The final season of Picard was so touching. Wasn’t it great seeing all our friends back together again? Wasn’t it moving to learn how they’ve changed? Cathartic to let them all band together to save the galaxy one more time? Who wouldn’t want to be at that poker table, huh?
Now that I’ve gotten that out of the way—we need to talk about Beverly Crusher.
We waited an entire season to find out what the whole deal with Jack Crusher Jr. was all about. And I’m not talking about the Borg stuff, a reveal that was destined to be underwhelming in every direction because how many times can we rehash what the Borg did to Picard, we get it, the whole arc was very dramatic, thanks for that. What I’m referring to is the single (one!) conversation that Beverly Crusher has with Jean-Luc about the sudden appearance of progeny in his life, and how we’re all meant to go along with that one conversation in good faith because… it’s good that Picard has a kid now?
But moreover, we’re supposed to believe that this is what Beverly herself wanted in the first place.
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Look, I wanted to give this character arc the benefit of the doubt. I actually enjoyed that one conversation that they have in “Seventeen Seconds,” at least on a scripting level: It felt like such a perfect illustration of both characters’ foibles, their joint terrible stubbornness and ability to talk through literally everything… except each other. The argument was a deeper, more gruesome echo of fights we’d already watched them have, about Wesley, about ethics, about the places where duty and personal choice collide. But nowhere in that conversation does Beverly ever explain why she chose to have this kid.
There’s a cynical part of me that worries the answer is, subconsciously, “because all women always want to have children when given the chance.” There are certainly plenty of people who think so, and it’s not a difficult or even particularly surprising vantage point to accidentally (or not) slip into a narrative, even one as convinced of its own progressive bonafides as Star Trek.
But there had to have been a perspective from the actors on this arc, right? What did they all think of this?
It turns out that the final season was always going to feature a Picard child—and it has been said that it was Patrick Stewart’s suggestion that Beverly be the mother. The rationale on that isn’t wrong, of course, particularly not from a melodrama perspective; fans have been obsessed with the will-they-won’t-they nature of that relationship since TNG’s heyday, and if any couple was going to have a messy falling out, they were always the most likely candidates. But it’s still true that most of the female characters on Next Gen got the short shrift, first in seven years of television, then even moreso in the films. This was particularly true for Beverly, who always seemed like an afterthought to the movie writers. Her relationship with Picard was largely forgotten in those years out of a desire to allow for romances between the captain and Hollywood-level one-off costars, making her story particularly iffy to anyone who appreciated the character.
Season three of Picard introduces us to a Beverly who cut ties with Starfleet ages ago, and hasn’t spoken to her friends and colleagues in decades—and we soon find out the reason for this is Jack, a son that resulted from her final liaison with Jean-Luc. Their fight in “Seventeen Seconds” is about the choice to keep Picard’s son a secret from him, but also about Beverly’s fear ruling her actions; she tells Picard that her reason for keeping Jack’s existence from him was partly down to his own clarity at not wanting children (which he rightly calls out as a poor excuse), but also knowledge that having Jean-Luc Picard’s son was always going to be dangerous for the child. So my brain naturally pipes up with the fact that there was an easy way to avoid this conundrum: not having the child in the first place.
Obviously that was never an option because Jack was supposed to be in this story, but it’s also true that women’s decisions around pregnancy in fiction rarely contain even a passing mention of abortion unless the story means to make abortion the entire point of the plot. This is a mistake because there are plenty of women who have had abortions as a matter of course, without a huge amount of fear and shame attached to the choice—sometimes mistakes happen, and people need to be able to handle their lives as they see fit. This is particularly true in a future like Star Trek’s where this should no longer even remotely be a debate. So why, if she was so terrified for the future of this child, did Beverly Crusher chose to have him?
According to actor Gates McFadden (in an interview with Variety), she believed that Crusher always had the desire to be a mother again, and moreover believed that her choice to hide Jack from Picard came from the telepathic connection the characters were forcibly given on the TNG episode “Attached”:
I feel that’s why they basically broke up, or it never really went anywhere. Because she didn’t want this on-and-off relationship she wanted a family. And he very clearly from the deepest instincts did not.
And this is where the whole thing breaks for me. Because while I understand that it’s part of our common vernacular, it is very important to remember: Children alone do not make a family.
This is absolutely not to say that a single parent raising a child doesn’t have a family, so lets preempt that right off the bat. But the problem here is that we often insist that children are what creates families. The phrase “starting our family” is universally understood in the English language to mean “having a baby.” And Gates McFadden believes that the relationship between Picard and Crusher couldn’t work out because she “wanted a family”—meaning she wanted more kids, and he did not.
And it is important to note that in order to have that child—that family—Beverly Crusher completely cut off the family that she already had.
Because cutting off Jean-Luc isn’t perhaps the best or kindest path Doctor Crusher could have taken, but it’s a choice that makes sense to a certain degree and a choice I don’t really begrudge her… until we come to the fact that staying distant from him meant that she had to leave a career that she adored and eschew contact with every single person she was close to. Because in Beverly Crusher’s mind, they were not family in the way that progeny could ever be.
