I had a dream paramount released a bunch of deleted scenes from ds9 and one of them was garak finding Milas body and it was cut because garak said “dude…”

Art

Me, very vocally, at my television screen when Enabran Tain threatens to hurt Mila in TDIC

MILA!!!!!! 💥💥💥

Round One, Bracket Six

Propaganda under the cut!

Mila Garak:

While she's definitely not a deadbeat mom in the lazy sense, she did kind of, proverbially speaking, leave her son out in the cold... She lied about who his real father was well into his adult life, while also imposing said father's wishes on him. She wanted what she thought would be a better life for him, a chance at upward mobility, but placed him under the thumb of an abusive man to get there and then didn't stand up for him. She roped her brother into helping raise the kid as a cover story. She retired alongside the father and didn't really do much during or after her son facing exile at his mercy. I don't think she's an unsympathetic character and I find her extremely compelling, but I also don't think anyone can claim she was a great mom 😭

Extra notes: Diversity win this ruthless woman is an alien scalie with cool hair and big boobs

Martha Wayne:

she died ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ and that's enough for this fandom to render the loml janet drake abusive so... failmom martha is therefore hilarious to me. martha wayne failed at being bruces mom by dying and that's why hes batman. and they're literally rich so she was probably an absent mother too (SILLY i stand by it tho if janets a bad mom so is martha). but its ok because shes hot

Extra notes: this is mostly for the bit but you should still include her in the polls its not like she's going to win im just being petty 😭

Thinking about perceptions of Mila again

Yes, we are told she is his housekeeper and it's implied Mila keeps his secrets and possibly has dispatched a few people or done Obsidian Order dirty work. But that doesn't mean only one of these things is true.

Is the implication of her being a bad cook and not cleaning the basement that she isn't a domestic worker? Or is it an indication of both her and Tain’s status? Tain is the head of one if 3 branches of government. His housekeeper is probably the boss of a bunch of other servants- not the one doing the cleaning, the one keeping track of the affairs of the house, hiring and firing servants, maybe personally waiting on his needs and his alone, things like that. A man like that probably has a separate cooking staff. Tolan probably isn't his head gardener and might not even work for Tain much at all, Tolan is a government contracted worker that takes charge of the upkeep of a specific section of Kardasi'or, including grounds management and sanitation.

Isn't it more interesting that Garak's class dynamic is, yes, service class, but specifically the kind of servants privileged enough to be in charge of other servants? To live in close proximity to the man they work for? Is it not a parallel to Garak himself as an Order agent of his background- of and above the people, with more in common than them than many other Order members in some ways but no ability to connect to them? Does it not tie into his early Season 7 breakdown- he is doing something for the good of Cardassia, but must harm other Cardassians to achieve it- how long has that guilt eaten at him? Was it the fact that he was doing it again after years of civilian life and on behalf of the Federation that finally made that break within him? Is it not characteristic of his alienation and how he loves Cardassia but we almost never see him in the show get along with other Cardassians? Its a position that privileges him- he never went hungry except as a punishment, he always had a place to sleep and clean clothes because otherwise it would reflect badly on his parents employer, he literally got into a prestigious school his class would otherwise bar him from- and it also is easily a position of isolation and harm long before he goes to Bamarren. Tain gets access to abuse him because of the positionality of his mother being such a close servant- and if she wasn't the housekeeper before, Tain would have put her in this position specifically to have access to Garak without it arousing suspicion. Garak himself never questions why Tain is allowed to punish him before he knows the true nature of their relationship. And I'm not even bringing up my favorite subject of Cardassian racial/ethnic politics.

And for personal extrapolation and yes more ASIT stuff; what would it say about Mila's determination for Garak to submit to his fate if she occupied the role officially as Tain’s servant, but also did the work off the books of handling certain things for the Order? Induction into the Order is explicitly an opportunity for service class people to attain status, power, and wealth. Doing the work of that on top of the legitimately very difficult work of maintaining a household- possibly MULTIPLE HOUSEHOLDS, Tain has three residences mentioned in the show, and not having the opportunity to rise above anything more than a favored servant, for a woman like Mila, is an open wound.

mila moment

so have people talked before about how being a cougar is apparently a hereditary trait in the Garak family lineage or

Mila Garak on the dome forever

Headcanon that Mila was not a housekeeper in the usual sense, but rather a housekeeper in the John le Carré spy jargon sense.

Fact 1: Mila can’t cook.

Evidence: She says herself that she is not much of a cook in ‘The Dogs of War.’ Also, Garak wouldn’t eat her food in ‘What You Leave Behind.’

Fact 2: Mila doesn’t clean.

Evidence: Of the messy basement in Tain’s house where she lives, she says “This place hasn't been cleaned in years” (’The Dogs of War’) rather than something more like “I haven’t cleaned this place in years.”

Fact 3: Mila is consistently referred to as Tain’s housekeeper (and confidant) in ‘Improbable Cause,’ ‘The Die is Cast,’ and ‘The Dogs of War.’ So she is definitely a housekeeper - unless, of course, that is just her preferred cover story and she’s really the Obsidian Order’s top sniper or something. Which is also a VERY good headcanon, but for the moment let’s just go for the simplest explanation.

