Doctor Renhol was a Trill and a member of the Symbiosis Commission in the 24th century.
In the 2360s, when Jadzia Dax was a Trill initiate for three years, Renhol was involved in her evaluation on the Commission's campus.
In 2371 Renhol welcomed Dax back. Unfortunately, Jadzia's homecoming was due to an undiagnosed medical condition that threatened the Dax symbiont. Renhol initially prescribed injections meant to increase Jadzia's isoboramine levels. When this approach failed to halt the threat to the symbiont, Renhol wanted to remove Dax and join it with another host, knowing that this procedure would kill Jadzia.
Renhol's decision was not based on the medical needs of the case, however, but on her willingness to keep secret the fact that symbionts could be joined to a much wider segment of the population than was generally known. The symbiont was experiencing flashbacks as the result of the failure of a memory block, a block which the Commission had created in order to cover up the fact that the symbiont had at one time been joined with an unsuitable host, Joran Belar. Benjamin Sisko and Julian Bashir discovered Renhol's motives and threatened to expose the Commission's secret if everything possible was not done to save Jadzia.
Renhol relented and Jadzia ultimately recovered after allowing the memory block to fail and Joran's memories of the joining to become part of her joined personality. (DS9: "Equilibrium")
Background information[]
Renhol was played by Lisa Banes.
In the first draft script of "Equilibrium", Renhol was a male doctor who was not joined and was about fifty years old. He was described as having "a warm quality [...] and an intelligent, competent air." This description of the character as well as the mention that Doctor Renhol wasn't joined were retained in the final draft of the script. However, also in that draft, Renhol was characterized as a female doctor "of about forty," placing her birth circa 2331. Furthermore, the script's pronunciation guide had her name pronounced as "REN-hall". [1]
The author Alex R. White commented: "That character had a lot going on when you think about it from a backstory perspective, because it's somebody who is having to weigh her professional and medical obligation towards somebody that she cares about against the secrecy and national security of her people and in the book it sort of comes up again. That sort of violation of trust, isn't something that just goes away. So it's really nice to be able to both revisit that and try to recapture that character who is both concerning and caring and not necessarily trustworthy." [2]
Renhol appears in the DS9 Star Trek: Gateways novel Demons of Air and Darkness and Revenant. The later DS9 novella Unjoined states that she was joined with a symbiont.
External links[]
- Renhol at StarTrek.com
- Renhol at Memory Beta, the wiki for licensed Star Trek works