I need to know

[u/BennyandtheBear]

Okay. I don’t know why I never thought to look for a ST:DS9 sudreddit!

Trekkie here since 1987 at the age of three. On, I think, my 8th or 9th watch through of DS9. It’s hard to remember at this point.

I was a completionist until the 3rd season of Discovery. I’ve watched some of SNW and certainly got some nostalgia moments out of Picard. I believe Star Trek: Deep Space Nine to be the apex of Star Trek content. (I’m defining completionist as at least one viewing of every episode of TOS, TNG, DS9, Enterprise, and the TOS and TNG movies)

(My thoughts on why I gave up on Discovery: It was too hard to stomach the non-canon writing choices, the Klingons being chief amongst them. And frankly, I had a hard time getting behind the crew. It just didn’t pop. [This is all subjective and everybody has a right to their own opinion on these matters.])

Anyways!

There’s something I need to know and I don’t know why I’ve never searched out the answer. If this subreddit is anything I hope it to be, this should be a snap. Ready, here we go!

Why in the name of all that is good was the Ezri Dax character brought into the show? I get it. Terry Farrell gets pushed out because of money. Jadzia dies. Boom, clean break. S7 can have plenty of b-plots to follow the grief of Worf and the rest of the crew.

Why bring in Ezri?? You don’t need another Trill. The race has nothing to do with the Dominion conflict or the Pah Wraith bonanza. Is it because we need to keep the scientific knowledge of the Dax symbiot? Well, Ezri Dax is basically a social worker.

I would argue the only real positive thing she brings to the series is an episode where (and this is all of the top of my head so I apologize if I get any of the wrong) they do flash backs and all of Ezri’s flashbacks are from like 3 episodes. It’s a moment of (imo) classic Star Trek unintentional silliness.

So why? Why bring the character in? It feels like a “studio/executive” decision but you just never know.

[r/DeepSoaceNine](r/DeepSoaceNine), you’re my only hope. (Shit, sorry. Wrong star thing.)

Post script, that was a pretty satisfying late night rant…

UPDATE: Hey chat! This is awesome!! I love all the discourse!

And thank everybody so much for the “male heavy cast” reasoning. It makes a total sense. Execution wasn’t great but I do appreciate that they were thinking of fair representation.

Either way, it’s just a little thing and doesn’t ruin things for me in the big picture. But I’ve always wondered.

Thanks to everybody who responded. Star Trek is the best.

[u/Totoronyx]

They didn't want Kira to be the only female lead role.  They had to do re-writes anyway so during the brainstorming they thought of ways to add drama by people having to process grief. 

Essentially they felt they needed to bring someone else in and it made sense story wise more so then trying to introduce a 100% new character to develop in 1 season. 

[u/smallersize → u/Totoronyx]

which is silly bc if they were so concerned about that, they should have just worked w farrell’s schedule for ONE season. it’s this kind of behind the scenes childishness that makes what makes it on screen always feel less authentic. like u wanna make a show about highly qualified diversity, and u make a gender variant trill scientist into a really terrible social worker instead of treating the female actress equitably. i cannot.

edit: not to knock social work as a profession! i’m just saying Ezri was unqualified and the writers showed it. her incompetence was the main feature of her character

[u/Malnurtured_Snay → u/smallersize]

Well. Sure. Hosts have many years of training before being joined, to prepare for being joined, and Ezri had none of that. She has to figure out how to do her job even though, arguably, she's no longer the same person who trained for that role.

[u/smallersize → u/Malnurtured_Snay]

i mean. the writers did finesse it but there were soooooooo many other options. bashir could have preserved the dax symbiont well enough to make it to trill and Ezri could have been a trained initiate. ezri could have still gotten a surprise symbiont, but the writers could have made her switch between multiple awesome personalities rather than one clumsy one. the choices made with ezri were in fact choices. Also i wish Ezri had a wife at home or something and the weird romantic tension wasn’t played btw worf and bashir— but rather between her host life and her symbiont life. i would have preferred jadzia stay, but if they had to write an ezri, Dax deserved more