I’m currently watching the episode of Deep Space Nine wherein Jadzia meets an old wife of hers from a previous host. (They’re both in new bodies) In it, it is explicitly stated that reassociating with her would be taboo and that it can lead to excommunication due to the whole idea of being joined is about experiencing new things, not reliving old ones.
I can understand the reasoning in this to a point but it got me to wondering… if reassociation with past loved ones is such a taboo, then why is it okay for Dax to be friends with Sisko when Sisko was first friends with Curzon? Shouldn’t the rules of reassociation apply to all friends and family and not just to other joined Trill?
I think the rule was about re-kindling romantic relationships, not any and all relationships. Otherwise, everybody would have to come up with a whole new group of friends every sixty years or so, and where’s the fun in that?
Of course, this begs the question of the original Trill episode in STNG, when the Trill tried to put the moves on the doctor after getting transplanted from Ryker into a woman’s body, but the writers felt it would be way cooler to have Doctor Crusher get all homophobic, and besides, they hadn’t thought of this rule yet.
The reason that Jadzia Dax can associate with Sisko (and the reason Jadzia can go on the blood revenge feud quest thing with the Three Old Klingons Who Grew Foreheads) is that the writers didn’t think about it. It’s a mistake if you’re charitable, a bad plot device if you’re not.
I just started re-watching DS9 recently, and have so far made it to the start of second season. It’s occured to me a couple of times that the whole trill thing was pretty poorly mapped out, as far as any kind of guidelines for the writers were concerned. The portrayal of Dax is full of contradicitons like the one mentioned in the OP. You can justify some, dismiss others as simple continuity errors and put others down to bad writing for an individual script, but taken together they portray a pretty patchy image of the dual race.
Most recently, in the three-parter that starts of second season, Dax and Kira are flying a junky old Bajoran fighter ship, and Dax is freaked because the controls are decades out of date. But isn’t ‘Dax’ 300 years old? What’s a few decades when your a few centuries? In fact, just a couple of episodes before the end of first season, Bashir mentions that Dax has 300 years experience.
If you compare the tech of TOS and DS9, there’s a certain reason to freak out–if you’ve been flying DS9’s shuttles, and then they want you to fly a combat mission in the Galileo 7… yikes.
300 years of experience won’t do you much good if your most recent starship-flying experience was a lifetime or two ago. I don’t know if it’s ever mentioned whether Kurzon Dax was a pilot, but it’s clear that Jadzia at least had to go through Stafleet Academy.
If you remembered, or rather, shared, the ability to pilot with the symbiot you could probably use the other guy’s Microsoft Certification and not have to go to school or be tested.
The episode didn’t say anything about the relationships having to be romantic and it wouldn’t make sense for it to apply only in those circumstances since a friendship can be just as intense as a romantic relationship too.
I’m well aware that it was due to writer error and was looking for some sort of justification within the series itself to explain as I’m sure you’re well aware. Was there a point in this other than pedantry?
I disagree. I think it had to do with past romantic relationships which couldn’t socially exist after a change of hosts.
I’ll shoot my Wife’s lovers, but not her friends.
