Synopsis: Representatives from a planet where Curzon Dax is accused of murder and treason thirty years ago, come to the station to extradite Jadzia Dax and bring her to trial for the alleged crimes of her symbiont’s former Trill host.
This episode explores the relationship between the Trill’s symbiont being and its host body, how they are joined and are interdependent upon each other.
In “Dax” the now dead former host of the symbiont Dax, Curzon Dax, is accused of murder and treason. In order to fight extradition of Jadzia Dax to stand trial for these crimes on a foreign world Commander Benjamin Sisko tells Major Kira Nerys and Dr. Julian Bashir that they must find evidence that the symbiont and Trill host are legally separate beings. This is analogous to how one’s conscious rational ego will try to explain away bits of unconscious matter in one’s psyche, separate it from itself and try to suppress those parts of the psyche that it deems unacceptable. Much as the conscious ego is only part of the psyche, not the entire thing, it seems that the argument for the symbiont Dax and the hosts being separate would not have held, but fortunately other information came in that clears Curzon Dax of wrongdoing.
As for somatic awareness, the entire episode is built around the image that was seen in the pilot episode “Emissary, Part I” when Jadzia Dax looks into the orb, the “Tear of the Prophets,” and was transported back to the moment that the symbiont was implanted into her. The way that the symbiont and the host body are connected and joined in one way illustrates the way that the conscious ego and the unconscious are connected and joined in our psyches. Yet there is a difference: unlike the symbiont, the conscious ego cannot know that which is unconscious to it. However, we must not forget that just as the symbiont and the host body are completely interrelated and dependent upon each other, this is the same relationship we have between our psyches and our bodies.
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