#joran dax

[out-of-context-ds9]

[vulcanlovetriangles]

Small handful of minor characters I'm either writing or want to write fanfiction about:

[startrekvsfaceapp]

[best-star-trek-character]

[sluttyquarantinetheory]

Deep Space 9 makes such a big deal about Joran having killed 3 people. But it does not want to discuss the fact that Curzon, Jadzia, and Ezri were all active duty soldiers.

[sshbpodcast]

Episode 169: Business Sense and Nonsense

DS9: "The House of Quark" and "Equilibrium"

Schemes are afoot this week on DS9, of wildly varying quality! First up, Quark finds himself embroiled in Klingon political scheming after an accident at the bar, but his acumen may be more useful than warrior ways in "The House of Quark"! After that, the Trill confuse everyone with a weird plot and ill-defined details and maybe it should've just been a circus instead in "Equilibrium"!

Also this week: forgetting the B plot, a karate lesson, and +6 to charisma!

Timestamps: "The House of Quark", 00:49; "Equilibrium", 38:35

[paulgadzikowski]

OP did you ever watch farscape

Ezri is a lot more fun when she has an imaginary murder friend. I wish she kept him around to randomly comment.

[filmjunky-99]

s t a r t r e k d e e p s p a c e n i n e created by rick berman, michael piller [equilibrium, s3ep4]

'You're a part of me.' - jadzia

[mylittleredgirl]

unpopular opinion but i really enjoy "field of fire," the ezri dax "to catch a serial killer" episode. for all the scenery chewing and deep space nine's continued vulcan smear campaign, i'm not going to pretend it's objectively the best of the ezri a-plot episodes, but it's my favorite for what it reveals about her.

jadzia was emotional, headstrong, and sometimes impulsive (as was curzon), but ezri is reckless.

of course she is! she's young! she's unqualified for everything that has happened to her, and honestly, so are all her peers. she ran away from a fucked-up home to starfleet at a time when, as we saw with nog, they're field-promoting cadets at top speed to fill the ranks as starfleet suffers massive war casualties. she's more or less the same generation as the red squad cadets on the valiant who decided to fight the dominion war by themselves behind enemy lines.

and she wouldn't be ezri dax otherwise. the reveal in "equilibrium" is a secret known only the symbiosis commission and the starfleet offiers who were physically in the room. to the medical staff on the destiny and ezri tigan herself, the odds of rejection from an improper trill joining are overwhelmingly likely and fatal. but ezri still volunteers to join with dax! she's probably going to die in this uniform anyway, right?

jadzia was a focused, rule-following, straight-a student before she met the party worm, and it took dax a season or two to loosen her up, but ezri was probably already unhinged.

so of course she's the one who decides to take her inner murderer off the leash at the slightest provocation. sisko asks her to help odo out, and ezri somehow interprets this as feeling like she's solely responsible for finding the killer when she only took one class at the academy in forensic psychology and didn't even like it. odo and o'brien are continuing their own investigation off-screen the whole time! meanwhile, she probably had to look up the trill emergence ritual in a book. she has not read the fine print on ANY of this.

and she sticks with this crazy plan, even when it becomes clear that she's right on the edge of becoming a danger to society. but ezri's whole starfleet career, maybe her whole young life of ignoring and plotting her escape from her emotionally abusive family, certainly her whole joined experience, has been lived right on the edge.

all the scenes she has with joran in and around quark's bar to me are her technique for staying grounded in reality. they often happen after joran pushes her too far, so she uses being public as a distraction from that one-on-one intensity—even though it means she looks insane and everyone's staring at her. even joran is like ".... shouldn't you have told sisko about me?" she is full in dax stubbornness on this deeply dubious plan.

and it works!! and in the final account, i think she liked it a little: the power of playing a killer, the power of being stronger than joran, and the soft ending she has with him during reintegration.

her symbiont, her whole life on the station, her friends, her romantic interests, they were all jadzia's first, but jadzia was afraid of joran and would never have played this game. in this one way, ezri has a closer relationship to her unearned symbiont than jadzia did.

ezri's beta canon trajectory of switching to a command track is okay, but it makes me sad to think she'd ditch her chosen career entirely. i could see her getting into criminal psychology. her brother's a murderer (she hasn't unpacked that AT ALL), one of her past hosts was a murderer... with that backstory, she'd do numbers in a federation law & order procedural series. i'd watch it.

but honestly, in the federation spirit of rehabilitation, she might be uniquely qualified to treat violent criminals as well, rather than hunting them down. she could reach in and heal that part of herself and then use that experience to reach others.

