SDS9 – S5E16: "Doctor Bashir, I Presume?" (Patreon)

This episode was recorded on May 18, 2025.

We recap "Doctor Bashir, I Presume?" and the eugenics of "elite" parenting.

SDS9 seasons 1, 2, 3, and 4 can be found wherever you stream Southpaw. Season 5 is only available to paid subscribers.

You can also listen to this episode directly from your favorite podcast player by following these instructions: https://support.patreon.com/hc/en-us/articles/212055866-Subscribe-to-your-Audio-RSS-link-on-the-Patreon-app

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Transcript

[Note: Transcripts are autogenerated and may contain errors.]

This is Southpaw Deep Space Nine Season 5. We are your hosts, Scott and Sam. On this Stardate, May 18th, 2025, we are discussing Dr. Bashir, I presume. Scott, can you tell us about this episode?

Today is the day Ram is going to let Lita know he likes her. Lita being the Davo girl that also likes him. And she comes up to her and he gets nervous. Quark says that Leta is a Davo girl and is all looks and no smarts because that's what Quark likes to do. Bashir and Miles...

are playing darts, and Miles talks about the joys of parenthood. As we know, he just had a second kid. But Bashir is stopped by Dr. Louis Zimmerman, Voyager Heads, pay attention, director of holographic imaging and programming at a Jupiter station, who has an offer to Bashir that he can't refuse to make him immortal. So Dr.

Zimmerman is hoping to further continue making holographic AI doctors as Starfleet is expanding their technology suite to create emergency medical holograms, which are like a temporary thought form, but also a hard light thing. platform that looks into as a solution. So, but you know, once you give power, it doesn't get taken away.

So this is an idea of streamlining and having less people work. It's kind of like the McDonald's kiosk of doctors and to go for like isolated, isolated posts, remote missions, small away ships, so bodies are just a commodity and each extra person is an extra cot and an extra hot, which holograms don't need.

Deep Space Nine, though, has this Cardassian tech which cannot support the basic EMH, the electromagnetic, whatever hologram thing. Everyone is dubious. However, Starfleet Medical picks Bashir as the model for this, you know, Star Trek series. Zimmerman, the program's creator, shows up on demand. You know, he... makes mods to make Deep Space Nine science work with him,

and Ben tells Bashir that his parents should be proud of him. Bashir goes through a government-level questionnaire and test filled with trauma and life questions. The med team needs to know that he will be a relatable algorithm bot and have Moxie as well. All the scans annoy Bashir. Zimmerman is at Quark's, and he finds and meets Alita,

who he finds attractive and realizes that she's Bashir's ex-girlfriend, so he wants to interview her. Bashir gives a boundary to not talk to his family. Of course, as you might expect, Zimmerman does not respect his boundary and talks to Bashir's estranged family. Bashir looks at the test, LMH Bashir,

and Zimmerman states he will delete computer Zimmerman and eventually just have Bashir be the representative on Starships. The LMH will need all new algorithms and They call the first hollow character Zesty, which has a very different meaning these days. Zimmerman does some interviews with all of the team.

Miles says really nice things about him, making sure to not tell Bashir this. And Zimmerman asks Lita out to dinner. Sad, Ram sees them again at the dinner and through his super ears can hear them talk. As the heat intensifies, Ram tries to interrupt and instead of asking for a date, he asks to fix her house.

As this is going on, Bashir is doing some science and all of a sudden Richard and Amsha Bashir, his parents, appear out of nowhere, happy to see him. Bashir is not happy to see them. There's something going on. His parents, his dad is an architect, very proud of Bashir. They are ready to talk of him and

Bashir, I'll call him Julian from here on out. Julian is Kurt. Zimmerman invites the parents against explicit direction. Zimmerman meets Lita with some flowers. She is slowly starting to be interested and Zimmerman offers her a cafe job on his ship where she'd be able to run her own joint because he thinks she's smarter and kinder and

better than she leads on, which is true. Julian and his parents eat. Amshar and Richard think that Ben is very nice and that Zimmerman is kind of gross, and there's a lot of tension. And Richard and Julian are always on the precipice of success in Julian's mind. Richard always has a harebrained scam. Clearly,

there is something very serious that we don't know yet, and Julian worries that the wrong questioning could reveal this, and there is a little bit of yelling. Leta asks Ram his thought about going to the cafe and begs him to let her let his feelings be known, and Leta leaves in a huff.

