We need to talk about this week’s best moment on the lower floors

There’s a lot to love in this week’s episode of Lower covers. The show’s penultimate episode set the stage for what could be one of the all-time great conclusions of a trip to the stars show, one packed with potential across the board to offer a rousing retort to much of what has made the show so good over the course of these five seasons. But even if the show somehow manages to sniff it out right on the final frontier, I’ll always be grateful for what this week’s episode gave to my weird little heart.

“Fissure Quest” immediately hits you with a boatload of Emigrate geekery, whether actually within the narrative of Lower covers itself (the return of Boimler’s transporter duplicate William, now a Section 31 agent captaining his own starship on a reality-hopping mission to save the multiverse!) or within the wild cameos , it just appears out of nowhere. William’s multiversal crew. Emigrate Characters include a veritable army of Ensign Harry Kim (plus a lieutenant, all voiced by Traveler‘s Garrett Wang), a version of Curzon Dax’s Deep space ninewhere the Dax symbiote had not yet been transmitted to Jadzia, as it would be in its prime. Emigrate timeline, and another alternative in the form of Company‘s T’Pol (Jolene Blalock makes a rare return to acting and an even rarer return to trip to the stars free) who had 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 his tailor’s hands to work in surgery, and a medical hologram of Julian Bashir, presumably from a reality where the events of Deep space nine“Doctor Bashir, I Guess” really worked well. That’s already pretty delicious, especially since both Andrew Robinson and Alexander Siddig return to reprise their respective characters for the first time on television in decades. But it’s also lovely how William presents them in his diary: they are married. Finally, even if these are alternative versions of them, there is a piece of trip to the stars TV that has Garak and Bashir as husbands.

Deep space nine Fans have long shunned DS9’s plain old tailor and CMO: the chemistry of their relationship on the show was electric from the moment Julian and Garak met, the allure of mystery in Garak’s past, and the Bashir’s overly eager curiosity provided an excellent opportunity. material for fans to read a queer interpretation. Although Deep space nine It was never literally there, even when it brushed against the then-perceived taboo of queer relationships in other areas, there was always something about the duo that sparked that romantic chemistry. It’s something both Robinson and Siddig have been keen to sustain ever since. Deep space nine he concluded, discussing the relationship at fan conventions and how they both, at times, tried to push their performances as if there was potential for something between the two of them there, even if the text would never go that far. Robinson even wrote several trip to the stars novels about Garak, addressing the character’s queerness, although not explicitly with Bashir.

Lower covers I could have left it like that. “Fissure Quest” certainly has enough that could have been gained by calling Garak and Bashir’s husbands and moving on with their countless other concerns, but instead it gives the couple room to really be a couple They have time to interact and be tender with each other. Hell, they arguably get one of the episode’s sweetest emotional arcs, playing on their broader musings on the concept of the multiverse to declaratively underline that regardless of the different realities they come from, and wherever they eventually settle after finish their mission, their home is one within the other. it is also perfectly Garak and Bashir in the sense that this conclusion comes after the former spends much of the episode arguing with the latter about whether or not they will live in his universe or Julian’s, because, as Garak lovingly tells her husband in the climax, he has always loved to argue. with him.

It just makes everything I’ve seen in these characters since I saw them. DS9 as a queer teenager, I am actually part of trip to the stars in some small way, after years of wondering what could have been. For all the interest in your own past trip to the stars has had in its streaming renaissance, from the appeal of aesthetic and structural nostalgia in series like Strange new worldsto Picardthe continuation of The next generationthe stories and characters of Lower covers‘Own nerd love of what trip to the stars is both inside and outside of his text – the idea of ​​him using that to give queer fans the couple that never was (even if they aren’t “our” Garak and Bashir) for a brief moment was something I never expected, and very much so. less like Lower covers He looked at the phaser tip on his own end. There are a lot of things I’m grateful the show has done over its five seasons, but regardless of how it ends next week, I’ll always be glad it gave a little bit of itself to one of them. Deep space nineThe best relationships, and gave him the queer justice he always deserved.

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