Trill Symbionts

WesleysDisciple · February 16 2013, 12:23 AM

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.

Pavonis · February 16 2013, 04:07 PM

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.

Captain Verata · February 17 2013, 07:56 AM

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.

Timo · February 17 2013, 04:17 PM

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.

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

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

Captain Verata · February 17 2013, 10:41 PM

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.

Merlanthe · February 18 2013, 01:39 AM

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.

Timo · February 18 2013, 04:12 PM

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?

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

lvsxy808 · February 18 2013, 04:27 PM

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.

WesleysDisciple wrote:

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

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.

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Tiberius · February 19 2013, 10:28 AM