@thrasher930 did you see her? Got herself into that posh Trill with the plastic arse and the fake tits. Was only yesterday that she was swimming around here farting bubbles and avoiding Steve's floaters. Stuck up cow!
I love how in an earlier episode (“Playing God”), Jadzia mentions being a collector of lost composers. Either a great coincidence or the scriptwriter was really on the ball in making her former host a lost composer.
The brilliant mask illusion is Jeff McBride’s own, and on stage, it’s magnificent. He teaches and performs all over the world, and still draws (tiny) residuals for this episode.
I like the group including Odo even if he doesn't eat. And his acceptance of the offer seems like he's warming to the group more. I did notice the Defiant bridge got an update. Looked a bit rough in the premiere. I also recognize that tune as it sounds very similar to the piano opening of Type O Negative's "Haunted" which came out a year or 2 later.
Ok, but it just wasn't the forced joining, Riker was joined. So the Trill and StarFleet knew that. If Riker could be joined, even temporarily, then an "unsuitable" Trill, or any Trill should have long been investitgated as a possibility.
Maybe long ago, when the first joinings took place, the Trill weren't almost all compatible, it could be that joined Trill given their apparent somewhat revered status simply tend to have a good deal more kids, so over time, the number of possible hosts has gone up from perhaps just 5% to past 50%, assuming it's a dominant gene. This would also explain why few Trill question the process, especially if qualifying for things are quite common, this would leave the conspiracy very limited to just the commision and their doctors, so going from a conspiracy of possibly millions to probably less than 100. Dr. Crusher didn't really know much about the Trill in TNG at all, so we know they certainly do keep a lot of things pretty secret.
I wish I'd seen this post earlier as I thought up this exact same scenario to - I agree the likelihood of a low initial probability of compatibility and selective pressure towards compatibility is about the best explanation of how this came about; I think it's plausible less than 20 people know about this before Sisko and co found out - head of the commission at the time and a small handiful of people who where directly involved in covering up murderboy's joining and then from that date onward the only new people informed would be new heads of the commission and any Trill physician of the current Dax host. Eventually the conspiracy will be revealed, but I think the advantage the conspiracy has is that anyone likely to uncover the truth is also likely to be someone who would agree with the need to protect the belly worms. After all, the main people likely to find out are doctors who choose to work for the symbioses commission and they would be by self-selection be people who'd understand the risks and want to prevent them. The commission got lucky this time as the Federation Doctor and Captain are also people are very likely to keep their word and not inform anyone as to what they found out.
This episode confirms for me that the trill are pretty much cattle for the worms. They always do what is best for the symbiote and lie to the trill general public about suitability. The self preservation in the hosts is pushed aside for the worm. And if you don't follow protocol you are shunned. I've always thought the worms found the trill and evolved them into perfect hosts and have enslaved them ever since. Thanks for another great review 😁👍you are appreciated
I imagine his underlings at the development yard were really amused when he seized the first solid excuse to be like, "Hey, remember that ship I was helping develop before my assignment to DS9? I need it now! For strategic purposes!"
For me, the Commission is running an imperfect system but it's better than the alternative. I suspect that other Trill have tried to join with a symbiote illegally, but it's not common knowledge. Perhaps the symbiotes reject them, preferring to die than live in a host that is doing wrong or one they have been forced into? Perhaps the Commission is able to hunt them down and deal with them quietly but we never see that since it *is* dealt with quietly. The people who *really* need to know, know. What made sense to me regards the Jadzia / Dax naming was: Jadzia Dax is the gestalt, the host's name is Jadzia, the symbiote's name is Dax, however, which one they answer to depends on who they are talking to. Since the usual way of addressing someone in Starfleet is to use their surname / family name along with their rank, unless they are speaking personally (as a friend or off the record) JD is used to people calling her Dax when in Starfleet mode, and Jadzia when they are being more intimate.
The scene where he comes out of the pool, completely dry, sounds to my brain so unnatural and eerie I have goose bumps every, single, time. He's really a phantom from the past.
I think that Churchill summed up the TSC when talking about democracy. "It's the worst system, apart from all the others." One thing I like about this episode is that it reveals a hidden previous host. I've often thought that the Trill are an analog of Time Lords, with multiple faces and different aspects of the personalities showing and hiding over time. 16 episodes hence, Lela's memories actually paraphrase the Fifth Doctor when discussing things with Jadzia. Here, DS9 gives us their version of the War Doctor, which I think is a nice piece of symmetry. For those fans of Dax who haven't read it, find a copy of "The Lives of Dax". It has some brilliant ideas.
I've always seen Dax as an allegory for trans people. There's an episode that I like from season 7 where Dax visits home and she makes it clear that she wants her mum refer to her as Dax and make that distinction between her and her pre joining self; so I'd say it's fair to assume other Trill, joined or otherwise, are people she'd expect to respectfully observe the distinction. Strengthening the allegory I think.
