Generally, I’m of the opinion that the current crop of Star Trek television shows shouldn’t be leaning so heavily into nostalgia for legacy characters. I love those characters, but I also want fresh new characters to be created so that they, too, will inevitably be recast or revived and leaned upon in thirty years. And yet a recent post on X, nĂ©e Twitter, made me pause. There is in fact one legacy character I would bring back, give his own show or movie, and watch every single moment of action, even if that consisted of him sewing pieces of fabric together for the entire hour.
On X, user Comrade Sisko posted an edit that positions Andrew Robinson’s fan-favorite Deep Space Nine character, the Cardassian tailor/spy-in-exile Elim Garak, over an old promotional image for Star Trek: Picard. The imagined title of this dream show? Star Trek: Tailor.
— Comrade Sisko ??✊? (@Pinko69420) February 5, 2024
I have never needed a fan-inspired piece of media to come into being quite so badly in my life. Paramount, can you pencil me in for a meeting? I just want to talk. Listen, we can make this happen. Actor Andy Robinson, who is perfect and wonderful, is 81 years old, but Patrick Stewart, who is perfect and wonderful, just wrapped up three seasons of Picard and is 83. If Robinson didn’t want to come back onscreen as Garak—that’s many, many hours in the makeup alien chair—might I suggest an animated show like Lower Decks but darker in tone? Garak could be running a reform school for wayward spies. Garak could be working somewhere once again as a “simple tailor” when his years of training as a master spy reveal a dangerous conspiracy afoot. We could explore always-topical politics and dive into what played out for Garak in his attempts to help reconstruct Cardassia in the aftermath of war and empire, which could be inspired/adapted from Garak’s “diary” already written by Robinson as the Trek novel A Stitch in Time. Garak and Dr. Julian Bashir could have their golden years interrupted to intervene and save a bunch of Federation cadets in way over their heads. It also goes without saying that Garak’s queer identity deserves the representation it was denied in the DS9 years.
If we’re going animated, we could have the framing device of Garak recounting the adventures of his youth to Bashir, which we then watch play out. One thing we know for sure about Garak is that he is a consummate and exquisite liar, and many of the stories he related about his past on DS9 are fogged with doubt. Imagine the tales spun by this unreliable narrator as Bashir tries to parse what’s real and what isn’t. I know Alexander Siddig, who played Bashir, is joining Apple TV+’s Foundation as a series regular and I can’t wait to watch him in that. But both Robinson and Siddig have remained devoted to the characters and their relationship (which popped up as “canon” on a Star Trek mobile game), and I don’t think it would be impossible to get them involved. As recently as August 2023, Robinson sat down to record the audiobook for his Garak-themed cult classic novel A Stitch in Time, letting us hear that rich and wily Garak voice again.
More than twenty-five years after the final episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Elim Garak is still one of the most beloved characters in the franchise. Originally conceived as a minor role, Garak rose to prominence largely due to Robinson’s sly, witty, and subversive performance. It’s difficult to play a character cloaked in moral shades of gray and have him endure in fandom adoration across decades, but Robinson did exactly that. Garak is a tailor, an intelligence operative, a man burdened with a terrible conscience and checkered history, and someone who always does what needs doing. Star Trek: Tailor may be a fan manip of a Picard poster, but if wishes were TV shows, I’d be tuning into this one next week.
(via Comrade Sisko on X, featured image: Paramount)
Published: Feb 6, 2024 04:15 pm