Have you seen the ENT episodes "Affliction" and "Divergence"?
On of the Martin and Mangels novels said it was the same thing as in the above ENT episodes.
Spoilers Discovery and the Novelverse - TV show discussion thread
- Thread starter F. King Daniel
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Maybe, but how do you explain the fact that during TNG the Trill are supposed to be the mysterious species that no one knows much about. Which is actually really strange, because they are Federation members. While during DS9 everybody and their grandmothers seem to know what Trills are and that they are a symbiotic species?
And what about the different way of naming in their culture: While Odan's host is apparently nameless and Odan is the name of the symbiont, Trills in DS9 use mixed names: The first name of the host + the name of the symbiont (e.g. Jadzia Dax).
[Edit] Not to forget the important fact that hosts apparently have no rights in TNG, living only to be joined. While they are treated as the ones in charge during DS9 and symbionts are actually rare. So not everyone can get one.
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To be fair, you could say the same about pon farr in Vulcans. It was somehow a deep dark secret in "Amok Time" despite the Vulcans being Federation members (see also the Vulcan inner eyelid in "Operation -- Annihilate!"), and yet it was talked about openly in later series and retroactively established as known to the Starfleet medical establishment in Enterprise.
This is why we need to be forgiving of inconsistencies in series fiction. They make it up as they go, often in an awful rush, and thus it is necessarily imperfect. And an imperfection that can be glossed over in a one-and-done episode is harder to ignore in later revisits, so it's only sensible to revise the idea going forward.
And connected to that is that the hosts the TNG episode contributed nothing to the personality; Odan was treated as the same person in all three of their hosts, even Riker. And the unjoined host at the end barely even seemed sapient.
I always liked to think that the Trill used two host species, and that the one in "The Host" was to the DS9 ones as something like Homo erectus was to H. sapiens.
That's a great post. Just one nitpick, wouldn't the apparent slavery of a sentient species be highly problematic, considering that they are members of the federation?
My point is that the host species in "The Host" was not necessarily fully sapient at all. (Yes, they can talk, but so can Siri.) And a naturally evolved symbiosis would not constitute slavery. Does Commander Bem from TAS enslave his arms and legs?
Maybe but i couldn't help myself thinking that the female host appeared to be resignated and fatalistic at the end of the episode before she got joined.
To me she just seemed devoid of will and personality, which is why I perceived the hosts as subsentient. I took the original idea to be that the symbiont provided the brains and the host was just the body, with only the intelligence of a draft animal, say. The episode repeatedly referred to them as "merely hosts" as if they were nothing but carrier vessels for the symbionts. Naturally this was retconned for DS9, along with almost everything else.
Don't think Trill were ever said to be or not be Federation members.
IMHO, I just treat parts of the TNG episode as "Early installment weirdness" with a bit of assuming "we don't learn the fine details behind the broad explanations." Not everything can be reconciled, obviously, but what else can you do?
Quiz - which of these is a typical human name?
A) Bob Smith
B) Ukhnaa Khurelsukh
C) Sting
The Trill occupy at least one whole planet, and I've go not problem believing there's some cultural diversity happening there. How many different cultures do we have here on Earth? How many different languages? Religions? Or other things that determine naming conventions? Let's give alien races in Trek the same opportunity for cultural development. I'm in favor of anything that moves past the Trek Mono-Culture trope.
^"Sting" is a poor example there since it's Gordon Sumner's stage name, not his legal name. But there are plenty of human cultures where people do generally use just one name, like Indonesia. Or where they used to use one name but adopted Western-style surnames because of colonialism.
Okay, bad example, and me just trying (without success, apparently) to be funny. But my point stands as is.
Still, I think Unimatrix Q has a point. Yes, alien cultures should have diversity of naming habits as a general rule, but in this specific case, it makes sense. Since DS9 established the pattern that a joined Trill's two names represent the host and symbiont respectively, and since TNG's version was all symbiont and no host as far as identity/personality was concerned, it made sense that they'd only use one name in that case.
After all, given what DS9 revealed about Trill joining, the joined are a fairly small percentage of the population and they're all approved by the same body. So it stands to reason that, even if there are multiple cultures among unjoined Trill, the joined Trill represent a single subculture with standardized practices.
After all, given what DS9 revealed about Trill joining, the joined are a fairly small percentage of the population and they're all approved by the same body. So it stands to reason that, even if there are multiple cultures among unjoined Trill, the joined Trill represent a single subculture with standardized practices.
Yeah, could be. By the way, i guess bringing the TNG Trill back in combination with the DS9 ones could still have potential for some really interesting stories.
When Wildstorm brought back Odan in the Divided We Fall mini, they just put spots on her, right?
Yes -- unlike DC's TNG Annual #4, which reused the "Host" makeup design, despite coming out 9 months after DS9 premiered.
Sure, but there could also be subsets of the whole of joined Trill. There are very few groups (or cultures) of people that are truly monolithic in their behavior and culture. There's always a few folks putting there own spin on things. People who are not part of Star Trek fandom, for example, tend to portray the group as if everyone involved have the same viewpoints and behaviors when that is most certainly not the truth - evident even here on this board which is a niche of that niche culture. Yeah, there are some folks who are annoying, know-it-all pedants; but there are also folks who are a bit more socially adjusted.
As I said, since all Trill joinings are approved and supervised by the same single council, with a standardized set of parameters that a potential host has to meet, it seems likely that they're pretty uniform. Any divergence from that uniformity would lead to candidates being rejected or joinings deemed unsuccessful. This was actually a story point in the novels, as I recall.
That's a bad example, because there's no official body that regulates Trek fandom, no standardized set of rules for membership in the group. There very much is for joined Trill. It's not just a fan club or a social group. It's a carefully vetted elite that is required to conform to a specific set of standards.
In some respects, I think we have to, since the DS9 writers clearly did. As much as we might want to believe everything we see is "real" as shown, in practice, the first appearance of a concept is often a rough draft that gets reworked later on. See the Ferengi in "The Last Outpost," for instance, with their writhing "alien" body language and their energy whips. Or the way the Borg in "Q Who?" were grown in incubators and were interested only in technology rather than people, but afterward they developed an interest in assimilating humans and were eventually retconned in VGR as consisting exclusively of assimilated drones.
TOSS pilot era Spock, for one.
Don't remember the former, but the energy whips did come back in later episodes (on an action figure set Quark had in DS9 and in "Acquisition" [ENT]).
Incubators came back as maturation chambers and the only one who claimed they were only interested in technology was Q. Of all the retconned stuff, I find this to be one of the more easily reconcilable ones. Frankly, I have more problems with the TNG crew learning to control transwarp conduits in that "Descent" two-parter, while later shows and stories not only ignored that (either by having characters try to use that knowledge or establishing why the couldn't), but "Shattered" (VOY) showing that special Borg tech is needed to travel through it.