S04.E06: Rejoined

[rmontro]

Quote

Jadzia rekindles a relationship when she meets the current host of the wife of one Dax's past hosts, Torias. However, under Trill law, this is an offense punishable by exile from the homeworld and thus the death of the symbiont. 

I'm surprised there was no discussion of this here, since it has been highly acclaimed and also considered somewhat controversial.  I'm not here to discuss the so-called "lesbian kiss", however. 

Terry Farrell does a fine acting job in this one.

The only thing that bugged me was that while Jadzia talked about being willing to sacrifice any future life the Dax trill would have, there is no mention whatsoever about Lenara's trill being sacrificed.  It seems to me that if Jadzia Dax truly loved Lenara, the main sticking point would be her willingness to take an action that would result in the death of the person that she loved.  If you love someone, you don't want to bring harm to them.  Yet this point is never discussed.

[John Potts]

There are a number of problems with the episode, as I see it. OK, if "Rejoining" is so bad, how come it didn't seem to be a problem for Odan in The Host, who seemed to have no problems in hooking up with Beverly with two different (three, if you include Riker) hosts? And even if you want to say, "Well, that was before they'd worked out the details of Trills", then how come it was OK for Sisko to hang out with Curzon, Jadzia AND Ezri? And even if you want to say it only applies to sexual relations (which is explicitly NOT what they say here - each new Host is meant to make it a clean slate) Ezri seems to be OK (in principle, at least) with resuming a relationship with Worf. And is the Federation really OK with the Trill banning certain relations between it's citizens? That doesn't sound like the sort of thing the Federation would permit for its members.

Now of course, all that is irrelevant, because it's all just an excuse for getting our first gay relationship on Trek. But if so, I was too busy thinking, "What are you talking about? That's never been the case before!" to look past the completely artificial setup to swallow the premise of the story. You know what they say: you get one implausible premise "free" if you want people to buy your story, beyond that your viewers will start going, "But wait a minute..." 

IMO, Season 7's Chimera handled things far better (a I've posted here).

[readster]

Yes, it was way too busy thinking. It just threw the ideas out the window of starting "fresh" with the Trill. I agree, it did seem very "un-Federation" with that kind of limitations and so forth, but remember, Trek had the first ever inter racial kiss, so let's do that L-word. 

[Maverick]

 In the episode, they did state the taboo was only about intimate long-term relationships/marriage.  While I don't consider anything from The Host applying to subsequent Trill appearances, I don't think would have applied since Odan and Crusher had just started seeing each other.   The issue should have come up in conversations between Ezri and Worf, but of course they didn't because the whole taboo was an ass pull to make their lesbian kiss work.  Ezri probably shouldn't even have been serving with Worf given that taboo.   The whole episode was a clunky mess.  

[rmontro]

Well, technically it wasn't entirely a lesbian kiss, but I get the point.  If the taboo is strictly about marriages and long term romantic relationships, I don't see where any continuity was messed up.  Not that I'm all that concerned with Trill policies anyway.  I thought it made for an interesting story.