From Alaska To Bajor In Search Of Identity
Like many other people my age, I’ve been rewatching Northern Exposure ever since the digital release a few months back more recently was followed by Amazon picking up the streaming rights. Yesterday, it was the episode “Crime and Punishment”.
Karma catches up with Chris for a West Virginia parole violation, and the subsequent extradition hearing becomes an arena for philosophical discourse, with a spirited defense by lawyer Mike and community testimony attesting to Chris’ good deeds.
The parole violation in question was leaving the state after his release from prison for grand theft auto without telling his parole officer. That departure is what eventually led Chris to Cicely, where he become the voice of the borough of Arrowhead County and the town’s de facto minister thanks to answering an ad in the back of Rolling Stone.
Faced with a delay because the prosecution doesn’t have Chris’ fingerprints on hand, the traveling circuit judge agrees to let Mike mount a defense based upon the premise that, metaphysically speaking, the Chris Stevens of today simply is not the same Chris Stevens who committed the parole violation, and so cannot be held accountable for it.
Watching this setup, I swore I’d seen this defense before. I was pretty sure it was in an episode of Star Trek, but there have been so many courtroom drama episodes across that franchise that my brain simply couldn’t lock onto which one.
Last night I had two dreams which I managed to remember upon waking. In the first, all I recall is turning to face a mirror. In it was me maybe as I was around eight years old. My face was smeared with an unsuccessful attempt to remove clown makeup. I’ve a vague sense that before this I was feeling disappointed in myself or that someone else was disappointed in me.
In the second, I was a girl arriving for her first day at a new school, either late middle or early high. I remember is trying to decide what to include in my backpack, and knowing that I needed to have my big, bulky Walkman, and then trying to figure out where I was supposed to go first.
Until this past year or so, I’ve never dreamt of being a different gender than I am when awake. It’s not entirely clear to me that the perspective character through whom I experienced this dream was even “me as a girl”. These dreams mostly feel like they belong to someone else.
Readers here know that I’ve blogged about identity before. At least as early as 2019 in the modern incarnation(s) of my blogging, I’ve talked about simply not having a “stable, constant sense of self and identity”.
At any rate, by the article and study above, my entire life appears to be one of routine “derailment”, per se, except in that I don’t feel the discomfort they speak of, over the disconnect between the who I was and the who I am. I’m not sure it ever occurred to me to think of myself as anything other than a succession of selves.
I’ve wondered, when discussing the blog restoration project and past selves, “just how many of me will there be”. For more, especially see this post, where I sort of bring together several of these previous discussions while thinking aloud about identity.
As was almost immediately pointed out to me on Mastodon, I was thinking of “Dax”, an episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.
New evidence reopens a thirty-year-old murder case and Dax’s previous host, Curzon, is the prime suspect.
Once again, a defendant here faces an extradition hearing. Sisko, defending Dax, argues much the same case as Mike does for Chris: because Jadzia Dax is a blending of a Trill symbiont and a Trill humanoid, she cannot be held responsible for an act committed by the blending of the same symbiont but a different humanoid.
In the end, Chris is positively identified by his fingerprints and subject to extradition. However, the judge determines that Cicely’s loss of a prominent community leader outweighs Chris’ offense against West Virginia and grants him a three-year reprieve. Jadzia goes free based upon testimony placing the previous Dax somewhere else when the crime occurred. Neither episode, then, entirely comes to a decision regarding the nature of identity.
As often and freakishly seems to happen in television, these two episodes sharing a central theme aired very close together: “Crime and Punishment” on December 14, 1992, and “Dax” on February 13, 1993—but that’s not the only quirk of proximity between them.
I’d been sure that it was a trick of my questionable memory because it’s simply too “just so”, but it’s completely real: both Judge Elizabeth Percy for Northern Exposure and Els Renora for Star Trek: Deep Space Nine are portrayed by the same actress, the late Anne Haney. What that says about the nature of identity, I’d be afraid to hazard a guess.