Jadzia Dax's Death Was A Mess

When I watched “Tears of the Prophets,” the season 6 finale of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, I knew Jadzia Dax was going to die. I even knew some of the behind-the-scenes details of why she was being written off. What I didn't realize was just how much her death would feel designed to spite the audience.

So, with Starfleet Academy getting me back into the mood to finally finish DS9, I wanted to excise my feelings about Jadzia’s death before going into season 7.

Fridges In The 24th Century

Gail Simone, writer best known for her work with DC and Marvel, first coined the term “Women In Refrigerators” to refer to the way women in comics suffered, to borrow a phrase from Star Trek, “a meaningless death.”

They would be assaulted, depowered, and killed not because it suited their own stories, but to further the narrative of another, usually male character. They often tended to be forgotten more; if they lost their powers, it tended to be permanent, or they’d retire more often.

Or put another way: when Barbara Gordon is shot by the Joker in The Killing Joke by Alan Moore, she is left in a wheelchair for years, it becomes a defining part of her character, and appears in multiple adaptations.

When Batman's spine is broken by Bane in Knightfall, it does not become a permanent part of Bruce Wayne’s character, and the writers of the original story always intended to bring him back.

In the best case, shoving a woman into a refrigerator is because of carelessness. Writers and editors don’t see women as important characters in their own right who might be popular and get their own spinoffs. They’re tools to further the story. They don't think about what it would feel like if this had happened to a male character, because male characters are the main characters.

That casual kind of thing that’s easy for individual writers to dismiss or feel like they’re not contributing to the problem.

When I first saw it, Jadzia’s death felt different. It doesn’t just feel like the writer didn't care about her character; it felt like the writer actively wanted to give a middle finger to everyone who liked her character. I would have sworn that whoever wrote it hated women.

Jadzia’s Death Is A Cop-Out

From the moment she was introduced, Jadzia was different than previous female characters. She was confident and could hold herself in a fight, happily dated multiple people throughout the series, and had many exes.

Compare her to Tasha Yar in season 1 of The Next Generation. Tasha, despite being the chief of security, was kidnapped by a racist stereotype and felt flattered he was attracted to her, talks about how she’s jealous that Deanna Troi was so beautiful, and grew up on a planet where she had to flee from “rape gangs.” And then she died, so she never really got a chance to grow beyond that.

Troi herself eventually ended up with several very good episodes where she was involved in the action, but those are definitely in the minority compared to episodes where she is taken advantage of, assaulted, and otherwise in danger and in need of being rescued.

They’re passive characters, especially compared to the men on the show.

Jadzia, meanwhile, is a fighter. It’s quickly established that she can handle herself, is knowledgeable, and across several lifetimes has had many lovers of various species and genders.

In the first season episode “If Wishes Were Horses…”, a passive, fawning version of Jadzia (allegedly) created by Julian Bashir’s imagination, and the difference is stark.

Michael Piller, showrunner of the first two seasons of Deep Space Nine, put it best when he said in The Fifty-Year Mission that they “went out of our way not to make the women on Deep Space Nine caretakers.” Although, as Piller points out, Dax is a caretaker in her own right, that’s not all she is.

Jadzia’s character only further develops when she and Worf start to have a relationship. Jadzia’s more than capable of keeping up with him in a fight, she’s the one to actively pursue Worf, she often teases him, and they have crazy Klingon sex that sends both of them to sick bay regularly.

She is a breath of fresh air for audiences put off by Troi and Yar, and it’s why a lot of people like her.

So what happens to her in her final episode?

Well, she and Worf decide they’re going to try for a baby, which in and of itself is fine. While they both have been parents before, it makes sense that Worf would like another chance to be a proper father, and Jadzia is good with kids.

(also, you KNOW Worf would be such a girl dad. We were, frankly, deprived)

The problem is how obsessed Jadzia gets with the idea of having a baby. She will not stop talking about it, like it’s the most exciting thing that could happen, but Jadzia’s given birth and raised kids before.

Compare this to her wedding, which she was more than happy to let Worf plan because she'd already been married as a bride and as a groom, so it wasn’t a big moment for her.

But Jadzia is all about this baby, so much so that she decides to pray to the Prophets for help conceiving, despite the fact that she doesn’t believe in them and has consistently said she prefers to think of them as wormhole aliens.

Because she’s praying, she gets jumped by Dukat, and Jadzia, the badass fighter who can hold her own against Klingons, gets blasted by a magic laser for several seconds, and dies instantly.

No fight, no nothing.

And her last words to Worf are “our baby would have been so beautiful.”

The natural way to write Jadzia’s death is to have her go down swinging. Kicking and fighting and staring down her enemy as she drags them down to hell with her.

Jadzia sacrifices herself, and in doing so gives the rest of the cast a chance to turn this war around after their darkest moment, and is remembered as one of the greatest heroes of this war.

That is how you kill off a character like Jadzia Dax.

Instead, we get something indistinguishable from someone who saw a feminist critique of Troi and Yar that praised Jadzia, decided those women needed to be put in their place, and so made Jadzia suddenly overly obsessed with babies and killed her off in a way where she had no agency.

I was really ready to assume the worst, because there’s no way you do that accidentally, right? Suddenly reducing her to being all about this baby, and having that get her killed? Who could be so incompetent as to write that without seeing the misogyny?

