pleyre - Tumblr blog

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incredible 60 seconds here, my god. how does he do it off the cuff like that

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You guys he's fine. Stop asking if he's ok. It's the last episode and all of his friends are leaving, but, you know, he's here at the party which means he's totally fine. Look at him. He's socializing.

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Acryl on canvas

Hello! I like this painting fine enough. I think I accidentally made him look older, but I think it serves the piece well!! I wish I could take better pictures, but my hands are pretty shaky. I intentionally didn't put him in his uniform, though I'm not sure how I'd explain it haha. It's not perfect, but I don't mind 💪💪💪💪 PS: If you've read this far I'm titling this painting "She Sid on my dig, till I Alexander"

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James Acaster as Lars Pinfield in GHOSTBUSTERS: FROZEN EMPIRE (2024)

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DS9 1x17 The Forsaken: More Feelings about the Augmented Abilities of Julian Bashir

(Apologies, shutting up about Julian is not within my capabilities.)

In The Forsaken, Bashir is charged with looking after three Federation ambassadors while the entire station is having a meltdown. At one point, he and the ambassadors are walking along a corridor when suddenly: FIRE

The bulkheads close, Julian tries to open the door and finds it locked... the scene ends.

We're then left in suspense for the rest of the episode; we only see Sisko and Kira's side of things, who are assuming the worst, not knowing how badly they all got hurt.

Eventually they get in and find Julian and the ambassadors, who immediately start heaping praise on Julian:

BASHIR: Here, take my hand, Madam Ambassador. Watch your head. TAXCO: Please, Julian. Call me Taxco. SISKO: Ambassador, are you all right? VADOSIA: Yes, thanks to Julian. LOJAL: The doctor was remarkably calm and logical for a man of his years under such severe conditions. VADOSIA: We'll be putting him in for a commendation.

Sisko congratulates him ("Nice work, Doctor Bashir." "Just in the right place at the right time, sir.") and that's the end of that.

But I couldn't stop thinking about how different Julian is to how we've seen him so far in season 1.

It's pretty well established that Julian in the early seasons (and some might say, all of them) is often smug and insufferable. In Season 1, we've seen him boast about the most minor things (becoming salutatorian, Q-Less) to how good a doctor he is ("I was very impressed, Doctor." "And well you should have been." The Passenger).

But at the end of The Forsaken, he seems positively startled to be praised. In complete contrast to The Passenger, in which he takes Kira's compliment and adds to it himself, here he doesn't even take the praise, but dismisses it as luck. What's changed?

Well, I think there are a few things in play here. For one, he's shaken up, he really hasn't been in that many life-or-death situations - maybe the boasts come out later. For another, he usually boasts about his medical expertise, which he knows is good; he might not have felt he did anythign special here. But most importantly, I believe - this is the first situation he's been in where he's had to choose between revealing his augmented abilities or potentially letting people die.

We don't see much of what he does, admittedly, but we do see him trying to unlock a door: first he tries the access codes, when that doesn't work he strains to rip the cover off to get the the lever underneath, which he tries to pull until one of the ambassadors touches him, when he appears to give up. I find it pretty easy to read that touch as having reminded Julian that he's not alone, he has to act normally.

(sorry for the poor quality)

Yes, we really don't know if he could have got them out using his augmented abilities, or how "superhuman" he had to be to get them into the vents. But I think it's very possible that he did have to find a balance between getting people to safety, and not showing an above-average ability in the methods he used.

And keep in mind these are Federation Ambassadors. Julian's already stated in this episode - though it's unsure how seriously - that spending time with the ambassadors could "destroy his career". How much more aware will he be of keeping his secret around them, when they already appear to dislike him and would have the power to investigate if anything did slip?

Other people have hypothesised that his boasting is a way to hide his abilities in plain sight, as it were - and this makes enough sense to be at least part-way true. I think his boasting is a mix of genuine pride in his work; being, in brutal honesty, a young, naïve idiot; badly misjudging how to make himself likable; and attempting to normalise how good he is by showing off at every opportunity.

