Why Star Trek’s Most Important Relationship Is Garak And Bashir

“Star Trek” is full of incredible odd couple friendships, starting with the hot-tempered human Captain James T. Kirk (William Shatner) and stoic half-Vulcan Commander Spock (Leonard Nimoy). Kirk and Spock were a terrific pair because of how much they balanced one another and learned from each other, showing the deep bonds that can develop between very different people. Spock is even the one who helps Kirk begin to understand his racism against the Klingons in “Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country,” showing that even after decades together the two still have things to teach each other. Their friendship is a truly beautiful thing, but there is one notable factor: they are both in Starfleet, and from Federation planets. They may be very different, but they are never truly adversarial (unless something wacky happens, like that whole Pon Farr thing). 

Then there’s Dr. Julian Bashir (Alexander Siddig) and Elim Garak (Andrew Robinson) of “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.” The two are unlikely friends aboard the space station Deep Space Nine. The station was formerly called Terok Nor and was run by Cardassians in their occupation of the nearby planet Bajor, which has just regained its independence. Garak is the only Cardassian left on the station: a tailor and possibly an outcast spy. Bashir is a Federation golden boy: a (genetically enhanced) human doctor whose work is so impressive that he is used as the model for new Starfleet medical holograms. Garak and Bashir have a complicated friendship with a lot of depth, and because of the sheer breadth of their differences, they have the most important and powerful relationship in all of “Star Trek.”

Gene Roddenberry’s vision for “Star Trek” was of a utopian future, and the Federation was supposed to represent the very best of humanity. In “Deep Space Nine,” which has long been considered the odd, dark offshoot of the franchise, the aliens aboard Deep Space Nine represent the ugly realities of humanity. Not only that, but the aliens were often at odds: though Roddenberry never wanted “Star Trek” to be about war, the show nevertheless dealt with the harsh truths of conflict with the Dominion Wars, which forced Captain Benjamin Sisko to abandon his Starfleet morality in order to save millions and millions of lives. 

Alien characters like the Ferengi bartender Quark (Armin Shimerman), Garak, and shapeshifter Odo (René Auberjunois) provided a very different look at Starfleet, in moral shades of gray that were well outside the range of other “Star Trek” shows. No one represented moral ambiguity quite like Garak, who should have been completely despicable in every way simply because of who he was: a member of the Obsidian Order, the Cardassian spy organization, something akin to a reptilian space Nazi. He was never outright evil, though, and over the course of the series and his friendship with Bashir, he began to do things for seemingly selfless reasons, belying his very nature. 

In an interview with TrekMovie.com, Robinson explained that he likened Garak’s exile on Deep Space Nine to that of a Nazi officer left in Jerusalem, asking himself “What is this guy doing here where he is universally hated?” in order to connect to the character. As we begin to learn more about Garak and his past, he becomes less villainous and more tragic, and he’s an ideal foil to the almost too-perfect Dr. Julian Bashir.

Dr. Bashir is young, hopeful, and a bit naive when we first meet him on “Deep Space Nine,” and he meets Garak in the third episode. The two hit it off right away with a kind of flirtatious and feisty friendship in which Bashir desperately tries to solve the mystery of Garak’s true identity and Garak tries to get into Bashir’s pants (more on that later). Bashir is a little cocky but understandably so, as we discover later on that he’s been genetically enhanced and is smarter, stronger, faster, and more agile than most humans, though he had to hide this fact because genetic modification is banned in Starfleet. He’s more human than human — an earnest and heartfelt young man who loves a good mystery and has a holosuite program where he pretends to be a character that is basically James Bond. His best friend in the entire world is put-upon engineer Miles O’Brien (Colm Meaney), the most important man in Starfleet history, and the two of them together truly represent the best humans have to offer the Federation. 

Bashir and Garak’s friendship begins out of curiosity on Bashir’s part, as he tries to learn as much as he can about the eternally enigmatic Garak. He’s pretty sure Garak is actually a Cardassian spy, and he often picks at Garak’s words to try and get him to elaborate on the art of espionage. It’s only after Garak nearly dies from an addiction to a device in his brain planted by the Order to keep him quiet during torture in the season 2 episode “The Wire” that the two truly become friends, and their bond runs deep.

