Jadzia finally gets her episode

Rhonda’s Take on Episode 2.17: “Playing God”

Finally, Jadzia Dax is featured in a story about Trill! I’ve often talked about what a great ensemble show Deep Space Nine is, and it is, but Jadzia Dax has been underserved through the first season and a half. We’ve had two previous episodes about the Dax symbiont (Season 1 Episode 7: “Dax” and Season 2 Episode 4: “Invasive Procedures”), but the character was silenced in the former and in a coma in the latter. In “Playing God,” Jadzia finally gets to show us her journey as she wrestles with how to treat the Trill initiate, Arjin, assigned to her for field experience.

Before we get into the primary Dax storyline, I have to give huge props to Jim Trombetta, the writer of this episode (or maybe the credit goes to Michael Piller, who gave it a final treatment and shares teleplay credit). There is little time in the episode for our other cast of characters, but each of them gets at least a one-line or brief scene that packs a wallop of character development. Kira and O’Brien spend most of the episode chasing Cardassian voles. She gets the opportunity to insult Quark with the hate-filled, “I’d take a Cardassian vole over you any day!” Quark dismisses the vitriol handily as her trying to deny her latent attraction to him. When Dax and Arjin take the protouniverse back through the wormhole, Kira says, “May the prophets guide you.” While Kira’s faith has been a centerpoint to several episodes, the writers don’t often sneak in the actual daily behaviors of the faithful in this way. When Quark gives advice to Arjin, we find out that he failed an opportunity given to him because he disregarded Rule of Acquisition #112, “Never have sex with the boss’s sister.” Sisko begins the episode telling O’Brien to set phasers to stun to bring in the voles alive, but mid-episode is frustrated enough to shout, “Take those phasers off stun!” In one of his station logs, Sisko also debates the fate of the protouniverse and reminds us what he has lost to the Borg when he questions whether his choice to destroy it compares to the indifference of the Borg when assimilating. Jake even gets a moment when he confesses to his father that he is in love with Marta, the Dabo girl he’s been tutoring in entomology. When the command officers are arguing about the fate of the protouniverse, Kira is characteristically pragmatic in her argument that it must die so they live, but Odo argues, “I don’t step on ants! Just because we don’t understand a life form doesn’t give us the right to destroy it!” This reminds the audience that Odo is unlike any life form we understand and, despite being seemingly indestructible, he fears being misunderstood and destroyed.

This episode also sneaks in the humor starting with Dax introducing Arjin to Kira and O’Brien when all Arjin (and the camera) can see is their shapely, uniformed bottoms sticking out of a duct. Dax’s misbehaviors are also a source of humor from her playing Tongo with the Ferengi to Arjin showing up early at her quarters only to be harassed by an alien while she runs around dressed only in a towel. Like Arjin, we are left to speculate whether she was only working out with the wrestler or whether she was getting a workout (wink, wink).

There’s a tightness to the storytelling as well and a gorgeous parallel between Arjin’s journey to become a host and the debate over allowing the protouniverse opportunity to expand and form. Arjin, played with spectacular sensitivity by Geoffrey Blake, is like a caterpillar who’s been led by others into the initiate program. The universe is in the chrysalis phase with early signs of life. Both need room to grow and Jadzia creates that room.

This isn’t the first episode where Jadzia tells someone she is not Curzon, but it is the first episode where we are given some distinct differences. At the top of the episode, Arjin tells Julian Bashir he nearly requested another mentor because the Dax symbiont has eliminated 50 candidates from the program in the last 200 years. Jadzia doesn’t tell us what Curzon did to her during her field training with him, but she describes it as “two weeks of hell” and tells Arjin that she cried herself to sleep every night. Sisko says Curzon was tough, and “maybe abusive in his own way.” (Let’s put the metaphorical pin in Sisko’s affection for Curzon, who he always describes in terms that seem like punishable offenses.) Jadzia is determined not to recreate the same experience for Arjin, yet she also feels a responsibility to truly push Arjin to prove his worthiness.

Perhaps the most important revelation comes when Jadzia explains to Arjin that the files he’s studied on her tell him what Jadzia has done, but not who Jadzia is. She explains that before Curzon broke her she was a quiet, serious student who lived fully within the program. She explains that it took Curzon eliminating her from the program for her to find her voice. Despite her anger at Curzon’s treatment, she requests the Dax symbiont, and Curzon doesn’t object, which hints that his mistreatment was to prepare her for the joining. Ironically, Arjin tells Jadzia that he’d assumed the joining made one complete and wise beyond one’s years. These are qualities we’ve attributed to Jadzia, but she allows him to make the observation because she doesn’t see herself as fully formed. She may have a 300 year old symbiont inside her and seven lifetimes of knowledge, but she is still a 27 year old woman at heart. “I’m nothing like what I expected,” she concludes. We wouldn’t have her any other way!