Reviews

As the pieces began moving into position, I expected to loathe this episode. The cliches were lined up & waiting, it was obvious. And at times, I felt incredibly uncomfortable. How can someone so incomprehensibly intelligent by our standards be so devoid of basic understanding? But the way it played out was, at least viewed through the prism of 2018, remarkably compelling.

Dr. Julian Bashir is a lonely, frustrated man. In our modern pop culture terms one might ascribe him the maligned titled of "involuntarily celibate", or someone who is frustrated at their inability to find a mate and, perhaps through lack of humility or self-awareness, places the blame onto their environment. They believe fate has conspired their unhappiness.

There was Jazdia. Julian came onto her too strong (in her own words) & the failure of winning her love left him distraught for seasons on end. Being forced to watch her marry a Klingon, someone so unlike him; a lesser mind but superior physicality. His frustrations grew anew at the end of the previous season, culminating with her unfortunate end.

But Jazdia is reborn in this season, as Ezri, who offhandedly informs Julian that had she not met said Klingon, she (as Jazdia) would've probably ended up with him. This was actually meant to foreshadow the character Ezri's own attraction (as well as her newfound confusion sorting the thoughts of lives past & present), but to Julian it must've ripped open one of his deepest wounds anew.

In Chrysalias, Julian helps revive Sarina, a highly-intelligent beautiful woman, from a vegetative state. We brace for the inevitable: the lonely man, despite being a doctor treating a patient, falls hard for Sarina. It's creepy, it's uncomfortable. In 1998 that was probably less of the intention; in many ways, the self-awareness of mainstream romantic storytelling has matured by leaps & bounds since then. & Star Trek is smart, so the conclusion hits its necessary mark, but the navigation must've felt slightly less gaudy at the time.

But now in 2018, one can't help but think of those involuntary celibates, the incels, the lonely men raging online at their inability to find a mate, and consider how they might act in such a situation. If you take that filter, and apply several strong dashes of naive innocence, you get Julian Bashir trying to woo Sarina. Only he doesn't woo her. He doesn't put the patient effort into wooing her. He *expects* romance, and because she is so indebted to him for rescuing her from her aimless slumber, she reciprocates. He kisses her first & she returns the kiss. He's happy but it's there for us all (& to the show's credit, Chief too) to see: the relationship isn't about *her*, it's about him. She's his escape from loneliness. He uses her to ease his deep-seated pain of failing to find companionship.

I'm sure a lot of modern-minded people will see the ending as a somewhat superficial way to wrap up a fairly problematic story, but to me, the light touch made the whole more palatable. Sarina is able to let go of him & reject his absurd advances in a way that doesn't exacerbate his fragile state; she's undeniably the stronger of the two of them. She deserves our admiration while Julian deserves our sympathy. Being a man is easy, but sometimes it's excruciatingly difficult too, in ways that we men don't realize until we step back & breathe, focus & make sense of the moment. I think this episode presents that frustrating fact in a very compelling fashion.