I do think it works as an allegory, though not a perfect one. Most joined Trill (Ezri Dax being a noteable outlier here) are voluntary and want to be joined - most transpeople I've listened to tend to work on the lines that being trans is an inherent part of who they are and not something they 'chose' in the same way that homosexual and bisexual people didn't 'choose to be gay'. So an imperfect allegory.
Regarding the Trill preference for being on a “first name basis” with people: I think most bellyworms prefer it this way. Dax especially seems to encourage people to refer to them by their host’s name.
Further bollocks to be had is the change in narrative for the Trill. Up to this episode, the story was that the symbionts carry memories from host to host and each joining creates a new joined consciousness built on the last. This episode now states that the symbionts actually carry an entire copy of every consciousness they join with! It would have made a lot more sense to stick with the idea that a Trill who was also psychotic somehow slipped past all of their careful screening and they wanted to hush it up to prevent panic and protect the status quo. It makes perfect sense to want the very best for the Joining because they're borderline immortal and we don't want to give that power to those who will abuse it. But even more interesting, in a flashback to Voyager, is that they have the technology to not only hide entire memories but both memories in Trill and the Symbionts! I'm sure such a useful technology will never be mentioned again.
I had to guess they needed to make joining appealing in a "you can be immortal" sort of way to avoid questions as to why the non-joined would stomach keeping this around. Because what you start to get into with just the memories and "new consciousness but based on the old" is essentially the belly worms being a sort of ruling class who the trill are subservient meat vehicles for. You get into the ideas of joined being an aristocratic class and then you get the questions that arise with that such as "why are we serving these parasites?" And now you have a space French revolution but instead of guillotines it's disemboweling machines.
Forget about whether some Trill deemed unsuitable had ever tried to appropriate a symbiont illegally. Had there ever been a situation where a Trill who had not been evaluated as a host been implanted under emergency circumstances to save the symbiont, because we know that happens too. How are there free symbionts in the pools? Every indication we have had before is that they cannot survive long outside a host. How does a species,whose lifestyle is to live inside another species where only one individual can fit, evolve sexual repoduction that requires two of them? Are the mating sy bionts between hosts? Never had hosts?
The writers/Behr have acknowledged they think they fumbled this one a bit by having Jadzia essentially absent from the climax of her own focus ep, and I gotta agree, but I still like what this overall added to the Trill complexity and messiness.
Captain Lives, this worm pool raises another thought for me: Suppose a light being from TNG pops in a host and has a baby, what does this mean for the worm? And for THAT matter, what if the WORM has a baby in the host?
When I was young, I thought to myself "Okay, they made a mistake once. Not a big deal. Why the overreaction?" Now I think, "how many times has this sort of cover-up happened?"
What I am wondering is how the joining became a thing in the first place. You don't simply walk into a damp cave and cut your abdomen open to put a worm inside.
Symbiosis happens in animals on Earth. Perhaps initially the symbiotes had the ability to enter the hosts' abdomens on their own and the advantages it seemed to give the host made it desirable for them. Then over time the ability to burrow into hosts was not necessary, hosts starting to place them in on their own, and proved less desirable in their pools. So eventually they lost that ability making it a surgical thing. I do wonder now why they couldn't have just made being a host seem not so desirable. Presumably some of the 50% who can don't want to, even now. They could still recognize the advantages, but focus more on the negatives of joining making less hosts want to.
Imho the worms bred the Trill to be compliant hosts to the point where they now compete for the 'honor' of hosting. They encountered the Trill in an earlier evolutionary stage and with genetic manipulation and selective procreation created the perfect hosts who will always prioritize the symbiote.
To address how you can keep a conspiracy involving thousands secret all you have to do is discredit the whistleblowers as crazy. Or you have those whistleblowers get into unfortunate accidents. You couple that with a populace that has no other choices or doesnt really care and you can keep your secrets under wraps. Just look at boeing. Their whistleblowers suddenly really didnt care much for their lives and yet the planes still kept getting flown.
Just an aside...much like the question of how did the first person to milk a cow know the fluid was drinkable, what was the first Trill to stuff a brain turd into itself expecting to happen?
Maybe the original relationship wasn’t as invasive? Maybe it all started similar to the Guardian, they communicated in the caves like a form of communal ritual. And Joining didn’t become a thing until much later, after the required medical knowledge became available to them? Early Trills probably held communal baths in the pools with the Symbiotes.
