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[8.6/10] Sometimes you make the best out of a bad situation. Jadzia’s exit from Deep Space Nine is a mixed bag at best. A demon-infused Dukat magic-blasting her to death played as silly, even in the heightened confines of a sci-fi show. Focusing on Julian and Quark pining after her as the prelude to her demise remains baffling. And Terry Farrell’s exit from the show is much worse, with behind-the-scenes crudeness and arguably bullying that leaves a sour taste in your mouth.

Which is all to say that there can be great poignance and catharsis in killing off a main character. Deep Space Nine earns a measure of it. But it’s still hard to look back with any great appreciation on the departure of Jadzia and the actress who played her from the series.

And yet, I kind of love the arrival of Ezri. I love the ways in which she’s different from Jadzia. I love the thought experiments that her bursting into the Deep Space Nine milieu creates. I love the ways in which the rest of the crew reacts to losing their friend while having to engage with someone who carries on her spirit. Everything here is so rich, in a way that honestly makes me wish that, if Jadzia had to go away for whatever reason, the creative team had pulled the trigger earlier in the show’s run. That way, we would have more time to dig into Ezri’s predicament and her friends’ readjustments. It’s incredible how well this replacement works.

That starts with how the show characterizes Ezri. I’m reminded of the creative team behind MASH (which, come to think of it, has a surprising amount in common with DS9), went about replacing one of its major original characters. Major Frank Burns, the irksome, sycophantic foil to the good-natured cut-ups who led the series, departed the show. In his place, the show brought in Major Charles Winchester (played by David Ogden Stiers of TNG’s “Half a Life” fame). And despite occupying the same place in the series’ orbit, the two characters could not have been more different.

Burns was a crude dummy. Winchester was a sophisticated intellectual. Burns was a hack doctor. Winchester was a talented surgeon. Burns was a twerp who arguably got bullied by the show’s protagonist. Winchester was a nerd who could match wits with him, even when the pranksters managed to get his goat. Both characters served the same function in the series -- as a low-stakes, stiffer and more uptight adversary for the main character. But they contrasted him in different ways, and thus the one never felt like the cheap replacement for the other, just a different spin on a consistent foil that freshened up the dynamic.

Deep Space Nine takes the same approach here. Jadzia was a confident cool girl. Ezri is a nervous dork. Jadzia came in with the self-assurance of multiple distinguished Starfleet careers. Ezri is an ensign and assistant counselor who is just starting out and feels it. Jadzia is someone who came into being joined well-prepared and emotionally ready for the event. Ezri has the joining thrust upon her and is still a ginger and uncertain about the whole thing. Heck, you can even break the distinctions down to something as superficial as Jadzia being tall and Ezri being short.

The contrasts are striking, and those differences allow the show to come at the idea of being a Trill in a new and different way. Beyond that, they allow the writers to tackle what Dax means to her friends and family aboard the station in a new and different way. The possibilities that opens up are endless, and the new depths it allows the show to explore pays so many more creative dividends than introducing another Jadzia-type into the show’s roster ever could.

The most exciting part of Ezri’s emergence may be the differences between her situation from Jadzia’s and how the newly joined Trill’s presence allows the audience to put themselves in her shoes.

Jadzia was someone largely at peace with her past lives. The show still made hay from the turbulence of Curzon’s misadventures or Torias’ regrets or Joran’s psychopathy, but for the most part, Jadzia was someone who drew strength from the symbiont’s memories, rather than felt destabilized by them. Whether it was because she’d been more adequately prepared by the Symbiosis Commission, or just had more time to acclimate to the joining, Jadzia walked into the series premiere fairly self-assured about her situation.

Ezri is the exact opposite, and that's interesting! Past episodes have suggested that becoming joined was a rare and immense opportunity full of responsibility and difficulty. What would it feel like to be a regular Trill, moving about your life as usual, and suddenly be thrust into it without training or preparation, because the alternative is another being’s death? (Hello, Judith Jarvis Thomson fans!) What would it be like to have your mind flooded with eight lifetimes’ worth of preferences that may not jibe with those of the current host? What would it be like to have to harmonize all of these storied memories and experiences with your own limited ones?

We never got a chance to explore that with Jadzia. She came into Deep Space Nine fully-baked, more or less. We get to see the rocky transition with Ezri (and, vague spoilers, her situation lays some groundwork for Discovery), knowing more about Trill experiences and culture that allow the creative team to add meaning and context to what it is to be a member of this unique species.

The imaginative character possibilities that opens up are crucial. The truth is that Terry Farrell wasn’t the best actress in the world when she started on Deep Space Nine. But the strength of the concept of a joined species did a lot of the heavy lifting in the early days of the series that helped buttress Jadzia amid the show’s cast. I like Nicole de Boer’s performance better from the start, and she gets the same benefit -- of an equally fascinating basic situation behind her role that gives her a lift from the jump.

