“Afterimage”
Written by Rene Echevarria
Directed by Les Landau
Season 7, Episode 3
Production episode 40510-553
Original air date: October 14, 1998
Stardate: unknown
Station log: Dax stands overlooking the Promenade, weirded out by how familiar this station that she’s never set foot in is. She then goes to the temple where Jadzia was killed, which weirds her out even more, and has an awkward conversation with Kira. She then goes to Quark’s, where she turns down Quark’s offer of bloodwine, even though it was Jadzia’s favorite. Dax comments that Sisko and Quark are the only people who aren’t uncomfortable around her. As if to accentuate the point, Worf walks in, sees Dax, and turns around and walks out again, looking incredibly constipated as he does.
Dax goes to see Sisko—coming via the side door so she wouldn’t have to go through Ops and see Worf—and reaffirms that she’s not going to stay on the station. Too many memories are there, and she’s better off returning to her post on the Destiny.
Garak’s claustrophobia is acting up. The crowds in Quark’s cause him to snap, and he has an episode while in his shop talking to Odo. Even the wide-open spaces of his shop are constricting, as is the infirmary. He also needs to take a break from his work for Starfleet Intelligence decrypting Cardassian communications, as the claustrophobia makes it impossible for him to concentrate.
Sisko needs Garak back at work for the war effort, so he conscripts Dax to work with him as a counselor. Dax’s protests that she’s an assistant counselor, still in training, falls on deaf ears, as she now has 300 years of experience to add to her training. Her first session with Garak doesn’t go all that well—talking about it just makes Garak ill, and she mostly just comes up with blindingly obvious causes without any kind of therapy at all. However, Sisko surprises Dax by informing her that Garak is back to decrypting, and surprises her again by offering her the post of station counselor, complete with promotion to junior-grade lieutenant. But she isn’t comfortable staying on the station, mostly because of Worf.
Garak locks himself in an airlock trying to open it out to space. Bashir, Dax, and one of Odo’s deputies manage to get him out. Dax then takes Garak to the holosuite, bringing him to a tranquil mountain to meditate. Garak is having trouble forgetting that there’s a holosuite wall just ten feet away, but he does try to use the program to ease his claustrophobia. It doesn’t work, so he goes back to the shop to sew. He also rejects Dax’s help, as she can’t even help herself or figure out who she is, so how is she supposed to help him?
Worf makes it clear to Dax that he wants nothing to do with her, and then to make matters worse, he threatens Bashir and Quark, making it clear that they should have nothing to do with her, either. Bashir sends a peace offering of bloodwine via O’Brien, who points out that Bashir being friendly to Ezri isn’t what’s dishonoring Jadzia’s memory, it’s Worf treating her like crap that’s dishonoring Jadzia’s memory.
Dax tenders her resignation to Sisko because she can’t do her job, and does so while wallowing in self-pity. Sisko’s response is to tear her a new one and say she doesn’t deserve the Dax symbiont or to wear her uniform. She then goes to Garak to apologize and say she’s leaving. Garak knew that the Destiny was about to arrive, but Dax says she isn’t reporting there, but resigning and returning to Trill—the Destiny, instead, is going to Kalandra with the Seventh Fleet, a battle plan enacted based on Garak’s intelligence.
Garak then starts ranting and raving, which finally gets at the truth: Garak has believed that he’s been helping Cardassia by fighting the Dominion, but in truth he’s betrayed Cardassia. Cardassian lives will be lost because of his work with Starfleet. Garak collapses, but she gets him to the infirmary. He’s going to get back to work, and thanks Dax for her help. Dax, meanwhile, has decided to stay in Starfleet—luckily, Sisko was just rattling her cage, and never submitted her resignation in the first place. But she won’t stay on DS9.
As she’s packing, Worf comes to her cabin and apologizes, and also says she shouldn’t decline the post of DS9’s counselor on his account. So she accepts and Sisko promotes her in a big ceremony in the wardroom.
The Sisko is of Bajor: Sisko is thrilled to learn from Dax that Worf is intimidated by him.
Don’t ask my opinion next time: Kira tries not to think about the fact that Jadzia was killed in the temple because otherwise she’d never be able to go there.
The slug in your belly: Dax tries standing on her head, because Emony did that to relax, but it just gives her a headache. She blames her space sickness on guilt over how Torias died, and we also learn that Tobin never disciplined his children and was a vegetarian.
There is no honor in being pummeled: Even though he’s gotten Jadzia into Sto-Vo-Kor, Worf is still in eighteen kinds of pain over her death, and treats Ezri like crap on her arrival. But he eventually comes around, even raising a mug in salute to her at her promotion.
Preservation of mass and energy is for wimps: Apparently during meals with Kira, Odo counts the number of times she chews. That’s probably not creepy.
Plain, simple: Garak is being used by Starfleet Intelligence to decrypt Cardassian communiqués, which makes sense, especially since he wrote a lot of the encryption protocols during his time in the Obsidian Order.