Speculation: By communicating with the unjoined, the symbionts learned enough about trill biology (and their own biology, as discovered by Guardians using instrumentation not available to the symbionts, if they even need it) to realise the possibilities of joining. The first (experimental) candidates for joining would ideally be anyone who had achieved great things and then developed an incurable condition that caused an irrevocable degeneration of the memory, and all at a relatively young age. But said condition was still in the early stages, so the trill retained a lot of important memories and was competent enough to consent, and was of the option that an untried and extremely weird procedure was preferable to the continued progress of such a medical condition. Since one of the main functions of the symbionts appears to be retaining memories, implantation would cure this, and provide a living example of the advantages of being joined. I called it "an extremely weird procedure," but maybe the trill homeworld has many biocompatible creatures that they implant for various purposes.
How we came to use cow milk is pretty understandable. We are both mammals. It is not too much of an intellectual leap to think cow's mlik could be as drinkable as human milk. It is also a good way for humans to indirectly get nutrition from plants we cannot digest well, like grasses. How the Trill managed to figure out the worms could be portable hard drives for their minds is another thing. Though it seems the symbiosis may have had some kind of symbiosis with the humanoid Trills I their prehistory, since the worms don't seem to survive freely outside the pools. Though How that worked is never fully ex0lained.
They're Worms. They swim in a pool. Veterinarians see this after Fifi and Fido swim in questionable bodies of water. I know exactly how that went, and my mind's eye can't unsee it.
14:56 Speculation: By communicating with the unjoined, the symbionts learned enough about trill biology (and their own biology, as discovered by Guardians using instrumentation not available to the symbionts, if they even need it) to realise the possibilities of joining. The symbionts then used this communication to negotiate getting some of themselves implanted. The first (experimental) candidates for joining would ideally be anyone who had achieved great things and then developed an incurable condition that caused an irrevocable degeneration of the memory, and all at a relatively young age. But said condition was still in the early stages, so the trill retained a lot of important memories and was competent enough to consent, and was of the option that an untried and extremely weird procedure was preferable to the continued progress of such a medical condition. Since one of the main functions of the symbionts appears to be retaining memories, implantation would cure this, and provide a living example of the advantages of being joined. I called it "an extremely weird procedure," but maybe the trill homeworld has many biocompatible creatures that they implant for various purposes.
A better way to cover it up would have been to not. Admit they fucked up with choosing a host and that Joran died because he was incompatible. They thought he was compatible; he very nearly was. A fake 1 in a thousand billion genetic incompatibility or something. That's why he was able to survive for six months. Six months of major complications, in which the joining wasn't complete and Joran Dax never fully became a single consciousness. The complications explain the no/limited memories of Dax and the openness about it all reinforces their hold over bellyworm joining and reinforces the idea of the dangers of joining rather than threatening their hold. The main lesson is: if you ever need to do a cover-up, get an autistic person to find the plot holes.
i feel some combination of lottary and the 'elite' training would probably be a better soluation than the current one. if so much of the trill population seek out the simboits as we are told they are. then some kind of randomized selection with in that group would dieloot the possibility of favoritism. you do want to seprate the weat from the caff so having those that are among the weat be then randomly selected come selection time would not only insure that negtive feelings are not directed towards the former host or their fellow fininalists be minimised. or have the lotray decide one say a dozen or so 'finalist' that are then extentivliy reviewed after all here on earth you have to pay to enter into any lotary so you have to have some means of 'buying' your lotary numbers and most people understand that its an extremally low chance to 'win' the lotary and those that dont make it through to these final levels or wash out early can turn their skills towards till society. kind of like oylimpans
I always kind of hated this episode. It is so tantalisingly close to giving us a look behind the curtain of Trill society and the power and manipulation therein however snatches it away at the last moment. I'm left with all questions and no answers, and not in a good 'make up your own mind' kind of Sci fi way but a 'you don't get this information' kind of way. There is so much room for a great and compelling story about Trill society but we never get it.
@@ptonpc Well I better not say that I actually simply upgraded my patreon level. But after 10 Month of being a Lt I think he deserves a bit more as I continue to enjoy his content.
16:28 I think I've said it before, but I want to say it again. Dax is good unintentional trans rep (saying that as a trans person). But in this (and a few other episodes), the unintentional representation she's doing isn't trans people, its plural people (i.e., multiple personalities, for those unfamiliar with the proper terminology used within the community). And not just the typical "multiple personalities is inherently a disorder and/or caused by trauma" thing, either. Sure, a look at the surface of these kinds of Dax stories (i.e., the Deep Dax Lore) often brushes up against harmful tropes (i.e., Split, and any number of other typical Hollywood stories centered on plurality, where one of the alters is inherently dangerous), but the tone is different. Deep Dax Lore stories often have a harmful previous host, but Dax isn't portrayed as an inherent threat to the """normals""". She doesn't have to hide her multitudes to appease the fragile sensibilities of the singlets (another one of those plural community terms, referring to people who aren't plural, for those who haven't guessed) around her. Her and her previous hosts are valued for their individual experiences and perspectives. She is given space to share those perspectives and experiences. And sometimes, when a previous host's personality turns up, and they were a wrongun, the situation isn't treated any differently from if a singlet had done the same. Also, minor Disco season 5 spoiler: I love that they continued that good unintentional rep (or perhaps even intentional, based on just how good it was) in Disco. TL;DR: DS9 didn't just say trans rights. DS9 also said plural rights. And so did Discovery.
