Talk:Elim Garak

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[edit] Third Party Sources needed

I happen to have several back issues of the now out of print "star Trek: The Magazine". Now, to the best of my knowledge these magazines use official canon, and I was curious if anyone had any objections to using these as sources in the article.

[edit] Move to Elim Garak

I don't understand why the title of this article is only "Garak"? Elim is his first name. It should be the title of the article, not a redirect.--Fallout boy 08:32, 18 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Gary Monak Conjecture

I wonder if Garak was named after special effects guy Gary Monak, who's listed in the end credits of some DS9 episodes. ShutterBugTrekker 17:57, 29 Mar 2004 (UTC)


One of the absolute best Garak lines ever...

"You know what the worst part is? ... I'm a very good tailor."


-Yeah, Garak was my favorite character on the show. I always liked the expat dynamic, the exile's love of country, all the intrigue of his past, of which we've only seen a little...Garak rocks.

[edit] Complete Garak Episode List

Could I recommend this for a future update? I have looked around, but have not found a complete episode list for Garak. So, I just added a link to StarTrek.com's 10 greatest Garak episodes. I think a complete list would be a nice addition to this marvelous entry. MetaChimp

[edit] Garak gay?

The controversy section about Garak possibly being bisexual or gay is complete conjecture and the justifications for this belief are quite juvenile.

Juvenile? Hmmm...that sounds biased.
Never said Garak was gay, I said that this was a popular fan interpretation that was not, I repeat NOT canon. I included that because A) there's an LGBT characters in Star Trek article on Wikipedia, and therefore thought it relevant, and B) it offers another interpretation on the deterioraton of Garak and Bashir's friendship, which played a significant part in his character's development.

How for instance, having a mysterious past would lead one to believe that you might be gay, is beyond me. And the idea of his profession as a tailor being "more gay" than others is just playing on the current stereotype of gays having a good sense of style, which somehow is supposed to tell you something about an alien, living on an alien space station, 400 years in the future? And "effeminate mannerisms"? Some examples would be nice because I do not remember any of Garak’s mannerisms that scream gay.

I agree, Garak was not effeminate, Garak was camp. Re-watch "Our Man Bashir" for ample examples.

Just because some "gay friendly" Star Trek fans go out of their way to see hints of gayness does not mean that their intuition has any basis in fact. The only piece of information that could be possibly worthwhile in this whole section is about Robinson mentioning that he played the character as if he were bi-sexual. But the quote is paraphrased and not sourced.

Quote and source-"I had planned Garak not as homosexual or heterosexual but omnisexual, and the first episode I had with Bashir played that way gave people fits. So I had to remove that characteristic from him."-Andrew J. Robinson, "The Great Link"
And here's another-"The important thing about Garak is that he lives in the subtext. Again, with the iceberg analogy, the substance of Garak is what you don't hear. It's what he doesn't say."-Andrew J.Robinson, "The Great Link"
The actor who played him didn't intend Garak to be straight or gay, but more fluid, and those acting choices bled through. As such it isn't "intuition" or "conjecture" that those "gay friendly" Star Trek fans picked up on, but a subtextual interpretation intended by Mr. Robinson which is why I thought it was relevant to note.

It is also brought into doubt by the fact that Garak had a female love interest in a book about Garak’s past written by Robinson himself.

As per an interview about his book,
Amazon.co.uk: Were you given guidelines about what you could and couldn't say?
Robinson: "There were two things really. They were very free in terms of the story that I wanted to tell, but I had to be faithful to what has gone before."
"Basically his sexuality is inclusive. But--it’s Star Trek and there were a couple of things working against that. One is that Americans really are very nervous about sexual ambiguity."
"For the most part, the writers supported the character beautifully, but in that area they just made a choice they didn't want to go there, and if they don't want to go there I can't, because the writing doesn’t support it." "Amazon.co.uk-Tailor Made".
Even if he wanted to write Garak a little more outside the box character-wise(even though he didn't need to because the book is amazing anyway), Garak was already established as canonically straight, and Star Trek's people weren't all that jazzed about gay or bi characters. See Ron Moore's assessment.

And I'm still not sure what playing a character as if he were bi-sexual means. Far as I remember, Garak did not make any moves on anybody, male or female. I guess he tended to stand a little too close to people, and stare them down with an insincere smile, but that was just to unnerve them.

I agree about the smile, but do you have a verifiable source for that opinon?(j/k :D )

Basically I think that the section should be removed, unless someone can come up with some decent sources for this information.

Done and done.

That being said, i removed a line at the end of the "Exile" paragraph where it states that Garak and Ziyal fell in love with eachother. Anyone who watched the series would/should know that, while Ziyal was in love with Garak, he never returned those feelings. Sure, he never told her to stop, but he never did anything back either. When Ziyal died, he said that he did not understand what she had seen in him.

