Joined trills and memories

[LobsterAfternoon]

So I was rewatching some of DS9 season 7, and all the Worf/Ezri/Jadzia drama got me thinking. So you're an unjoined Trill, let's say around age 20. You get a symbiont. You live with it for 50 years, you die, and it gets a new host. Does the new host have have just 50 years worth of memories from you, or the entire 70 that that humanoid trill lived for? Essentially, does the symbiont pick up stuff that you experienced before becoming joined?

 

[Worf'sParmach]

So I was rewatching some of DS9 season 7, and all the Worf/Ezri/Jadzia drama got me thinking. So you're an unjoined Trill, let's say around age 20. You get a symbiont. You live with it for 50 years, you die, and it gets a new host. Does the new host have have just 50 years worth of memories from you, or the entire 70 that that humanoid trill lived for? Essentially, does the symbiont pick up stuff that you experienced before becoming joined?

Good question. I don't know that there is a canon answer to that, it would be like Jadzia remembering things that happened to Curzon before he was joined. I'm going to say that because the host and symbiont become a shared intelligence that the symbiont acquires whatever knowledge and memories that host has, integrates it and carries it on. Like, if Torias learned to pilot before becoming joined, subsequent hosts of Dax would have the skill also.

But this is purely speculation on my part.

 

[Timo]

Supposedly, one of the prerequisites for becoming a host is that you educate yourself ("Playing God" et al.). Is all of this actually wasted effort, a sadistic exercise by those who maintain the pretense of some hosts being "incompatible" when all they really do is reject perfectly good hosts because there aren't enough symbionts? Or does the education amount to something that the symbionts truly find useful in their eventual joined life?

If the latter, then the answer must be 70 years of memories rather than 20 years. But the possibility does exist that "memories" or "education" are too abstract for the symbiont to retrieve from the past of the host, and only certain motoric or otherwise basic skills from that past are useful currency after joining. This merely means that the candidates are being lied to - but this we knew canonically already, and it's just a question of how much.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Deranged Nasat]

On a related note, while early twenties seems to be the socially accepted age for Joining, in part because a young Trill must endure years of intense training and evaluation before being judged suitable, I wonder when the Trill is actually capable of Joining. In theory, could a child Join? Or would their neurology be not yet sophisticated enough to make the Joining stable? Might Joining in adolescence or pre-adolescence have disruptive effects on the developing Trill? I imagine for one thing their sense of identity might be distorted, but where is the line drawn regarding the age at which a young humanoid is considered grounded enough in their own identity to take on the role of host? When you're plugging a three-hundred year old symbiont and all its accumulated experiences into a 20-year old, is that really so different from plugging it into a 15 year old? Or a 12 year old? Do the Trill see Joining as something to be entered into upon maturity, in a way similar to sexual activity or recreational drug use - that is, a younger person might well be biologically capable of it, but socially they're considered not ready? Or are there physiological and neurological reasons why a preadult Joining would be unwise, or even fail? Before the Trill civilization established the Symbiosis Commission or a structured body of laws relating to Joining, would children or adolescents have become hosts?

 

[Merlanthe]

I do remember that in the episode where Dax got..err, kidnapped?...by the nervous Verad guy who wanted a symbiont really badly that he was willing to atke an entire space station hostage that once Dax was removed from Jadzia she could no longer recall any of the other hosts memories so i am guessing that the previous hosts memories are imprinted on the symbiont and the current host is only able to access them because their mind is joined with that of the symbiont.

Trying to remember if Jadzia or Ezri ever made reference to any of their previous hosts childhoods or just their own and none spring to mind.