I respectfully call bollocks on your bollocks - not all of it, but some of your points, I feel, have more nuance than you gave them. Look at what's happening to Diddy right now. 'Everyone knew', yes, and no one did anything for literally decades. He had loads of people on staff and what looks like hundreds of victims and yet he was able to keep going unchecked for that long? If you have power you have the power to make people stop talking about you. My only issue with this episode was that the Commission wasn't 'cause a tragic accident, sorry about your Starfleet officers' level scarier, but maybe they were hoping that Sisko and Bashir just wouldn't figure it out. This is a whole society - that apparently were Federation members from at least McCoy's university days - who managed to avoid anyone finding out that some of their population were joined beings until Crusher's time over a century later. This is a SPECIES of secret keepers. They aren't human, in spite of their surface presentation. Apparently if the Trill don't want you to know something then you don't get to know. Like any large organisation, I doubt the majority of the people who work at the Commission actually have access to the data that would disprove the claim. The lower level doctors may be running the initial tests that fifty percent conveniently pass before the senior medical staff take them on to weed out the remaining 'unsuitables.' Once you get to the high level you get let in on the secret AND the reason why you can't blab. I would also assume that this issue has come up several time over the centuries and has managed to be successfully turned into a 'crazy conspiracy theory' by dedicated effort and propaganda. There are enough scandals that last for decades in our own world that it doesn't seem implausible that truthtellers would be written off as crazy 'bitter' rejects who are jealous that they aren't able to be joined. Verad was declared unsuitable for unspecified reasons, but given that he went all the way to the finish line before being booted it was most likely psychological ones. Psych rejections are - so they claim - supposed to set off rejection. If Verad had been able to fully join with Dax that may have blown the whole thing wide open but he was successfully stopped before the 'three, maybe four days' the Trill doctor is quoted as giving so no cover up needed. Joran on the other hand lasted 6 months and, as it turned out later, several murders (I actually hated that retroactive change). That's a problem. That's information that can cause chaos.
Idk if it’s really an allegory on trans or just multiple personality disorder. Sorry but arbitrarily assuming things of personal preference/beliefs is different than what the story is presenting of multiple personalities.
I mean, it could easily be both. The point he made about being referred to as both Jadzia and Dax, I actually know someone like that, and their alternate personalities don't mind being referred to by their name...usually.
I think maybe it was at least a little. Like in the terminology of the 1990s "She used to be a man" is what was said of trans people. I know that's not considered the right nomenclature now, but considering other things I think Dax was likely intended more as about LGBT issues than multiple personalities. Although this particular episode is about disassociation a bit so there is that.
Today's Thought Experiment: What do the cave bellyworms talk about?
"Nice PH levels today, huh?"
Probably gossip about hosts. Play worm games.
Probably complain about swimming around in each other's excrement all day
As they are fresh brain worms, the only topic that comes up is who can fart the biggest bubble in the wormy pool.
They talk trash about ones that get a new home.
@thrasher930 did you see her? Got herself into that posh Trill with the plastic arse and the fake tits.
Was only yesterday that she was swimming around here farting bubbles and avoiding Steve's floaters. Stuck up cow!
"these things now somehow have more lore than Harry Kim..."
I mean that's not really difficult..
Harry Kim is the most incompetently handled character on Trek, a record he holds until Travis Mayweather shows up.
I love how in an earlier episode (“Playing God”), Jadzia mentions being a collector of lost composers. Either a great coincidence or the scriptwriter was really on the ball in making her former host a lost composer.
Damn that's a good catch. I never thought of that link. Like her subconscious is trying to point her to the hidden truth.
The guy under the mask is a magicians named jeff mcbride.. he has appeared on penn and teller fool us.. he is mostly famous for card magic
The brilliant mask illusion is Jeff McBride’s own, and on stage, it’s magnificent. He teaches and performs all over the world, and still draws (tiny) residuals for this episode.
I like the group including Odo even if he doesn't eat. And his acceptance of the offer seems like he's warming to the group more. I did notice the Defiant bridge got an update. Looked a bit rough in the premiere. I also recognize that tune as it sounds very similar to the piano opening of Type O Negative's "Haunted" which came out a year or 2 later.
He probably made sure Kira would be there before saying yes.
Ok, but it just wasn't the forced joining, Riker was joined. So the Trill and StarFleet knew that. If Riker could be joined, even temporarily, then an "unsuitable" Trill, or any Trill should have long been investitgated as a possibility.
