Trill Symbionts

Discussion in 'Star Trek: Deep Space Nine' started by WesleysDisciple, Feb 15, 2013.

  1. WesleysDisciple

    WesleysDisciple Lieutenant Commander Red Shirt

    Joined:
    Feb 13, 2013
    Their one of the less well defined aspects of the setting, if you ask me.

    Any ideas how the Symbionts reproduce, or how long a symbiont can live for?


    Oh heres a question

    in the episode Dax... I noticed a lot of issues, youd think The judge would have set some kind of precedent either way... even if it wasnt pertinent, simply to have their name attached to a precedent setting case.


    That aside... something I wondered a lot about... if the extradition request had been refused without the kind of evidence that wound up being found... would Dax have wound up in effective Isolation on Bajor.
     
  2. Pavonis

    Pavonis Commodore Commodore

    Joined:
    Apr 26, 2001
    I don't think judges like setting precedents; they try to avoid doing so most of the time. That the Bajoran judge ended up not ruling at all was probably a relief to her.
     
  3. Captain Verata

    Captain Verata Lieutenant Red Shirt

    Joined:
    Oct 13, 2010
    Location:
    Space, the final frontier
    I thought the episode "Dax" was weird because it was as if the question of "are current hosts responsible for actions of previous hosts" never occurred before in the history of Trill. There didn't seem to mention any Trill legal precedents or Trill customs on the relationship of symbiotes and hosts. Of course the drama that the story was trying to make probably would have been destroyed with some realistic legal talk that would settle the whole issue.
     
  4. Timo

    Timo Fleet Admiral Admiral

    Joined:
    Aug 26, 2003
    One might argue that the Trill as a species were being accused here, and the accused should have no say on how they are judged.

    That is, there would be plenty of Trill precedent of the Trill committing crimes and being judged for it, but what the Trill did with or to each other would not be of any interest to the Bajorans - and what the Bolians or the Cardassians in the past had judged about the Trill criminals they faced would not be relevant, either. Bajorans and Bolians would simply have different and often incompatible ideas about justice; strange foreign ways would not satisfy Bajorans.

    Considering how willingly Dax in this episode seemed to throw itself at the (lack of) mercy of the Bajoran court, without any attempt at a defense, one might argue that Dax was old for a Trill, and for that reason uninterested in what the next fifty years would bring. A couple of hundred years would then be a good guess for a lifespan.

    Other Trills of comparable age might be daredevils for the same reason of approaching death. Or they might have become death junkies, enjoying the rush of their host dying. It's a bit difficult to see why the hosts would be interested in this joining thing if all Trills were like Dax or Odan, but perhaps those two were old geezers the likes of which a host candidate would rarely face?

    Procreation might be something left to the unjoined Trill, in those underground milk pools. We never learned whether the symbionts recognized the concept of family or pedigree; perhaps they don't even know who their parents are, and it's all conducted much the same way the fish spawn here on Earth?

    Timo Saloniemi
     
  5. Captain Verata

    Captain Verata Lieutenant Red Shirt

    Joined:
    Oct 13, 2010
    Location:
    Space, the final frontier
    Obviously the Klaestron people didn't care about Trill customs but it would have been useful to the Bajorian court instead of Sisko trying to explain his "new friend" as this issue has been explained by the Trills a long time ago. Everything that our heroes did to explain a Trill person should have been easy using information from Trill and Tandro could have spent his time trying explaining why, possibly centuries old, information about how Trill individuality is wrong.
     
  6. Merlanthe

    Merlanthe Commander Red Shirt

    Joined:
    Jun 10, 2012
    Correct me if i'm wrong but once a Trill is joined to a host dont they become reliant upon the host and tend to die once unjoined which is why they have to go on being joined to new hosts once their current host expires?

    At any rate i believe that symbionts swim about and reproduce and stuff in their underground pools and only join with a Trill once they have become bored of their existence within the pools since it seems like a one way deal. I have an idea of a symbionts first joining involving an unjoined Trill initiate walking naked into one of the symbiont pools and waiting patiently for a symbiont to come and make the life changing decision to join with them by swimming into their pouch. (The guardians who tend the symbionts and their underground pools would have informed the symbiosis commision that one was ready to choose a host).

