Jadzia Dax (), played by Terry Farrell, is a fictional character from the science-fiction television series Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.
Jadzia Dax is a joined Trill. Though she appears to be a young woman, Jadzia lives in symbiosis with a long-lived creature, known as a symbiont, named Dax; Jadzia is Dax's eighth host. The two share a single, conscious mind, and her personality is a blending of the characteristics of both the host and the symbiont. As such, Jadzia has access to all the skills and memories of the symbiont's seven previous hosts. Prior to the symbiotic joining, Jadzia earned academic degrees in exobiology, zoology, astrophysics, and exoarchaeology.
Jadzia Dax is the chief science officer of the space station Deep Space Nine and is close friends with station commander Benjamin Sisko. Later in the series, she becomes involved with the Klingon character Worf, and they marry during the sixth season of the show. In the sixth-season finale Jadzia dies but the Dax symbiote survives, and in the seventh-season premiere returns with a new host Ezri Dax, played by Nicole de Boer.
Development
Make-up
When selecting the characters for Deep Space Nine, the production staff knew that they would have humans, Bajorans, and a changeling; for other characters, they wanted to pick "a species that had already been established" on Star Trek: The Next Generation. They decided on a Trill, as seen in the form of Odan in the TNG episode "The Host".
Although Michael Westmore's alterations to make the Odan headpiece more feminine were as good as all of his work, the writers simply did not like it. Apparently, after she had put on the Odan forehead appliance, Rick Berman looked at Terry Farrell and said to Westmore, "What did you do to her head, she used to be beautiful?". Instead of changing species, as they had already come to like the idea of an "old man", a person with centuries of experience to guide Sisko, Westmore suggested, "just give her spots like we gave Famke [Janssen]", who played a Kriosian in TNG: "The Perfect Mate".
This make-up was used on all Trill afterwards, comprising lines of dark spots that run from the temples and down both sides of the head, neck, and body.
Characterization
When the show began, the writers had difficulty defining the character of Dax. Michael Piller explained, "Having a Trill seemed like a really, really good idea at the time, but it was the most difficult character for us to define. Jadzia Dax escaped us. At first we thought she was going to be ethereal, a Grace Kelly/Audrey Hepburn kind of goddess, and ultimately I think Ira Behr really figured it out, probably not until the second season, when he really made her a smart-talking, wise-cracking tough cookie."
In 2014, Farrell admitted she found playing the character initially frustrating. "The writers didn't know what to do with the character they created", saying she was asked to portray the character as a cross between Grace Kelly and Yoda. She was also annoyed by a scene written where Dax gossiped about who was dating whom on the station, questioning "Why would a 350-year-old person care about who you're going out with?"
Piller explained, "The more we've written her, the more we're finding that she is not what she appears to be. That underneath this placid exterior, there's all these various personalities that she's gone through that are in turmoil and there's a lot of inner conflict. You know all the voices we hear inside ourselves are all made up of different subpersonalities; well she's got them all screaming at her in a variety of different ways."
Ira Behr spoke further on the character, announcing that they had intentionally changed the character early in the series. He said, "We changed Dax in year two. Originally, she was going to be the Spock character, the wise old owl, the wise old man. And then we realized that she could be the one who's ready to go out and kick anyone's butt, and go out and have an adventure and have fun, and be kind of witty and mercurial. And that turned out to be great. When we found that part of the character, we just ran with it."
Speaking in 2002, Terry Farrell said of playing Dax, "It was a character who had lived seven lifetimes, been a man and a woman. Before I walked in and actually met everybody, I felt a little bit intimidated about this, I thought 'Oh my God, I need to meet them so they're going to tell me what I need to know.' And when I actually got here and spoke to everyone, they kind of didn't really know. And I was 28, and they kind of wanted me to be wiser than my years, just have the physicality of a 28-year-old, but have a 350-year-old wise person inside me."
"They tried to find what they wanted in adjusting me here and there, and I think really what happened was surrender to that it was all new for this Dax, Jadzia Dax, this experience of the seven lifetimes, and Michael Piller made the decision that she was trying to come to terms with all of these entities, all of these memories that were inside of herself. And I think that helped me a lot as an actress to try to assimilate the job, period, and in a lot of ways, made me feel a little lost and uncomfortable as Terry, which got played out as Jadzia, so it was okay that she slowly felt more comfortable, so did I, and by the time they decided to make me a little bit more roguish in the second or third season, I felt much more comfortable about the dialogue and the other actors, and my lack of stage experience. And when I had to start doing action sequences and work with Michael Dorn, I felt a lot more comfortable. I had my own voice."
When asked how she would like Jadzia Dax to be remembered, Terry Farrell said, "wisely mischievous."
The episode "Rejoined", in which Jadzia is reunited with the wife of a former host of the Dax symbiont, features one of the first televised kisses between two female characters. Terry Farrell was happy with the story line, saying that it made sense for Dax to have this issue because the symbiont had been in both male and female hosts, adding, "Gender wasn't the issue. For the worm/symbiont, it was a matter of the being it was embodied in." She was pleased to be able to "stand up" for the LGBT community.