Maybe long ago, when the first joinings took place, the Trill weren't almost all compatible, it could be that joined Trill given their apparent somewhat revered status simply tend to have a good deal more kids, so over time, the number of possible hosts has gone up from perhaps just 5% to past 50%, assuming it's a dominant gene. This would also explain why few Trill question the process, especially if qualifying for things are quite common, this would leave the conspiracy very limited to just the commision and their doctors, so going from a conspiracy of possibly millions to probably less than 100. Dr. Crusher didn't really know much about the Trill in TNG at all, so we know they certainly do keep a lot of things pretty secret.
100 is still way to many. For it to be believable for me it would need to be single digits.
@@fatalshore5068 Single digits is, lo and behold, less than 100.
I wish I'd seen this post earlier as I thought up this exact same scenario to - I agree the likelihood of a low initial probability of compatibility and selective pressure towards compatibility is about the best explanation of how this came about; I think it's plausible less than 20 people know about this before Sisko and co found out - head of the commission at the time and a small handiful of people who where directly involved in covering up murderboy's joining and then from that date onward the only new people informed would be new heads of the commission and any Trill physician of the current Dax host. Eventually the conspiracy will be revealed, but I think the advantage the conspiracy has is that anyone likely to uncover the truth is also likely to be someone who would agree with the need to protect the belly worms.
After all, the main people likely to find out are doctors who choose to work for the symbioses commission and they would be by self-selection be people who'd understand the risks and want to prevent them. The commission got lucky this time as the Federation Doctor and Captain are also people are very likely to keep their word and not inform anyone as to what they found out.
This episode confirms for me that the trill are pretty much cattle for the worms. They always do what is best for the symbiote and lie to the trill general public about suitability. The self preservation in the hosts is pushed aside for the worm. And if you don't follow protocol you are shunned. I've always thought the worms found the trill and evolved them into perfect hosts and have enslaved them ever since.
Thanks for another great review 😁👍you are appreciated
Nobody at Starfleet wants to be the one to tell Sisko to give the Defiant back. It would be like trying to take Winona away from John Crichton.
I imagine his underlings at the development yard were really amused when he seized the first solid excuse to be like, "Hey, remember that ship I was helping develop before my assignment to DS9? I need it now! For strategic purposes!"
For me, the Commission is running an imperfect system but it's better than the alternative. I suspect that other Trill have tried to join with a symbiote illegally, but it's not common knowledge. Perhaps the symbiotes reject them, preferring to die than live in a host that is doing wrong or one they have been forced into?
Perhaps the Commission is able to hunt them down and deal with them quietly but we never see that since it *is* dealt with quietly. The people who *really* need to know, know.
What made sense to me regards the Jadzia / Dax naming was:
Jadzia Dax is the gestalt, the host's name is Jadzia, the symbiote's name is Dax, however, which one they answer to depends on who they are talking to. Since the usual way of addressing someone in Starfleet is to use their surname / family name along with their rank, unless they are speaking personally (as a friend or off the record) JD is used to people calling her Dax when in Starfleet mode, and Jadzia when they are being more intimate.
"The people who hand out the belly worms think you're shit!" You got a thumbs up from me for that line!
The scene where he comes out of the pool, completely dry, sounds to my brain so unnatural and eerie I have goose bumps every, single, time. He's really a phantom from the past.
When I first scrolled up and saw the thumbnail for this, I thought: "It's The Unknown
...from Willy's Chocolate Experience."
Seems she was at GlasGlow one night doing her thing.
I've seen enough pop-psychology youtube videos to confidently declare this episode is about incorporating the Jungian shadow.
I think that Churchill summed up the TSC when talking about democracy. "It's the worst system, apart from all the others."
One thing I like about this episode is that it reveals a hidden previous host. I've often thought that the Trill are an analog of Time Lords, with multiple faces and different aspects of the personalities showing and hiding over time. 16 episodes hence, Lela's memories actually paraphrase the Fifth Doctor when discussing things with Jadzia.
Here, DS9 gives us their version of the War Doctor, which I think is a nice piece of symmetry.
For those fans of Dax who haven't read it, find a copy of "The Lives of Dax". It has some brilliant ideas.
To be honest, I only watch for the Space Dog Saga 😜
RIP Teri Garr. Thank you for Assignment Earth (TOS s2 e26).
@@james_baker in the vein of the Skywalker clan: "NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!"
😭😭😭😭
I've always seen Dax as an allegory for trans people. There's an episode that I like from season 7 where Dax visits home and she makes it clear that she wants her mum refer to her as Dax and make that distinction between her and her pre joining self; so I'd say it's fair to assume other Trill, joined or otherwise, are people she'd expect to respectfully observe the distinction. Strengthening the allegory I think.
