Because Dax’s consciousness was carried on by the symbiont in her belly, the character of Dax was able to live on in a new character, Ezri, played by a new actress, Nicole de Boer. Farrell, however, was given the short end of the stick in that scenario, as it would require Jadzia to be killed. Farrell did, however, ask that her role be reduced because the shooting schedule on “Deep Space Nine” was exhausting.
In her vision, Dax’s role could have been merely shrunk to a guest role. “I didn’t want to die,” she said, “I would have been so happy if they just would have let me be … recurring [in] the final season, so I didn’t have to be in every episode.” Farrell cited that the shooting schedule was rough, saying:
“I was just really tired. I was tired of waking up at four in the morning. I was tired of all the minutiae. I’m sure a lot of the other actors feel this way, too. When you’re number five (on the call sheet), you’re waiting for that schedule to arrive and it becomes frustrating. You want to feel like you have your life again, and I’d definitely put my life on hold because I didn’t know how to balance a schedule constantly changing all the time. It was really hard for me.”
It wasn’t just being worn out that made playing Dax distasteful. In the oral history book “The Fifty-Year Mission: The Next 25 Years: From The Next Generation to J. J. Abrams,” edited by Mark A. Altman and Edward Gross, Farrell also noted that executive producer Rick Berman treated her poorly, too often talking about her body and her figure.