  • Good call, trying to put a gay title on Garek is just plain silly, the character was never shown that way in the series. This is just wishful thinking on the part of these few fans. --The Matrix Prime 03:33, 12 March 2007 (UTC)

Frankly, I think that since the actor playing Garak (not "Garek" as noted by The Matrix Prime) considered him bisexual, this concept is worth a mention here (151.152.101.44 (talk) 20:39, 28 March 2008 (UTC)).

[edit] Sentence does not make sense

I don't know enough about the subject to correct it, but I can't make sense of it:

Elim Garak was born on Cardassia Prime to Enabran Tain. In the non-canon novel A Stitch in Time it was revealed that his mother was Tain's housekeeper Mila. He was raised by Tain and his Mila and did not know the true identity of his father until much later on.

Anyone know enough to fix it?--Anchoress 22:51, 24 March 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for the fix, it's perfectly clear now.--Anchoress 02:17, 26 April 2006 (UTC)

[edit] This article needs a major rewrite

This article is mostly written well, but it has a major problem: it mixes canon and non-canon material haphazardly. The non-canon material is a book written by Andrew Robinson, which makes it worth mentioning, but the way the article is written, it's impossible to tell what information is from the series, and thus canon, and what information is from the book, and thus not. That's a big problem. The book should be included, but it should have its own section instead of being mixed in throughout, with nothing to distinguish it from the series. I've never read the book (and it's been a while since I've seen much of the series), so I'm not qualified to do this rewrite, but in my opinion, it needs to be done. Jcb9 02:05, 5 June 2006 (UTC)

I've rewritten the article to better show what is canon and what is just in the novel and have worked a lot of the non-canon out of the main article. Should be a bit better now. --The Matrix Prime 03:33, 12 March 2007 (UTC)
Why does the non-canon material have to be included at all, though?--MythicFox 04:37, 10 May 2007 (UTC)
Excluding material because it doesn't fit Paramount's definition of canon is non-npov. I think it's best to present whatever's floating out there and let readers decide what they feel best fits/is worth latching on to. --EEMeltonIV 05:51, 10 May 2007 (UTC)
Then perhaps it can be set aside in its own section (as has been previously suggested) just to make it a little more clear what's canon and isn't. It's pretty jarring to be reading the backstory of a character and have it interrupt with "This doesn't really count, because it's not from the show, but..." Maybe a seperate section saying "A novel that features the character prominently suggests these backstory possibilities..." would be sufficient. I'm not entirely sure why excluding it is considered non-npov, though. I don't look at that many Star Trek articles; do many of them go out of their way to point out backstory items that only appear in the novels?--MythicFox 12:03, 10 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Memorable quotes

I removed this section. "Memorable" is subjective/non-NPOV -- strictly speaking, everything he says (and more Garak than most other Trek characters) is to some degree "[re]memorable", and we're not going to put all his dialog there. "Notable" quotes would be more significant, but lacking a citation about what makes them memorable, that doesn't work either -- and, unfortunately, WP:ILIKEIT isn't a reason to keep this, either. Lastly, straight-up quotes should be over in Wikiquote. If someone wants to move them over there, by all means... --EEMeltonIV 11:47, 20 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Re-vamped Bio

I revamped Garak's "bio". Garak is a fictional character and being a fictional character, should not have an actual bio like (example) Ghandi. His story needs to be told as being relevent to the rest of the series, not side stories like his stationing on Romulus and stuff like that. --VorangorTheDemon 18:53, 28 September 2007 (UTC)

[edit] What, no Ziyal?

I'm not the one to add this information, not having yet seen any Garak and Ziyal episodes, but I've read enough on the Net to know they exist! If nothing is added by the time Netflix catches me up on these episodes, I'll add them. (151.152.101.44 (talk) 19:36, 28 March 2008 (UTC))

[edit] Yes, Ziyal Definitely Needs to be in this Article

Here is a quote from the Star Trek company site which in turn quotes from their official book, Deep Space Nine Companion:

"Of the death of Ziyal itself, Hans Beimler says, "We understood the ramifications on all the characters. We'd built up her relationship with Garak. The girl who always told the truth had fallen in love with the guy who never tells the truth - or all of the truth. It made for a nice tragic love story, and her death served to motivate Garak in his future actions." (Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Companion)."

I think removing her wholesale from past versions of this page represents personal interpretations (or even wishful thinking about) the character of Elim Garak rather than canon and what the creators of canon said they had in mind. 151.152.101.44 (talk) 19:00, 1 May 2008 (UTC)