Rules of Acquisition: As far as Quark is concerned, Dax is Dax, only now he can’t possibly lose her to Worf, so he figures he has a do-over. At least, he thinks that until Worf threatens him…
What happens on the holosuite stays on the holosuite: Bashir, O’Brien, and Odo are planning to do a Davy Crockett scenario in the holosuite. O’Brien is Crockett (though Bashir offers Crockett to Garak in the hopes of getting costumes from him), Bashir is William Barret Travis, and Odo is General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna.
No sex, please, we’re Starfleet: Let’s see, Quark decides he’s going to go after Dax, Dax tells Bashir that Jadzia might have eventually gone for him if Worf hadn’t come along (which is a horrible thing to tell him, quite frankly), Jake thinks the new Dax is cute (prompting Sisko to say she’s 300 years too old for him), and Kira and Odo invite Dax to dinner while being all cute and couple-y. Quark also reports to the infirmary because his “tympanic tickle” led to an infection (Bashir starts to query Quark as to what, precisely, a tympanic tickle is, and then rather sensibly thinks better of it).
Oh, and Dax informs Worf that Jadzia loved him as much as he loved her, and Worf’s response is relief so great that he looks like he’s released a breath he’s been holding since she died.
Keep your ears open: “I want someone to help me get back to work. And you, my dear, are not up to this task. I mean, look at you—you’re pathetic. A confused child trying to live up to a legacy left by her predecessors. You’re not worthy of the name ‘Dax.’ I knew Jadzia. She was vital, alive. She owned herself, and you—you don’t even know who you are. How dare you presume to help me. You can’t even help yourself. Now, get out of here before I say something unkind.”
Garak criticizing Dax’s counseling techniques.
Welcome aboard: The only guest star this time ’round is Andrew J. Robinson as Garak.
Trivial matters: At the end of the episode, Dax is promoted to junior-grade lieutenant. This is the second time a Dax has been promoted on the show—Jadzia went from lieutenant to lieutenant commander between seasons three and four—and the fifth opening-credits regular to be advanced in rank, following Sisko in “The Adversary,” Bashir at the same time as Jadzia, and Kira prior to this season. (In addition, Nog was promoted from cadet to ensign in “Favor the Bold.”)
When O’Brien shows up with a bottle of bloodwine at Worf’s quarters, he says, “Not again.” O’Brien previously did that in “Image in the Sand,” when he got Worf drunk to find out that he wanted to get Jadzia into Sto-Vo-Kor.
Bashir tells Dax he’s surprised that Jadzia enjoyed Bashir’s flirting with her, even though she herself told Bashir that in “Starship Down.”
The Kalandra Sector where the Destiny is going to launch an offensive with the Seventh Fleet is the sector via which the Dominion conquered Betazed in “In the Pale Moonlight.” A major battle will occur there in “Once More Unto the Breach.”
The childhood incident mentioned by Garak when Enabran Tain locked him in a closet is dramatized in Andrew J. Robinson’s “autobiographical” Garak novel A Stitch in Time.
Walk with the Prophets: “These pronouns are going to drive me crazy.” This is almost a good episode. It certainly tries really hard, and starts out promising. Garak’s issues and Dax’s dovetail nicely—so much so that Dax even points it out in their first session—so it’s a natural fit.
But the resolution is a confused mess—very much like Ezri Dax, in fact. Her actual counseling work is simply horrendous, for reasons outlined very clearly by both Garak and Sisko. The fact that Garak was an emotional mess and Sisko was messing with her is irrelevant to the fact that they were both right. For starters, the notion that Garak had childhood trauma is pretty obvious given who his father was—and that’s something Dax would know, since I can’t imagine that Garak’s parentage remained a secret after “In Purgatgory’s Shadow”/“By Inferno’s Light.” So Dax treating it like some kind of major revelation that his claustrophobia has its origin in being raised by Enabran Tain doesn’t really speak all that well for her.
Garak’s catharsis itself is actually quite convincing—he’s collaborating with the enemy of his people, and for all that he’s fighting to save Cardassia, he’s doing so in such a way that will lead to the deaths of flipping great wodges of Cardassians. To make matters worse, he knows that Cardassian casualties will be even worse because the Dominion will insist that Cardassians give their lives in service to their new masters, and now Garak is facilitating that. He can only be a patriot by being a traitor, and it is eating him alive.
What isn’t convincing is Dax’s subsequent catharsis. Garak only stumbled into it because of an accident of how the conversation between her and Garak turned. It certainly wasn’t due to anything she did as a counselor. Now, to be fair, this kind of therapy isn’t instantaneous and would take many sessions, what Dax does are preliminary steps, but they’re halting ones that are sabotaged by her own adjustment to being joined. Sisko somehow convinces Starfleet Medical that becoming joined will make up for her incomplete training, and I’m wondering how the hell he convinced a single medical professional of that. (For what it’s worth, scripter Rene Echevarria has said that he was told by several therapists after the episode aired that what he wrote was hokum. Would that he had consulted one or two before writing the script…)
Also, Dax spends the entire episode explaining why it’s a bad idea for her to be reassigned to DS9, and nothing in the episode convinces me that she’s wrong. Sisko just seems to want to have a Dax around, which is understandable, but it’s a crappy reason to have her do a job that she’s demonstrated very little skill in so far, and the other reasons are never really addressed, especially the one about her being assigned to the same station as a previous host’s husband.
