Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (TV Series) Chrysalis (1998) User Reviews

Doctor in love

[Tweekums · 7/10 · 2 January 2010]

This is another stand alone episode that doesn't advance the main story arc but concentrates on Doctor Bashir who is trying to cure a young genetically engineered woman called Sarina who has been in a catatonic state all of her life. She has been brought to the station by three other genetically engineered people who while brilliantly clever have personality disorders which make it hard for them to function amongst normal people. Once the doctor has performed the operation it is clear that she doesn't suffer from these disorders and she gets on well with Dr Bashir's friends and very well with the doctor himself who finds himself falling in love with her only to find that she appears to have slipped back in to her catatonic state.

Alexander Siddig does a fine job as Doctor Bashir and Faith Salie did well guest starring as Sarina. I found the other genetically engineered guest characters somewhat irritating although that was down to the way the characters were written rather than the acting. Over all it wasn't a bad episode but I look forward to a return to the main story arc.

Too Many Mountains to Climb in the Blink of an Eye

[Hitchcoc · 7/10 · 9 November 2018]

The curse of TV series is the amount of time required. The main characters are stuck in a defined space and time. Dr. Bashir works to help the genetically enhanced, introverted to the nth degree, girl from a precious episode. Once he finds a way (thanks to the genius of her unconventional friends), he falls in love with her. It's obvious that she is brilliant, perhaps more brilliant than he. This is a study in impatience confronting loneliness. It seldom works. This is a passing episode but a little too predictable and pat.

Best subversion of "Born Sexy Yesterday" trope

[hddgwgfvdb · 8/10 · 6 July 2023]

It would have been easy to end this episode like "Flowers for Algernon" or "Awakenings," and it would have been only slightly harder to have this episode end with "Sleeping Beauty" awakened to have Bashir be her Prince Charming.

They went the more realistic and honest route - she needs to learn about herself and how to be a person before she can be someone's romantic partner.

I'm also glad the doctor/patient ethics were addressed, even if they were slightly lamp-shaded.

Plus, the genetically enhanced people are a fun bunch! Their harmonizing together was a joy.

But poor Bashir never seems to catch a romantic break.

Meh

[Ar_Pharazon_the_golden · 6/10 · 2 September 2018]

I would not be assuming the mantle of Captain Insightful by pointing out that Statistical Probabilities, the episode where we were first acquainted with dr Bashir's genetically enhanced patients, was hardly worth a sequel. The characters were rather annoying and the show's view on transhumanism rather shallow.

Despite that, this episode is slightly better, as there is less focus on the obnoxious characters - aside from them providing silly resolutions, with corny lines like "you can't break the lows of physics but you can bend them".

The problem is that the main themes of the episode have received better treatment elsewhere - the loneliness of the genius is something that has been shown both in Star Trek, and DS9 in particular, since Bashir is not so different from Sarina, and elsewhere. For instance, there is an episode of House that goes pretty deep into it. Additionally, the whole plot is pretty reminiscent at first of the film Awakenings, although the show, understandably, hints but eventually backs away from that bleak narrative.

In any case, the view of genetically engineered humans as human computers who can solve problems an hour after becoming acquainted with a field remainds naive.

New life

[francespen · 6/10 · 12 May 2021]

Some very critical and disparaging comments about this episode. Yes the characters of Jack, Patrick and Lauren could be annoying and to us odd, but they have spent all their lives in an institution so can't be expected to act like other folks. But they all cared enough for Sarina for them to ask their friend Julian for help to bring her out of her catatonic state and be 'normal', well as normal as anyone who had been genetically enhanced could be. It turned out she was very intelligent, of course she would be, but still needed to learn abut the world around her and the people in it. The scene when she met for the first time proper Jack, Lauren and Patrick was very moving, their delight, even Jack, was very visible. Didn't she have a marvellous voice! She was very astute on picking up on people's emotions too as demonstrated when she met Odo, Nerys, Miles and Ezri. And charmed the socks off them. Though not Quark, as she would have had him broke in a week. Julian had transferred Sarina's cared to another doctor so he wasn't breaking any ethical rules. I'm guessing she was an adult so he wasn't breaking any other kind of rules? It was expecting too much for her to feel the same way as Julian, she had no experience of the world which she needed to do first before of thinking of any kind of a relationship. It was a tender and fitting goodbye.

