Practically all of the episodes of the first half of the seventh season are filler, though. Really bad filler, at that. The one where they play baseball against a team of Vulcans? Or all those godawful Ezri episodes.
Some of that comes from production problems.
Terry Farrell leaving meant any replacement character needed some kind of development and fast since there was only the 1 season left. Couple that with Ezri then being the following Dax host and it meant a crash course in getting to know everyone again from Ezri's POV along with the problems written in with her never actually intending to be Joined.
A lot of the Dax focused episodes from the previous seasons deal with the issues surrounding Joining for the Trill, one of the big ones being the suddenly near sublimation of the host self when occupying the same body with multiple other personalities and memories. Initiates spend years training and preparing to Join and many simply don't qualify because as another episode points out the potential number of hosts is significantly higher than the Trill government actually claims. Were the real numbers known it would swamp the application process and result in far more characters like Verad played by John Glover who briefly steals the Dax symbiote.
As an aside this is a personal bugbear about what Discovery then did where it had a human host for a symbiote, wokeness aside since the character was also non-binary because of course a host character to both male and female characters just happens to be non-binary 🙄, since this would very obviously mean various Trill were passed over to be the next host. Which would most likely result in a Trill civil war.
So with Ezri the template is flipped because she never went through any of that and was wholly unprepared, only becoming the Dax host by sheer luck as the sole Trill on the ship transporting the symbiote back to Trill after Jadzia died. Conceptually it was an interesting idea and one that only really works when something sudden as an existing character dies in a way Jadzia did rather than what most hosts probably did like with Curzon who went back to Trill when dying in order for the transplant to take place. The main differences being Jazdia had already died and at the hands of a Pah-Wraith empowered Dukat, so writing the host in distress could fit.
The death of Jadzia was so underwhelming that I had completely forgotten how she had died. Some sort of glowy, shaky death involving Dukat. Laugh-out-loud ridiculous. Most people disliked Ezri because she was there to replace Jadzia and no one knew why they fired her.
Some of that comes from production problems.
Terry Farrell leaving meant any replacement character needed some kind of development and fast since there was only the 1 season left. Couple that with Ezri then being the following Dax host and it meant a crash course in getting to know everyone again from Ezri's POV along with the problems written in with her never actually intending to be Joined.
A lot of the Dax focused episodes from the previous seasons deal with the issues surrounding Joining for the Trill, one of the big ones being the suddenly near sublimation of the host self when occupying the same body with multiple other personalities and memories. Initiates spend years training and preparing to Join and many simply don't qualify because as another episode points out the potential number of hosts is significantly higher than the Trill government actually claims. Were the real numbers known it would swamp the application process and result in far more characters like Verad played by John Glover who briefly steals the Dax symbiote.
As an aside this is a personal bugbear about what Discovery then did where it had a human host for a symbiote, wokeness aside since the character was also non-binary because of course a host character to both male and female characters just happens to be non-binary 🙄, since this would very obviously mean various Trill were passed over to be the next host. Which would most likely result in a Trill civil war.
So with Ezri the template is flipped because she never went through any of that and was wholly unprepared, only becoming the Dax host by sheer luck as the sole Trill on the ship transporting the symbiote back to Trill after Jadzia died. Conceptually it was an interesting idea and one that only really works when something sudden as an existing character dies in a way Jadzia did rather than what most hosts probably did like with Curzon who went back to Trill when dying in order for the transplant to take place. The main differences being Jazdia had already died and at the hands of a Pah-Wraith empowered Dukat, so writing the host in distress could fit.
The death of Jadzia was so underwhelming that I had completely forgotten how she had died. Some sort of glowy, shaky death involving Dukat. Laugh-out-loud ridiculous. Most people disliked Ezri because she was there to replace Jadzia and no one knew why they fired her.