Surfing Retro: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine – Facets
If you ask me who the best Captain in Starfleet is, I will, without batting an eye, tell you that, of course, it’s Picard. Star Trek: The Next Generation has always been my favorite of the shows, and Picard is my favorite captain. In the Original Star Trek, it was all about Spock, not Kirk; and in Voyager, Janeway spent too much time in fits of depression/locked away in her ready room or making the stupidest mistakes in the history of Starfleet to even be considered [Editor's Note: Watch it, Ginge --R] — and I don’t count Enterprise as cannon, so let’s not even go there.
But then there’s Deep Space Nine. And, well, it’s not fair to say that Sisko isn’t a good captain, because he is, but not in the same way that the others mentioned above are. First and foremost, Sisko started out as a Commander, not a Captain, in charge of a space station, not a starship. He later was promoted to Captain and DS9 was given the Defiant, but Sisko’s primary task was still running the space station.
And yet…
Well, TNG may always be my favorite, but I love Deep Space Nine, too. This past month, DS9 joined the ranks of the other Star Trek series when it finally became available for instant streaming on Netflix. Characters like Picard and Data are often in my mind, but I was quickly reminded of my love for long-forgotten characters like Quark, Odo, Bashir, and the rest of the crew and residents of DS9.
One of my favorite episodes of DS9 is the penultimate episode of season 3: Facets. Facets revolves around Dax — and while Jadzia Dax is not one of my favorite characters from the show, the idea of the episode was one I always enjoyed. In the episode, Jadzia goes through an ancient Trill ritual that allows her to talk to previous hosts of the Dax symbiote. The previous hosts’ memories are transferred into a volunteer. Sisko, Kira, Bashir, Odo, Quark, O’Brien and Leeta all accept their roles and embody different previous hosts so that Jadzia can learn more about them and about herself.
The two best parts of this episode involve Sisko and Odo. Sisko takes in the memories of Joran Dax, a violent murderer; Avery Brooks gives a creepy performance as Joran, who tells Jadzia that she’s worthless and then tries to get to her by hurting Sisko before finally being subdued.
Odo takes in the personality and memories of Curzon Dax, Dax’s previous host (and the “Old Man” that Sisko is always referring to), but something doesn’t go quite right. Because of Odo’s unique shapeshifting abilities, Odo and Curzon sort of merge together, blending together their personalities and memories in sort of the same way of a Trill host and symbiote. Curzon/Odo decides that he doesn’t want to go back to the way things were and that things would be better if Curzon’s memories stayed inside of Odo instead. In the end, it’s revealed that the reason Curzon originally flunked Jadzia out of the Joining program was because he was in love with her — and he doesn’t want his memories to go back to her because he thinks she’ll feel the shame he feels for flushing her out of the program. In the end, all is resolved and Odo and Jadzia share a special moment as Odo expresses how he never appreciated things like cheating Ferengi at the Dabo table, and Jadzia expresses the joy she feels from now having Curzon’s memories of what it feels like to be a Changeling.
The episode was actually inspired by the movie Sybil, and the writer wanted to do something that explored the idea of multiple personalities — but, of course, in a Star Trek fashion. The idea of multiple personalities is something difficult to tackle in most television series, but Deep Space Nine found a unique and interesting way to use Jadzia Dax, a character with a symbiote that has lived inside multiple humanoid hosts, to allow the different “personalities” of Dax to emerge and to talk to Jadzia.
Now, I’m not saying that any of my loyalty for Picard and the crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise is lessened after rewatching some of Deep Space Nine, but I can certainly appreciate the difficulties of a completely different format than what Star Trek writers were used to (space station instead of space ship), and it’s episodes like Facets that remind me how much I loved this series.
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