Typically Star Trek romance

[snoozejonc · 6/10 · 10 August 2023]

Dr Bashir gets involved with a genetically modified love interest.

This is an okay episode with a reasonably well written one-off love story for episodic television. Feelings developing between the two such characters are not implausible, so the concept it does work to a certain degree. However, it is predictable at times (especially as it involves a guest character of the week) and I struggle to get invested in another couple on DS9. The sight of other pairings like Kira/Odo, Worf/Jadzia, and Sisko/Yates provide more than enough romance for me.

There are some humorous moments involving the generically enhanced characters, such as the Jack's pursuit of saving the universe from collapsing on itself and their musical interlude.

I think the actors do a good job, particularly Faith Salie, Alexander Siddig and Colm Meaney. If you can get over how annoying Tim Ransom's character is written and one-note Hilary Shepard's character is portrayed I think you can appreciate the actors embody them very well.

Through a 2018 lens: stirring, challenging & profound

[zethiryuk · 9/10 · 20 June 2018]

As the pieces began moving into position, I expected to loathe this episode. The cliches were lined up & waiting, it was obvious. And at times, I felt incredibly uncomfortable. How can someone so incomprehensibly intelligent by our standards be so devoid of basic understanding? But the way it played out was, at least viewed through the prism of 2018, remarkably compelling.

Dr. Julian Bashir is a lonely, frustrated man. In our modern pop culture terms one might ascribe him the maligned titled of "involuntarily celibate", or someone who is frustrated at their inability to find a mate and, perhaps through lack of humility or self-awareness, places the blame onto their environment. They believe fate has conspired their unhappiness.

There was Jazdia. Julian came onto her too strong (in her own words) & the failure of winning her love left him distraught for seasons on end. Being forced to watch her marry a Klingon, someone so unlike him; a lesser mind but superior physicality. His frustrations grew anew at the end of the previous season, culminating with her unfortunate end.

But Jazdia is reborn in this season, as Ezri, who offhandedly informs Julian that had she not met said Klingon, she (as Jazdia) would've probably ended up with him. This was actually meant to foreshadow the character Ezri's own attraction (as well as her newfound confusion sorting the thoughts of lives past & present), but to Julian it must've ripped open one of his deepest wounds anew.

In Chrysalias, Julian helps revive Sarina, a highly-intelligent beautiful woman, from a vegetative state. We brace for the inevitable: the lonely man, despite being a doctor treating a patient, falls hard for Sarina. It's creepy, it's uncomfortable. In 1998 that was probably less of the intention; in many ways, the self-awareness of mainstream romantic storytelling has matured by leaps & bounds since then. & Star Trek is smart, so the conclusion hits its necessary mark, but the navigation must've felt slightly less gaudy at the time.

But now in 2018, one can't help but think of those involuntary celibates, the incels, the lonely men raging online at their inability to find a mate, and consider how they might act in such a situation. If you take that filter, and apply several strong dashes of naive innocence, you get Julian Bashir trying to woo Sarina. Only he doesn't woo her. He doesn't put the patient effort into wooing her. He *expects* romance, and because she is so indebted to him for rescuing her from her aimless slumber, she reciprocates. He kisses her first & she returns the kiss. He's happy but it's there for us all (& to the show's credit, Chief too) to see: the relationship isn't about *her*, it's about him. She's his escape from loneliness. He uses her to ease his deep-seated pain of failing to find companionship.