When I first watched this season a decade and a half ago, I absolutely hated Ezri Dax as a character. I was pissed at Terry Farrell’s departure, and found the attempts to sledgehammer this new Dax into the ensemble to be lame at best. Since then, I’ve actually written the character a couple of times—once in a novel taking place a year after this episode, another taking place several years later when Dax is the captain of the U.S.S. Aventine—and I’m a bit more predisposed to the character, but I’m finding that that’s mostly due to the work that fiction writers like me, S.D. Perry, David Mack, Andy Mangels & Michael A. Martin, and others have done in the prose fiction moving her past where she was in this season. But in the seventh season itself, Dax is a mess and one that still feels as unwelcome as Worf says she is at the top of the episode.
What we wind up with is a story constructed to bring us to a result that is preordained by virtue of Nicole deBoer’s place in the opening credits. Ultimately, though, Echevarria’s script does nothing to hide the strings of this particular manipulation.
Warp factor rating: 3
Keith R.A. DeCandido’s got a bunch of things due out in 2015, including the novels Mermaid Precinct, the fifth novel in his series of fantasy police procedurals, and Stargate SG-1: Kali’s Wrath; the short stories “Back in El Paso My Life Would be Worthless” in The X-Files Volume 1: The Truth is Out There, “Streets of Fire” in V-Wars Volume 3, and “Down to the Waterline” in Buzzy Mag Online; and the short story collection Without a License: The Fantastic Worlds of Keith R.A. DeCandido.
This is a wonderfully gleeful panning, and the pacing of the rewatch reads much like the pacing of the episode.
Of course, Echevarria threw modern psychological practice out the window because it served the Almighty Story. Sure, there are probably dozens of counselors Garak can call up on subspace, but let’s throw him in with poor Ezri, because it’ll be interesting!
I find it interesting that the Trill hosts seem to be altered – or expected to be altered – by receiving the symbiont. Ezri didn’t like bloodwine before, so why would getting the Dax symbiont make her like it? Was it Dax who liked bloodwine, or Jadzia? Can Dax change the host’s taste buds? Ditto for the headstand. Just because Emony liked it, why should Ezri like it? Curious…
Loving the picture of Worf mugging with the mug. Too bad duckface survived into the future…
I thought this episode was better than the review. One thing that has puzzled me over the TNG/DS9 series is how much slack Worf gets cut – his exploits as Enterprise Security Chief weren’t exactly stellar as Odo cheerfully points out in one episode. In this episode, he roughs up a fellow officer and threatens a civilian while being a general jackass. For that he gets a bottle of peace offering? Seems like an intimidating session with the Captain and a permanent note on his record would be more appropriate. That’s on top of the extended leaves-of-absence/resignations/reinstatements he’s gotten from both postings.
“Also, Dax spends the entire episode explaining why it’s a bad idea for her to be reassigned to DS9, and nothing in the episode convinces me that she’s wrong” – yes, THIS. This is exactly how I feel about this episode.
I also totally hated the ‘Jadzia was actually into Bashir all along’ thing too, OMG.
I can certainly see how suddenly getting access to all the previous hosts’ experiences, preferences, memories, etc can result in some adjustment, and maybe you’ll have some new positive or negative associations with things you never did before (and I think our tastes for food can be very much influenced by that). But it bothered me so much that Ezri seems to have no sense of self OUTSIDE of all that. What did SHE want and like?
Also, I find it a bit ridiculous that ‘300 years of experience’ is apparently a subsitute for actual training on how to be a counsellor.
Oh, and in that first session she had with Garak, at first I actually thought she was trying to be clever and talk about herself in an attempt to draw something out of Garak, but then I realized I was giving her a bit too much credit and she really was just talking about herself.
Yup. That pretty much sums up how I felt about Ezri (cute as a button though she may be). I never encountered her elsewhere and so my opinion has changed little over the years. The simple fact is she had no business on the station. She should have been sent back to Trill and given the counseling she needed to deal with her unprepared integration.
Her lack of preparation probably also answers most of MeredithP’s puzzlement @1. There’s no reason for any of those things, but Ezri doesn’t know that. She doesn’t know any more about joining than the mix of truth and rumor that circulates through Trill society. Somewhere she got the idea that being joined is supposed to make her like things that earlier hosts did.
I don’t really feel like digging into this one right now, and I suspect other people will mention all the things I would (that is, the ones that haven’t already been mentioned).