In le Carré’s novels, the housekeepers are a department of the British intelligence service, and they are in charge of the financial aspects of espionage as well as internal affairs within the service. (I’m going off of the definition given on the jargon section of the Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy wikipedia article, as well as my memories of a handful of his works, but feel free to correct me on this definition if you think I’ve missed some nuance.)

So basically, Mila doesn’t clean... except for organizing and orchestrating all of the OO's cleanup and coverup operations. She can’t cook... but she can cook the books when money has to flow clandestinely from one shady source to another. She can’t sew either (Garak definitely doesn’t get it from her)... unless it is to sew someone's lips shut with blackmail material or to patch holes in an agent's cover stories.

Thanks for coming to my TED talk! ^_^

Talked about this in an ao3 comment so I’m repeating myself, but I always interpreted Mila’s rant to Garak in A Stitch In Time about assimilating into Cardassian society as very telling about what the nature of her relationship with Tain might be like.

Tw: sexual assault and a whole lot of internalized racism

After Garak returns from Bamarren, he’s being forced into the Obsidian Order and Mila is the one to walk him to their headquarters. She tells him “Understand, Elim-you are being given the opportunity to move above the service class.” The opportunity here is emphasized again and again in this scene.

When Garak tries to contradict her implication that the service class isn’t valuable or desirable, she becomes furious, speaking with a passion we haven’t seen her express ever before and don’t see expressed again. I just want to highlight the exact passage I find most important.

"Listen to me!" she said with a passion that startled me. "You are my son and you are a Cardassian. Not a Hebitian. Look around you!" she commanded. I did. We were in the great public area which is surrounded by the buildings that house the power of the Union.

"Hebitians did not build this. Cardassians did. Your father and I serve and maintain, but we do not influence or guide the destiny of the Union. You could. That's why you must submit right now! Do you understand me, Elim? Once we walk through that door," she indicated the one that led to the subterranean levels of the Assembly building-to the Obsidian Order-"you must submit to your fate."

Mila is a Hebitian woman and yet she obviously rejects that heritage and culture. She’s directly juxtaposed with her brother, Tolan, who is desperately trying to keep his identity alive. Meanwhile, Mila assimilates as much as she can. She demands Garak do the exact same. She glorifies the acts of Cardassians (in this case I’m using “Cardassian” to mean non-Hebitians). Most importantly, she tells Elim to submit, submit, submit. Whatever is about to happen to him, it’s going to elevate him from service class and Hebitian to upper class and Cardassian, the dominant and powerful racial category in their society. The message is obvious. The best thing a Hebitian can do is assimilate and submit to Cardassians.

I always saw this scene as a sort of extension of her relationship with Tain, or what it could be like. Her dialogue here obviously reads as her projecting onto Garak in some way, that’s very clear. She’s telling him to submit to the Order, yes, and the racial and class divide of their society, but more importantly, to Tain and his whims. After all, he’s the one at the very core of Garak being forced into the Order. And Tain very much represents this racial hegemony of Cardassians. He’s directly contrasted with Mila, Garak’s other parent, he literally lives above her and her Hebitian family, he has a collection of ancient artifacts from other cultures collecting dust in his study like some kind of commodity.

Mila wants Garak to submit to the racial and class hierarchy by assimilating, just like she does. She also wants him to submit to Tain, because he and that hierarchy are the same. So then, can we assume she has also submitted to Tain?

We don’t know much about the relationship between Tain and Mila, and what we do know (her being his employee) doesn’t scream perfectly consensual. This interpretation makes that dubious consent a lot more dubious I know.

To me, this scene makes me view the relationship between the couple as Mila having more directly submitted to Tain by being his lover, because it’s an opportunity (there’s that word again) to have some kind of power, to be near that racial ideal, to be more than a mere Hebitian, and more importantly, because she simply won’t ever fight back against the racial and class hierarchy (Tain) she’s trapped in, unlike her brother. What Tain wants, Tain gets. What Cardassians want from Hebitians, they get, so why fight back? This is the only way to survive for Mila and it might just bring her some kind of power, no matter how small.

Their relationship is a sort of microcosm of how Mila navigates being Hebitian. Cardassians dominate her and she doesn’t fight back. And even if she cares about Tain (the way she talks about him in TDIC makes this likely to me), they both know she can never be his equal and she’ll always be expendable to him.

I hope this analysis and interpretation makes sense

do u think Garak is named after his mom. "Elim" is almost "Mila" backwards. what if it's considered disrespectful to take the exact name of an elder (like in Chinese culture) so names given in honor of someone r slightly altered, like by flipping it backwards. what if the change from "a" to "e" is to masculinize it. bc ofc Cardassian names r as strictly gendered as every other aspect of their society. what if names starting with "a" sound feminine to Cardassians in the same way names ending in "a" sound feminine to English speakers.