Star Trek: 10 MORE Behind The Scenes Decisions We Can't Forgive

No one is arguing that Ezri Dax isn't an interesting character who added a new flavor and new chemistry to Star Trek: Deep Space Nine's final year, but we can probably all agree that Terry Farrell's Jadzia was the definitive Dax. And that Jadzia Dax should not have been killed off.

Unceremoniously blasted with Pah-Wraith fire by a possessed Gul Dukat in the season six finale, "Tears of the Prophets", Jadzia's death really comes out of nowhere, a show of strength by a villain who isn't even his right mind when he does it. Dax doesn't die in the line of duty, on the bridge of the Defiant, or fighting alongside her beloved Worf in the battle to save the Alpha Quadrant, she was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. Which also just happened to be church.

It's unnecessarily abrupt, disconnected to the character's greater arc, and seemingly done out of malice by the show's producers rather out of a genuine drive to tell an interesting story. Years later, Terry Farrell herself said:

I didn't want to kill Jadzia. To me, that had very little to do with good storytelling.

According to Farrell, she was bullied by executive producer Rick Berman after she requested reduced screen time in season seven:

He had [another] producer come up to me and say, "If you weren't here, you know you’d be working at Kmart."... It was that kind of thing. Rick Berman said I was hardballing him, and I was, like, "I'm not. I just want to have a conversation. You're giving me a take-it-or-leave-it offer and I’m not okay with that." So I finally did have a conversation with him and asked to cut down my number of episodes or just let me out.

Ultimately, the producers opted to kill Jadzia off rather than accept using Farrell on a part-time basis. While Jadzia's death weighed heavily on the characters in the subsequent final season, the producers not-so-subtly avoided using footage of Farrell as Dax during the feel-good montage during the series finale, a clear indication of the bad blood left by the departure and yet another disservice to a character fans fell in love with in the previous six seasons.