“Star Trek: Deep Space Nine” The Die Is Cast
Okay - can I ask everyone: how do you view this line? I’m never know how to read it.
Does he find it sad because he would have been a good tailor and that’s what Elim should have been rather than a spy/ gul/ tourturer/ powerful man like Tain made him be?
Or is he sad because being a good tailor on DS9 isn’t enough for him? He wants to be the powerful Son of Tain. Being a simple tailor doesn’t match his ambitions but that’s all he’s got left?
I think this is kind of two-edged sword thing for Garak. On the one hand, he is a good tailor, and he enjoys it, and had he been a tailor only, he could have been a very happy man. He may even wish that he had never been noticed by Tain, that Tain wasn’t his father and that Tolan had in fact been his father.
BUT he was a Son of Tain. He’d experienced the rush of being a powerful person, who had every comfort imaginable, a very addictive experience (and we’ve already seen that he has problems with addiction). Further, his being on DS9 and being a tailor are part of his punishment for whatever he did that Tain saw as betrayal. All that power was stripped away, and now he’s spit upon by his fellow Cardassians, when they should have been trembling in fearful respect around him as they had been prior to his exile. So part of him resents being a tailor now, because he’d once been so powerful, had had influence, even if only from the shadows.
Thanks! That’s is interesting: a sort of ‘ if I hadn’t seen such riches, I could live with being poor’ view works.
He’s a complex little lizard isn’t he? What do you do with a character who’s more ashamed of enjoying being a tailor than he is of being a torturer…
