What's the earliest mention of a Trill serving in Starfleet?
Trills in Starfleet - a question for the hivemind...
- Thread starter James Swallow
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Pretty sure Jadzia Dax is the first canonical Trill seen serving in Starfleet. I don't think anyone was mentioned as serving prior to her, though I could be wrong. I never got the impression she was meant to be the first Trill in Starfleet, though given how secretive they were there couldn't have been very many, if any at all joined Trills serving at the very least.
IIRC, Torias Dax also served in Starfleet (as a shuttle pilot). And I believe Curzon was in Starfleet as well before he became an ambassador - Sisko once spoke of how he and Curzon served together.
Yes, Torias was a shuttle pilot, but there's no indication he was in Starfleet.
According to Memory Beta, Curzon never served, but rather had a posting as a diplomat on the same starship Sisko served on.
According to Memory Beta, Curzon never served, but rather had a posting as a diplomat on the same starship Sisko served on.
AIUI The Trill joined the Federation fairly early, in the 23rd Century. They've since become mainstays. Articles of the Federation stated that a Trill, Madza Bral, was the first non-Founding Five Federation President, c. 2230's, so I would take it the Trill would be well integrated into Starfleet by that time. By 2250 they'd be everywhere.
^Although we can safely assume that most Trill in Starfleet were unjoined, partly because most Trill period are unjoined, and partly because the Trill probably didn't want to subject their joined members to the risk of discovery.
My novella "The Stars Look Down" in the Vanguard: Declassified anthology established that Lieutenant Dastin was a Trill serving aboard the U.S.S. Sagittarius as a tactical officer in 2268. He will return in the new series Star Trek: Seekers.
And yet, Starfleet is supposed to be for the Trill-seeking members of society, innit?
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I can't remember - is he joined or unjoined?
I thought I remembered a Trill Starfleet officer in one of the Vanguard stories, glad to know I wasn't mistaken.
It's never addressed in the books; it just hasn't come up. However, the series bible for Seekers specifies that he is unjoined.
In Diane Duane's Intellivore, we meet a joined Trill Starfleet captain, Gohod Clif. The Clif symbiont is said to have served in space for two centuries, first in the Trill Private Service, and then in Starfleet after the forces were integrated. That would seem to indicate the merger happened sometime after the 2170s.
The Trill (albeit different looking Trill) 1st appeared in TNG's 'The Host'. Kind of a Romulanish (?) Forehead.
http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/The_Host_(episode)?useskin=oasis&cb=2547
The Trill (albeit different looking Trill) 1st appeared in TNG's 'The Host'. Kind of a Romulanish (?) Forehead.
http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/The_Host_(episode)?useskin=oasis&cb=2547
Yes, but he wasn't in Starfleet. As stated, Torias and Curzon both worked for the Federation, but that's not the same thing as being a Starfleet officer.
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Thanks for the input, gang - especially D-Mack for the link-tacular post. 
This is something that has long bothered me about TrekLit's interpretation of the Trill. In "The Host," we see this exchange between Picard and Troi (emphasis added):
Now, obviously, a lot of material from "The Host" was not religiously respected in DS9, but there are still plenty of ways to easily rectify most of the apparent contradictions. And beyond the physical appearance of the Trill humanoids and symbiont, the relationship between host and symbiont during joining, and the question of transporter use, nothing from DS9 blatantly contradicts anything from "The Host." (And even those can be explained away pretty easily.)
It's easy to interpret the Trill, as shown in DS9, as a race about which the Federation, on the whole, knows very little. DS9 may not have honored the details of "The Host," but they never violated the spirit of "The Host"'s depiction of the Trill.
TrekLit, on the other hand, makes it very, very hard to make sense of Troi's statement. Really, Federation science knows very little about a species that is integrated enough into Federation society to have one of its own elected president 150 years earlier??
And given what we've seen of Trill society and how the joined end up forming a de facto upper class, it would require a lot of explaining, in my opinion, to justify how a non-joined Trill could rise to such prominence. (Likewise, it would require a lot of explaining to justify how a Trill president could be joined without such medical knowledge being commonplace 150 years later. [Actually, now that I think about it, that might not be so hard. But still, the larger point remains.])
Basically, though, I take issue with canon's implication that the Trill are still pretty isolationist and TrekLit's very frequent use of them. (Seriously; I feel that I read about supernumerary Trill characters as often as I read about supernumerary Vulcans.)
Well, I guess my assumption would be that the President wasn't joined. It's not unrealistic to think that an unjoined Trill could rise to be President at all. Yes, there's something of an aristocracy of the joined among the Trill higher-ups, but by sheer numbers they can't possibly all be. The Trill ambassador in the Mission Gamma books was unjoined.
Plus, if they were as paranoid as they seem to have been about anyone finding out about the symbionts, especially that early in their relationship with the Federation, then it makes sense to me that they deliberately wouldn't send anybody who was joined to be their ambassador or councillor (from whom the president would have been selected). I suspect they'd keep all their joined Trills well away from contact with the other worlds of the Federation until they were absolutely certain they could trust them with the secret. Yes, joined Trills are supposed to go out and gets lots of wide-ranging experience, but you have to balance that against the paranoia the government seems to have about any possible danger to the symbionts.
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Plus, if they were as paranoid as they seem to have been about anyone finding out about the symbionts, especially that early in their relationship with the Federation, then it makes sense to me that they deliberately wouldn't send anybody who was joined to be their ambassador or councillor (from whom the president would have been selected). I suspect they'd keep all their joined Trills well away from contact with the other worlds of the Federation until they were absolutely certain they could trust them with the secret. Yes, joined Trills are supposed to go out and gets lots of wide-ranging experience, but you have to balance that against the paranoia the government seems to have about any possible danger to the symbionts.
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