So in additon to the great disservices this episode does to the characters of Ezri, Jadzia, and Dax, and to Jadzia Dax’s relationship with Bashir, and in addition to being generally condescending towards the mental health profession and saying “if you’re old enough, anyonecan be a counselor because counselling is just handing out life advice to normally adjusted people when facing some problem,” this episode also does a disservice to Sisko by making him a horrible commanding officer. The only reason he wants her there is because he liked both Curzon and Jadzia Dax. There is absolutely no reason why she should be there. Also, the stupid mind games he played with her were probably more likely to backfire than help.
Oh, I remember what I was going to say.
I remember the scene in TNG when Troi loses her empathy, and Picard is saying something like when someone loses one sense, the others take over, and she just throws back, “That just shows that you don’t know wtf you are talking about.” (That’s paraphrased–they didn’t drop F bombs on TNG, in case you couldn’t tell).
That’s what Ezri should’ve done to Sisko when he started spouting off his “300 years of experience” nonsense. But she should’ve used the F bomb.
Personally wouldn’t have gone as low as a four, but mainly because Andrew J. Robinson elevates pretty much anything to at least a 5 merely by showing up. That and Sisko finding out that he intimidates Worf was a highlight.
As hard as Nicole DeBoer was trying (and she’s not a terrible actress), some of Ezri’s dialogue was so cringeworthy in the first few encounters with Garak that by the time of the “keep your ears open” dressing down, you AGREED with Garak. Totally ruined the character for me from then on, though the post finale novels have gone a ways to rectifying that.
Also, I’ve been reading this since it started and have just realised that I’ve picked a lame Ezri episode to crack my comment’s cherry. Oh well.
I agree that it isn’t the best episode. But I always interpreted Ben’s insistence on keeping Dax around as his opportunity to repay Dax/Curzon. Curzon helped Ben out when he was young and inexperienced, now Ben can provide the same help to Ezri by helping her through this difficult transition.
There are problems with this of course – why would Ben be better at helping Ezri than the Trill authorities and is it prudent for the commanding officer to promote an evidently under-qualified officer – but I hand-wave those away as best I can.
Am I the only one who really enjoyed this episode? Aside from the contrived way she stumbled across Garak’s reveal, I think this was a pretty solid character piece. Could it have been written differently? Sure, but it would require multiple episodes for it to be convincing, and there were only 23 episodes left….
We’re being introduced to a new character with one season left until the end. There’s no time to hide the strings. It has to be a blunt introductory episode.
Farrell’s exit may have been a bit of a mess, but I would never let that affect my disposition towards meeting a new character. I thought Nicole absolutely nailed the part. Made Dax a lot more interesting as well. Confused, uncertain. These are qualities I can get behind. It makes for a good contrast to Jadzia’s self-confidence.
There’s a particular scene I adore. The one where she tells Worf they used to be married. Nicole seemed to emulate Farrell’s intonation and mannerisms when she read that line. Very underrated actress with plenty of responsibility on her shoulders.
Overall, I really liked Ezri.
And I forgot to bring up point number two. They could have simply NOT introduced a replacement character. Either bump Aron Eisenberg’s Nog to main cast status or save some money by not hiring anyone. Go figure what Berman, Behr and Paramount were thinking on that end…
…Which leads to the question: why did they bother to go through all the trouble of casting a new role at all?
Regardless what that answer might be, I’m glad they chose to replace her with an interesting character, and I’m grateful we got something out of it, in the end.
It would have been nice had they found a better reason for Ezri Dax to remain on the station. Or if they had just let her be a good counselor from the very beginning instead of this mess. Have her be ambivalent about staying at first, but ultimately make it obvious to her that she belongs here without trashing her character’s skills. It’s very hard to make me dislike something featuring Nicole DeBoer, but this episode came close.
Jake’s line about Ezri being cute (which, I must say, is very accurate) has always gotten me thinking: how interesting would a Jake/Ezri relationship have been? 300 year old symboint notwithstanding, they’re roughly the same age, and I think it would be far more interesting than any of the angles they did explore. Think about it: on the one hand, she sees an attractive young man, on the other, she has Curzon’s memories of holding him as a baby and Jadzia’s of watching him grow up. It would also be hella awkward for (Captian) Sisko, watching one of his oldest friends date his son. Plus, it’d actually give Ciroc Loften something to actually do in season seven.
@12, they didn’t want Kira to be the only female main cast member.
Chubbs: I was originally going to go with a 2, but bumped it up to 3 because of Robinson.
Eduardo: As StrongDreams said, they didn’t want to have only one female character in the opening credits. Plus, honestly, Dax is built to be replaceable. It would be silly not to.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
I recall finding the therapy scenes very unconvincing as well. But whatever the episode’s flaws, I love Nicole de Boer. First off, she’s absolutely gorgeous, every bit as much as Terry Farrell, but in a delightfully different, far more adorable way. More importantly, she’s enormously charming and lovable and a good actress — perhaps even slightly better than Farrell, or at least more natural. I’m just happy to have her around, even though I wish she’d gotten better focus stories.