[foone]

Trill (from Star Trek) who gives their gender as a fraction.

Ezri Dax: I'm 5/8ths a woman. Well, 5/9ths if you count Joran.

[autisticburnham]

They just hate to see a girlboss winning (summoning an actual serial killer through a seance so that he can advise her as she edges closer and closer to a mental breakdown)

People arguing Ezri is the most morally flawed ds9 character are talking about her like she has the serial killer gene from Riverdale

[vulcanlovetriangles]

For whatever reason I always imagine his voice would be deeper.

Also I've contemplated writing some fanfic about him.

[startrekvsfaceapp]

[lostyesterday]

Verad was the one who resented not being chosen as a host by the Symbiosis Commission so much that he took over Deep Space Nine and forced Jadzia to give the Dax symbiont to him before he was overpowered and the symbiont was returned to Jadzia.

Joran was the musician who was joined with Dax after Torias died suddenly. Joran went on to murder several people. The Trill government covered up the entire incident and blocked Joran from Dax’s memory, but the memories eventually resurfaced.

Yedrin was Jadzia’s descendant in the alternate timeline in Children of Time caused by Jadzia’s mistake in leading the Defiant to the planet where they were all pulled back in time. Yedrin tried to trick the crew of the Defiant into recreating the conditions of the accident in order to make sure his colony survived. Yedrin was erased from time with that entire timeline.

[thethirdromana]

I rewatched Facets recently, and there's the bit where Joran is taunting Jadzia:

Dax: You don't know anything about me. Joran: Only what I can see. A little girl not worthy of the noble creature nestled inside her. You're overwhelmed by it. You're in over your head. 

He's being gratuitously cruel. But in terms of the specific statement that Jadzia is overwhelmed by being joined to Dax... is he wrong?

Deep Space Nine shows us very little of who Jadzia was before she was Dax. We're told she was shy, quiet, hardworking and driven. Being joined seems to have been her main goal in life.

Being hardworking and driven remain parts of her personality. But a huge amount of the rest of what makes up Jadzia Dax seems to be much more Dax than Jadzia. The party animal stuff is Curzon, via Dax. The enthusiasm for Klingon life is Curzon, via Dax. Facets shows us that she's taken on Lela's way of standing, Tobin's mathematical challenges, and Torias' attitude to living life to the full. She falls in love with Torias' wife. We see her spending time with plenty of Curzon's friends, but I don't think we ever meet anyone who was a friend of Jadzia's before she was joined.

I think this is interesting in particular in the context of the reunification taboo. The idea is that the taboo exists so that the symbiont can have a diverse range of experiences, but the desire for a previous host's lover must - by definition! - come from the symbiont themselves, not from the host. The reunification taboo is essentially a requirement for the host to overrule the symbiont's wishes, for the symbiont's own benefit. And the only reason why that would need to exist as a taboo is if this is a likely problem.

So what does it actually mean for a symbiont to be given to an unsuitable host? I think Deep Space Nine gives us two examples. One is someone like Joran or Verad, who aren't morally worthy of the honour. Two is someone like Ezri, who is overwhelmed by getting a symbiont, and struggles to retain a sense of her own personality.

And in that respect... Jadzia doesn't actually seem that different to Ezri. They both pick up the former hosts' love interests and old friends. Personality-wise, Ezri perhaps manages better than Jadzia to maintain her own sense of identity.

(There are lots of Doylist reasons why they're written this way, e.g. Jadzia being introduced as Dax but Ezri then needing to be introduced as Ezri, but I'm really interested in focusing on the Watsonian take right now).

I wish Facets might have explored this as a reason why Curzon washed Jadzia out of the programme, instead of the gross storyline about how Curzon's love for Jadzia caused him to destroy her future, for which he gets forgiven much, much too easily. And it might have been an opportunity to get to know Jadzia a little better, not just Dax.