Star Trek

Now... Niners, favorite Dax?

Jadzia or Ezri? Or, since I'm willing to bet a bunch of you will shun the rules and say someone else, is it Curzon, or Torias, or Joran, or any of the other hosts for Dax?

Do you even like Dax? Why or why not?

Really quick one, as tiiiired.

Watched the third one of Discovery! Loved it, and starting to really like Michael, she is tough. The Engi is pretty cool, and a potentially dark Captain? Delicious. Kiddo was afraid of the suspect scenes

Dax is my least favorite character in all of a Star Treck. Too perfect, and not in a good way like Seven.

Ok watched the third episode and it is getting better.
There was mystery and a reasonably interesting story so it is an improvement.

Ezri is probably one of my favorite characters in Trek (she's the only example of the cuckoo-bubbly cutie type character I like anywhere), and Dax overall is in my top 10 for Trek. I actually think that's quite an accomplishment for a character who was only in one season.

It seems that you're not making much of a distinction between Jadzia and Ezri, particularly in regards to Dr. Bashir. It's a complex relationship for all of them (and that's without throwing Worf into the mix), and a lot of that complexity, particularly for Ezri and her feelings for Julian, comes from how she interprets her feelings for him as being her own, formed from a vestigial interest that Jadzia had in Julian, or a combination of her own organic feelings for the Doctor augmented by the seed of interest that Jadzia had had. Julian of course is left to sift through his own feelings for Ezri, and has to come to terms whether his interest in her is for her, or if its his own vestigial feelings for Jadzia being transferred to Ezri. I tend to think of it as less 'Dax finally beds Julian,' and more 'Julian and Ezri come to terms with their feelings for each other and decide to progress with it.' I mean, sure, their relationship is grounded in the friendship that Dax had had before with Julian, but I think the romantic feelings are something unique to Ezri. They might be based in Julian's feelings for Dax, but from then up, it really grew and blossomed with Ezri.

But sorry for the romantic schpiel on the Dax/Julian relationship.

I can also understand your reservations on thinking Jadzia was 'too perfect' again, but I do disagree. Dax has had centuries to acquire and attain a very wide variety of skills and knowledge. Playing Tongo with the Ferengi? Even if Dax picked up the game yesterday, she's had centuries to pick up on games and confidence tricks (Dax is that kind of symbiont, being the rebel that it is.) Have the ear and confidence of the Captain? Well, in her previous host (Curzon), she was a mentor to said Captain since his days at Starfleet Academy, and with the essential identity of who he is (thoughts, feelings, and memories) continuing to live on well after the host's death, it'd be natural to understand that Dax would always be that mentor-figure (or even protege, in Ezri's case) for Sisko. So far as outlogicking a Vulcan, I don't think you're going to do that often, but again, Dax has centuries of knowledge, experience, wisdom, and all the logic that comes with it to be able to have a very interesting discussion with any Vulcan master. Plus, of course, Vulcan logic only applies if you're dedicated to adhering by it - and it's easy to fluster a Vulcan when you intentionally fuck with them (though they will still probably outlogic you in the end.) 

Lastly, being a master of the Bat'leth isn't all that surprising given both Curzon and Jadzia's fascination and history with the Klingon's - Curzon especially was known for his exploits among the Klingons, and he was the Federation ambassador to Qo'noS. A lot of knowledge, appreciation, and experience with Klingon culture and society is to be expected from a Dax host.

Moving onto Sisko and your hesitation to take him seriously over his actor's antics, I just have to ask why? Can't you separate the character from the actor? I've met Avery Brooks, and while he is very unconventional and totally Jazz (and it's awesome!), one thing he is not is dull (I mean that mentally.) Sisko is consistently on the ball, and Brooks himself directed several of the best DS9 episodes ('Far Beyond the Stars' for example). That account I find to be rather peculiar to disregard such a strong character as Sisko all because you think the actor is a whackadoodle in his off-time.

I love the Voyager crew as well, but they did suffer from serious writing problems. It was a mash of characters that often had little-no direction at all narrative-wise, and characterization for major characters like Janeway often changed by the episode. Seven was well portrayed, but she also had issues of becoming too much of a focus - you get the sense that Voyager at some points started to become the Seven of Nine show. Other characters lost their edge (Tom Paris, one of my favorite characters on Voyager, and Torres), got railroaded with a lot of the same issues over and over again (Chakotay) or just were never allowed to develop or grow much to begin with (Harry and Tuvok.) That's not to say that all of them didn't have good episodes - barring Chakotay's constant vision quests (Robert Beltran is well known for having hated how Chakotay was basically written as a mystical Native American in space) - but the nature of Voyager and its connection to its own internal status quo meant that much of the time, a lot of the growth and drama would be reset by the next episode. That was arguably Voyager's greatest flaw as a show, being that due to the mashing of the reset button, the show never was able to live up to its potential.

The first season of TNG is more or less pretty bad, and even several of the actors and writers admit to such. One large reason is that Roddenberry's vision had become somewhat limited in scope and scale, which is, IMO, a sad inevitability when a creator has their works... reinterpreted or extended. The Great Bird of the Galaxy lost his feathers in his old age, but of course we'll always be grateful for his persistence of vision in the early days. 

IMO, TNG's first 'great' episode was 'Q Who', and of course, 'The Best of Both Worlds Pts. 1 and 2' are when TNG stepped out of the shadow of TOS and became its own.

The talk of the town, so to speak, is that Discovery will slowly 'phase in' the old (or new, in this case) uniform styles and their associated color coded roles (23rd-century Starfleet) where Gold = Command/Tactical Division, Red = Operations/Security, and Blue = Sciences. 

First season of DS9 wasn't really that great either. 

Speaking of TNG: 'great' episodes for me personally which precede 'Q Who' were season one's 'The Neutral Zone', and season two's 'The Measure of a Man', and 'Contagion'. Seeing the Yamato blowing up like that was pretty impressive at the time.

He was great when his episodes didn't resolve around comedy or levity - 'Q Who' (TNG), 'All Good Things...' (TNG), and 'Death Wish' (Voyager) for example, episodes that had more dramatic themes and implications behind his appearances and what 'lesson' he was trying to teach humanity. 

Other episodes with him were simply too... sitcom in nature. The only non-comedic episode with Q that was a stinker was the TNG Pilot. EaF was just an incomprehensible mess of an episode, and I think it's going to stand for a very long-time as the worst possible pilot to a Trek series.

I love his comedic episodes.

I think Seven worked better because she had spent so long with the Borg she never really knew how to be an individual and much of her character development revolved around that, so you always saw her actually struggling with something.

Dax on the other hand never really had anything to struggle with other than things like the one episode where it's discovered a previous host was a murderer, but that entire arc was resolved in the same episode it came up in and they basically never spoke of it again. She falls under the category of characters that exist to kind of just immediately solve the problem at the end of the episode whenever they don't know what else to do, but she has no theme beyond that to explore with her character that actually got developed.

Spock had logic vs emotion, Data what what it means to be Human(even if they milked the fuck out of it), and Seven had individuality.

I think Jadzia being good at so many things was their attempt to show just how long Dax had lived and how much experience it had, but a character still needs to experience growth over the course of a story. Since they kind of forgot about that, she can come off as being too perfect.

I thought Seven worked because she had a catsuit that looked painted on...

Hey, I was in college at the time