But you’ve got to like Garaks line:
“get out of here before I say something unkind”
Ya gotta feel sorry for Ezri. She’s half trained and she knows it, she’s also in dire need of therapy herself on account of not having had the massive amount of mental prep that receiving a symbiot entails, and knows that too. She’s completely unsure, partly because she is just young and partly because of all these issues walking around her, and as much as she knows DS9 is the absolute worst place she can be, Sisko bullies her into staying. And it is all made worse because while Sisko wants Dax around, he doesn’t give a flying photon about Ezri. He just needs whatever is tucked away in the symbiot.
Then there is Worf and his uncertainty and inferiority complex… Yeesh. Is there anywhere in the Alpha Quadrant more screwed up than DS9?
I recall Ben Sisko not being keen on the DS9 assignment in the premiere. He was dealing with the Wolf359 carnage, the loss of his wife, and those mysterious out-of-body experiences with the enigmatic wormhole aliens. Perhaps in addition to the self-serving desire to have 300 years of Dax around, he thought that Ezri – dealing with similar upheavals – could benefit from staying near the last people to know Jadzia and the rest. Not the perfect situation but not the worst.
I also liked the Ezri character and Deboer’s portrayal of her. It takes command presence to deal with Garak. I doubt Deanna Troi or any of the small number of counselors in the tv Trek universe would have come out any better. Reg Barclay he ain’t and Troi didn’t have much luck with him, either.
I love Ezri, but not, as it were, for this episode. This one has all the hallmarks of “cramming a new player into the game way too late.” Awkward and in your face and trying to do all the characterization. But, by the time she’s counseling Worf at the end of the year about his honor and the direction of the Klingon Empire, I’ve long since bought in.
@19 Good point about Troi. The only time she had any real success was when Data came to her to ask how to feel emotions in Descent. She advised him to try negative emotions, which led to Data turning evil and taking over the Enterprise again (or as it was known to Starfleet, Wedensday). I mean, good job Troi for getting him to feel emtions, minus five million for it leading him to turning evil and torturing his crewmates. Still, at least she was better at counselling than she was at driving…
Nothing Ezri does comes close to that, well except that time she turned into Dexter for an episode.
Wally Ballou & Random22: Actually, Troi did very well with Barclay, as he responded very well to her therapy, it just took a while. Episodes like this one notwithstanding, psychological problems can’t be overcome in the amount of time allotted to a 44-minute episode. It takes years.
Also what happened in “Descent” had absolutely nothing to do with Troi and everything to do with Crosus hitting Data with a whammy based on the emotion chip.
Troi had plenty of other good moments, ranging from “Skin of Evil” to “The Bonding.”
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
krad – I didn’t see that Ezri Dax solved all of her problems in this one episode. She just made a decision to stay on the station. As GarrettC mentioned, she grew enough in the one season to give Worf some no-nonsense advice towards the end of it.
I respectfully disagree about Troi helping Barclay. I thought that the Cytherian takeover did more for him than any counseling depicted on the show.
By the by (I don’t see a post edit feature) I am not a Troi/Sirtis naysayer. I thought “Face of the Enemy” was an excellent vehicle for both. Similary, in “Disaster” (I think) Troi was getting her buttons pushed by Ro Laren almost to the extent that Data was razzed by the anti-android XO in “Redemption”. By the end of that episode, she’d asserted herself quite nicely using all of her intrinsic talents and what she’d absorbed from the other command staff.
@24: If you register an account, you’ll be able to edit your posts, though not that one as it was made before you registered. Just for future reference – that’s why I created this account, actually.
Remember back in “Rejoined” when Lenara Khan was just visiting and Sisko tried to get Dax to take a vacation so as not to be tempted to reassociate? And this was his response to someone Dax hadn’t been married to in decades. Yet, he has no qualms with convincing her to come live on DS9 and work with Worf, whom she was just married to a few months prior.
I get it, plot device. It bugged me back in ’98 and it still bugs me now.
I met that Ezri solved Garak’s problems in a one-hour episode, which is absurd.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Ok, that’s fair. Kind of like Picard getting over the Borg takeover so quickly in ‘Family.’ Which also had that nice Troi moment in the the teaser where she counseled/tweaked Picard and briefly got past his famous reserve… “I hate it when you do that!”
Maybe it’s because I grew up in McLean VA, or maybe it’s because Andrew Robinson is so good in the role, but any episode with Garak is at least a 5 for me.
@wally, funny you should mention the Cytherian thing, because the point of the beginning of that episode is that he HAD come a long way: he went from being completely withdrawn in his holodeck fantasies to being in a play (however poor his performance was). The counseling was not necessarily “seen,” but the progress was seen across episodes.
@random22, as for her “bad driving,” I wouldn’t necessarily expect her to be skilled at piloting the saucer section of a Galaxy-class starship, which was already heavily battle damaged, when a stardrive section was exploding behind it in planetary orbit.