So does the notion of Ezri reconnecting with the various members of the DS9 crew in ways that are both familiar and jarring. The series dug into this idea a bit with Jadzia. One of the core components of her dynamic is having a friendship with Sisko that's complicated by his friendship with Curzon. And the show got great traction from the reentry of figures from Dax’s past -- from old lovers to old enemies to old allies -- and how they affected Jadzia.

The catch is that we didn’t know Curzon. We didn’t know Kor (or at least, not Dax’s relationship with him.) We didn’t know Lenara Khan. We do know Sisko and Worf and Julian and Quark. So seeing a new Dax reconnect with them, have those bonds feel at once familiar and alien, is a richer vein to explore, one that's more visceral for the audience since we were there when those bonds were formed.

You feel for Ezri, not just because she’s in a tender and vulnerable new place, but because she’s immersed in a series of relationships that are supposed to give her comfort, but instead induce a sort of reincarnation motion sickness. (A metaphorical motion sickness to go with her actual motion sickness -- what a concept!) To be frank, you can kind of understand the Trill’s reluctance about new hosts rekindling connections with the important people in the lives of former hosts, given how murky and difficult for Ezri here. The inherent parallax of Ezri’s view of these people It’s a hard thing for her to adjust to, and a difficulty that's doubled by the tragic air that tinges her presence on the station given how Jadzia died.

It’s just as hard for some other members of the crew. As much as Deep Space Nine’s interpretation of Worf is more dickish than his Next Generation incarnation, I’m a sucker for stories about him being a stick in the mud about something, only to relent and see the ways that a softer, more empathetic approach could very well be the right move. His reaction to Ezri, and everything around her, may be the peak of that (give or take some of his tender moments with Alexander in TNG).

What must it be like to lose someone you love, to mourn them, to lay them to rest, and then be faced with the presence of a person who both is and isn’t your dear lost loved one. (Hello Vertigo fans!) It’s too much to call Worf entirely sympathetic here. If anything, he feels like a real jerk. He’s curt with Ezri when she’s already having a rough time adjusting to her new life. He gets jealous and physical with Julian when he has absolutely no right. He rejects the very idea that a piece of his wife lives on in this stranger, and it brings out the worst in him.

But you can also understand where he’s coming from. He has been through the sudden traumatic loss of a mate for the second time. He went to great lengths to make peace with the idea of his wife’s death and earn her place in Sto-vo-kor. Now, he’s confronted with a walking reminder of his loss and what he might consider an impostor.

Grief is rarely fair and linear under normal circumstances. His anger and arguably cruelty is not fair to Ezri or Julian or the others he’s short with, but it is comprehensible. Most importantly, it gives Worf somewhere to go emotionally.

Frankly, my favorite moment in Worf and Dax’s relationship may be right here, where the Klingon’s mighty heart turns upon that piercing question -- how would Jadzia want him to treat Ezri. The way he apologizes to her, opens up to her about his struggles, tells them they’re not her fault and that he is glad his wife lives on her, is moving. He asks for space, and gives Ezri a mere polite nod from across the room. But he is there, in Ezri’s crisis of self and the celebration of her joining the station’s faithful. That is growth and empathy, the kind that Jadzia prized in her beau and which honors her memory. For now, it’s enough.

That's just one of multiple fraught or fascinating interactions Ezri has among Jadzia’s dear friends. Quark is the perfect contradiction: uniquely accepting of Ezri as valid without compunction but also just interested in a second chance with Dax. Julian is kind and compassionate, recognizing that Ezri is a different person, but also strangely compelled by the remnants of his friend. (Though geeze, even with where they’re going, we can't escape the “Jadzia liked flirting with you and if Worf hadn't come along she would have dated you” bullshit.) Even Kira trying not to associate her place of spiritual peace with the loss of her dear friend is complicated by Ezri returning to the scene of her predecessor’s demise.

Then, of course, there’s Sisko. And if there’s anyone who’s instantly at ease with Ezri, it’s him. It makes sense! He’s been here before! He already had to adjust from Curzon to Jadzia, so Jadzia to Ezri is easier having been a party to the transition once already. He can call her “old man” without hesitation, and recognize the challenges of the readjustment, and see the ways that Ezri is both the Dax he knew and a whole different person all at once in a way that's challenging for everyone else.

His dynamic with Ezri opens up the same kind of new opportunities. Curzon was a mentor. Jadzia was a peer. Ezri is someone that Benjamin can guide. Seeing how he relates to three different people, bonded by the same symbiont, is another way for the show to wring new possibilities from what is kind of the same character.

