One DS9 story had Bashir and Jadzia falling in love

Dr. Bashir and Jadzia would have fallen in love in one episode

At the beginning of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Dr. Julian Bashir began flirting with Jadzia Dax on a regular basis. But the relationship never went anywhere, and the two remained just friends. But that didn’t stop one writer from pitching a one-episode story that would have brought the couple together romantically…at least for forty or so minutes.

Michael McGreevey, who wrote the DS9 episode “Babel,” had the idea for a script that had Jadzia falling in love with Dr. Bashir, but it wasn’t Jadzia Dax falling in love with him. In McGreevey’s storyline, the symbiont starts to make Jadzia ill. That forces Bashir to remove it so it won’t continue to harm her and also so he could treat the symbiont. While Jadzia is separated, she reverts back to her own, unique personality before she became joined to the symbiont. And that personality attracts Bashir even more, and he falls in love with her with her soon reciprocating his feelings. The only problem was neither Jadzia nor the symbiont could survive without one another. So, before the end of the episode, the two had to be rejoined, thereby ending the short romance and breaking Bashir’s heart.

Writers passed on the Bashir and Jadzia story

McGreevey told The Official Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Magazine (issue 8) that he didn’t know why the team didn’t want to do the story as it was a simple love story. But giving Bashir one shot at being involved with Jadzia, even if it was only for one episode, would have been kind of cruel, especially when everyone knew it was temporary. Even Bashir would have known it was temporary as he was aware that a Trill cannot live without the symbiont once they have been joined for over ninety-three hours.

There would have been repercussions after the episode as the writers wouldn’t have been able to say “Oh, this didn’t work out” and move on. Again, Bashir would have been heartbroken, and they would have had to show that in follow-up episodes because no one would have believed he wasn’t still struggling with the one shot that slipped through his fingers. So, in this instance, the writers made a very wise decision in passing on this episode.