Johannes T. Evans

three years of this bloody vampire

In Re Gault was about a 15 year old kid who allegedly did a stupid crank phone call to a neighbor. (I don't think it was ever proven that it was actually him; he said it was his friend and he kicked his friend out after the phone call was made.) The sheriff took him into custody, his parents were not informed, and he was kept at the local jail. After that, the judge in the case decided that he needed to go to the state reform school until he was twenty-one (21) god damn years old.

Important to note that these reform schools were unregulated rarely inspected abuse factories. As with pretty much any time you hide away children and put adults in charge of them who can do anything they want, the children were often directly physically and sexually abused, used for forced labor, locked in solitary confinement, deprived of education, forced into religious conversion... What happened to these kids is very similar to the unceasing horror and violence done to Native Americans in residential schools, complete with unmarked graves, and just like with the indigenous peoples, authorities patted themselves on the back for taking care of the problem.

Gault, in this process, was not:

Told what specific crime he was charged with (the judge tried to backtrack and say it was a different one later)

Given an attorney

Given a transcript or the ability to make a transcript of the proceedings

Allowed to appeal the decision.

His parents brought it to the state Supreme Court anyway on a habeas corpus petition, which the Court referred back to the original judge to decide. When the original judge decided that he'd been right after all, they brought it back to the state Supreme Court, which said that all the problems seemed cleared up now.

The United States Supreme Court reversed 8-1 (THERE WAS A DISSENT!!!!) and gave kids, at that point, in the year of our lord 1967, the right to know what charges they had, the right to confront their accusers, and the right to have an attorney.

"Why is this two people's job to be the centre of this programme?"

Bullseye interview

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When I found out Curzon was dying, I requested the Dax symbiont.

And Curzon didn’t object?

No. And I’ve never been sure quite why. Except, as I’ve come to know Curzon’s dark sense of humour, I have a feeling the irony might have appealed to him.

Jadzia specifically requesting to take the Dax symbiont after her awful experience with Curzon is genuinely one of the most fascinating insights into her character, imo. It’s a showcase of her gritty determination, but also invites a lot of questions as to her motivations and her internal contradictions.

Because there’s something absolutely wild about choosing to inherit the memories of a mentor who did such a number on your self-esteem. Jadzia didn’t know that Curzon was in love with her (a reveal I have… mixed feelings about). For all she knew, he genuinely was unimpressed with her, and she was incredibly burned by not measuring up to his standards. And yet she chose to inherit his symbiont and his memories of her, to take that perception of her and make it a part of herself. I’ve experienced shitty academic mentorship (although not to that extent, fortunately) and I can’t think of anything that sounds worse than sharing my consciousness with someone I’ve had that experience with. But Jadzia wanted to.

And while we get her conjecturing about Curzon’s motivations in that exchange up there, she doesn’t elaborate on her own motivations for requesting the Dax symbiont. We can make inferences - she did it for the sense of vindication (she says she “tore through the program with a vengeance” when she reapplied), as a symbol of her resilience and her knowledge of her own worth and worthiness in spite of Curzon’s perceptions of her.

But it is an interesting contradiction, because for the most part her bad experiences as an initiate made her very avoidant of everything to do with Trill and the Symbiosis Commission. She’s apprehensive about having to go back there in Equilibrium, she put off doing her zhian’tara for so long that they had to do it on the station instead of on Trill, etc. And yet, she hasn’t washed her hands of the entire experience, because she actively chose to take on the most intimate possible reminder of it.

And while you could argue that taking on those memories and that perspective could constitute a sort of reconciliation with that experience (since, leaving aside Curzon’s actual reasons for washing her out, a lot of harsh mentorship is less malicious and personal than it feels on the receiving end), she obviously hasn’t reconciled herself to what happened. It’s clear from this episode that she still harbors a lot of anger and bitterness towards Curzon - when Sisko says “you made it through the program,” she replies, “no thanks to him.” It’s only through personal experience that she comes to understand Curzon’s POV (as she sees it) and appreciate the value of having high standards for initiates.

To me, her inheritance of the Dax symbiont is a symbol of both her rising above her insecurities, and the way those insecurities still haunt her. It’s clear in Facets that even though Curzon has very much influenced her behaviour and interests and priorities, she’s still apprehensive about actually “meeting” him, because his treatment of her is still a thorn in her side. And for a while she’s willing to simply let those memories go rather than confront him! So maybe her decision to take Dax was also a desire to keep that reminder of her failure close to her chest, to master it and subsume it into herself and rise above it. But across both Playing God and Facets, Curzon a part of Dax that she has considerable trouble incorporating into her gestalt conception of herself.

1.09 Speak of the Devil | 3.08 Upstairs Downstairs

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