surface of what he's saying.
The writing for this epic show is just on another level, and it blows away today's series by miles.the actors bring so much depth to the characters and I can't get enough.
Appreciate the level of dedication a sci-fi show like this has from the production end, when you realize that some guy was in makeup for hours just for a 15 second-long establishing shot.
The actor who played Garak wrote a novel on the characters origin. The only star trek book I ever picked up. It was pretty good. Always loved the character.
For nearly a dozen years I was a tugboat deckhand towing fuel oil out of NYC, and during long hours under tow or perhaps laying dockside waiting on a load, much of the time was passed... Smoking cigarettes, drinking coffee and telling lies
I loved this show! I got roped in from the very first episode. I was predisposed to like Ben Sisko because I so loved Avery Brooks previous work as Hawk on Spencer For Hire. But his work on DS9 was so much broader and deeper.
The more we watched Garak the easier it was to read his words. By nature of his upbringing and training, he was a master of subtlety, metaphor, and code. There comes a point where I don't think he was even capable of straight answers anymore, it was just so ingrained in his psychology and behavior to veil everything. But he seemed to do his best to be genuine with those around him about things that mattered, even if they didn't understand that he was doing so the best he could.
Garak had emotions and egos like most living things, but he has an almost Vulcan quality; what done is done and I'm still here. No need to dwell on it.
