Summary
- The latest clue in Star Trek: Discovery leads to a Trill symbiont named Jinaal Bix, creating a link to the Progenitors’ life-creating technology.
- The zhian’tara ritual allows past Trill hosts to temporarily live through willing volunteers, offering insight into the nature of consciousness.
- The Trill’s belief in the separation of mind and body may hold keys to understanding the Progenitors’ technology and the origin of sentient life.
The search for the latest clue in Star Trek: Discovery season 5’s treasure hunt involves a Trill ritual first seen with Lt. Commander Jadzia Dax (Terry Farrell) on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. 800 years before Star Trek: Discovery‘s 32nd century, Romulan scientist Dr. Vellek (Michael Copeland) laid the clues that will ultimately lead to the life-creating technology of the Progenitors. In Star Trek: Discovery season 5, episode 3, “Jinaal”, written by Kyle Jarrow and Lauren Wilkinson and directed by Andi Armaganian, Vellek’s latest clue leads to Trill, so that’s where Captain Michael Burnham (Sonequa Martin-Green) and the USS Discovery crew hope to find the next piece of the puzzle.
Star Trek: Discovery season 5, episode 3’s clue points specifically to a 24th-century Trill symbiont host named Jinaal Bix. Fortunately, the Bix symbiont is still alive, so everything Jinaal knew lives on in Bix’s current host, Kalzara Bix (Clare Coulter). The only wrinkle is that Michael Burnham, Cleveland Booker (David Ajala), and Dr. Hugh Culber (Wilson Cruz) must speak to the long-dead individual host Jinaal directly, and not the joined entity of Kalzara Bix. This seems impossible, but with the help of Dr. Culber volunteering as temporary host, there’s a specific Trill ritual from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine that can actually make that happen: zhian’tara.
What is Zhian’tara? Discovery & DS9’s Trill Ritual Explained
Past Trill hosts can temporarily live again.
Zhian’tara is the Trill ritual which allows the consciousness of a symbiont’s past hosts to be temporarily transferred into willing volunteers.DS9‘s Jadzia Dax undergoes zhian’tara in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine season 3, episode 25, “Facets”, with the rest of DS9‘s regular cast embodying all of Dax’s previous hosts. While the past hosts’ minds occupy living volunteers, those memories are no longer part of the symbiont, and inaccessible to the current host. Volunteers’ minds are suppressed, but still aware, since Quark (Armin Shimerman) is able to break through Audrid Dax to complain, and Dr. Culber remarks on the curious nature of being present in his own body with Jinaal.
| DS9 Characters Embodying Previous Hosts in Jadzia Dax’s Zhian’tara | |
| Lela | Major Kira Nerys (Nana Visitor) |
| Tobin | Chief Miles O’Brien (Colm Meaney) |
| Emony | Leeta (Chase Masterson) |
| Audrid | Quark (Armin Shimerman) |
| Torias | Dr. Julian Bashir (Alexander Siddig) |
| Joran | Commander Benjamin Sisko (Avery Brooks) |
| Curzon | Odo (Rene Auberjonois) |
The Trill Symbiosis Commission considers the zhian’tara ritual a mandatory part of being a joined Trill, since the symbionts are venerated as keepers of Trill history. In a typical zhian’tara, like Dax’s in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, the current Trill host is expected to meet and interact with their past hosts in order to better understand themselves and where they fall along the chain of individuals that make up a symbiont’s lifetime. The concept of transferring consciousnesses via zhian’tara, and the fact the temporary hosts need not be Trill, has far reaching implications on the nature of consciousness and the mind’s connection to the physical body in Star Trek.
Prior to “Jinaal”, an aytpical zhian’tara was used in Star Trek: Discovery season 4, episode 3, “Choose to Live”, to permanently transfer the consciousness of Gray Tal (Ian Alexander) from the Tal symbiont into a synthetic body.
The Trill Connection To Star Trek: Discovery’s Progenitor Technology
The Trill know something that other Star Trek cultures don’t.
It’s probably no accident that a Trill was on the team that the 24th-century Federation President tasked with uncovering the mysteries of the Progenitors’ technology. At the end of Star Trek: Discovery season 5, episode 3, “Jinaal”, Burnham and Culber discuss how Jinaal can possess Culber’s body from a scientific perspective, and conclude that “some things are unknowable”, but the Trill themselves have no such questions. It’s a matter of fact in Trill culture that the mind is uncoupled from the body, and symbionts are biological storage for previous hosts’ souls, while also being independently sentient. That’s important when digging deep into how the origin of sentient life.
If the Progenitors’ technology is capable of creating life, does it merely build the physical bodies as empty vessels awaiting the spark of life, or is Progenitor technology able to create souls from scratch, too? There must be a reason Star Trek: Discovery is using the Trill to lay the groundwork for the ultimate reveal, when similar practices exist in other Star Trek cultures, like the Vulcan ability to place one’s katra with another individual. With the Progenitors behind the existence of all sentient humanoid life in Star Trek, Star Trek: Discovery may come to the conclusion that it isn’t just biology that unites us, but our souls as well.
