"Blood Oath," or "Embrace Death"
I really don't understand Jadzia Dax. She's a trill. She can be whoever she wants to be. Her lives are legion. Life doesn't truly end for her at all, and each new identity is like another volume in an endless epic saga. Once she was Curzon Dax. Now she's Jadzia Dax. Some day she'll be another Dax. She bears their memories and their experiences, but she is not beholden to her previous self. Every life is new, born from a previous life but independent of it.
I don't understand why Jadzia is so hung up on being Curzon Dax. One episode ago, she gave a young student a lecture on how every Trill is their own person. Now she's abandoning her duties to starfleet and running off on some damn-fool mission with the Three Geriatric Klingon Musketeers because Curzon Dax swore a blood oath eighty years ago--an oath no one expects her to keep.
Why? What's the point?
Let me backtrack a little. Here's what happens. A trio of aged Klingon warriors meander onto Deep Space Nine, apparently by chance and circumstance. Jadzia Dax happens to know these three Klingon warriors--Kang, Kor, and Koloth--from a previous life.
Nothing too surprising so far. Jadzia Dax knows half the galaxy. I sometimes wonder if the whole of the Federation is just Six Degrees of Jadzia Dax. Everybody knows a guy who knows a guy who knows a guy who knows a guy who knows a guy who knows Curzon. What surprised me was the degree of intimacy and familiarity Jadzia shared with these Klingons. She knows them by name and by reputation, by deeds, by history. She can name the various wounds and scars they have. She's godfather to one of their sons. Jadzia knows these Klingons and their ways so well she's practically a Klingon herself.
Eighty years ago, Curzon Dax swore a blood oath--a kind of shared brotherhood--with three Klingon warriors. These warriors have a long-standing vendetta against some nameless Klingon bandit called "The Albino." The Albino killed their firstborn with a gruesome genetic disease, and Curzon swore vengeance. He's held to that oath for eighty years.
What baffles me is that absolutely no one expects or wants Jadzia to fulfill her blood oath. There isn't a person on Deep Space Nine that expects her to go through with an oath sworn eighty years ago by her previous host. Not Kiera. Not Sisko. Not even Kor. But, against all wisdom and common sense, Jadzia absolutely insists on accompanying her old band of brothers on some foolhardy revenge mission that could very well jeopardize her career with Starfleet and taint her soul with the act of murder.
It just feels so shockingly out of character for Jadzia to go through with this, and to the episode's credit, I respect how just about every single character in this episode tries their best to keep Jadzia from throwing her life away.
Maybe that's what bothered me about this episode. Jadzia feels like she's behaving out of character. Trill are cultural dilettantes. They know a little bit about every species and race. But Jadzia is more than a Klingon dilettante who speaks their language fluently and knows how to push their buttons. She understands Klingons almost as well as they understand themselves. She's a skilled Bat'leth fighter and intimately familiar with Klingon psychology. She practically IS Klingon.
"Blood Oath" is best when it focuses on the nuances of the Klingon warrior ethos. This is a culture that prides itself on battle and death, self-destructive and suicidal by nature. I admit, I enjoyed the little twist at the end, when we realize that our three Klingon musketeers are not saddling up for one last adventure, but throwing themselves with reckless abandon into a suicide mission. They're old, broken down relics of a bygone era, out of place in the modern world; they don't want to go gently into that good night, and so they elect to die with a blade in their hands.
I respect that story. I have a weakness for bittersweet endings, and the sunset of the lives of three Klingon warriors seems oddly spoiled by the presence of a Trill outsider. No matter how much Jadzia insists that Curzon is one of them, no matter how fervently she believes in the sanctity of their blood oath, this story was never about the oath. This story was never about vengeance.
This was an episode about the sunset of a life, and choosing the way you die. Trill are, therefore, the very worst possible representatives of this principle; a Trill never dies--they merely turn a page. I can't help but feel that this episode would have been better if it were somehow divorced from Jadzia entirely.
2/5
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