I'm sure a lot of modern-minded people will see the ending as a somewhat superficial way to wrap up a fairly problematic story, but to me, the light touch made the whole more palatable. Sarina is able to let go of him & reject his absurd advances in a way that doesn't exacerbate his fragile state; she's undeniably the stronger of the two of them. She deserves our admiration while Julian deserves our sympathy. Being a man is easy, but sometimes it's excruciatingly difficult too, in ways that we men don't realize until we step back & breathe, focus & make sense of the moment. I think this episode presents that frustrating fact in a very compelling fashion.

Bashir's morality dilemma

[tomsly-40015 · 8/10 · 26 November 2023]

This episode is quite interesting although or because Dr Bashir gets trapped again in a struggle of morality as a doctor and his own happiness as a simple man.

We meet Sarina and the other genetically enhanced misfits again that once tried to convince Bashir that surrendering to the Dominion will save millions of lives. This time Bashir is determined to cure Sarina from her catatonic state because, unlike the others, her disorder has a chance to be cured. He succeeds and Sarina awakes from her sleep like Sleeping Beauty and turns into a charming, intelligent and empathic young woman.

Bashir instantly falls in love with her - not only because she is genetically augmented like him, but also because she is the woman he always has been looking for. He realizes the dilemma though: A romantic affair with a patient. That's why he hands her over to another doctor for further treatment.

Yet, here now lies the big problem with Bashir's behavior. Falling in love with a patient is one thing. Bashir realizes that he cannot longer be Sarina's doctor. You could argue that a doctor should know better and keep an emotional distance to his patients. But ok, love happens. What I find much more disturbing is the fact, that Bashir took advantage of Sarina's emotional state. As the episode title "Chrysalis" implies, Sarina has been trapped inside a cocoon for years, unable to interact with her environment. And suddenly she has turned into a beautiful butterfly and wants to fly, but Bashir holds her back and wants to keep her for his own good.

Sarina first replied to Bashir's adcances but it feels like she does this out of guilt. To repay Bashir for saving her. She also tells him that she wants to make him happy because he cured her. But this woman never had the chance to learn, who she really is, what she wants, what she is capable of doing and she never saw other planets, met other people, other men, experienced love.. Bashir wants to hold her, keep her. Understandable since he feels lonely. But he just doesn't realize that he is about to deny her making her own experiences and finding her own way into her new life. And that is Bashir's biggest flaw in this episode: Egoism, arrogance and.a possessive attitude.

I cant believe people give this 7.1

[albert-bentall · 10/10 · 19 June 2021]

This is by far one of the best episode of the series. It is extremelly well written and rings true.

It is just sad ST does not like to build on passionate love. They give us relationships which feel so fake and they keep trying to convince us. Even Dax and Worf felt fake, except maybe a few episodes at the end of last season.

This love story felt really real, too bad they did not have the courage to push the genetically engineered storyline. Probably for moral reasons, as always, i.e. The wrong reasons.

Why did they do a sequel to "Statistical Probabilities" in the first place?!

[planktonrules · 4/10 · 27 January 2015]

One of the poorer episodes of season 6 of "Star Trek: Deep Space 9" was "Statistical Probabilities"--a show featuring a group of genetically modified folks who were misfits and were forced to live in an institution because of their mental problems. Dr. Bashir became friends with these folk and the episode had MANY embarrassing moments because it was so poorly written. So imagine my surprise that they would do a follow-up--a follow-up that I assume many folks would NOT have looked forward to seeing.

In this new episode, Dr. Bashir is surprised when his misfit friends show up on the base unexpectedly and in Starfleet uniforms. No, they are NOT members of the fleet--they are just once again social misfits who think this is cute. It isn't. Anyway, once they're on the base, somehow Bashir gets the idea to do some medical procedure to Sarina to try to bring her out of her mute and somewhat catatonic state. It is a success and almost instantly Bashir is smitten by her and is making plans for their lives together.

This episode is embarrassing--as are most of Bashir's attempts to court women. The problems are that he has no real ability to engage in a normal manner with women--almost as if he has Asperger's Syndrome. He also has ZERO sense of ethics, as no responsible doctor would almost instantly begin hitting on their patient! Sarina's reaction to the ultra-creepy Doctor isn't at all surprising. And, it makes for a rather uncomfortable episode overall.

