#what i wouldn't give for a flashback of ezri tigan pre-joining

[mylittleredgirl]

i'm thinking about ezri, and about trills, and specifically about how ezri gets the dax symbiont.

what we know is that she never wanted to be joined. she's not prepared. she's the only trill on the destiny, and en route to trill, the dax symbiont takes a turn for the worse and she becomes a host.

the thing is -- we know that while rejection is a real danger, there's still a better than 50% chance that any given trill is capable of safely being joined. but outside of us (the audience), the only people who know that are the symbiosis commission and the three people in the room in "equilibrium" where this news comes out: sisko, bashir, and dax. everybody else, including ezri and the destiny's medical staff, believes that only one trill in a thousand can be safely joined, and that an improper joining will result in the death of both the symbiont and the host.

starfleet officers routinely take on all kinds of dangers to save lives, even to save a single life, but those are absurdly bad odds. there is no way a starfleet doctor, or a starfleet captain, would order, coerce, or probably even ask a starfleet officer to take on that kind of risk, even if it's the only chance to save another being's life.

which means it was ezri's idea. which means ezri must have insisted, over the warnings and objections of the ship's chief medical officer, that she was willing to take the risk. which means that despite personally having no interest in being joined, ezri looked at a dying symbiont and felt it was her responsibility to try and protect its life at all costs, knowing she would most likely fail and die in the process.

which says something about the trill! no one in ezri's family is joined. for all we know, she didn't even grow up on trill, since her family now lives off-world. but joining must be such a significant factor in trill mythology, trill culture, trill life that she couldn't turn away from that, even in the face of all publicly available information and the fact that she doesn't actually want to be joined.

maybe there were other factors at play that mitigated some of the risk, like universal testing for young trill children that at least point to whether someone might be able to be a host, or the possibility they would make it to trill in time for the symbiont to be removed. but it seems like regardless, ensign ezri tigan made the choice to get on that operating table, knowing that more likely than not, she would die.

in one way, she does. in another, she gets the chance to live forever. in either case, joining isn't just something that happened to her. for all the challenges she faces in that first year, all the regrets and struggles and loss of herself, it was her very brave choice to do it. we know from jadzia that the most sacred obligation of a trill host is to ensure the survival of the symbiont, and ezri did that instinctively, without taking any oaths, without any training at all.