In “The Wire,” some of Garak’s walls begin to break down a bit due to withdrawal from the chemicals produced by the device, and he tells Bashir, “being on this station is torture for me, Doctor.” He reveals that he was sent to Terok Nor and left there because he had shown mercy to Bajoran POWs, mostly women and children, allowing them to go free. He still has to lie a bit, though, and the head of the Obsidian Order, Enabran Tain (Paul Dooley), explains to an investigating Bashir that Garak has an incredible gift for obfuscation, and that most of his lies have a seed of truth. 

Eventually we learn that Tain was Garak’s father (though he never admitted it publicly because Garak was illegitimate), and he was as cruel as one might expect. In fact, Garak has a severe case of claustrophobia that likely came from Tain locking him in a closet for hours at a time as a child. Nonetheless, it’s clear that all he’s ever wanted was to earn his father’s approval. So while Garak has done some pretty awful things, he was raised by one of the most awful people in the galaxy and didn’t really know anything different until he was sent into exile and got to know Bashir and the other humans of Deep Space Nine.

Bashir helps Garak learn to be a better person, to some degree, with a bit more consideration and empathy. He starts doing things to help others even at his own expense, like helping Quark’s Cardassian dissident ex-girlfriend escape. By having lunch together once a week for years, the Cardassian and the human start rubbing off on one another. In the season 3 episode “The Die is Cast,” Bashir tells Miles that Garak has gotten him to think of lunch as “sort of arena for philosophical debate.” Many friends will never challenge one another like Bashir and Garak do, but their back-and-forth pushes them both to be more complete, complex people.

So Bashir helps Garak become a better person and develop meaningful relationships, but what does the good doctor get out of it — besides the fun of trying to figure out the wily Cardassian? Well, along with the brain workout, Garak actually helps Bashir develop a bit of survival instinct and sharpens his espionage skills. In the episode “Our Man Bashir,” in which the two characters get stuck in Bashir’s James Bond-esque holosuite program without safety protocols engaged, Bashir even stops Garak from potentially killing other crew members in order to survive himself by shooting Garak, grazing him. For the first time Bashir proves himself as potentially dangerous as Garak, and it raises him in the spy’s esteem. It’s kind of funny, but it also works out for Bashir in the end because he later ends up dealing with Starfleet’s own version of the Obsidian Order, Section 31, and Garak’s tough lessons help him endure.

Bashir and Garak’s understanding of the world is best shown through their conversations about literature. Garak prefers Cardassian epics where people live dedicated lives in service to the state, while Bashir appreciates mysteries and tragedies like Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar.” Garak cannot understand that one, however, because he deduced so early on that Brutus would betray Caesar. Bashir tries to explain that the tragedy lies in the idea that Caesar could not imagine that his best friend would try to kill him, and Garak is amused, saying that instead of tragedy, it is farce. In Garak’s world, those closest to you are most likely to stab you in the back. But he learns to trust Bashir, and vice-versa, which is a powerful thing. 

Throughout “Deep Space Nine,” there is a fair bit of flirtation between Garak and Bashir, but it’s never fully acted upon because TV in the ’90s just wasn’t ready for hot gay alien loving. Robinson thought of Garak as “sexually ambiguous” and believed his motivation for getting to know Bashir was initially sexual, as he told TrekMovie.com:

“In that very first scene when he meets Dr. Bashir it’s clear as a bell — and this was my choice — that he was sexually attracted to this good-looking young Starfleet doctor. And although they didn’t follow that up with an explicitly gay character, that ambiguity about Garak remained. And it was appropriate for what they had written about his ambiguity, is he a tailor, a spy, what is he?”

While Robinson says that he was never told to tone it down, producer Rick Berman also notoriously kept Garak from being openly queer on the series. In the year since, however, Siddig and Robinson have performed fanfiction together for the YouTube channel SidCity, and in the readings Garak and Bashir are romantically involved. (The two actors are good friends in real life.) In season 5 of “Star Trek: Lower Decks,” alternate universe versions of Garak and the Bashir hologram are married to one another, and the actors reprised their roles (in cartoon form). It was deeply satisfying for fans who had always wanted to see them together as a romantic couple, but didn’t make any assumptions or changes to the original “Deep Space Nine” timeline, making it kind of a perfect way to say goodbye to these two deeply complicated characters. 

Even if you’re not a fan of “Garashir” (as the pairing is called), it’s impossible to deny the power of their friendship. Garak was unlike any other protagonist in “Star Trek” — a morally ambiguous alien with an allergy to honesty — but he and Starfleet’s most perfect doctor somehow managed a bond as deep as any other in the franchise. “Star Trek” is about finding common ground and seeing ourselves in one another, and Garak and Bashir are its strongest, best examples of that idea.