Oooooooooooooooh. Yeah, that checks out. Totally an allegory.
I do think it works as an allegory, though not a perfect one. Most joined Trill (Ezri Dax being a noteable outlier here) are voluntary and want to be joined - most transpeople I've listened to tend to work on the lines that being trans is an inherent part of who they are and not something they 'chose' in the same way that homosexual and bisexual people didn't 'choose to be gay'. So an imperfect allegory.
@@dm121984 eh it would still work as cis people back then didn't know any better.
Telling porkies meaning lies is why I love brittish accents
Regarding the Trill preference for being on a “first name basis” with people: I think most bellyworms prefer it this way. Dax especially seems to encourage people to refer to them by their host’s name.
He wasn't unstable until he was joined to Dax. Yes, he had those urges and feelings but never acted on them until he was Dax.
Or maybe he didn't get caught until he was Dax.
Allamaraine! Oh wait... wrong episode.
Gahhh! The entire rhyme is now going through my head!
Further bollocks to be had is the change in narrative for the Trill. Up to this episode, the story was that the symbionts carry memories from host to host and each joining creates a new joined consciousness built on the last. This episode now states that the symbionts actually carry an entire copy of every consciousness they join with! It would have made a lot more sense to stick with the idea that a Trill who was also psychotic somehow slipped past all of their careful screening and they wanted to hush it up to prevent panic and protect the status quo. It makes perfect sense to want the very best for the Joining because they're borderline immortal and we don't want to give that power to those who will abuse it.
But even more interesting, in a flashback to Voyager, is that they have the technology to not only hide entire memories but both memories in Trill and the Symbionts! I'm sure such a useful technology will never be mentioned again.
I had to guess they needed to make joining appealing in a "you can be immortal" sort of way to avoid questions as to why the non-joined would stomach keeping this around.
Because what you start to get into with just the memories and "new consciousness but based on the old" is essentially the belly worms being a sort of ruling class who the trill are subservient meat vehicles for. You get into the ideas of joined being an aristocratic class and then you get the questions that arise with that such as "why are we serving these parasites?" And now you have a space French revolution but instead of guillotines it's disemboweling machines.
I can see a Gene Wilder looking member of the Symbiosis Commission 85 years ago yelling "We gave Dax to a candidate with an ABNORMAL BRAIN?!!"
Forget about whether some Trill deemed unsuitable had ever tried to appropriate a symbiont illegally. Had there ever been a situation where a Trill who had not been evaluated as a host been implanted under emergency circumstances to save the symbiont, because we know that happens too.
How are there free symbionts in the pools? Every indication we have had before is that they cannot survive long outside a host. How does a species,whose lifestyle is to live inside another species where only one individual can fit, evolve sexual repoduction that requires two of them? Are the mating sy bionts between hosts? Never had hosts?
The writers/Behr have acknowledged they think they fumbled this one a bit by having Jadzia essentially absent from the climax of her own focus ep, and I gotta agree, but I still like what this overall added to the Trill complexity and messiness.
Captain Lives, this worm pool raises another thought for me:
Suppose a light being from TNG pops in a host and has a baby, what does this mean for the worm?
And for THAT matter, what if the WORM has a baby in the host?
Bonus points for the Guardians reference!
ooooh I love me some dystopia, and I love UK TV (anglophile Yank here). Just looked it up and it's archived on UA-cams.
@@spikeoramathon I'll have to look it up. I *might* remember it.
When I was young, I thought to myself "Okay, they made a mistake once. Not a big deal. Why the overreaction?"
Now I think, "how many times has this sort of cover-up happened?"
What I am wondering is how the joining became a thing in the first place. You don't simply walk into a damp cave and cut your abdomen open to put a worm inside.
The worms communicate with the guardians right? They maybe convinced somebody to do it?
During flashbacks to Jadzia's implantation in Emissary, it seemed like there may be some sort of pouch that hosts have.
Symbiosis happens in animals on Earth. Perhaps initially the symbiotes had the ability to enter the hosts' abdomens on their own and the advantages it seemed to give the host made it desirable for them. Then over time the ability to burrow into hosts was not necessary, hosts starting to place them in on their own, and proved less desirable in their pools. So eventually they lost that ability making it a surgical thing.
I do wonder now why they couldn't have just made being a host seem not so desirable. Presumably some of the 50% who can don't want to, even now. They could still recognize the advantages, but focus more on the negatives of joining making less hosts want to.
Imho the worms bred the Trill to be compliant hosts to the point where they now compete for the 'honor' of hosting. They encountered the Trill in an earlier evolutionary stage and with genetic manipulation and selective procreation created the perfect hosts who will always prioritize the symbiote.