@30: Hear, hear. I’m so sick of the jokes about Troi’s “bad driving.” It’s playing on an old sexist stereotype and it’s deeply offensive. It’s also stupidly wrong. She was at the helm of a gigantic half-vehicle that was out of control and crashing, and she managed to bring it down essentially intact with “light” casualties (at most — the log entry didn’t specify whether the casualties were from the crash or the preceding battle). That’s actually an amazingly good job of piloting. She saved the lives of the entire damn crew.
I have no issue with Nicole DeBoer’s acting, or even with Ezri as a character being as unsure and un-integrated as she is. That all makes sense and could be interesting. But the totally contrived reason for her staying on the station (and I do get the impression that Sisko is thinking more about himself than Ezri here, even if he thinks he’s doing Ezri a favor) is what is so ridiculous here.
Also, if I were Ezri I’m not so sure I would want to stay – even the people that seem to really want here there want her there for the Jadzia part of her personality (or maybe the Curson, or Dax parts)…I think Random22@18 puts it perfectly when he says that nobody really cares about *Ezri* or the unique entity that is Ezri Dax – at least not at that point.
There’s just something about how Avery Brooks delivers “Why are you standing on your head?” that makes me laugh.
@29: wiredog, I’m at a total loss. I live very near to McLean, but I can’t figure out what it has to do with Garak. Help?
@34 I think Wiredog is referring to all the political folk, spies, ex-spies, and military people that have made McLean their home. You can probably find someone like Garak on every street corner there.
McLean VA, home of the CIA (I went to Langley High School, right down the road…)
These days the actual spies can’t afford to live here, but in the 70’s there were lots of locals who worked for “The Commerce Department” or “The Agricultural Department” or suchlike.
No tailors. That I know of.
@13, I always wanted to see a Jake/Ezri relationship! Their interactions were so brief, but I thought there was a rapport there. I grew to like Ezri very much and I always loved Jake, and the poor guy all but disappeared this last season. Plus, it would have prevented the whole Bashir/Dax relationship, which I find more unconvincing and irritating every time I rewatch.
This episode is why I came up with this quip on KRAD’s Facebook page: Ezri Dax is the counselor who was NOT telepathic, right? (That she has to remind a hologram–Vic–that she’s Nog’s counselor in “It’s Only a Paper Moon” doesn’t help her cause much either!)
#3 LisaMarie: Poor Bashir! I’m just curious why you wanted his crush on Judzia to be unrequited? Judzia was a strong character (imo) and, as Ezri says, “knew how to handle” Bashir’s flirtations. Why don’t you like that it was (at least somewhat) mutual? : )
@30 – I agree she’s not a “bad driver.” What always bothered me about the scene was that Riker commanded her to get them out of orbit when she first took the helm and she didn’t do it. The Enterprise wasn’t too disabled at that point and it didn’t look like it was trying to get out of orbit at all.
@35/36: Ah, it finally clicks, thank you both! I still occasionally go for walks where FBI agent Robert Hanssen dropped off his packages for the Russians, but that’s about the extent of my attention to the shadows around here. It’s amusing to picture Garak skulking around Tysons Galleria, though…
@39 – Because I think Bashir was immature and gross and creepy in those early episodes, mainly…at the risk of repeating myself to others who have had to suffer through my rants on previous episodes already, I tend to dislike the idea that women just want to be relentlessly pursued and ‘won over’, especially once they’ve established they are not interested. Or men (I’m talking to YOU, Berelain) for that matter.
So, I definitely dislike how the series has backpedaled on that in ways with the ‘she really liked it all along’ trope (which as somebody else pointed out, even happens in an episode where she was alive). Which, fine, I know some women do enjoy the chase and being flirted with and all that and Bashir wasn’t doing anything overtly sinister, but I think it was handled rather clumsily.
But, one of my favorite parts about Bashir’s overall development in the show is his ability to move past the crush and just be friends with Jadzia, without ulterior motives. So for them to suddenly go back to ‘everybody is in love with Jadzia’ stuff (in addition to the ‘Bashir is secretly hoping for the demise of her marriage’ stuff from some of the season 6 episodes) is just a step backwards. And then to add in ‘Oh, and Jadzia was also secretly in love with YOU’ implication. Blech. It’s one thing to say she enjoyed the flirtations, but I am pretty sure in this episode Ezri says that if it weren’t for Worf she actually would have married him or been with him.
And, yes, I know that kind of relationship does happen in real life – in fact, my husband and I were friends before I realized I was in love with him – but I don’t like the way the narrative handled it in this case. It’s like they just couldn’t comprehend of a male/female relationship that didn’t involve romance, sexual tension, etc.
@40. If it helps, Troi took the helm again in Nemesis where she managed to successfully follow orders in her maneuvering.
I’m with Edward Jencarelli: I really liked this episode. In fact, I really like Ezri Dax. I can look past the sledgehammering of her character into the ensemble because its the final season. I also totally disagree that Sisko wanted Dax around for himself. As someone said earlier, I think Sisko wanted to pay it forward with Ezri; help the young, inexperienced officer the way Curzon helped Sisko and how Sisko helped Worf find his way when Worf first came to Deep Space Nine.
