|
Trills, chills and spills! What's it like to be joined? How
might Trills live, die, marry, give birth and all the other things in between?
If you want to be "spotted" like Dax, maybe you'd better read this
before signing up, for there may be more than meets the eye on the Trill
homeworld. I haven't been "slugged" by the Symbiosis Commission yet,
but I have given considerable thought into the various implications of a life
of constant Trills.
Worming Your Way Into The Trill Species.
The Trill species has been growing in prominence in the Star Trek universe
since the appearance of the first Trill in the 1991 Next Generation episode
The Host. In that episode, a Trill ambassador named Odan - whose true
nature is not yet known to the Enterprise crew - is being ferried to mediate
between two warring factions of another alien race; over the course of Odan's
trip, he falls in love with Beverly Crusher. Upon arrival in the midst of the
hostilities, Odan turns down every attempt to beam him down to negotiate, opting
instead for a shuttle trip. His shuttle is attacked by one of the fighting
parties and he is severely injured - or at least his host body is. Demanding to
be shuttled, not beamed, back to the Enterprise, Odan reveals that he is a
joined species consisting of a humanoid host and a mollusc-like symbiont nestled
within the host's abdominal cavity. According to Odan, the symbiont contained
the entirety of a Trill's personality and could retain that personality if
transferred into another body. (This concept was later refined, and it is now
generally accepted that the personality emerging from a joined Trill is a
melding of the host and symbiont.)
Odan - the symbiont - was transplanted into Riker to serve as an emergency
host until the Trill homeworld could send another suitable host to the Enterprise,
and Riker's personality was completely subdued by Odan for the duration of his
mediation duties; this resulted in the primary emotional arc of The Host,
a relationship between Beverly and Odan, and her subsequent difficulties in
continuing that relationship when the personality of Odan spoke from the body of
Riker. The Trill idea wasn't lost on Trek's producers, who quickly created a
Trill character to fill a void left when one of their planned regular characters
for Deep Space Nine didn't quite work out; originally, DS9's science officer was
to be a female from a low-gravity planet who would need a wheelchair or other
protective support in the Earth-normal gravity of the station. Though this
concept was later explored in the episode Melora, the impracticality of
frequently having to create the illusion of zero-gravity for a regular character
left a gap in the lineup, one which the creators of DS9 filled with a Trill we
now know as Lt. Jadzia Dax.
With a Trill on our screens every week, we have an opportunity to study this
enigmatic alien race in the kind of detail which has only been lavished upon
Vulcans and Klingons in previous Treks. Such a study opens a lot of questions
to debate, and theorizing along those lines produces some troubling results.
Some of the basic concepts of the Trill have changed; the hosts seen in The
Host had small ridges on their foreheads, while those subsequently seen in DS9
have displayed spots along their temples and necks, derived from the same makeup
design seen in the Next Generation episode The Perfect Mate. Since DS9's
premiere, it has been established that Trills instead have spotted patterns on
their necks and temples, and the parasitic nature of the symbionts - along with
the self-treatment Odan had to perform upon himself in The Host - were
apparently set aside to simplify matters. From the initial transplant
operation, the joining takes roughly 93 hours to solidify, a period during which
the symbiont can be removed, but after those 93 hours, the two halves of the
newly-joined Trill are dependent upon each other for life; the host will die
within hours of the symbiont's removal.
Though the symbiont/host interspecies dependency has supposedly existed for
a number of centuries on Trill, it is intriguing to speculate whether or not the
Trill - or the writers and producers of Star Trek - have begun to explore the
moral, societal or legistlative aspects of this unique biological arrangement.
Marriage and relationships among the Trill have the potential to seem truly
bizarre from the human perspective. In The Host, for example, an
implication is clearly made that a Trill can handle relationships with either
sex when Odan's new host - a woman - makes an overture to Beverly Crusher that
it is time for their relationship to continue. As we all know from having seen the
episode, Beverly turned down this offer, stating that humans aren't quite so
unaffected by such seemingly casual changes in appearance, gender and lifestyle.
While subsequent Trill episodes on DS9 have made it clear that the changeover of
host bodies is no easy thing for the symbiont and can in fact be traumatic, the
rest of the good doctor's declaration is seeming more and more like an
understatement.
In the DS9 episode The Nagus, Sisko ruminates his son's unexplained
absence from home and Dax, who offers him advice based on her previous experience
as parents of both sexes; in The House of Quark, Dax makes a similarly
unique claim of having been both a husband and a wife. On the surface, these
seem like innocuous enough remarks, meant to play humorously on Dax's varied
past hosts. But if you try to sort through these statements, it gets really
complicated!
Let's start with marriage. It's a simple enough concept for we humans, but a
somewhat more baffling one where a joined species like the Trill is concerned.
With a situation involving one joined Trill and an unjoined spouse, what happens
with a child whose joined parent becomes the opposite sex through a change of
host bodies? Does this child now have two mothers or two fathers? In a worst
case scenario, what if the parents divorce - who gets custody of the child, his
mother or...his mother? You see, it gets very strange! Naturally there would
be records of any changes in a parent's host body. But beyond the purely legal
ramifications, how would a child adjust to a parent's host changeover? Another
weird twist is the revelation, in The Host, that the Odan symbiont had
inhabited a male host body and that male's own son. Like many things in The
Host - such as Odan's alleged inability to use the transporter and his ridged
forehead - this element of Trilldom may have been abandoned, but if not, it may
represent some potential problems. Father-and-son rivalries of varying degrees
are an inevitable part of everyday life, and in the event that a son joins with
his father's symbiont, the conflicting emotions could begin anew and could cause
a constant source of confusion and emotional upset for the new host. It would
seem reasonable that some Trill legislation would be necessary to prohibit a
host inheriting a symbiont from one of his parents. And more fundamentally,
given the Trill symbiont's roost within the abdomen, it seems unlikely that a
joined female such as Dax could have a child, unless the physiology of the Trill
host is sufficiently different from that of humans.
