Our Man Bashir
"Our Man Bashir" is the 82nd episode of the American science fiction television series Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, the tenth of the fourth season.
In this episode, Dr. Julian Bashir (Alexander Siddig) plays a 1960s secret agent in a holosuite game, accompanied by his friend Garak (Andrew Robinson), who is himself a former spy.
After a transporter accident, the physical likenesses of several crew members are temporarily stored as characters in the holosuite memory; Bashir and Garak must prevent any of them from dying in the game or else they will be lost to the real world.
The production team had deliberately avoided episodes centering on holodeck malfunctions as they felt they had been overused on Star Trek: The Next Generation.
This obvious influence resulted in Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer complaining to the studio, and later references to Bashir's holosuite game in the episode "A Simple Investigation" were toned down.
"Our Man Bashir" received Nielsen ratings of 6.8 percent, and while the episode was mostly praised by reviewers, with particular attention paid to the performance of Avery Brooks, there was some criticism levelled at the depiction of women.
Eddington informs Bashir that he can't shut down the program or let the characters die, or else the patterns of the crew members may be deleted.
After escaping the assassin Falcon (Miles O'Brien), Bashir, Garak and Komananov go to a casino to speak to Noah's associate Duchamps (Worf).
Noah (Captain Sisko) explains his plan to flood the rest of the world, wiping out the human race except for his kidnapped scientists.
As he had not expected to actually win, the shocked Dr. Noah is still about to shoot Bashir, but before he can pull the trigger, Eddington beams the crew's patterns out of the holosuite.
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer was later not pleased with the James Bond-style approach, and when Bashir's spy program appeared in the later episode "A Simple Investigation", the references were more generic.
[2] Dennis Madalone managed to save some time during the production as one of the shots involved Bashir seeing Falcon approach him from behind by seeing his reflection in a bottle of champagne.
After time was already scheduled to attempt the shot, Madalone explained to the director that he could take the filmed sequence and digitally manipulate it onto the bottle.
Madalone was also responsible for firing a cork from a bottle at Colm Meaney's head from off screen to make it appear as if Bashir did it, and managed to do it on the first take.
The majority of the 1960s style technologies such as Dr. Noah's base, were all custom built in house and where parts moved they were generally manually operated off screen.
[5] In Michelle Erica Green's review for TrekNation, she criticised the role of women in the episode, saying that they fared better in the James Bond movies.