    Symbionts definitely communicate with one another through the electrical charges carried by the underground pools so they might know how they relate to one another but i like Timo's idea that they spawn like fish.
     
  7. Timo

    Timo Fleet Admiral Admiral

    Joined:
    Aug 26, 2003
    Perhaps, perhaps not. We know for sure that the hosts don't take well to being weaned from symbionts; as per "Invasive Procedures", they typically die if the symbiont is removed. But the opposite case is not well explored.

    Odan and Dax both had hosts die from under (around) them, and there was hurry involved in finding a replacement; in Odan's case, there was even the need for a short-term "intermediate" host. But the host deaths in both cases were particularly traumatic, and a death more akin to that of Curzon might leave the symbiont less shaken and possibly capable of walking (that is, crawling) out unassisted and taking a sabbatical before ordering the most recent catalog for available hosts.

    Timo Saloniemi
     
  8. DS9Continuing

    DS9Continuing Rear Admiral Rear Admiral

    Joined:
    Jun 29, 2001
    Location:
    Manchester
    A lot of these questions are answered in the Lit, which obviously is not canon so you're free to accept it as you please, or not.

    The novel Unjoined claims that the symbionts (or Swimmers as they call themselevs, as opposed to the Walkers) can grow to many thousands of years of age and as massive in size as an Earth manatee.

    Dax, as an eight-lifetime 300-year-old symbiont, is considered young to these older symbionts. They can continue to join to the humanoids for several more hundred years than this (for example, Odan was already on its eighth host when Dax was only on its first, explaining why the Odan symbiont looked different from Dax - it was simply older), but eventually there must come a point when the symbiont is physically too large for the host to accommodate anymore.

    It is at this point that the symbiont returns to the pools and where, given the chance, it will grow into one of the ultra-old ones. These old ones also lay eggs (I think) which some middle-aged symbionts who act as caretakers for the old ones then carry up to the surface, which is how we get new symbionts.

    .
     
  9. Tiberius

    Tiberius Commodore Commodore

    Joined:
    Sep 28, 2005
    What I want to know is this...

    How did they figure out that you can put them inside people?
     
  10. dub

    dub Fleet Captain Fleet Captain

    Joined:
    Sep 13, 2012
    Location:
    Location? What is this?
    It's evolution. You see, early on they entered their hosts through the mouth. :lol:
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g_Vr9LnogLM
     
  11. Tiberius

    Tiberius Commodore Commodore

    Joined:
    Sep 28, 2005
    lol! That's probably the best we're gonna get too!
     
  12. Worf'sParmach

    Worf'sParmach Commander Red Shirt

    Joined:
    Oct 13, 2011
    Location:
    Plano, TX
    I've always wondered this too. Who was the first guy to say "You know those weird slugs in the pools underground? I think I want to put one in my belly and see what happens..."
     
  13. heavy lids

    heavy lids Lieutenant Commander Red Shirt

    Joined:
    Jan 29, 2013
    Location:
    Denver
    Someone drank a lot of Romulan ale and had an idea.
     
  14. Timo

    Timo Fleet Admiral Admiral

    Joined:
    Aug 26, 2003
    Remember how the Trill communicate in those milk pools of theirs? One might think they were originally predators who stunned their victims with electric shocks and then wiggled their way into the victim body to feast. But eventually they developed finer control over their stunning tool, and found out that it could be used to control the body of the victim; perhaps they were using the tool in a somewhat related manner with each other already?

    Over millions of years, the Trill would refine their skills into the ability to not just take over a practical body, but also to use that body to lure further bodies into their doom in the milk pools. Eventually, it would become practical to build a whole society around the captured bodies, or to usurp a society that a particularly useful set of bodies had already built. And this society could start inserting the slugs by civilized, surgical means...

    Timo Saloniemi