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…


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