‘DOCTOR BASHIR, I PRESUME?’ (DS9)
Please feel free to comment on my review.
The episode’s title is the first line said by Robert Picardo as Dr. Lewis Zimmerman when he meets Dr. Bashir aboard DS9. This episode also has a significant change/revelation regarding Bashir’s character.
But yeah! Robert Picardo makes a special guest appearance in this ‘DS9’ episode. Robert Picardo is well-known for playing the holographic Doctor aboard the starship Voyager in the ‘Voyager’ series. 🙂
In this episode, he plays the holographic Doctor’s creator, hologram engineer Lewis Zimmerman. He comes to DS9 with the intent of making Bashir ‘immortal’. Bashir is quite surprised by this revelation.
Essentially, what Zimmerman is doing is that he wants to use Bashir’s likeness as a template for a holographic program designed to provide medical treatments for long periods and unsafe scenarios.
The program is to be the LMH (Long-term Medical Hologram) as opposed to the EMH (Emergency Medical Hologram). This sounds good. It’s great Bashir has been chosen for the program’s template.
I truly enjoyed Robert Picardo’s performance as Dr. Zimmerman in this episode. You can see traces of Voyager’s holographic Doctor in Dr. Zimmerman, despite being smug and quite arrogant at times.
I liked it when Bashir got to see the first test of the LMH program looking like him, though he sounds more like the old EMH. Bashir saying “Please state the nature of the medical emergency” was fun. 🙂
Zimmerman also needs a complete personality profile on Bashir in order to make the program as robust as possible. This involves a number of interviews with people who know Bashir pretty well. 🙂
This includes people like Sisko, Jake, Kira, Jadzia, Morn (who just shrugs 😀 – I’ll talk more about Morn in ‘Who Mourns For Morn?’), Worf, O’Brien and Leeta (whom Zimmerman fancies – more later on). 🙂
Zimmerman also invites Bashir’s estranged parents to be interviewed, whom Bashir is strongly against. 😐 Bashir’s parents are Brian George as Richard Bashir and Fadwa El Guindi as Amsha Bashir.
Interesting fact to point out is that Fadwa El Guindi is an anthropologist and a university professor. She doesn’t have much acting experience. She did co-write and co-direct a play called ‘Mahjar’ though.
And she did a community theatre performance for that play. She was invited to play Bashir’s mother based on that. I did enjoy the performances of Brian George and Fadwa El Guindi as Bashir’s parents.
Bashir seems embarrassed by his parents being aboard DS9 and he asks them not to reveal the secret of his childhood to Zimmerman when interviewed. This results in an argument between the three. 😐
When his parents try to apologise to their son in the infirmary, they don’t realise they were speaking to the hologram Bashir, not the real one. Thus they blurt out the secret they were meant to keep secret.
It turns out that Bashir was illegally genetically modified when he was a child. Zimmerman and Chief O’Brien overheard everything that was said in the next room when they were testing Bashir’s hologram. 😐
Bashir becomes furious once O’Brien informs him about what he heard. Despite that, Bashir admits the truth and shares what happened to him when he was a poor student and had a certain learning disability.
Destined for failure, Bashir’s parents took him for DNA re-sequencing and greatly improved his intelligence and physicality. With his secret out, Bashir sees no alternative but to resign from Starfleet. 😦
Before Bashir tends to his resignation, his parents take matters into their hands. His father turns himself in for two years at a minimum security prison in exchange for Bashir to keep his commission.
So yeah, Bashir happens to be genetically modified. This was an intriguing turnaround for Bashir’s character. Hopefully this will lead to some potential character studies on Bashir in future ‘DS9’ stories.
There’s also a subplot where Max Grodénchik as Rom confesses his love to Chase Masterson as Leeta just in time before she leaves with Zimmerman. I like how their love story comes around here.
‘Doctor Bashir, I Presume?’ is a good ‘DS9’ episode focusing on Bashir’s character and how he turns out to be genetically modified. It was also nice to see Robert Picardo making a guest appearance here.
‘Doctor Bashir, I Presume?’ (DS9) rating – 8/10
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