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Nov. 19th, 2019 06:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beatriceeagleTitle: Human Winner
Fandom: Star Trek DS9
Music: "Human of the Year," by Regina Spektor
Summary: Julian Bashir is not allowed pride.
Warnings: Violence; two shots of flashing lights (think of the lights in Quark's bar).
Notes: Thanks tothirdblindmouse for the once-over!
Comment at AO3 | Watch on YouTube | View on Tumblr
Fandom: Star Trek DS9
Music: "Human of the Year," by Regina Spektor
Summary: Julian Bashir is not allowed pride.
Warnings: Violence; two shots of flashing lights (think of the lights in Quark's bar).
Notes: Thanks to
thirdblindmouse for the once-over!Okay, so. Fuck. My joke with DS9 is always that Jadzia may have gotten the Big Gay Kiss, but Julian got all my Big Gay Feelings. But it's true. Because here's this guy who, for his entire adult life, kept a soul-defining secret from everyone he knew: his colleagues, his friends, even his lovers. And if that secret ever got out, he could—no, he would, it was written into the law—lose his job. And because it was a secret, he got to hear people he knew talking about what they thought about people like him, so he knew it wasn't good. And partly because he could never be entirely truthful with anyone, and partly because he was just different and didn't know anyone like him, he was incredibly lonely. When he does, eventually, reveal his secret, he finds himself surrounded by a mixture of supportive, clueless, and suspicious colleagues and friends, occasionally being lectured to about his own experiences even by very well-intentioned people, and sometimes outright persecuted because of his identity.
Like, when I type it all out like that, it's no surprise that Julian's storyline fucked with my head so badly. You literally almost cannot talk about the retcon and reveal in "Doctor Bashir, I Presume?" without using the language of "outing" or "closets." And "Rejoined," though I love it so, so much, is just the one episode; every other time Jadzia or Ezri expresses attraction to another woman (and incidentally, I very much respect that DS9 maintains that outside of the one episode), they do so without angst or fear of retribution, because, of course, that's the point. And I love that. But it's also, I think, why "Rejoined" didn't burrow into my brain the way that Julian's story did. Because even if there's nothing overt about the metaphor, it's there, and it never. ever. goes. away.
But also. It's not like, a clean metaphor. By which I mean, the show sometimes does not seem to be on Julian's side, in all of this, the way it is more-or-less clearly on Jadzia's side in "Rejoined." (Or, to pick another, less obvious but even more relevant example, the way that it's on Odo's side in "Chimera.") When you have a character who is a member of an oppressed class, who has been told all his life that people like him are either evil or deranged, who has been denied openness and community with others like him, generally speaking, it feels like it should be pretty easy to take a clear stand and say: This person deserves to exist, as they are, openly in society. This person deserves community. This person deserves pride.
Julian never gets that. Not once, in the two and a half seasons of DS9 that aired after his big secret came out. And there's a reason: Julian's existence is eugenic. He didn't make a eugenic choice himself—indeed, he argues pretty eloquently in "Doctor Bashir, I Presume?" that he's the victim of such a choice—but nevertheless, Julian Bashir, the genetically engineered man, exists as a result of centuries of eugenic thought and practice. Of people with great pride in their genetic superiority, existing openly, in community.
But that's not Julian's fault. And despite some fumbling and rather ugly implications, Julian is not a genetically-engineered supremacist. This is one of the weirdest artifacts of the retcon, actually: Stories from the first four seasons that were supposed to be just character pieces about Julian overcoming his arrogance become, in hindsight, loaded with subtext. In light of, say, "Statistical Probabilities," a story like "The Quickening" starts to feel like it's saying something about not just Julian as a person, but Julian as a genetically engineered person. And whereas in "Hippocratic Oath," Julian and Miles could disagree on ethics and have it just be a personal argument, in "Statistical Probabilities," when they disagree, Miles sees it as being a result of Julian's genetic status—and the show seems to take his side.
But as I said, Julian is not a genetically-engineered supremacist, and what arrogance he has, he comes by honestly, by virtue of being young, and sheltered, and having been told by a lot of people that he can do anything. He largely grows out of it. And he is not to blame for what was done to him. But he's living with nearly all of the consequences.
DS9 never really figured out a way to resolve this tension. They never even totally acknowledged it—the closest they get is "Statistical Probabilities," an episode that is flawed in many respects, but that at least raises the idea that genetic engineering might pose a danger to society in some way other than superpowered boogeymen. But they never do manage to write Julian out of that corner, and I find the ending of that episode almost unbearable to watch.
I think, frankly, DS9 wasn't totally prepared for the magnitude of the problem they were taking on, with Julian's genetic engineering plotline. It was written to fit a single episode's demands, and then when they went to start filling it in for the long term, the parallels and emotional realities became clear—but so did the catch. And they kept digging, because this was interesting territory, the kind that Star Trek is naturally drawn to, but they did not go into this thing with an exit strategy, and they didn't know, in the end, what they wanted to say, or what to do about it.
And the thing is, I don't know either. If those are the parameters of the world, I don't know how to resolve things so that everyone's okay. Because on the one hand, telling a group of people who have done nothing wrong, who are despised and discriminated against and forced to hide, that they can't have community pride, feels horrific. But on the other hand, "genetically engineered and proud" is a hell of a slogan.
All I really know is that I can't let it go. Julian's genetic engineering is one of two fictional open wounds that I think I may just never get over. (The other being what happened to Donna on Doctor Who.) It's so open-ended, is the thing: He never gets to find a community for himself. He never gets to say, out loud, "The way people like me are treated is fucked up," and not have it fired back in his face. He never gets to form any kind of solid position, because the show never found its own position, and so he's just stuck there forever, lonely, angry, knowing something isn't right but not knowing how far to take it.
