We Have to Talk About the Best Moment in This Week’s Lower Decks


There’s a lot to love in this week’s episode of Lower Decks. The penultimate episode of the show set the stage for what could be one of the all-time great conclusions to a Star Trek show, one packed with potential across the board to deliver a rousing rejoinder to a lot of what has made the show so good across these five seasons. But even if the show somehow manages to whiff it right at the final frontier, I will forever be grateful for what this week’s episode gave my queer little heart.

io9 spoiler bar

“Fissure Quest” immediately hits you with a boatload of Trek geekery, whether it’s actually within the storytelling of Lower Decks itself (the return of Boimler’s transporter duplicate William, who’s now a Section 31 operative captaining his own starship on a reality-hopping mission to save the multiverse!) or within the wild cameos it just drops out of nowhere. William’s crew of multiversal Trek characters includes a veritable army of ensigns Harry Kim (plus one lieutenant, all voiced by Voyager‘s Garrett Wang), a version of Curzon Dax from Deep Space Nine, where the Dax symbiont had yet to be passed on to Jadzia as it would be in the prime Trek timeline, and another alternate in the form of Enterprise‘s T’Pol (Jolene Blalock making a rare return to acting and an even rarer return to Star Trek at large) who got her happy ending with Trip.

But the biggest surprise for me at least were William’s medical officers: an Elim Garak from a reality where he joined Starfleet and put those tailoring hands to surgery work, and a Medical Hologram of Julian Bashir, presumably from a reality where the events of Deep Space Nine‘s “Doctor Bashir, I Presume” actually played out well. That’s already delightful enough, especially as both Andrew Robinson and Alexander Siddig return to reprise their respective characters for the first time on TV in decades. But it’s also delightful for how William introduces them in his log: they’re married. At long last, even if it’s alternate versions of them, there exists a piece of Star Trek TV that has Garak and Bashir as husbands.

Star Trek Lower Decks Garak Bashir Kiss
© Paramount

Deep Space Nine fans have long-shipped the plain, simple tailor and DS9’s CMO—the chemistry of their relationship on the show was electric from the moment Julian and Garak met, the allure of the mystery in Garak’s past and Bashir’s all-too-eager curiosity providing prime material for fans to read a queer interpretation into. Although Deep Space Nine never textually went there, even as it brushed up against the then-perceived-taboo of queer relationships in other areas, there was always something in the duo that sparked that romantic chemistry. It’s one that both Robinson and Siddig have been eager to support themselves since Deep Space Nine concluded, discussing the relationship at fan conventions and how they’d both, at times, tried to push their performances as if there was the potential for something between the two there, even if the text would ultimately never go that far. Robinson even went on to write several Star Trek novels about Garak, touching on the character’s queerness—even if not explicitly with Bashir.

Lower Decks could’ve just left it at that. “Fissure Quest” certainly has enough going on that it could’ve taken the win of calling Garak and Bashir husbands and moving on with its myriad other concerns, but instead it gives the couple space to actually be a couple. They get time to interact and be tender with each other. Hell, they arguably get one of sweetest emotional arcs of the episode, playing with its wider musings on the concept of the multiverse to declaratively underline that regardless of what differing realities they come from, and wherever they ultimately settle after their mission is over, their home is within each other. It’s also perfectly Garak and Bashir in that this conclusion comes after the former spends much of the episode arguing with the latter about whether or not they’ll live in his universe or Julian’s—because, as Garak lovingly tells his husband in the climax, he’s always loved arguing with him.

It just makes everything I’ve seen in these characters since watching DS9 as a queer teen myself actually part of Star Trek in some small way, after years of wondering what could’ve been. For all the interest in its own past Star Trek has had in its streaming renaissance—from the allure of aesthetic and structural nostalgia in series like Strange New Worlds, to Picard‘s continuation of The Next Generation‘s stories and characters, to Lower Decks‘ own nerdy love of what Star Trek is both within and without its text—the idea of it using that to give queer fans the couple that never was (even if it’s not “our” Garak and Bashir) for a brief moment was something I never expected, let alone as Lower Decks stared down the phaser-tip of its own end. There’s a lot I’m grateful the show did over its five seasons, but regardless of how it comes to an end next week, I’ll always be glad it gave a little of itself to one of Deep Space Nine‘s best relationships, and did it queer justice it always deserved.

Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what’s next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who.


Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *