Was Mirror Bashir also genetically enhanced? Or was he also unable to tell the difference between a dog and a house.
1. Almost certainly not. Such technology would not have been available to Terrans. 2. Regardless, I found him... boring.
Maybe? Probably not? It was a dog from a cat. When he was six years old. If MU Bashir didn't get the procedure or a similar one, I guess we know that our man Bashir might have eventually leveled out, more or less. Not to where our Bashir was, but maybe more like the kind of person you sometimes see interviewed on The Daily Show.
I have to admit there was a part of me that found scruffy MUBashir more viscerally appealing than the rather milquetoast PrimeBashir. I'm not proud of it, but I can't deny it either; of course, my taste in men has always been a bit dubious. That said, I don't see how he could have been genetically enhanced...or if he was, it was likely a much less refined and more illegal (in the MU, for Terrans) process. Perhaps Garak experimented upon him? I agree with Tosk that Prime Julian's argument that he might have turned out reasonably fine even if his parents hadn't had him augmented seems to hold some weight in light of what we see of MU Julian. While the latter doesn't seem to be exceptional in any manner, he seems to fit in well enough with the other Terrans. I guess it's a little less clear whether he could integrate well with Prime universe humans given some of his displayed behavioral tendencies, which serve him well in the circumstances he's living under but might serve him less well in a more civilized universe.
This is an interesting question. The quick prevailing answer seems to be "No", but... that doesn't seem right. Pre-augment Bashir had severe developmental disabilities. We see no evidence of this in Mirror Bashir. It's possible that Mirror Bashir was not born with these, possibly due to past eugenics programs within the Terran Empire weeding out weak genes. However, the MU has always supposed to have been "close" to the Prime Universe, down to McCoy spilling acid in the same spot in sickbay. I find it likely that Bashir *DID* receive some augments. The exact circumstances behind them will forever be a mystery. We can see that not every Terran is a slave... Mirror Sisko was living a pretty decent life. *Speculation Time* We know that there were some "collaborator families" that we treated much better than most Terrans upon the collapse of the Empire. Given the nature of the MU, it would stand to reason that Bashir's parents... who violated Federation laws to protect their child... may have done something similar in the Terran Empire, pledging their support and turning on the Empire in an attempt to protect their son Julian. If we take that, now we have a privileged Terran family who has more access than most. As a "reward" for the assistance, the Alliance may have offered to have their scientists help their son... realistically they would just be using him for genetic experimentation... but the Bashir's accepted (as if they had any choice). In trying to generally mirror Prime, Julian, along with several other human children were given genetic augmentations. The experiments worked to varying degrees... most of them ended up with some severe issues, but it all worked very well on Julian. Obviously, the Alliance wasn't going to just let their genetically augmented super soldier just... go free, but Julian escaped. By the time we meet up with MU Bashir, he kind of hates his parents for what they did, but now he does have genetic augments... augments he hides from the others in the resistance, because if they knew they had an Alliance lab rat in their midst, things would not end well... mirroring Bashir having to hide his augments, so as to not get in trouble with Starfleet. The DS9 MU is a bit odd because there are people who shouldn't have skills that they do. Smiley, for instance, was a slave miner who was kind of good at fixing things... and then he builds a Defiant from scratch from schematics. Where did he learn all of the engineering knowledge necessary for THAT?! I do like the IDW comics take, that the Terran Empire isn't actually GONE, it's just beaten back and contained mostly to Earth. The Alliance going on about the Empire being defeated is only a half truth... sure, they "defeated" the Empire, but they didn't "destroy" it. Given that, someone like Smiley may NOT have always been a slave... he may have outright been a member of Starfleet who ended up captured and pressed into slavery.
No. Nothing in Shattered Mirror suggests Mirror Bashir was particularly bright. He was, at best, irascible. And considering Bashir's development was curtailed at a very early age, it's not clear that he would not have functioned at or above the level of Mirror Bashir without more conventional treatments. Indeed, the dialogue of Doctor Bashir, I Presume, suggests that Bashir, now an accomplished physician who has displayed advanced understanding of neurology in some episodes, opined that genetic intervention may have been unnecessary. He may have lived a mor4 ordinary life.
Siddig just played him as an over-the-top asshole, just like every other character in that bastardized version of the Mirror Universe. Was he enhanced? Who cares? He's just a jerk.
He might've been enhanced before being enslaved, but I can't think of any conclusive evidence to figure it out. I'm going to assume he wasn't though, it didn't seem like he or the Terrans had the means to do so.
The way Prime Bashir described his early days, it didn't sound like he was just a little slow, anything that could have corrected itself in time. It sounded more as if he had some severe developmental problems. Mirror Bashir doesn't seem to stand out in terms of intelligence, neither particularly bright nor slow. Perhaps he was used as some kind of guinea pig by the klingon-cardassian alliance testing a more primitive form of genetic enhancement on him, making him end up merely average (still a significant 'upgrade' from how he would have been otherwise)?
I think a writer could go either way if they wanted to and there was a good story, but for me I think it's more interesting if he is just normal and play the differences that would bring against Regular Bashir. However, there is a Myriad Universe story where there's some future Augment based civilisation and Bashir is genetically enhanced in that one, but I haven't read it.
^I don't recall the name of it, but I think you're referring to the one where Khan wins the Eugenics Wars and by the 24th century Bashir is in command of his own ship, which then encounters the Botany Bay (utilized by non-augmented humans)? That was a pretty good read!
Some have postulated that Kelvinverse Pavel Chekov is a somewhat different individual than prime universe Chekov genetically, having been born 4 years earlier. Perhaps mirror and prime Bashir are also different. Then again, that discrepancy could be explained by Pavel being at one time a frozen embryo in one or both realities, implanted four years earlier in the Kelvinverse.
For me, nobody in the MU seems to be genetically enhanced. Especially not the Intendant, as she would abuse such technology for her own agenda. As to MU Bashir: he certainly had a different childhood. Maybe he has the same bad relation with his parents. Or his parents are already dead, who knows?
Maybe altBashir didn't have developmental issues as a kid. The other side of the mirror doesn't have to be one-to-one; we don't even know that altBashir's parents are the same people they are in the prime universe, nor do we know that the probabilistic outcome of their genes mixing during conception came out exactly the same.
It's an interesting idea that genetics themselves could take over paths in different universes - and I suppose it does make sense, why does it have to be confined to man made events?? There was a Sliders where a doubleganger for Quinn was a woman.
I don't think so. I think it more likely that because of the mirror-universe's special "nature", instead of making Bashir developmentally disabled, like in our universe, it probably made him extra sadistic or sociopathic. It seemed that he was getting off on torturing Intendant Kira.
Vic Fontaine. Was a hologram in the prime universe, but -somehow- a real human in the mirror universe.
Not that surprising that a Terran freedom fighter would get pleasure out of torturing the Intendant. I don't think you need to postulate "extra sadistic" for that. What do you think Kira would have done if Dukat had fallen into her hands during the occupation?
To me, it just makes sense that he isn't genetically modified. From a story perspective, it makes more sense that he's unmodified than that he is, so that's what I go with unless they specify otherwise. I also assume that both Jadzia and Ezri were unjoined, as that makes more sense from a narrative perspective as well. Although I forget, did anyone ever refer to Jadzia as "Dax"? Cause that would of course change things. But, clearly, Ezri is unjoined. Or at least clearly doesn't have the Dax symbiont.