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.
Wow, some excellent insights. As if I didn’t already have enough reasons to think this entire story arc was a bad idea.
I have felt there was a very sexist undercurrent to all this, an implication that Jack only mattered as Picard’s son, and the fact that he was also Beverly Crusher’s son was largely incidental. I mean, what happened to the last child Beverly had? He was a supergenius who evolved into a posthuman cosmic being. If there was anything remarkable about her second son, it should’ve come from her, considering that she’s the only one of his parents who’s already given birth to a superhuman mutant. So why does this season treat Beverly as little more than an incubator for the male hero’s legacy?
As for the question of abortion, it shouldn’t even have gotten that far. As Keith DeCandido has pointed out in his episode reviews, unplanned pregnancies just shouldn’t happen in the 24th century, where both men and women canonically take regular birth-control injections. It happened in DS9 because Ben Sisko and Kasidy Yates let their injections lapse during the chaos of the war, but it makes no sense that the chief medical officer herself would forget to keep her and her captain’s injections current, especially if they were sexually active with each other. Jack should simply never have been conceived in the first place, unless the two of them had chosen to conceive him together.
This. All of this.
While I quite like baby Jack, despite everything, it occurs to me that a good many of your problems with this plot would have been ironed out if Jack were Picard’s biological child and Doctor Beverly’s adopted son: Picard has had at least a few adventures in romance and I suspect one or two of his amours were with persons less responsible (and more scheming) than the Good Doctor.
An argument over what to do with a child he never wanted and who may actually have been conceived as a lever to manipulate him would be a fairly elegant explanation for the Picard/Crusher split (A split that could easily have become exacerbated by unanticipated twists and turns).
Why would a crude medical procedure such as abortion be required by the enlightened 24th century? Trek has shown that fetuses can be transplanted between wombs.
Yessss you hit on something that definitely bothered me and I kind of passingly mentioned when I was commenting on the watch threads.
My issue isn’t so much with Beverly’s decision to have a child, per se. It’s a reasonable assumption that Beverly is at least open to the idea of motherhood as part of her identity (and perhaps losing Wesley to space travelers would also impact that since he apparently just never comes around any more). So I don’t really find it that crazy or against her character that she would still desire to have a child, in addition to the other aspects of her life (and I appreciate that it did show her still concern with providing medical care to the most vulnerable and doing whatever she had to, as well as fighting the implicit ageism from the snotty doctor on the Titan, and contributing meaningful scientific/medical insights). So, I do like that she didn’t just stop pursing her other passions/dreams just because she became a mother. The balance worked for me, at least.
The whole ‘running off’ thing is illogical for several reasons (although I also don’t so much find it logical to imply that abortion is ‘safer’ than keeping the child safe, per se, but the whole ‘running away to keep him safe’ is a dumb argument for reasons already articulated – but by the time she is making that argument, she is already invested in the child’s future). All that said, I have to imagine that in their society they must have pretty reliable birth control, but the other implication there is that she baby trapped him…but then ran away. (Which might be worse!). At any rate, given what we know about 24th century technology…on some level it was something she wanted, I guess. And on it’s own, that’s fine for her (outside of all the soap opera love child running away theatrics) but I agree it’s a lot of mental gymnastics because they really wanted their surprise love baby plot. Which, frankly, I don’t even know was needed. They might still have been able to do the general Changeling/Borg plot involving JUST stealing Picard’s body, reprogramming the transporters, and then maybe just using Picard himself as the ‘transmitter’ without needing the son. Beverly could just have been ‘away’ because she was doing missions! And then somebody else could reach out to Picard to ‘bring him back’ if that was needed.
Maybe somebody will handwave it by saying something about the Borg modifications bypassed the birth control, because it was all part of their long con!
But in a way I’m more peeved on Picard’s behalf. I have kids. I love kids, I love big families (although I personally don’t have one by choice), I totally understand the feeling of that completing your life or feeling like something is missing without that and I think it’s a legitimate desire. But I also get that it is not necessarily everybody’s vocation. Picard was never presented that way, so this idea that ‘turns out all along he wanted a son’ just feels kind of weird and while I loved, thematically, the concept of Picard winning his son over through a matter of heart and connection (kind of an inverse Return of the Jedi moment with the father saving the son) I also felt like for Jack to act like his mom wasn’t his family or always there for him was kind of off.
