January Meme: Ezri Dax

[selenak]

Considering Jadzia Dax was one of my favourite characters on DS9, I wasn’t happy when she died. (And that’s leaving aside the manner of her death.) But I liked Ezri as well, and appreciated the writers tried to make her recognizably Dax yet different, her own person. (Not just visually, by casting the tiny Nicole DeBoers.)

In fact, DS9’s seventh season spent considerable screen time on Ezri Dax, more so, arguably, than on Jadzia in her last two seasons, which is why fannish rumor had it at the time Terry Farrell supposedly said that if they’d given her that many episodes she wouldn’t have left. Be that as it may, a great many of the Ezri-related plots were about establishing and fleshing out the character, which wouldn’t have been necessary for Jadzia. Otoh, we also got Ezri-related stuff that the show could have told us about Jadzia but didn’t, to wit, her pre-symbiosis background. (With Jadzia, her relatives were mentioned in dialogue with a line or two, and she said she was a very serious, shy girl pre-Symbiont, but that was it.) In the episode Prodigal Daughter, we meet Ezri Tigan’s family. It happens to be an episode with which I developed issues upon rewatching it some years ago when I did research for my first DS9 story featuring Ezri, and I’ll get to them in a moment, but what’s undeniably true is that it offered us our first look at a Trill family. And one that isn’t interested in symbionts, as opposed to every other Trill character on DS9. Making Ezri the new Dax simply because of an accident of fate – the symbiont needed to be bonded, and she was the only Trill on board the ship carrying it back to the home world – had created a difference to all the other Dax carriers from the get go, and thus it made sense to show us what life Ezri had had before that.

The episode itself goes for a noir story with a touch of Tennessee Williams – a crime (or several) has been committed, it turns out various members of the Tigan family are involved, and the family itself consists of the classic set up of dutiful business involved older son, artistic, emotionally volatile younger son, and domineering mother. My big problem upon rewatching was that the episode as well as Ezri ended up blaming the mother, the sole person who turned out to be innocent of the crimes in question, for her sons committing them, because of her being domineering. Sure, Ezri also blamed herself for not returning sooner and thus robbing her younger brother of emotional support. You know who does not get blamed? The two brothers, who actually committed the crime. Bah. I suspect the scriptwriters got the wrong lesson from Psycho if they think having a domineering mother inevitably makes one a killer. That Ezri is a counsellor by profession and goes the „blame the mother“ route adds insult to injury, though.

Otoh, Ezri deeply disliking her mother and parting from her without reconciliation is in a way an original departure from all the other parent/child relationships Star Trek gives us. (The Siskos are the notable exception in having love and harmony through three generations – Joseph, Ben and Jake. Everyone else has in various degrees dysfunctionality. And even the Siskos turn out to have rape by Prophet in Ben’s biological background. No, I’ll never let that go.) All the other regulars at odds with their parents tend to reconcile with them by the end of the tale featuring the parent in question, or at least achieve a truce/peace with their memory. That Ezri doesn’t provides us with a counterpoint to her basically cheerful, eager-to-make-friends personality. She doesn’t want to please at all costs. This also fits with her voicing her perspective on the state of the Klingon Empire and Klingon society to Worf (specifically, the decay) in a way Jadzia wouldn’t have, both because Jadzia and Curzon were enamored with all things Klingon (as Ezri is not) and because Jadzia would not have wanted to hurt Worf.

Speaking of Worf: Ezri coming to terms with that relationship and them having a one night stand leading to the mutual conclusion that they’re not in love, as Worf and Jadzia were, but can be friends now was something that worked for me in a way the last minute hook up with Julian Bashir did not. The only preparation the show gave us was to let Ezri say early in the season „if Worf hadn’t come, it would have been you“ re: Jadzia and Julian, and sorry, but that’s not enough. (Leaving aside that I doubt this on a Watsonian level, whatever the Doylist intentions of the show writers were. Yes, Bashir crushed on Dax from the get go, but she never gave the impression of being more than amused by this, and by the time Worf showed up in s4, even Bashir’s crush was over.) Though I can fanwank it as Ezri wanting to try out the road not taken, same for Bashir, and predict it won’t last long.

