9 Ups & NO Downs From Star Trek: Lower Decks 5.9 - Fissure Quest

Lovers might never have fallen out of the rifts for this version of Curzon Dax, but in the space of just one episode, we certainly fell in love with him. True to his Klingon connections, the initially overzealous Curzon of the Anaximander practised his bat'leth on the bridge and fired first before asking questions. By the end, and by the same bat'leth, he had saved the lives of his crewmates at the cost of his own.

Let's just pause for a moment to reiterate — this is CURZON Dax, "from a reality where he hasn't yet passed his symbiont to Jadzia". Even for Lower Decks, that's a deep cut which no one saw coming. Before this, we'd only ever seen the Prime version of the character via flashbacks, via Odo, and via the words of others.

Having spent at least part of the episode arguing over sodium (chloride), we hardly expected to feel quite what we did by the character's death. With T'Pol at his bedside, Curzon's "You back Dax up in that big Vulcan brain" formed a surprisingly moving moment in an action-filled episode.