The other
night, a friend and I were talking about plot holes and unresolved
threads in Star Trek and something occurred to me about Jadzia Dax.
The thing about Dax, you see, is that she is the only dedicated
science officer we meet in the 24th century shows. Voyager
doesn't have a science officer, unsurprising given she's not an
exploration vessel, and on the Enterprise-D
the job is effectively split between Geordi and Data.
The
question that occurs is that Dax was assigned to DS9
before Starfleet knew about the wormhole and the strange new worlds
on the other side of it. So why does a random Deep Space station in
the middle of nowhere need a science officer when the flagship of the
fleet doesn't?
So
here's my utterly pointless headcanon reason: she's there to
supervise the Starfleet relief efforts on Bajor. It isn't something
that gets much play after the pilot episode but the main purpose of
the Starfleet presence on DS9
is to do everything “short of violating the Prime Directive” to
get Bajor up and running again after the Occupation.
Jadzia
is there to help with the scientific side of that process like
supervising agricultural projects or setting up genetic databases so
families separated during the Occupation can reunite. Given that the
chief engineering officer is a CPO (O'Brien) and never seems to work
on anything not related to the station or its vehicles (runabouts,
Defiant, so on) she's
probably involved in the logistics side of things: what tech to send
where, what Starfleet's industrial replicators should be churning out
for the reconstruction effort and so on.
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