I've tried a lot of times to make a fic out of this, but ultimately I ran into the same problems that the show did, so finally, I made this vid. Because a story, for me, would have to be about moving Julian out of that space, and I don't know how to do that, but a vid can just be about how he's stuck—stuck in-universe and also stuck by his own narrative. And also, as I played around with themes of pride and humanity—which are pretty much the overarching concerns of Julian's whole story from the very beginning, give or take some stuff about secrecy, which I guess I was also playing around with in this vid—I wanted to reiterate how much Julian's pride, specifically, is not some terrifying supervillain thing, and how incredibly humane he is.
Like, when I type it all out like that, it's no surprise that Julian's storyline fucked with my head so badly. You literally almost cannot talk about the retcon and reveal in "Doctor Bashir, I Presume?" without using the language of "outing" or "closets." And "Rejoined," though I love it so, so much, is just the one episode; every other time Jadzia or Ezri expresses attraction to another woman (and incidentally, I very much respect that DS9 maintains that outside of the one episode), they do so without angst or fear of retribution, because, of course, that's the point. And I love that. But it's also, I think, why "Rejoined" didn't burrow into my brain the way that Julian's story did. Because even if there's nothing overt about the metaphor, it's there, and it never. ever. goes. away.
But also. It's not like, a clean metaphor. By which I mean, the show sometimes does not seem to be on Julian's side, in all of this, the way it is more-or-less clearly on Jadzia's side in "Rejoined." (Or, to pick another, less obvious but even more relevant example, the way that it's on Odo's side in "Chimera.") When you have a character who is a member of an oppressed class, who has been told all his life that people like him are either evil or deranged, who has been denied openness and community with others like him, generally speaking, it feels like it should be pretty easy to take a clear stand and say: This person deserves to exist, as they are, openly in society. This person deserves community. This person deserves pride.
Julian never gets that. Not once, in the two and a half seasons of DS9 that aired after his big secret came out. And there's a reason: Julian's existence is eugenic. He didn't make a eugenic choice himself—indeed, he argues pretty eloquently in "Doctor Bashir, I Presume?" that he's the victim of such a choice—but nevertheless, Julian Bashir, the genetically engineered man, exists as a result of centuries of eugenic thought and practice. Of people with great pride in their genetic superiority, existing openly, in community.
But that's not Julian's fault. And despite some fumbling and rather ugly implications, Julian is not a genetically-engineered supremacist. This is one of the weirdest artifacts of the retcon, actually: Stories from the first four seasons that were supposed to be just character pieces about Julian overcoming his arrogance become, in hindsight, loaded with subtext. In light of, say, "Statistical Probabilities," a story like "The Quickening" starts to feel like it's saying something about not just Julian as a person, but Julian as a genetically engineered person. And whereas in "Hippocratic Oath," Julian and Miles could disagree on ethics and have it just be a personal argument, in "Statistical Probabilities," when they disagree, Miles sees it as being a result of Julian's genetic status—and the show seems to take his side.
But as I said, Julian is not a genetically-engineered supremacist, and what arrogance he has, he comes by honestly, by virtue of being young, and sheltered, and having been told by a lot of people that he can do anything. He largely grows out of it. And he is not to blame for what was done to him. But he's living with nearly all of the consequences.
DS9 never really figured out a way to resolve this tension. They never even totally acknowledged it—the closest they get is "Statistical Probabilities," an episode that is flawed in many respects, but that at least raises the idea that genetic engineering might pose a danger to society in some way other than superpowered boogeymen. But they never do manage to write Julian out of that corner, and I find the ending of that episode almost unbearable to watch.
I think, frankly, DS9 wasn't totally prepared for the magnitude of the problem they were taking on, with Julian's genetic engineering plotline. It was written to fit a single episode's demands, and then when they went to start filling it in for the long term, the parallels and emotional realities became clear—but so did the catch. And they kept digging, because this was interesting territory, the kind that Star Trek is naturally drawn to, but they did not go into this thing with an exit strategy, and they didn't know, in the end, what they wanted to say, or what to do about it.
And the thing is, I don't know either. If those are the parameters of the world, I don't know how to resolve things so that everyone's okay. Because on the one hand, telling a group of people who have done nothing wrong, who are despised and discriminated against and forced to hide, that they can't have community pride, feels horrific. But on the other hand, "genetically engineered and proud" is a hell of a slogan.
All I really know is that I can't let it go. Julian's genetic engineering is one of two fictional open wounds that I think I may just never get over. (The other being what happened to Donna on Doctor Who.) It's so open-ended, is the thing: He never gets to find a community for himself. He never gets to say, out loud, "The way people like me are treated is fucked up," and not have it fired back in his face. He never gets to form any kind of solid position, because the show never found its own position, and so he's just stuck there forever, lonely, angry, knowing something isn't right but not knowing how far to take it.
I've tried a lot of times to make a fic out of this, but ultimately I ran into the same problems that the show did, so finally, I made this vid. Because a story, for me, would have to be about moving Julian out of that space, and I don't know how to do that, but a vid can just be about how he's stuck—stuck in-universe and also stuck by his own narrative. And also, as I played around with themes of pride and humanity—which are pretty much the overarching concerns of Julian's whole story from the very beginning, give or take some stuff about secrecy, which I guess I was also playing around with in this vid—I wanted to reiterate how much Julian's pride, specifically, is not some terrifying supervillain thing, and how incredibly humane he is.