Children aside, marriage itself could also be a fairly complex aspect of the
Trill lifestyle. Dax says she has been a mother and a father, a wife and a
husband. Trying to make sense of how all of these could fit into any number of
lifetimes is baffling. In human terms, marriage - at least in theory - is an
arrangement 'til death us do part. A joined Trill could die a number of
deaths - so do his vows travel with him into the next life? There's really no
way to tell without further explanation from the show itself. But for the sake
of speculation, let's assume that marriage has the same meaning for Trills that
it does for we humans, that of an everlasting bond. If a married host dies and
the symbiont is placed in another host, does the marriage continue? Is it
nullified? Is a decision made depending on the specifics of each couple? It
gets even wilder if both parties in a marriage have symbionts. Again, there
would obviously be records kept of any changes in host bodies, but there would
be many more considerations involved in a wedded Trill couple than mere facts
and figures.
On the other hand, all of this speculation could just as easily be moot, for
Dax herself once mentioned to Bashir in A Man Alone that Trills don't
succumb to the human urge to find romance. Whether or not this extends to
marriage is unknown; if such seeming frivolity includes all aspects of Trill
life, then all is probably well with the Trill and it's just we who will never
quite understand it.
Another and perhaps more troubling matter that doesn't seem to have been
considered by the Trill until the 23rd century or so is the rigorous testing and
qualification of prospective hosts. As seen in Playing God, a potential
host is observed extensively at work and in social situations to determine his
fitness for joining. His observer is always a joined Trill. After the wanna-be
host leaves, his field docent reports back to the Symbiosis Commission on the
Trill homeworld with a full evaluation. However, it seems that this is a fairly
new practice, perhaps not even a century old at the time of the DS9 episode
Equilibrium, in which Joran Belar's joining with the Dax symbiont sparked
more thorough testing of potential hosts which limited the percentage of Trill's
humanoid population that could be considered eligible for joining. If hosts and
symbionts have been joining for centuries - an implication derived from the
number of hosts Dax has had, assuming all of them lived at least into their 60s
or 70s - it's shocking that the Symbiosis Commission has been so lax in their
testing parameters for so long. And one can glean from Invasive Procedures
that the mental and emotional instability suffered by Joran Belar was not an
isolated case. In Invasive Procedures, Verad has been turned down for joining
by the Commission and decides to take a symbiont for himself, even when such an
action means that the death of another Trill is certain. We've seen only a
handful of Trills, and of that small number there have been two certifiable nut
cases, one a murderer and the other a criminal who wouldn't think twice about
killing. And it is this which brings us to my darkest speculative observation
on the Trill race(s).
The Symbiosis Commission is comprised of joined Trills, presumably some of
the elders of the race who have much knowledge and experience of what
combination of certain hosts, certain symbionts and certain personalities will
generate productive members of Trill society. But nowhere in the process of
deciding who is or isn't suitable for joining have we heard mention of unjoined
members of the Commission. There is only one specific related job in which
we've seen unjoined Trills, and they happened to be the Guardians who observe
and care for the symbionts in their native habitat on the Trill planet. Dax
described the Guardians in Equilibrium as being unaccustomed to visitors,
and after one Guardian revealed that there was something wrong with Dax, someone
had obviously gone to the trouble of intimidating him so he would keep quiet,
so there is a possibility that the Symbiosis Commission isn't fond of an
independent body, particularly one composed of unjoined Trills, keeping track of
their activities.
With those who are already joined acting as the final arbiters in who else
will be joined, it's possible - by no means certain, but at least possible -
that a division exists in Trill society between the more prestigous joined hosts
and the much greater numbers of unjoined Trills, basically forming bourgeois and
proletariat castes among the Trill. Near the end of Equilibrium, the
Symbiosis Commission is about to remove the Dax symbiont from Jadzia, resulting
in her death, to protect the secret that many more Trill humanoids are eligible
and suitable for joining than the official percentage known to the public, and
Sisko threatens to unleash this forbidden knowledge upon the Trill populace if
Jadzia is sacrificed for the Commission's political respectability. Dr. Rinhol,
a member of the Commission, is staggered by the implications, noting that if the
public were made aware that most of them are eligible the symbionts would become
a coveted commodity, stolen and fought over by the great unjoined masses. The
joined segment of the Trill populace - or at least an elite portion of the
joined - mean to keep their priveleged lifestyle to themselves, and to do this
they carefully and discretely choose those who will become their peers. As
noted before, a fairly large percentage of the Trills we have seen other than
Dax have exhibited violent tendencies and dangerous mental instabilities. Many
times, from The Host through Equilibrium, emphasis has been placed
upon the safety of the symbiont over that of the host, and no treatment, therapy
or any other help seems to be offered to those who are ineligible for joining.
Trill medicine has concentrated on the welfare of the symbionts and easing the
process of joining, and seems to pay no attention to the humanoid hosts beyond
their basic fitness and suitability to carry a symbiont. While there's no
indication that the unjoined masses on the Trill homeworld are living in poverty
or in other undesirable conditions, a deception is being foisted upon the
general populace by the highest echelons of society, and perhaps even more
disturbingly, that elite caste is not elected by the people, but chooses its
own lot.
Perhaps, with this final question, one wonders what reason Jadzia Dax has to
be so serene all the time.
Earl Green
This article originally appeared in the June 1995
issue of LogBook: The Zine
© 1995, 1997
|
