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."
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