I am not saying that there’s no version of this story that could ever work from a character perspective. (Let’s never forget that the choice to raise her son on Picard’s Enterprise is a large part of the reason why Wesley rarely comes home for family holidays.) What I am saying is that I’m going to need a little bit more than a single fight in a single episode where there is literally no mention of what this choice has cost Beverly Crusher as a person—only what it cost Jean-Luc. And what I am also saying is that a so-called utopian future where we still only equate offspring with family is a comparably garbage future.
And the depressing state of affairs created in wake of this decision doesn’t stop there! Because when Jack finally learns about the accidental Borg heritage he inherited from Picard and escapes to the Collective, prompting an Enterprise-D Reunion Rescue mission, Jean-Luc is the one who comes to get him, of course. Because in addition to children being the only way that you can have a family, having two (presumably) heterosexual parents is also the only way for family to truly work; Jack has been distraught throughout the entire season over the idea that Picard didn’t want to have a son, and Picard’s rescue is meant to be the moment when he assures Jack that isn’t true. In fact, he tells Jack that he’s spent his whole life having difficulty connecting with others, and that he now knows why and what was missing from his life—it was his son.
Let’s just skip right over the fact that the entire second season of Picard was a treatise on Picard’s difficulty with connection being due to unresolved family trauma. Like or dislike the choice and backstory, that was the whole prompt last year: a dying Q using his final actions to help Jean-Luc heal because he loved him so dearly.
Even ignoring that, there is nothing about this declaration that rings remotely true for Picard’s character. One of the greatest strengths of TNG was always the fact that nearly everyone on the ship had trouble connecting in one way or another, and that they learned how to navigate those difficulties together by all letting each other be their oddball selves. They don’t need fixing or magical nuclear families to be okay, just people whose weirdness jives with their own. That’s ninety percent of what makes Starfleet go in the first place, when you get right down to it. That’s… the point of the poker game, y’all. That’s the entire metaphor.
What the show is now (unintentionally or not) retroactively suggesting, by insisting that Jack fills a void, is that all of these connections Picard already made were inherently less meaningful simply because they were difficult for him to achieve and maintain. That all the work he put in to understand his crew and guide them over their years together—these people who are willing to drop everything at a moment’s notice to help him achieve the impossible once again—left his life incomplete when compared to the instantaneous bond of genetics. Why? Because these bonds were imperfect and complex? Because they took effort to perpetuate? Because they did not smoothe every personal flaw that Jean-Luc felt he still possessed? Because I only have Admiral Picard to quote back at himself if that’s the issue: “That is not a weakness. That is life.”
It’s strange, too, because this isn’t the first time we’ve dealt with this exact same arc for a Trek captain, though to an ultimately more credible end: After all, James T. Kirk went through a very similar ordeal. We found out that he wasn’t involved in his son David’s life due to Carol Marcus’ insistence, though he clearly wished he could have been. But even though the death of his son is a horrifying point of personal pain for Kirk, it never outweighs the relationships that are present and meaningful to him, and he never suggests that his lack of time with David was some sort of gaping hollow in his life. And here we have Jean-Luc Picard, ultimately a more self-reflective and staid sort of man, claiming that Jack’s existence somehow completes his life in a way that nothing previously could.
But you know, let’s say we just shrug our shoulders and accept this arc anyway because this is the story the final season of Picard means to tell us, and we’ve got no say in it. Or let’s even say that we think this was a bit of emotional fakery on his part to stop Jack from destroying the galaxy, which is also possible. Are you telling me that we’re not supposed to be furious that Beverly Crusher gave up her entire life to raise this kid, and her decades of support and love apparently means absolutely nothing to him? He can only be saved by dad-love because only Jean-Luc can truly understand—not Beverly Crusher, humanist renegade doctor-at-large?
Sorry, it’s not working for me. None of this tracks.
And we all know it’s a flaw, because when you ask anyone what they loved about the final season of Picard, it is the TNG class reunion, full stop. But now we’ve got a Picard son with basically no personality—I took to calling him “self-aware Han Solo” because that’s genuinely all I can parse about his character, that he’s kind of a jerk or scoundrel, but he’s cognizant of it, and that somehow is meant to make him more interesting—staffing the next Enterprise with Captain Seven of Nine. And to be clear, I desperately want a show that is Seven and Raffi commanding a bunch of weirdos into the next-next generation. What I don’t need is Admiral Crusher and Picard’s kid on their bridge for no reason other than a humorless nepotism joke.
Honestly, if they were going to stick us with a Crusher-Picard nepo baby, they could have had the decency to at least give us a daughter squaring off against the Borg Queen.
But at least we got that poker game, yeah? And I suppose that’s what we’ll all focus on until we’re forced to deal with the specter of Jack Crusher II again. Because legacy in Star Trek shouldn’t be tied to a familiar last name, but that does seem to be the only way franchises know how to keep building these days. And we should all be at least a little concerned about that…
Emmet Asher-Perrin really doesn’t want to deal with Jack Crusher anymore, but assumes there’s nothing for that. You can bug them on Twitter, and read more of their work here and elsewhere.
