Be Like Kor, But Don't Be Like Doctor Beverly Crusher

I saw this meme going around on Twitter based on the Deep Space Nine episode Blood Oath, where Kor calls Daz 'Curzon' when he's in a holding cell and is exited to see an old friend, and is corrected by Dax who says their first name is now Jadiza. The reason for this is that Dax is a Trill, an alien race that has a symbiotic existence, a humanoid host carrying a slug that has centuries of living experience. When a host dies, the symbiont is transferred to the next qualified person to its host, regardless of it being male or female. There is an entire process to determine if someone is qualified to be a host for the symbiont, but for the most part it is pretty straight forward.

The Trill do have a 'policy' that when the symbiont gets a new host, all ties to its previous life are cut, so Dax would not have gone out of their way to tell Kor who they are now. Hell the only reason Commander Benjamin Sisko knows about Dax in the series pilot the Emissary is because he and Dax are both assigned to Deep Space Nine and Dax while they were Curzon was Sisko's mentor. With that said, Kor knows that Dax is a Trill, he hasn't seen Dax in who knows how long, and when Dax tells him the new first name, Kor just goes with it because again he's exited to meet an old friend once again.

So with all that on the table, being a Star Trek fan and really into a lot of the details, it made me think some people were really trying hard to connect a few moments from that episode to Pride month.It kind of works if you don't know the actual backstory of how how the Trill go about their business. So yeah, Be like Kor because of his instance acceptance of Dax's new host.

And this is where we talk about Doctor Beverly Crusher from Star Trek The Next Generation and the episode 'The Host', the first time The Trill as a species is introduced. You see in this episode, Beverly is having a secret fling with Ambassador Odan, and she doesn't know that he's a Trill until after he is injured on a shuttle flight to mediate a situation between two potentially warring sides. Beverly finds this out when Odan is dying on the operating table and is told that the body is just a shell and that Odan himself is the symbiont within it which needs to survive. The symbiont is placed inside Commander William Riker to provide it a temporary host, and this causes some drama for the negotiations but for Beverly who struggles a bit with the fact that the essence of who Odan was is now in Riker.

There is some drama about Riker's body rejecting the symbiont placing both he and Odan in peril, but in the end everything works out and the new host for Odan is a woman. Odan, in their new permanent host for the foreseeable future, is more than willing to continue to continue the relationship because they do deeply love the good Doctor... but Beverly takes issue with the fact that the Trill basically have no preference for gender orientation because the hosts can be either male or female and she basically can't handle that. Odan fully understand this, but for crying out loud, Beverly shoots Odan down hard. Yes in the context of the show, there is no way the relationship was going to go beyond this one episode, but Beverly was more than willing to work things out in her mind when Odan was in Riker's body for a time, but when she sees the new host, the good Doctor is basically makes up her mind that it isn't going to work for her. Sure Beverly says she'll still love Odan but what are the odds she actually kept in touch with them, as is often the case with relationships in Star Trek that involve a 'guest characters', out of sight, out of mind.

It really is eye-opening going back and seeing that, and realizing Beverly Crusher is completely anti-trans and ends up being a bit racist on top of it because of how the Trill exist. It's really fucking surreal.

So with that said, Don't be Like Doctor Beverly Crusher