Let’s see, what else: considering Ezri solves crimes more than once this season, I wish the show would have let her abandon the counsellor business for good and become the station’s P.I., especially since a) Ezri’s counselling efforts as shown on screen are less than inspiring (with Nog, a hologramm turns out to be more efficient, and with Garak, it’s more about Ezri getting her confidence to stay on the station), and b) with Odo departing, the station could be in need of one…


The other days

Comments

[zulu]

I like these thoughts.

I actually was so devastated when Farrell left that I stopped watching before the last season. And you could hardly pay me to miss DS9 before that.

Someday I'll do a full rewatch and see then, I expect!

[selenak]

S7 has its flaws (one of my least favourite things happens right at the start, and no, it doesn't have anything to do with Dax), but it also has good stuff, and thus I would not want to miss it.

[ffutures]

It's possibly telling that the first DS9 story I wrote was (almost as an after-thought) a fix-it to keep Jadzia alive, and the second (and so far last) was a fix-it for Ezri to hook her up with Bashir anyway. If I ever write more in that universe it's going to be a fix-it for Voyager - I have the first scene written, involving the discovery of a giant (2 km tall) woman on a surfboard waiting for a supernova to explode, after that it it'll get silly if I can ever get the damn thing finished.

[jesuswasbatman]

I remember Ezri the same way as I do Fred Burkle, which may be unfair to her - a potentially interesting character let down by the fact that the writers couldn't come up with anything to do with her except ship-based arcs.

[selenak]

Well, they also let her fight crime. :) (No, but really: in addition to "Prodigal Daughter" where she finds out what her brothers did, Ezri also unmasks a crazy Vulcan serial killer in the episode where she has to consult her own inner killer (aka the suppressed Dax carrier), Joran.) Though it's definitely true that her main arc through the show, in as much as she had one, was figuring out her relationship with Worf, with the Bashir romance thrown in at the proverbial last second.

[zahrawithaz.livejournal.com]

Speaking of Worf: Ezri coming to terms with that relationship and them having a one night stand leading to the mutual conclusion that they’re not in love, as Worf and Jadzia were, but can be friends now was something that worked for me in a way the last minute hook up with Julian Bashir did not. The only preparation the show gave us was to let Ezri say early in the season „if Worf hadn’t come, it would have been you“ re: Jadzia and Julian, and sorry, but that’s not enough. (Leaving aside that I doubt this on a Watsonian level, whatever the Doylist intentions of the show writers were. Yes, Bashir crushed on Dax from the get go, but she never gave the impression of being more than amused by this, and by the time Worf showed up in s4, even Bashir’s crush was over.) Though I can fanwank it as Ezri wanting to try out the road not taken, same for Bashir, and predict it won’t last long.

Amen. I could believe that Bashir might have his old feelings awakened by Ezri, but Jadzia really wasn't into him, and the writers putting wank in Ezri's mouth did not fix that. Plus, the Bashir who was crushing on Jadzia was uncomfortably stalker-like, and bringing that up again after he had progressed as a character was not a good look. (Another way of saying this is that the show tried to transpose the actual relationship Jadzia had with Quark—I know he has a crush on me, and I might even return it, but nothing's going to happen in this lifetime—to Bashir. It didn't work.)

I also liked Ezri a lot, though after experiences in other fandoms I am more sympathetic to the basic problem of introducing new characters late in the series arc, and then spending a lot of time establishing them, which takes time from the characters in which the audience is already invested.

Ezri also suffers from one of the classic DS9 problems, whereby female characters are defined primarily in contrast with each other (see early Jadzia, who primarily exists as the anti-Kira until the writers figure out how else to flesh her out). It makes a lot more sense in Ezri's case, but still. She's also aggressively coded as feminine—girly even—and young. This is a lot of why I like her, personally, but given that setup, it's really unfortunate that the show both makes her incompetent in her chosen profession and centers her arc on romance.

But still, her re-meeting Sisko and getting him out of his funk has got to be my favorite moment in that otherwise troubling arc. I definitely cheered when I watched it. And I really wish we had gotten to see her grow into the realization that she was meant to be a PI or security officer!

[selenak]

But still, her re-meeting Sisko and getting him out of his funk has got to be my favorite moment in that otherwise troubling arc.

Same here! That's the one scene I want to rewatch in that arc, otherwise I skip the Sisko scenes in the s7 opening episodes and only watch the station scenes.

Early Jadzia: in the writers' defense, I recall the publicity around DS9's launch describing her as someone "like Spock", so that, rather than "not!Kira" seems to have been what they were going for in the first season, until s2 had them try another approach.