I think an Ezri/Jake relationship would have made for very interesting storytelling. Maybe it works out, maybe it doesn’t, but exploring it would have been fun. Missed opportunities.
Watching the seventh season in earnest, the way I should have fifteen years ago, and had I known that Terry Farrell, for whatever reason, decided to leave right before the final season, I see I would have really liked Ezri. I love Jadzia, but Ezri is so relatable. She’s us, she’s anyone who’s still finding themselves, not totally sure of how to get there. My teen self would have loved her, loved her the same way I love the character of Reginald Barclay.
I think we’re all missing what’s really important here: Sisko’s office has a side door that doesn’t require going through Ops??!?
(OK, I guess I should have figured Dukat would have a secret escape hatch.)
* * *
KRAD does an admirable job summing up my frustrations when I first saw this episode. But since then, it’s mutated from “bad” to “forgettable,” which makes it better than some.
Admirable effort by Nicole. Some really enjoyable passing character moments by Brooks. But who really stole the show, IMO, is O’Brien. In an episode about counseling, he’s the most effective counselor, impressively using bloodwine and prior friendship to soften the blunt metaphorical blow to Worf’s gut that Worf needed.
I’ll admit that my biggest beef with Ezri is irrational anger that she’s a replacement for Jadzia. I also didn’t care for the fact that she gets promoted out of nepotism after all but completely botching counseling Garak. (I mean, when his problem is finally solved, it’s because he gets to the root of it while she happens to be standing there.)
And something I had never really noticed the first time I watched DS9, but once my girlfriend pointed it out I can’t stop noticing it — I feel like Nicole DeBoer overacts a bit, at least initially. Just a handful of cartoonishly exaggerated facial expressions, mostly. I feel like I might have been more sympathetic to how lonely and out of place she felt if she played it a little more subtly than “scrunch up my face into a giant mopey expression.”
-Andy
@39 Jadzia vs Judzia – I normally would not say anything about this type of thing…but Judzia immediately drew a mental picture of detention at Starfleet Academy where Judzia is vitimized by a badmiral played by Paul Gleason ala The Breakfast Club. But at least Judzia would find unlikely friends such as Ali Selki, Efrosio Estevez, Aenar Michael Hall, and T’Molly Ringwald.
@45: Yes, the side door has been part of the set from the beginning. In the opening scene of “Captive Pursuit” way back in early season 1, when the Dabo girl was complaining to Sisko about sexual harassment from Quark, we saw her leave by the side exit while Sisko went out into Ops.
@46: To be fair, it is a therapist’s job to guide a patient to figure out how to help themselves. The way it was depicted in the script was clumsy as hell, but the solutions are supposed to come from within rather than being handed to you by the therapist.
@48: Valid and fair point, sir, and definitely reflective of my own experiences with therapy. I guess I mostly take issue with Ezri having seemingly done little to actually guide Garak to where he ended up, but nonetheless patted herself on the back for it.
(But, like I said, take any criticism I have of Ezri with a grain of salt, because of my own irrationality.)
-Andy
@46: I don’t know that her scrunchy face should be called over acting. I feel like that’s just a part of Ezri’s personality. I feel like I could easily know people in real life who would scrunch their faces like that.
@49: Well, I’m just as irrationally biased in favor of Ezri because she’s so adorable and hot. So I’m in no position to judge.
@51: I am so glad somebody else said that, because I have been thinking it the entire thread. “Yeah…Ezri’s probably got issues…but man, she’s really cute.”
I would definitely agree with the general sentiment here about the episode, but there’s one thing that I think hasn’t been mentioned. Regardless of the way they shoehorned Ezri into staying on the station, the character adds a completely different energy into the mix which, even at this late stage of DS9, I found to be a welcome change.
I really felt like they were setting up a Jake/Ezri match too, which would have been fun to see Ben (and Worf) adjusting to.
@43 – Agreed!
Just some random observations:
1. If Garak rocked any harder, he’d be Kilimanjaro.
2. Garak’s description of Jadzia during his telling-off of Ezri is quite the nicest thing anyone on the series said about her. Made me wonder what his interactions with her were like and a quick binge-watch of certain episodes leads me to conclude she was the only Starfleet officer he never clashed with. At least, I can’t find any disparaging comments she made about him.
3. I thought Ezri was okay but wonder why they had to bring in another trill as opposed to introducing us to a renegade Romulan in another capacity. Didn’t surprise me she’d end up with Julian.
I don’t mind the character of Ezri as much as I find her a distraction from the overall story as a whole. That being said, I think pairing her up with Garak was probably a pretty smart move on the writers part. In one episode, we get to see the pure depth of her inexperience, especially when held up against such a complex character as Garak. I am more in the camp that Dax’s death could have served the story more if we never saw Ezri, or if the symbiant had died as well. It would have been a pretty good plot element to harden the reserve of the crew and coalesced them into a battle hardened team that would have had to less rely on technobabble endings and more upon themselves. But that is just a bunch of what ifs. As it stands, so far, Ezri is kind of annoying but I think the writers are doing a fair job of getting her integrated into the cast and quickly, at that.