Romantic interests
Jadzia Dax was initially pursued by Dr. Julian Bashir aboard the station. The Ferengi bar owner, Quark, also has a special affection for the Trill scientist, even after the Dax symbiont was transferred to Ezri. However, her most notable and serious suitors include:
- Deral, played by Brett Cullen, a resident of the planet Meridian ("Meridian")
- Dr. Lenara Kahn, played by Susanna Thompson, a Trill theoretical quantum physicist and the current host of the symbiont Kahn, who was previously joined to Nilani, the widow of Torias Dax ("Rejoined").
- Lt. Commander Worf, a Klingon: Dax and Worf connected over their mutual love of Klingon traditions, including Klingon opera and martial arts. Their intimate relationship began in "Looking for par'Mach in All the Wrong Places", and in "You Are Cordially Invited...", they were married and Jadzia Dax formally joined the House of Martok. Their attempts at parenthood (despite the difficulties faced by biological incompatibilities between Klingons and Trills) were cut short when Jadzia Dax was murdered.
- Captain Boday, an unseen former lover of Jadzia's, is occasionally referenced. Boday is a Gallamite, and like all Gallamites, has a transparent skull. Worf becomes angry with Jadzia when he learns she had lunch with Boday.
Relationship with Worf
In the fourth season, Michael Dorn joined the cast of Deep Space Nine as the Klingon character Worf. Perhaps because of her past interactions with Klingons, Dax is fairly flirtatious with Worf. He appears at first to be oblivious to this attention, and in the fifth-season episode "Looking for par'Mach in All the Wrong Places", he becomes enamored with a female Klingon named Grilka. This is resolved by the end of the episode, with Quark ironically winning the heart of Grilka, and Worf becoming romantically involved with Dax.
In the beginning, their relationship is very sexual, with the strong implication that their encounters are somewhat rough (the above episode ends with Worf and Dax visiting the infirmary with various bruises and other injuries). In the season-five finale "Call to Arms", the station is overrun by Dominion forces, and Dax and Worf are assigned to different starships for the Dominion War. Near the end of the episode, they agree to get married after the war is over. Worf and Dax's marriage is the centerpiece of season-six episode "You Are Cordially Invited...". During the episode, Dax must obtain permission from the lady Sirella to join the House of Martok. At first, Dax is loath to pay Sirella the required respect, and the lady is unwilling to accede to Dax's request. The situation is resolved by the conclusion, with Sirella admitting during the ceremony that nothing can stand between "the beating of two Klingon hearts".
Death
Jadzia is murdered in "Tears of the Prophets", the finale of the sixth season. Worf and she had decided to attempt to conceive, despite the doubts of Dr. Bashir that such a pregnancy was possible. After Major Kira tells Jadzia she has been praying for a conception, Jadzia receives encouraging test results from Julian, saying that the enzyme modification would allow her to become pregnant with Worf's child. While the Federation leads an attack on Cardassia with the Defiant, Jadzia remains on the station for some unclear reason. Jadzia goes to the station's Bajoran temple to thank the Prophets for the good news of her potential pregnancy. The Cardassian Dukat transports to the temple, possessed by a Pah-wraith, when Jadzia is there and unleashes his power, mortally wounding Jadzia. Dukat opens an Orb, one of the artifacts given by the Prophets to the Bajoran people; the Pah-wraith enters it, the wormhole closes, blocking access to the Prophets. Jadzia dies shortly after in the infirmary. Sisko, devastated by her death along with the severed link to the Prophets, leaves the station in despair and in search of answers.
Though the host Jadzia is dead, the symbiont Dax survives and is removed and sent to Trill to be implanted into a new host. During the journey, Dax is quickly implanted into a Trill named Ezri Tigan. The resulting joined Trill, Ezri Dax, becomes a main character during the seventh and last season of the series. Worf grieves a long time for Jadzia, believing that because she did not die in battle, they will not meet again in Sto-vo-kor. He leads a dangerous mission against The Dominion in her name, to win her entry to the Klingon afterlife.
Reception
Jadzia Dax, and all Trills in general, have been argued to be conceptualized in a similar way to transgender individuals.
In 2016, Screen Rant rated Jadzia Dax as the 19th-best character in Star Trek overall. In 2018, TheWrap placed Jadzia Dax as 26th of 39 in a ranking of main cast characters of the Star Trek franchise prior to Star Trek: Discovery.
In 2017, CBR ranked Jadzia Dax the 13th-fiercest female character of the Star Trek universe and in 2018, CBR ranked Jadzia the 18th-best Starfleet character of Star Trek.
In 2019, Jadzia was ranked the 12th-sexiest Star Trek character by Syfy. Writing for Syfy in 2020, Laura Dale called Jadzia “an early sci-fi trans allegory handled with respect”.