It also gives him a role to play here -- guiding Ezri through the challenging readjustment to life on the station. His is a ploy to get her to stay on DS9 despite the discomfort she feels inhabiting Dax’s old environment. The inertia of network television tells savvy viewers that Ezri will probably stick around, but I appreciate the subtext that Sisko is loath to lose his friend again, and more to the point, that “Afterimage” earns her staying aboard the station. And the perfect fulcrum for that is none other than plain, simple Garak.

Look, I’m in the tank for Garak to begin with, so it’s easy for storylines focused on him to work on me. But I think using him as someone for Ezri to spark off of is perfect for a couple of reasons.

The first and easiest is that you can buy him as someone who, well, needs a counselor. From all the way back in season 2’s “The Wire”, Garak has been through emotional turmoil, despite his unflappable demeanor. Losing his emotionally distant father, being stuck in a POW camp, finding his father alive, losing him again, being forced to become a vindictive murderer, all give him reason to need therapy even before you get to the claustrophobia.

So he provides a clear use-case for Ezri’s talents. On a practical level, Garak’s ability to decode Cardassian cables is necessary for the war effort. On a canon level, his claustrophobia attacks are well-established. On a personal level, he has skeletons in his closet (if you'll pardon the expression) that need unpacking.

With all of that, at a time when Ezri is full of uncertainty and self-doubt, he’s someone who badly needs her help. You can see the young Trill, tentative and uncertain, slyly using her own discomfiting situation to prompt Elim to discuss his. The comparisons she draws between the two of them -- the way emotional hardship can manifest in physical discomfort, the way Tain locking his son in a closet as punishment has parallels to Torias dying in a shuttle accident in how each event leaves lingering scars -- allow her to help the ailing Cardassian. Ezri shows her value, even if she herself doesn’t quite see it yet.

What especially impresses me about veteran Trek writer René Echevarria’s script is how he gives the ebbs and flows and turns of Ezri’s treatment of Garak. If she’d merely given Garak some solace and coaxed him to confront his childhood abuse in a way that got him over his phobia, it would be too pat. Instead, like so many of us, both she and Garak rise and fall. One minute they're beleaguered. The next they’re self-assured. The next they’re having a crisis. The next they’ve found some measure of peace and direction. Their situation is no more a straight line than Worf’s, and it makes their shared experience realer and more affecting.

Therein lies the second reason that Garak is the perfect first patient -- because no one is more adept at slickly and cruelly tearing someone down than DS9’s resident tailor. The cliche goes that hurt people hurt people. So as with Worf, you can somewhat forgive the trespasses of another character who’s suffering his own crisis. But the way he dresses down Ezri in his own lowest moment, confirms every fear she has -- that she’s useless, not good enough, unworthy of carrying on the legacy of Dax -- comes with extra force and poison when it comes out in the form of Garak’s searing invectives.

So you buy it when Ezri is crestfallen and ready to give up entirely. You buy it (admittedly, with some reservations) when Sisko gives her some tough love, knowing his friend will bounce back. You buy it when Worf gives her the boost she needs right when she needs it most. And you buy it when she’s there for Garak when he finally feels ready to admit what the true source of his pain is.

I love the reveal that what’s eating Garak is not the ghosts of his terrible treatment by his father (or at least not entirely), but rather, the acute sense that he’s a traitor to his people. Despite his exile, Garak has always fancied himself a patriot. He lamented to Julian the pain of being forbidden from his homeland. He was aghast at the Female Changeling’s pronouncement that there were no Cardassian prisoners taken in their attack. He has his criticisms of the regime and his foes like Dukat, but by god, Garak loves his people.

And he’s killing them.

Ezri’s right. He’s doing a good thing, one that would likely spare the lives of more Cardassians than sitting idly by while the Dominion sinks its claws into his homeland. But you can understand why he would feel like he’s a traitor, a handmaiden to annihilation, someone with Cardassian blood on his hand. The source of his pain is more than a pop-psychology fig leaf; it’s an on-brand longing and woundedness at the heart of the character and his connection to his people.

To have Ezri provoke that, help him through it, get him started on the right path toward confronting his feelings and so being able to address them, shows that she does have a place on Deep Space Nine, as a counselor and a friend. Garak’s situation is a challenge that, for all her kindness, Jadzia couldn’t have handled it. She wasn’t trained for it, and I don’t think her disposition was particularly suited for it either. Ezri, however, is the right Trill for the job. Unknownst to Garak, he needed her, and she needed to know that. She needed to know that she could be a different, but no less valid or valuable denizen of the station.

That is the truth on multiple levels. She may not be a science officer, but as Sisko notes, in the throes of war, a counselor is more than called for on the station. She may not have years of friendships with Benjamin and Kira and the rest of the crew, but she can occupy a different, no less vital place in these people’s lives. And Ezri may not have been a character since Deep Space Nine’s premiere, but in the hands of de Boer and the writing staff, she still has a crucial role to play in the final year of the series’ mission.