Star Trek: 10 Things You Didn't Know About Garak
5. Garak's List
The Wire is one of the most important episodes for Garak's character growth and development. After two years of living in exile, a device implanted in his brain, one designed to flood him with endorphins, begins to break down. While the episode was analogous to the journey of a recovering addict, there was a much more direct influence on the script - a movie that had just been released, in fact.
Schindler's List had recently hit theatres, playing a big part in inspiring this story. Robert Hewitt Wolfe wrote the episode and recalled Ira Stephen Behr saying 'This guy is Schindler. He let the prisoners go.' Then, that would change. They would suggest that Garak was the 'Butcher of Budapest' and that he had, in fact, had the prisoners killed.
Wolfe said that the episode works because they simply kept adding lie upon lie, with no one of them coming out as the actual truth. The truth, in fact, was somewhere in the middle of all of them. Maybe he did let prisoners go? Maybe he sentenced them all to die? This was simply another mystery to this already mysterious man.