Great Fictional Speeches Most of Us Never Hear 003: Elim Garak & Quark, “Root Beer”

So, I’m going to try something new here. There are some great speeches–be they by warriors, presidents, kings, farmers, saintly little children, or even the occasional elf–in movies and television. Many of them come from mainstream movies we’ve all seen to the point they’re in our shared collective consciousness. President Whitmore’s speech on the eve of Earth’s counter-offensive in Independence Day comes to mind.

But there are so many wonderful speeches with equal or greater verve and punch and emotional impact, that come from non-blockbuster sci-fi and fantasy (Hey, not everything can be Lord of the Rings and its three prequels (What.)). But within the fandoms that love these shows and movies, these speeches are cherished as some of the best writing and acting around.

So now I’d like to start a collection of the ones I personally think are pretty great. I speak only for myself and my subjective tastes, so if I ever link to something you think of as unworthy, keep that in mind. At the same time, if anyone has any suggestions for great clips, let me know.

Alright, so two people talking to each other isn’t so much a speech as a conversation, but where that conversation takes the form of a allegory or metaphor or socratic exchange (that is, one character asking another guided questions to force them to think things through and reach a conclusion about some important matter), you can get the same sort of neat emotional impact or clever, grin-inducing dialogue I’m trying to highlight in these entries.

This week I’d like to highlight one such exchange from Star Trek: Deep Space 9. It’s wonderfully tongue-in-cheek and comedic on the surface, but it does a great job of summing up in just a few sentences everything great (and from a certain point of view, not so great) about Gene Roddenberry’s utopian vision of the future represented by the United Federation of Planets and Starfleet. Its cleverness exists on two levels. The first has a lot to do with who’s talking:

1. Quark’s species, the Ferengi, is so focused on raw, pure capitalism and survival of the fittest that they would frighten Gordon Gecko, but they are never presented as evil so much as very, very different–their hyper-misogynistic treatment of Ferengi women being the big exception, and that’s something the culture grapples with over the course of the seven year DS9 series. The Federation, which is (and has always been) economically socialist–there are varying levels of wealth, private business ownership is the standard, and ability and ambition is rewarded, but the state makes sure no one ever goes hungry or homeless or without education or medical care–has always looked down on the avarice-driven, “unenlightened” Ferengi.
2. Elim Garak, on the other hand, is an exiled Cardassian, a member of a species who has been in and out of war with the Federation for decades, and whose government is a hyper-fascist, military dictatorship that we are first introduced to as having just come off a decades long series of small scale but brutal and bloody wars with the Federation, and whose military has a standing policy of taking the particularly attractive female prisoners from captured planets and ships and turning them into “comfort women.” All to the glory of the Cardassian state, motivated by a drive for order and a collective, non-genocidal feeling of racial superiority over pretty much everyone. (It’s pretty much Cardassian doctrine that you don’t kill an enemy, you make them love you instead–after you conquer them.) Deep Space Nine is centered on a space station orbiting the planet Bajor following the end of the Cardassians’ invasion, conquest, and decades-long and horrific occupation of the planet, which only ended after years upon years of brutal guerilla tactics on the part of the agrarian, technologically less advanced Bajorians that scarred their entire culture and civilization in ways we never quite see them recover from. By season 3, the Cardassians have allied with another major antagonistic power and plunged the galaxy into a terrible war the likes of which hasn’t been seen in 100 years or more. It should be no surprise that Garak, a former member of the Cardassian secret police, isn’t exactly the most popular of exiles, for all that he is an ally of the Federation and actively working with Starfleet to defeat his own people in the war. He knows his people have lost a great deal of their culture and the things that made them great as the fascist military gradually took over more and more of society, and wants to see his people redeemed and returned to their former glory as a compassionate, enlightened species–even if that means helping the Federation blast the more aggressive, morally bankrupt elements of his society into gravel. Needless to say, he’s a very complex character.

I could go on for pages and pages about both of these characters, but the point is that they’re both non-Federation outsiders who come from very different cultures and are able and more than willing to see the flaws and merits of Federation society with a clarity that those having lived in it all their lives cannot. This is one of the reasons they’re both considered among the most interesting characters in the entire series–and arguably the franchise.

The second big element working here that I love, aside from the characters, is the metaphor they use to critique (and in the end, grudgingly complement) the Federation. Out of all the possible metaphors you could imagine coming up between a grumpy, likable-in-spite-of-himself super-capitalist and a former high level member of the space Stasi who got kicked out after finding his conscience, what do they choose?

Root beer.

And it works so wonderfully well to explain the ethos of the Federation and Starfleet because as much as it tries to be insulting, it can’t help but be complementary. Yeah, the Federation isn’t perfect, but you can’t help but like it and want it to succeed because it aims so high.

Watch.