At Julian's quarters, they apologize and reveal something That's pretty big. He is a genetically modified human, which is illegal. We'll get there. But they really do love him. But the person that heard that information wasn't actually Julian. It was hollow Julian, which means Zimmerman knows now and will have to write up Julian and maybe threaten his career.

Everything could be over. So we learned that Julian was not very smart as a kid around. He wasn't reading as fast. He wasn't good at school. He was very unremarkable. Around age seven, the family left to a space hospital and accelerated his growth and ran through illegal neuroboosts for months.

And pretty much everything about him changed except his name. On Earth, his family relocated, created new names, fake records, you know, the witness protection program type of thing. No one thought anything of it. And it is the first case in over a century.

See the wrath of Khan as to why you don't want to do that sort of thing. Starfleet has no protocol about all this, but Julian is sure that it's going to be drummed out as Zimmerman. And before anything, he's going to resign. And Miles pushes back. Then we see Rom. He's so sad about Leta.

Rom is a romantic, pun intended. He was in love with Nog's mom, and after their vow renewals, he was duped by her. Quark says a bunch of sexist stuff. In Julian's room, he and his family try to figure out a way to fight this. Everyone can lose it all if this were to happen.

It would be a gigantic scandal. Julian and the family fight, everyone hugs, and it is understood that their son has made a decision. In the morning, Julian will tell Ben and resign to avoid the eugenic wars. Again, see Wrath of Khan. The next morning, Julian walks into Ben's office and finds his parents already there,

having spilled everything to Rear Admiral Bennett Jagg, present over Hollow, overseeing the mess. His parents call him Julian, a gesture to who he's become, not the child they rewrote. A deal has been made. Richard will take the fall, will plead guilty, will say that he planned the engineering all alone, and he'll get, you know,

a slap on the wrist sort of sentence. Two years, low security in New Zealand, no charges for mother in return. Julian gets to keep his license, keep his commission, keep working. Julian tries to object, but Ben cuts him off. The law exists for a reason, Julian. Julian says nothing more.

Ben orders Richard to report in once he's back on Earth. Ben steps out and lets the family talk. As Lita is about to leave with Zimmerman, Ram professes his love, and she professes hers, and they start kissing. Zimmerman leaves forlorn and sad, but you overhear him trying to flirt with some women. At Corks,

Julian and Miles are playing, and Julian is about to thank Miles for the nice words when Miles realizes that probably Julian has been taking it easy on him. And he has been, so they make an accommodation. Friends!

So I thought this was going to be a light episode and a break from some of the recent dark themes. But nope, it's back to shitty parenting and parents playing God again. But rather than playing God with a baby changeling or Odo, we found out Dr. Bashir was the test subject.

This episode dealt not only with ableism, but eugenics. As it was made clear in this episode, it wasn't clear that young Bashir was disabled in any way. He was just not excelling in the way his parents wanted. They had a schedule that they wanted him to keep up with, and he wasn't keeping up with it.

And they, without his consent, put it upon themselves to change him to the image of him that they wanted. So it's not that they were just against disability. They were against average or slow development, which is like some high level of eugenics.

Right. Because, because some secure six year olds don't read or write just yet. And they, they end up perfectly fine and have great lives. Yes. Yes. So on some, on some RFK bullshit. Sorry. Yeah.

I mean, we're going to get into all of that, how prescient this is. And also, they're not giving the kid dignity or personhood. They're treating Julian, thought of Julian as an object, as property. So erasing disabled people is one thing, but just because you're not developing fast enough,

these parents aren't even going to give the child the chance to develop. I really appreciated the arguments Julian was making. I remember in the episode Melora, it also had themes of not erasing disability and talking about greater themes of diversity, which also Dr. Bashir was a pivotal part of that plot.

