Nah, I doubt it's that personal. People leave jobs all the time in the real world. It's no different in Hollywood.
Absolutely. Sometimes fans are far too quick to impute personal motives to creators' choices. Usually it's about what's best for the story, not about personal whims or dislikes. (Usually when I've killed off characters in my fiction, they've been characters I hated to lose and I've felt terrible about it, but it was what the story needed.)
I have heard that the producers of
Sliders were motivated by a certain vindictiveness toward departing cast members and thus gave their characters very ignominious fates. But that's an exception to the rule.
With Dax, it made perfect sense to kill off Jadzia since, by coincidence, they had already set up the ideal way to recast her, what with the Trill and the symbionts and all.
Indeed. I remember when I first learned, some two decades ago, that there would be a Trill regular in DS9, one of the first thoughts I had was, "Well, if the actress ever decides to leave, it'll be easy to recast the role."
Really? I thought bringing Ezri onboard was silly and a little too convenient--the new host just happens to be a dark-haired women like Jadzia, just happens to also wear a blue uniform, and just happens to stay aboard the station as a full-time member of the crew. It's like they replaced Jadzia with Jadzia 2.0--the next best thing (granted their personalities were different).
Well, that's hardly true. First off, I'm sure they looked at actresses with a variety of hair colors, and the one they chose happened to be a brunette. Second, they didn't look that much alike -- Farrell's an Amazon and de Boer's a pixie. And third, Jadzia was a science officer and Ezri was a counselor, so they didn't fill the same role any more than Data and Troi did. And fourth, how could she be a regular and
not stay on a a full-time crewmember?
If they wanted to have the new Dax visit the station once or twice to see old friends, fine. But adding her the cast with only a season to go seemed kind of dumb.
Why is it dumb? Terry Farrell decided to leave the show at the end of season 6. The producers had no choice but to deal with that reality. And they couldn't very well leave Nana Visitor as the only female regular in the cast. They had to add a new woman to the cast to replace Farrell, and as Greg said, the very nature of the Dax character provided an obvious route for that. If Dax hadn't been a joined life form, maybe they would've promoted Kasidy or Leeta to regular status or something. But since the idea of taking new hosts was intrinsic to the character, it was only natural to use the opportunity to explore that premise, to show us how a new host adjusted to being joined. There was a lot of untapped story potential there, and that's an irresistible lure for a writer.
Besides, the whole new host/same symbiont story had already been told before both on DS9 and TNG. I didn't see a need to bring it up again.
It was told for one episode in TNG, and with a very different conception of the Trill in which the hosts' personality was totally subsumed, so it doesn't even count as the same kind of story. And with Jadzia we only explored it years after the fact, once she'd already acclimated, or we saw it briefly for a few minutes with Verad. This was an opportunity to explore the ongoing process of adjustment for a host who was still brand new, and moreover who'd been joined reluctantly in an emergency situation and was thus far more unprepared and conflicted than other hosts. It's clearly a very different situation that allowed examining the concept from new angles and in new depth.
Of course it's a no-brainer--it's the most convenient fix. Jadzia's leaving?--oh, let's bring in someone very similar to replace her. It's the quick and easy solution. God forbid the writers actually challenge themselves and come up with something different.
Jadzia was a gifted scientist with the confidence, wisdom, and grace of a 300-year-old elder, with a maternal affection for her crewmates. Ezri was a neurotic kid who was struggling to find her balance and her identity after having eight other personalities dumped into her head with minimal preparation. They were extremely different, indeed diametrically opposite in a lot of ways. Some of the other characters
wanted Ezri to be a continuation of Jadzia, but she was very much her own person.
How can you say introducing Ezri is more dramatic
We're not. We're saying that killing off Jadzia was more dramatic than just transferring her away. Introducing a Ninth Dax was just a logical consequence of that decision.
I think the reason why they chose to kill off Tasha Yar as opposed to have the character get transferred to another ship or whatever was shock value. Prior to Skin of Evil, a main character had never been permanently killed in Trek. The closest we got was Spock, but he was resurrected in the next movie so that doesn't count. This was considered to be less expected.
I'm not sure if "shock value" is really the phrase. Or at least that's a simplification. The idea was, to some extent, to do the opposite of a "redshirt" death -- instead of having a random act of lethal violence befall some nameless extra, it would happen to a main character and its emotional impact would really be explored. And it was to make the point that death isn't always some grand meaningful thing, that sometimes it's just random and arbitrary and unfair. It was a very mature and honest treatment of the subject, and then "Yesterday's Enterprise" had to go and ruin it.