I needed to jump in here to point out how furious I am with Worf in this episode. He says he doesn’t want to have anything to do with Ezri Dax. I totally understand that it’s very confusing for him to handle his emotions. But he married Jadzia Dax – not Jadzia. Although the “shell” has changed, the “slug” hasn’t changed. It’s incredibly insensitive to him to ignore Dax’s emotions through the whole thing.
I’m actually a bit surprised that I seem to be the first person expressing this opinion.
Neither Ezri nor Worf cover themselves in glory during the bulk of the season.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
(Also, I said right there in the rewatch entry under Worf’s category that he treated Ezri like crap in this episode….)
—KRAD
I never particularly liked Nicole deBoer’s acting. I agree it would have been better to have promoted Nog to the main cast. And for of all things for her to be, Ezri Dax had to be a counselor. Garak’s excellent take down of her in his shop is very harsh but also completely correct. She is a pathetic confused child trying to live up to the legacy of her predecessors. She’s a quivering neurotic who is more in need of intense psychological counseling than anyone else on that station. And they just shoe horn her in b/c they want a new Dax? Ugh. I understand the logic of her being main cast but I never understood why she went along on virtually every mission from then on. She was at the Siege of AR-558, she was on the Defiant at every battle against the Dominion, she battled the Breen. Ezri’s a counselor. She should be in her office all day long with patients; she’s not a science officer and a combat pilot like Jadzia, who had useful skills to be bring to the bridge of a warship in war time. Just like Odo as a cop had no reason to be on the bridge of the Defiant, Ezri had no business there as well. It’s questionable if she even had any competence as a therapist; a self-aware hologram was far more useful to Nog during his trauma and recovery then Ezri. She should have been relieved and sent back to Trill for her own intense counseling and therapy to integrate Dax into her. And definitely not been allowed on the previous host’s posting.
I love these reviews, thanks for doing them. But this is the one that I disagree with the most. I see it as an excellent episode about an excellent character.
The only flaw I kind of agree with is that Ezri probably shouldn’t have stayed on the station if we were looking at it realistically. That just seems like it would be a massive mindfuck for everyone involved considering Jadzia just died. But this is TV so of course she is going to stay. To me it’s an easy suspension of disbelief thing because I certainly wouldn’t have wanted them to have her leave and miss out on a great character.
And she is a great character. I know that their hand was forced by Jadzia’s actress leaving, but in retrospect I think it would have been a huge missed opportunity if this didn’t happen. It’s one thing to have Jadzia tell us about her past lives and try to get across that she both is and isn’t the same person as them, but now we really get to see that for ourselves in the contrast and similarities between Jadzia and Ezri.
The only thing I don’t mind about this episode was Garak. Otherwise . . . I was not impressed. Ezri Dax feels shoe-horned into the series. I find her initial presence on Deep Space Nine, along with her assignment something of a head scratcher. Hell, I find Sisko’s return to duty after his resignation from Starfleet something of a headscratcher.
Shoe-horned? You have a symbiotic character from the start of a show, the host is killed: her replacement should be a given. Not including her would have been a waste of built-in dramatic possibilities.
I didn’t watch much of Season 7 back when it was originally on but I actually like Ezri Dax a lot. I felt Jadzia became grating when she started courting Worf because she was trying to fit in with Klingons too hard, and it just wasn’t believable. I also think they tried to make Jadzia an officer who is flawless with every thing she does (like a biological Data), and we almost never saw her make mistakes throughout the whole series, which is just unrealistic.
Ezri is a flawed officer who is trying to find her own identity. What’s interesting is Sisko made her into the station counselor, but she seems to be the one the most in need of counseling. I wonder if she would have been better as a nurse in the Infirmary.
Lockdown Rewatch. I never got the Ezri hate, I like Nicole Deboer (a lot) and she does very well in my opinion throughout the season., okay this episode falls down a bit with the terrible counselling scenes but there are some nice little character scenes particularly involving Ezri with Sisko Garak and Bashir. The Worf / Ezri relationship is more problematic I don’t think they ever got that right throughout the season. I have to say I enjoyed this episode much more than the uneven two parter that opened the season Which was quite frankly all over the place.
a 5 or 6 out of 10 for me.
It was a good idea to kill Dax because a war without casualties on the good guys side is military pornography not military science fiction according to David Weber. I think this episode also was correct that the fans were reacting the same way as the DS9 cast: weird and creepy. Essentially, the symbiote is being abused by the people who were supposed to be her fri
Killing Dax was not WRONG. Killing her in a Good vs Evil Spirit Battle, well…
CT: but Jadzia’s death had absolutely nothing to do with the war…….
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
I liked this episode a lot more than KRAD did, but I still can’t help remembering that scene from Mean Girls about trying to make “fetch” happen every time I watch it.