But this event is one he wants to downplay - he doesn't want a reputation for being good at anything else. He can't afford people to question how a doctor forced entry into the vents, or whatever he needed to do to get in there. While the ambassadors are coming out, he sticks to his job and doesn't respond to their praise - in fact you could say he looks concerned or worried. After they've gone, and Sisko congratulates him, he's startled out of his thoughts for a second, before responding: "Just in the right place at the right time, sir" - a throwback to their earlier conversation, and a dismissal that he did anything particularly special.

(again, awful quality, I've never made GIFs before!)

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oh bad boy, surrender your friends, they never belonged to you XXX

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So the dude passes through dimensions, dies twice AND gets assimulated, still no promotion.

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Actually my concept for a Star Trek series would be something like:

It's 10,000 years in the future (or some big number, it's kind of arbitrary. It's a hell of a long time after anything we've seen, anyways)

The Federation and the Borg have long-since merged into a galaxy-spanning hyper civilization

Most sentient life in the galaxy is connected in a sort of utopian hivemind, but you can opt out. There are entire worlds that are just like...wilderness preserves for weird "throwback" types who value their individuality, unique cultures, etc.

The Civilization basically has a sort of collective midlife crisis and decides that it's stagnated; it hasn't really changed its technology or modes of living in thousands of years and it decides that cultural stasis is a sort of death (there's probably some kind of event to touch this off in the pilot)

Their solution is that they need to start exploring again to encounter new ideas, but all of the other galaxies are damn far away

But the Federation-Borg (Forg?) can't really operate over those distances, because they're out of direct contact with the rest of the hive and their units find this existentially terrifying

So they need to recruit a bunch of people from these weird throwback planets to go out and explore for them in a fleet (or in one really big ship with a bunch of, like, Enterprise-sized support craft)

Except these people have tensions because they all come from different sorts of cultural perserves. And some of them don't even think that they *should* be helping the Forg expand

The entire first season just shows their long, long journey through intergalactic space toward the Andromeda galaxy with just a few rare pit stops at isolated star systems all alone in the void

(Maybe, like...a haunted starship that has been floating in the night for half a billion years or something)

All of the aliens that they encounter are really weird and gnarly because this is outside the galaxy, so there should be no humanoids

They eventually get caught up in a bunch of shenanigans between rival gods and the like.

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Low effort, low quality meme time

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Chakotay is demisexual.

In seven years across multiple romantic partners he never once flirts or shows interest in a woman he just met, with the notable exceptions of Valerie Archer, an 8472 he was honey potting and who he then froze up on when she tried to kiss him, and a woman in 1996 who he hit on at Janeway. Kellan shows up on Voyager and tells him they were an item and his response was ‘huh’. He showed no interest in Riley Fraiser until after he was connected to her limited Borg network (sidepoint: we need to quit pretending that wasn’t a violation of him). He didn’t even start flirting with Janeway until season two after they’d had time to get to know each other.

A common fan canon is that he’s a ladies’ man who is regularly dating any woman on the crew but he just has a nice smile. In the season seven Q episode a random dancer touches his shoulder and he moves her hand off of him. He is demisexual and I demand Star Trek put him on Pride merch. Thank you, goodnight.

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Not actually opposed to Archer becoming President because it’s a job that would have driven every other captain insane

Kirk: Would be so bored he’d give Florida to the Romulans just to feel something

Picard: Too overstimulating. He needs at least three hours of alone time every day to decompress

Sisko: actually the most qualified but he’d get an aneurysm from having to deal with with the bureaucracy

Janeway: It’s inhumane to house Janeways in office spaces. Even with her emotional support terrorist she’d be so stressed. You cannot put enough enrichment in her enclosure to make up for the lack of activities

Archer: With the appropriate handlers President of the Federation sounds like a great job that would keep him from fucking up somewhere else

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like, I love how harry isn't even written like he's a lost little boy who needs a mother... janeway just saw him on the first day and was like, "yep, I'm adopting that one and i'm gonna be weird af about it too."