problems stem from memories of one of her symbiont's previous hosts. Sisko and Bashir identify the musical tune Dax heard in her hallucinations as a composition by a Trill named Joran Belar. When Dax sees his photograph, she experiences another hallucination of the masked man murdering someone, and when she rips off his mask she sees Joran's face. She then goes into neural shock and is hospitalized. Doctor Renhol plans to remove the Dax symbiont, which will kill the host Jadzia. Sisko and Bashir revisit the spawning caves, but the caretaker there has been scared into keeping quiet. Bashir finds that the Trill government deleted information on Joran Belar from its records. However, they manage to contact Joran's brother, Yolad, who says that Joran was a candidate for being joined with a symbiont. According to the official report, Joran was rejected due to his violent temper and murdered the doctor who evaluated him, and was then killed by hospital security. However, Yolad doubts this story, because he remembers Joran telling him that he had been successfully joined. Sisko and Bashir deduce that Joran was one of Dax's previous hosts, and to cover this up Joran's files were altered and Dax's memories of him were suppressed. Sisko and Bashir confront Doctor Renhol, and accuse her of letting Jadzia die in order to protect an even bigger secret. The Trill government claims that only one in a thousand Trill are physically and psychologically fit to be joined with a symbiont. If a symbiont is placed in an unfit host, both host and symbiont will die within days. Joran's psychological problems should have disqualified him, but the doctors failed to detect them and gave him a symbiont. By the time the doctors discovered their mistake, Joran had been carrying the symbiont for six months despite being "unfit". This proves that the official criteria for fitness are excessively stringent. Renhol admits that nearly half of all Trill are in fact fit to carry symbionts, but if the truth came out the small supply of symbionts would be fought over fiercely, jeopardizing their welfare and destabilizing Trill society. To prevent this, the government pretends that only a tiny minority of the Trill population are fit to be joined so as to lower the demand for symbionts to a manageable level. The only way to stabilize Dax's mind would be to allow her suppressed memories of