The Biogenes return

[XweAponX · 10/10 · 22 July 2019]

From "Statistical Probabilities"

And it was kind of fun to see them return to DeepSpace Nine, the way that they do it was kind of unique, they sneak in under the radar, but in plain sight.

Hilary Shepard who plays Lauren, always looks magnificent as this character. But the real highlight here was Faith Salie as "Serina"- it is like a light switch being flipped.

This episode is mostly about her. All I can say about this character is that the title of the episode matches what happens to the character.

And that brings me to my very minor complaint. This episode is a lot of fun up until about halfway, and then Bashir gets totally sidetracked. Probably because there was no more Jadzia for him to pine over, all of a sudden this episode is no longer an episode involving the genetically modified people, suddenly their characters are no longer the focus, and something else happens, everything gets suddenly very deep and in some cases tiresome, and we can understand something that Sarina does in this episode, because we feel it.

I was hoping that the Biogenes would do something totally off or crazy like they did the first time they appeared, but after about halfway through, their appearance in this episode is reduced to practically nothing. Of course Bashir needs to consult them because something happens that they are familiar with, but that is basically the last time that we ever see them.

It's not that I didn't like this episode but that it should have included more of the Biogenes. Mainly it's about Bashir making another incredibly stupid mistake (again).

And we've had plenty of those kinds of episodes, this episode had so much potential but it didn't live up to all of it. But it did provide some extremely unique interactions.

And of course, the universe is too heavy!

Bashir was way too creepy

[trux_32 · 5/10 · 16 July 2021]

The way here slides from being a caregiver to romantically involved is disturbing, regardless of his self realization at the end. Not only do I dislike this episode, it damages the character in an ugly way.

Another black eye for Doctors everywhere.

[thevacinstaller · 5/10 · 13 December 2021]

Well, it's another black eye for Julian Bashir and the Doctor profession as a whole ------ He gets into a relationship with a woman who he helped liberate from a catatonic state. I just can't see Dr. McCoy hitting a patient up for her digits after saving her life. The show did lightly touch upon this breach of ethics in a scene with O'Brien but we really needed to have Bashir undergoing a real internal struggle about this. This is not nearly as bad as the time he killed worf's brother ---- so, that's something?

I like the genetically engineered scooby gang and I thought the do ra me song was pretty creative.

Is this a subversive commentary on people of power thrusting themselves onto others?

Sarina is the real star of the show for not dating Bashir out of a sense of obligation. She put in a good acting performance and comes off as very sympathetic.

I feel like there is a way to write this episode that doesn't make Bashir look like morally dubious opportunist.

I can accept a Doctor being attracted to a patient, right? That's must happen from time to time ---- but ---- for the love of Sisko, you cannot act on those feelings if they are your patient (handing them off so you can date them does not count either). This has to be discussed on day 1 or 2 of MD school, right?

A fairly useless episode

[zombiemockingbird · 5/10 · 11 May 2023]

I didn't like the genetically engineered group when they first showed up, so wasn't thrilled to see them again. Jack is beyond annoying, and wears on my last nerve. Patrick is just silly and Lauren is over the top cringy with all her sexual innuendos. The scene where they were singing was...weird, like a somewhat demented Sound of Music. Most reviewers are completely hung up on the relationship between Bashir and Sarina which I didn't find particularly inappropriate or cringy; but then I seldom agree with other reviewers. Actually, it kind of made sense for him to fall for someone who was very much like him.

DS9 is my fav trek

[brenttheceo · 2/10 · 15 July 2020]

I didn't like this episode back when I first saw it. It just seemed weird. Watching it again doubles down on the weird. DS9 still one of the best treks, but the doc fixing her, dating, then wanting to Risa her. It seemed like a burner episode. The weird/creep factor

Bashier falls for a cataleptic, strikes out.