On the other hand, I do understand what it can feel like with depression or other neurodivergence to feel like you are always alone or out of step, so I don’t totally begrudge his initial euphoria at finding the Borg and finally feeling ‘connected’ despite the fact that he had supportive loved ones all along. But I guess I kind of wish that part of what ‘brought him back’ wasn’t JUST Picard per se, but his memories of ALL of them, as they are all his family. I don’t remember, was that part of his memories/flashbacks before he ‘came back’ to himself?
I am not a huge fan of him in Starfleet, especially on the nepo-bridge (and there’s a lot of nepotism on that bridge). Shouldn’t he need MASSIVE THERAPY after what he went through, to say nothing of whatever outstanding warrants were out for him, and the fact that he did willingly seek the Borg queen out? Plus…not everybody has to join Starfleet! Not even Picard and Crusher’s son! Why not keep doing the doctors without borders thing?
You know, back while this season was airing, I gave the whole “Jack” thing the benefit of the doubt because some reviewers that I generally trust, who had been given advance screeners of the first six episodes, assured me that it all worked out. But having now seen this entire season, I must admit: There is no part of Jack Crusher–neither his concept, nor his character, nor his role in the story, nor his acting–that I actually enjoyed. He’s simply the worst. I wish that they had used almost anything else as a Macguffin to bring the band back together. And I had been so looking forward to a Seven / Raffi spin-off, but it’s difficult for me to work up much enthusiasm for it if it’s going to have Jack smirking there beside them, constantly pulling the plot into his orbit by being the Specialest Little Nepo Boy in the Universe.
With that out of my system: Thank you for articulating this so well. There was something that really didn’t sit well with me about how Beverly was used in this season, but I couldn’t quite put my finger onto what. And the thing is: Gates McFadden is such a fantastic actress that she absolutely sold that one scene where she had it out with Patrick Stewart; and I was so caught up in her acting that I didn’t even notice that her story falls apart when you blow on it. I can maybe accept her ghosting Picard, but all of her friends? Even Deanna? It was all just so poorly conceived that it bordered on character assassination. But they also gave her combat abilities and a new willingness to murder people, so I guess it counts as feminist </s>.
But if may add one more thing to the “found family vs. blood family” pile: the first season already gave Picard two separate surrogate children in the persons of Elnor and Soji. They were, of course, discarded without mention to make room for his “real” son. In case we didn’t pick up on the theme that found family ain’t shit.
None of this tracks is a good summation of Star Trek: Picard.
Yes, it’s great that Gates McFadden finally got more to do. A pity, however, what the writers did to her character, as my impression of her now is that of a bad parent and bad friend who makes up for it by being really good at firing photon torpedoes. It was also depressing to hear her say something to the effect that no one wanted the Borg to die more than her; this the woman who once argued against using Hugh as a weapon of mass destruction. So much for all that humanism and compassion stuff, huh, doctor?
While we Bevheads agree with you on a lot of these issues (you have no idea – therapy sessions were had!), 1st off, we actually don’t believe that they are all straight in the 25th century. More like pansexual and we’ve just seen some of their relationships (as for The Host – Beverly did not turn down a woman, she turned down the numerous and frequent changes in hosts). And yes, I think Jack would have been better as female. A daughter would have been nice, but Picard had “daughter” figures, including Ro. Who got a whole freaking episode to conclude their relationship. And if you didn’t notice, Beverly and Picard did not touch the entire season. That was on Patrick’s direction. And the way it ended and was edited was because of Patrick. From what I understand, there are deleted scenes, but I still don’t know if we ever got that big second scene between them that we needed. A big, huge, yellling fight. That is really what I expected. But we didn’t get it.
I guess it wouldn’t do them many favors to draw attention to the preexisting “Picard’s secret son, or is he…?” episode from 1994.
@12/ AbsoluteVerdict – Actually, Jack reminded me quite a bit of Jason Vigo, in that they’re both one-dimensional “thief with a heart of gold” archetypes.
Beverly did what a LOT of women do with men that don’t wanted children. That is an extremely common occurrence. On top of that, the reason he doesn’t have a close connection with his mother is ALSO for that very reason. She deliberately kept him from his father, so there is gonna be a lot of hatred and resentment towards her for that. This is demonstrated in the scene where he secretly seeks out Picard and incorrectly presumes that he would have no interest in his son because Starfleet is the only family he’s ever needed, per Picard’s own words.
Literally EVERYTHING tracks about this season and it was absolutely phenomenal. As an FYI, people don’t change. No matter how much we’d like to believe they can, it’s just not a thing that can or does happen, despite the claim of many to the contrary. Humans will always be the complex, flawed, instinct-ruled beings we’ve always been.