The Behind-the-scenes Situation

As much as I would love to tell you that Rick Berman, the executive producer of Star Trek, personally wrote the most horrific death for Jadzia possible to spite her actress, Terry Farrell, life isn’t that simple.

Berman is infamous among Trek fans for many reasons, including many complaints from female cast members. Farrell herself explicitly pins the blame for her leaving on Rick Berman, saying, “he’s just very misogynistic. He’d comment on your bra size not being voluptuous… Michael Piller didn’t care about those things, so he wasn’t there when you were having all these crazy fittings with Rick Berman criticizing your hair or how big our breasts were or weren’t.”

She’d requested to be a recurring character instead of a part of the main cast starting with season 7, so she could work fewer hours, but claims Berman “was trying to bully me into saying yes. He was convinced that my cards were going to fold, and I was going to sign up. He had [another] producer come up to me and say ‘if you weren’t here, you know you’d be working at Kmart.’”

Ira Behr, Berman’s fellow executive producer, says he didn't know about the situation and that “if I had known what was going on, I would have stopped it from happening.. Everyone chose not to tell me for various reasons. Including, as I found out, to protect me from having to get in someone’s face… and I said that was all ridiculous.”

Berman himself blames the studio and said that adding Farrell as one of the show’s many recurring characters for the final season was unfeasible. “You can’t be in a situation on our shows where somebody is just going to do seven out of thirteen… The studio basically said ‘no way.’” He also maintains that “Terry and I got along perfectly,” and claims she only started blaming him years after the fact.

While he admits he didn’t want to give her a recurring part, his last word on the subject in The Fifty-Year Mission is that “you can’t be in a far-off part of the galaxy and just suddenly not show up for half the episodes because you want to go do a movie. Or you want to be with our family. It doesn't work.”

This wouldn’t be the first time Berman has been directly contradicted by an actress about being on better terms than they were, but in the end, it doesn’t really matter, because when it comes to Jadzia’s death, Berman was on the nose.

According to Ronald D Moore, his vision for Jadzia’s death was that she “was in the wrong place at the wrong time, and Dukat got her. He just fucking executes her. And it was brutal, and it was supposed to be shocking… [Berman] would not let us do it. ‘She’s got to fire a shot, and she has to die shooting at him. She has to die in a heroic way.’ And I was just, like, ‘Come on.’”

This quote from Moore is a little confusing and seems like he’s misremembering, because the thing he is describing is exactly what happens.

Jadzia's death isn’t heroic. She doesn’t fire a shot at Dukat, her hand barely reaches her phaser before Dukat “executes” her. And it’s a terrible death. Especially from the writer who fixed Tasha Yar’s death in “Yesterday’s Enterprise.”

It has nothing to do with Jadzia as a character, and every moment leading up to it is a slap in the face. Earlier, I said that I don’t think we end up with “women in refrigerators” because the writers have it out for female characters. I think we get there when writers are careless and don’t take the needs of the character into proper consideration.

The quote from Moore reads to me as if he cared more about shock value than he did about giving Jadzia a proper send-off, which would leave fans feeling satisfied. The interest was in making Dukat seem powerful over wrapping up her story.

If Worf, or O’Brien, or Bashir died because a villain they’d never spoken to got the drop on him would the writers have so readily turned to emphasizing the shock value over anything else? Would O’Brien or Worf’s last words have been “our baby would have been so beautiful?”

Or would the issues with that be apparent from the first draft?

Yes, the writers were short on time. If Berman hadn’t tried to stall out Farrell, or Behr had been involved in the negotiations, perhaps they could have had time to write something amazing and had actual build-up.

But that’s not an excuse. Even on that short notice, they also could have written something that wasn’t this bad.

The sudden baby obsession and the fact that her new focus on it gets her killed is cheap. I don’t even know what the purpose of it was, because no one discusses it. As if we wouldn’t feel bad about her death unless she and Worf were going to have a child, or that was what the audience wanted to hear as her last words.

“Our baby would have been so beautiful” sticks with me the way a nightmare lingers after you wake up.

Jadzia could have actually put up a fight, she could have saved an innocent person or protected the station. Her death could have been the one thing that saved the finale from being a total defeat and gave Sisko a chance to turn things around in season 7.

She didn’t even have to die. If the writers were going to do the baby plot, she could have been written off because she was pregnant with Worf’s child, and so couldn’t be at the center of an active war zone. Plenty of shows have disappeared characters with less of a justification, and this leaves the door open to bring her back for the finale.

If Farrell couldn’t have a recurring role, surely she could be a one-off guest for the finale.

Reading The Fifty-Year Mission crushed me. It was easier to believe that someone had it out for Jadzia or Farrell or female Trek fans in general after watching how brutal her death was. Someone had to have actively had some Nick Fuentes-like obsession with women making babies to have that be the focus of her character all of a sudden.

But it’s not that. It rarely is. The fact of the matter is, someone can write such an awful scene not out of spite but out of sloppiness. When Jadzia had to die, the first goal was not “how do we make her death meaningful,” it was “how can we make it shocking,” even after six seasons of writing this character. And that’s more chilling, that someone could slip into that mindset even if they’re not openly commenting on women’s bodies.

Once again, Hanlon’s Razor leaves a wound deeper than pure spite could ever hope to