To address how you can keep a conspiracy involving thousands secret all you have to do is discredit the whistleblowers as crazy. Or you have those whistleblowers get into unfortunate accidents. You couple that with a populace that has no other choices or doesnt really care and you can keep your secrets under wraps.
Just look at boeing. Their whistleblowers suddenly really didnt care much for their lives and yet the planes still kept getting flown.
Just an aside...much like the question of how did the first person to milk a cow know the fluid was drinkable, what was the first Trill to stuff a brain turd into itself expecting to happen?
Maybe the original relationship wasn’t as invasive?
Maybe it all started similar to the Guardian, they communicated in the caves like a form of communal ritual. And Joining didn’t become a thing until much later, after the required medical knowledge became available to them?
Early Trills probably held communal baths in the pools with the Symbiotes.
@akmi1931 maybe, but I reckon someone took a swim without looking, and one of the brain worms mistook a puckered orriface for a balloons end.
Speculation: By communicating with the unjoined, the symbionts learned enough about trill biology (and their own biology, as discovered by Guardians using instrumentation not available to the symbionts, if they even need it) to realise the possibilities of joining.
The first (experimental) candidates for joining would ideally be anyone who had achieved great things and then developed an incurable condition that caused an irrevocable degeneration of the memory, and all at a relatively young age. But said condition was still in the early stages, so the trill retained a lot of important memories and was competent enough to consent, and was of the option that an untried and extremely weird procedure was preferable to the continued progress of such a medical condition.
Since one of the main functions of the symbionts appears to be retaining memories, implantation would cure this, and provide a living example of the advantages of being joined.
I called it "an extremely weird procedure," but maybe the trill homeworld has many biocompatible creatures that they implant for various purposes.
How we came to use cow milk is pretty understandable. We are both mammals. It is not too much of an intellectual leap to think cow's mlik could be as drinkable as human milk. It is also a good way for humans to indirectly get nutrition from plants we cannot digest well, like grasses.
How the Trill managed to figure out the worms could be portable hard drives for their minds is another thing. Though it seems the symbiosis may have had some kind of symbiosis with the humanoid Trills I their prehistory, since the worms don't seem to survive freely outside the pools. Though How that worked is never fully ex0lained.
They're Worms. They swim in a pool. Veterinarians see this after Fifi and Fido swim in questionable bodies of water. I know exactly how that went, and my mind's eye can't unsee it.
Hahahah more lore than Harry kim
14:56 Speculation: By communicating with the unjoined, the symbionts learned enough about trill biology (and their own biology, as discovered by Guardians using instrumentation not available to the symbionts, if they even need it) to realise the possibilities of joining.
The symbionts then used this communication to negotiate getting some of themselves implanted.
The first (experimental) candidates for joining would ideally be anyone who had achieved great things and then developed an incurable condition that caused an irrevocable degeneration of the memory, and all at a relatively young age. But said condition was still in the early stages, so the trill retained a lot of important memories and was competent enough to consent, and was of the option that an untried and extremely weird procedure was preferable to the continued progress of such a medical condition.
Since one of the main functions of the symbionts appears to be retaining memories, implantation would cure this, and provide a living example of the advantages of being joined.
I called it "an extremely weird procedure," but maybe the trill homeworld has many biocompatible creatures that they implant for various purposes.
So...basically like James Cameron's Avatar, but without the "noble savage" trope or the implicit anarcho-primitism preaching?
A better way to cover it up would have been to not. Admit they fucked up with choosing a host and that Joran died because he was incompatible. They thought he was compatible; he very nearly was. A fake 1 in a thousand billion genetic incompatibility or something. That's why he was able to survive for six months. Six months of major complications, in which the joining wasn't complete and Joran Dax never fully became a single consciousness.
The complications explain the no/limited memories of Dax and the openness about it all reinforces their hold over bellyworm joining and reinforces the idea of the dangers of joining rather than threatening their hold.
The main lesson is: if you ever need to do a cover-up, get an autistic person to find the plot holes.
i feel some combination of lottary and the 'elite' training would probably be a better soluation than the current one. if so much of the trill population seek out the simboits as we are told they are. then some kind of randomized selection with in that group would dieloot the possibility of favoritism. you do want to seprate the weat from the caff so having those that are among the weat be then randomly selected come selection time would not only insure that negtive feelings are not directed towards the former host or their fellow fininalists be minimised.
or have the lotray decide one say a dozen or so 'finalist' that are then extentivliy reviewed
after all here on earth you have to pay to enter into any lotary so you have to have some means of 'buying' your lotary numbers and most people understand that its an extremally low chance to 'win' the lotary
and those that dont make it through to these final levels or wash out early can turn their skills towards till society. kind of like oylimpans
15:50 Jadzia Dax isn't Dax either, Jadzia's personality makes a difference. So there is no correct name, if you're being that fussy.