[snarky-trek-reviews · 5/10 · 8 March 2019]

Should Basheir fall for a patient that just awoke from a cataleptic state? Of course not. That's a stupid question!

The actress that plays Serena is absolutely wonderful and her actions through out this episode make sense. Basheir on the other hand comes across like a grown man that's fallen for a teenage girl.

The sequence at the 16 minute mark is touching, but its the only part of this episode that's memorable. Its all down hill from 19 minutes on with the disgust really picking up right around 30 minutes in. By the time we get to the 40 minute mark I am ready to throw things at the screen. At least the episode is self conscious about the whole affair, but that doesn't make the icky feelings go away.

Everyone of the five stars I give this episode go to Sarena. Admiral Patrick and the mutants get an honorable mention. The rest is garbage.

Verdict: Predictable and grown inducing.

Possibly the worst Episode of the series.

[Calaverasgrande · 4/10 · 21 June 2020]

The original episode featuring the genetically enhanced peers of Dr.Bashir was a groaner. Hard to bear, but at least it had a B plot and an appearance by Jeffrey Combs as Weyoun. Which is always a highlight. Combs inhabits his characters quite well! This episode actually expects to carry the attention of the viewer with the single story arc of the genetically modified cinderella. It fails on many points. First this type of story is just too familiar. Having been done by every science fiction TV show at least twice by this point in time. Then there are the actors. Every single one of them is just too annoying. Not just the writing but the way they put those words into flesh. Was that the directors intent? It seems so. I won't even start on the ethical problems that Bashir just brushes off as a mere technicality. It's disgusting. This entire mess would be tolerable as the B plot to a more interesting foreground story. Some silly stuff happening in the background while Sisko and Kira grapple with Kai Wynn over the Orb of coffee. However there is no other plot holding our attention. It's as if there was another story, but they yanked it out of the script and left this wheezing skeleton of corpse to be re-animated. And make a mockery of the living with it's rude shambolic pantomime of life. It's just such a hollow, characterless pointless story. What is struggled against? What is resolved? Did Bashir come out a better man? The story doesn't even really resolve. Leaving open the possibility of these annoying genetic nerds coming back. And can we all agree it's kind of disgusting how the genetic enhanced woman can't just be smart and weird. She has to be some kind of elite cougar sexbot.

Creepy!

[retrobate · 2/10 · 13 December 2023]

The augments return from "Statistical Probabilities".

Bashir 'cures' the catatonic Sarina, and proceeds to be as creepy as hell with her afterwards, falling in love with her and trying to sweep her off her feet during her convalescence period, even so much as forcing her back into her catatonic state to get away from him!

Bashir has made her feel so indebted to her she doesn't know how to stop it.

This is just the worst Deep Space Nine episode I've ever seen. And there's some excruciating singing from the augment foursome.

Bashir is wooden and a bit creepy at this best of times, but he outdoes himself in this one. Avoid.

Not a Terrible Guilty Pleasure Episode, but Nothing Special

[frankelee · 5/10 · 18 June 2022]

Dr. Bashir tries and succeeds to cure one of the institutionalized gene-modded patients from last season. And then he moves very quickly to marry her!

I don't give this episode a 5 because I don't like it, I give it a 5 because it would be insulting to every other episode that's a 6+, which actually did something to deserve a higher score. It's an okay premise. Dr. Bashir is given some characterization, namely he's way too lonely and really prone to giving in to his more immature fantasies. But nothing about it ever wows. Nothing from the premise, to the writing, the dialogue, the acting, the themes, or the emotional payoffs ever rises above an "okay" grade.

And frankly the actor playing Dr. Bashir gets really spastic in the second half of this series. I think the crew were getting a bit tired of the show to be honest, and it shows. But that boyish over-enthusiasm makes Bashir so incredibly grating and hard to watch. And with a woman who just had brain surgery, it's not really creepy, a guy in an alley staring at you menacingly is creepy, but he wants it waaaay too much and it's creepy in the not-serious usage of the word. The story, the character, and the actor all are working at cross-purposes in this one.