Star Trek Pays Homage To Fan-Favorite DS9 Episode

The Deep Space Nine episode “Facets” gave us most of the details about how the zhian’tara ritual works. In that ep, Jadzia Dax reveals that this is a ceremony intended to help her meet and talk to her previous hosts. This is significant because while the Dax symbiont passes from body to body, the hosts may have very different personalities–in other words, while Jadzia had access to the memories of her previous hosts, she didn’t really know them, something that the zhian’tara ritual is supposed to fix.

Jadzia Dax had made several close friends on Deep Space Nine, and that came in handy because she had a fairly big request: she wanted all of them to serve as temporary vessels for the previous hosts of the Dax symbiont. Most of this goes well, though Jadzia’s conversation with Joran, a previous host who was convicted of murder, gets pretty intense (complete with an attempt to strangle Jadzia). Unexpectedly, the weirdest moment comes from their discovery that Curzon Dax (Sisko’s former bestie and the Trill symbiont host before Jadzia) doesn’t want to leave Odo’s body, though Sisko eventually convinces him that he needs to move on. 

That Deep Space Nine episode had a cool conceit that allowed our favorite actors to functionally play completely different characters, but Star Trek never referenced the zhian’tara ceremony again until very recently. Star Trek: Discovery has focused on the Trill more than any series since DS9, and last season, zhian’tara was combined with Dr. Soong’s research to help the joined Trill Grey Tal get a new golem body (Picard-style) after his corporeal body was killed. Now, zhian’tara has popped up again in the context of the mystery driving the fifth season of Discovery.

This most recent season of the show has had Captain Burnham and crew trying to figure out the mystery of the Progenitors, ancient aliens whose existence was first discovered by Captain Picard. These aliens claim to have basically created humanity, Romulans, Cardassians, and many more races throughout the galaxy, and a secret team assembled by the Federation president back in the 24th century tried to figure this mystery out. In the Discovery episode “Jinaal,” the zhian’tara ritual was used to help a previous Trill host who was part of that team disclose to Captain Burnham exactly what he knows about the research.

By itself, this Discovery ep didn’t really tell us much about the zhian’tara ritual that we didn’t already know, but it was cool to find out that the Trill ceremony can be used as a kind of research tool. The chief difficulty facing our 32nd-century protagonists is that there is much about this secretive 24th-century research they just don’t know. With zhian’tara, Burnham is able to conveniently interview someone who was actually part of that research all those centuries ago.

Considering this is the final season of Star Trek: Discovery, it’s unlikely we’ll see the zhian’tara pop up again, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see more of the Trill. These were some of the coolest aliens introduced in The Next Generation, and having a Trill as a main character is just one of the things that made Deep Space Nine so awesome. Discovery may be taking a bow and Lower Decks has recently been canceled, so we’ll just have to cross our Vulcan-saluting fingers that we get more Trill content in future Star Trek series and films.