It’s the fun alien part of Star Trek that I like. Multiple names that refer to the same entity and yet doesn’t describe it entirely.
I always kind of hated this episode. It is so tantalisingly close to giving us a look behind the curtain of Trill society and the power and manipulation therein however snatches it away at the last moment. I'm left with all questions and no answers, and not in a good 'make up your own mind' kind of Sci fi way but a 'you don't get this information' kind of way. There is so much room for a great and compelling story about Trill society but we never get it.
Woohoo I got a promotion :)
Congratulations! :D
@@ptonpc Well I better not say that I actually simply upgraded my patreon level.
But after 10 Month of being a Lt I think he deserves a bit more as I continue to enjoy his content.
16:28 I think I've said it before, but I want to say it again. Dax is good unintentional trans rep (saying that as a trans person). But in this (and a few other episodes), the unintentional representation she's doing isn't trans people, its plural people (i.e., multiple personalities, for those unfamiliar with the proper terminology used within the community). And not just the typical "multiple personalities is inherently a disorder and/or caused by trauma" thing, either.
Sure, a look at the surface of these kinds of Dax stories (i.e., the Deep Dax Lore) often brushes up against harmful tropes (i.e., Split, and any number of other typical Hollywood stories centered on plurality, where one of the alters is inherently dangerous), but the tone is different. Deep Dax Lore stories often have a harmful previous host, but Dax isn't portrayed as an inherent threat to the """normals""". She doesn't have to hide her multitudes to appease the fragile sensibilities of the singlets (another one of those plural community terms, referring to people who aren't plural, for those who haven't guessed) around her. Her and her previous hosts are valued for their individual experiences and perspectives. She is given space to share those perspectives and experiences. And sometimes, when a previous host's personality turns up, and they were a wrongun, the situation isn't treated any differently from if a singlet had done the same.
Also, minor Disco season 5 spoiler: I love that they continued that good unintentional rep (or perhaps even intentional, based on just how good it was) in Disco.
TL;DR: DS9 didn't just say trans rights. DS9 also said plural rights. And so did Discovery.
Trill are both plural and not simultaneously. Which is frickin weird.
Like sheep. And fish.
@@Mecharnie_Dobbs I'm not talking about grammatically, no.
I respectfully call bollocks on your bollocks - not all of it, but some of your points, I feel, have more nuance than you gave them.
Look at what's happening to Diddy right now. 'Everyone knew', yes, and no one did anything for literally decades. He had loads of people on staff and what looks like hundreds of victims and yet he was able to keep going unchecked for that long? If you have power you have the power to make people stop talking about you. My only issue with this episode was that the Commission wasn't 'cause a tragic accident, sorry about your Starfleet officers' level scarier, but maybe they were hoping that Sisko and Bashir just wouldn't figure it out.
This is a whole society - that apparently were Federation members from at least McCoy's university days - who managed to avoid anyone finding out that some of their population were joined beings until Crusher's time over a century later. This is a SPECIES of secret keepers. They aren't human, in spite of their surface presentation. Apparently if the Trill don't want you to know something then you don't get to know.
Like any large organisation, I doubt the majority of the people who work at the Commission actually have access to the data that would disprove the claim. The lower level doctors may be running the initial tests that fifty percent conveniently pass before the senior medical staff take them on to weed out the remaining 'unsuitables.' Once you get to the high level you get let in on the secret AND the reason why you can't blab.
I would also assume that this issue has come up several time over the centuries and has managed to be successfully turned into a 'crazy conspiracy theory' by dedicated effort and propaganda. There are enough scandals that last for decades in our own world that it doesn't seem implausible that truthtellers would be written off as crazy 'bitter' rejects who are jealous that they aren't able to be joined.
Verad was declared unsuitable for unspecified reasons, but given that he went all the way to the finish line before being booted it was most likely psychological ones. Psych rejections are - so they claim - supposed to set off rejection. If Verad had been able to fully join with Dax that may have blown the whole thing wide open but he was successfully stopped before the 'three, maybe four days' the Trill doctor is quoted as giving so no cover up needed. Joran on the other hand lasted 6 months and, as it turned out later, several murders (I actually hated that retroactive change). That's a problem. That's information that can cause chaos.
Idk if it’s really an allegory on trans or just multiple personality disorder. Sorry but arbitrarily assuming things of personal preference/beliefs is different than what the story is presenting of multiple personalities.
I mean, it could easily be both. The point he made about being referred to as both Jadzia and Dax, I actually know someone like that, and their alternate personalities don't mind being referred to by their name...usually.
I think maybe it was at least a little. Like in the terminology of the 1990s "She used to be a man" is what was said of trans people. I know that's not considered the right nomenclature now, but considering other things I think Dax was likely intended more as about LGBT issues than multiple personalities. Although this particular episode is about disassociation a bit so there is that.