This episode is so heavy in many ways because this is not sci-fi, but something that's happening now. as Scott mentioned, RFK, but even before RFK. And the themes that this episode was tackling, it's not necessarily an ethical issue every parent is dealing with, or most parents even, but some elite, privileged,

and rich parents have the means and resources to either ensure they have the kind of kid they want or to modify kids after they are born. So... Living in Los Angeles with some of the most vain and probably some of the most unethical and rich parents,

you have parents putting their kids on hormones to ensure they are tall and athletic. To even things like having procedures done to make sure their kid is well endowed. In the absence of gene editing, they can do other things where they could pick out the kid that they want and then

decide that's the one they're going to go with. There's been other movies talking about these things because they've already seen where science was headed. There's already lots of literature on this, but we are in a present and going into a future where disabilities and neurodiversity will only be things that exist in poor and marginalized communities

while the rich do eugenics without even realizing it's eugenics or questioning anything about ethics because it's such a smooth transition for them. It's not a stark contrast from what they were already doing. When you're maximizing what you can do with nurture to make ubermenches, messing with nature doesn't seem like all that big of a deal.

The gap of inequality is going to widen, not just income and wealth or where people live as far as pollution, who's living in polluted areas, who's not. Also access to technology. That's another widening gap. But now also genetic gaps. Who has access to mess with genetics? Who is making ubermenches worse? Disabled people will exist in the future,

but it's less and less likely to be rich people, and rich people will ensure disabled people get further neglected and abandoned as it becomes less and less a topic that affects them. Absolutely. It's interesting that in the Star Trek future, what's becoming a norm for the rich here now is illegal.

Eugenics and making the supreme child is such an accepted religion among the rich people in California that That it's disgusting and I would go as far as to say liberals are some of the most guilty of this. I can only imagine how bad it is in the Bay Area with all the techno bros.

I was in the Bay Area earlier this year and there were spots that were like how they say, but then there were spots that weren't.

Yes. The widening gap. Yes. Yes. The other thing this episode dealt with and it's a topic you and I have talked about and talked about how scary it is, right? This episode talked about LMH, which, man, it sounds a lot like LLM, right? Yeah. So these LMH, which are awfully like LLM,

they're just plagiarized versions of other people's work and just literally other people. They're plagiarized other people in hologram form. That's going to replace people. A plagiarized version of you will be replacing you, essentially, which is also happening now. Jesus fucking Christ. Why is this episode hitting so hard today?

And so because this is my first watch through, I really am curious. Scott, how did this episode hit for you when you first saw it compared to how it's hitting you today?

It's hitting very different. I just didn't consider the nuances of it. I always thought it was an interesting episode and an important lore episode, but that was kind of it. Where now I'm like, oh, this is an onion. There are layers.

Yeah.

Oof.

I'll tell you what, man. This episode kind of creeped me out for days. And the thing was, even though I didn't watch this episode, these kind of themes have come up during the 90s in other movies and other works of fiction and such. And yeah, when I watch those, you're just thinking more of Terminator or whatever. Yeah.

These fantastical things, these like kind of sci-fi, like kind of unrealistic things, right? So I didn't really think that much of it, but now it's like this more something you always bring up, right? This procedural way that is happening that this episode actually tackled really well about.

And so, yeah, I didn't think anything about those themes back then. But now, wow, it's just like looking through the looking glass, right? It's like it's showing me right now back to me in a way where it shows me how creepy it is. So, Scott, how did you rate it and how important is this episode for canon?

So for canon, it's quite important because finding out that Julian Bashir is a... mutated human might have effects later on in other episodes. It also creates new contexts for Julian Bashir. It might make you feel a little more soft to him. And that part is really quite important. to the show and, uh,

the leader and let's just say leader and Rom, they, they get along real good. So it's nice. Um, so it's like a four episode is his four star episode. Um, it actually dragged its feet to me, but it brings up things that really are important. And that hologram character shows up in Voyager. So it has a connection.

And again, they talk about Khan, who was, was a, you know, bioengineered character from Wrath of Khan in a couple episodes of the original Star Trek and other things he's appeared in.

And is considered one of the great cinematic villains of all time.

Most definitely.

So I like how this episode took a part of canon and showed us what that same violation looks like when it's not fantastical and more grounded and white collar and probably more common. So these themes, like I said, existed in the 90s, but this was kind of a more grounded white collar version of that, which I enjoyed.

Scott, can you tell us about the next episode? Maybe Odo can get a little love as a treat. They've been hinting at that. Maybe you'll find someone, Odo. Maybe you'll find someone, Odo. And maybe this is leading to that. Maybe.

Until then...