@12 /AbsoluteVerdict: The whole time I was expecting DaiMon Bok to jump out from behind a crate or something.
@12 – haha, I mentioned that to my husband and he was like what? I was like, yeah, wasn’t there some random TNG episode where Picard had a supposed son that was a scoundrel but then it all turned out to be some weird DNA manipulation thing? He’s way more into Trek than I am but he apparently blocked that one from his memory.
Which is also why I kept rolling my eyes at this plot.
@14.
‘People don’t change’ doesn’t track at all with the overall theme of Star Trek, especially TNG, because it’s always been about people either changing for the better or at least trying to do so. Call it a fantasy if you like, but it is a legitimate criticism when a work of fiction veers off from its original intentions.
But then, this series did show that people can change. Only in this case with Crusher it was change for the worse.
@14/ChipBoundary: “Beverly did what a LOT of women do with men that don’t wanted children.”
Raising the child on her own without the father’s involvement? Okay. Cutting herself off from all her other friends at the same time, and basically abandoning her entire life just so the father doesn’t find out he has a son? I profoundly doubt it.
“As an FYI, people don’t change.”
“People” are not one thing. People who cite “human nature” as an excuse for skepticism about humanity’s potential for improvement ignore the fact that human nature includes everything from Hitler to Gandhi. We all have the potential to turn out better or worse, depending on the choices we make and the influences in our lives. Star Trek doesn’t say that human nature changes; it says that conditions can be improved so that a much higher percentage of people manage to cultivate their positive potential. The range of the bell curve of human behaviors is the same, but the peak is moved further toward the positive end.
Plus, of course, the conceit of Trek has always been that Starfleet members are the best and brightest that humanity has to offer. They’re at the top end of the bell curve, more so than the average human.
> So why, if she was so terrified for the future of this child, did Beverly Crusher chose to have him?
The obvious possibility is that she really wanted to have a child.
Looking at her biography, by the time of Nemesis she was in her mid-50s. Even accounting for greater human longevity and youth thanks to advanced medicine, and to rejuvenating factors like the stay on the Baku planet in Insurrection, by that time she had to be very near the upper age limit for non-medically assisted fertility among late 24th century humans.
(Why did she not use contraception? One perfectly plausible possibility is that Beverly may have thought she that she but need to worry about contraception.)
Even in as relatively bioconservative a setting as the Federation, where practices like cloning are looked down on if not illegal, if Beverly had set out to carry a pregnancy to term she would have had possibilities. I see no reason why the late 24th century might not have sperm and/or egg donors. She, theoretically, had options if she wanted to revisit .motherhood.
The problem from her perspective, even if we set aside the possibility of her pregnancy with Jack being an unexpected and unplanned one, is that she had to deal with the pregnancy she actually had. If she had wanted to terminate her pregnancy, then Beverly would have had the ability to do so. She has managed to conceive a child with a man she cared for deeply, but she had reason to believe it would not work in the relationship: Apart from it being unstable, prone to fracturing, her partner had apparently told her repeatedly that he did not want to be a parent. Picard had misjudged his potential to be a parent and a partner, true, but at the time of Jack’s conception Picard wholeheartedly believed what he said. The threats that a child of Picard could face were also real.
What could Beverly do? She kept Jack; she chose to separate herself from her former circles to keep Jack safe; she told Jack who his father was when Jack reached adulthood. She could have taken a risk—maybe Picard would have opted for fatherhood and a partnership with Beverly if she has prompted it—but it could easily have gone badly.
Beyond this, there is the whole background of trauma that Beverly is responding to. She is right to note that all of her closest relatives—her parents, her husband, Wesley—have either died outright or are completely out of touch. There are easily worse reasons for someone to behave irrationally about a pregnancy.
Even the idea that Bev left “to keep Jack safe” doesn’t really hold water, given that she immediately set off on a career so dangerous that her son had a rap sheet as long as his arm by the time he turned twenty, whereas Picard canonically spent most of Jack’s life in comfortable retirement at a winery.
I kept expecting that some other shoe would drop, and it would turn out Beverly knew more than she was letting on, given that she was already taking care to vaporize Vadic’s goons execution-style even before they were revealed to be Changelings. But apparently not.
@19/Randy McDonald: “Apart from it being unstable, prone to fracturing, her partner had apparently told her repeatedly that he did not want to be a parent. Picard had misjudged his potential to be a parent and a partner, true, but at the time of Jack’s conception Picard wholeheartedly believed what he said.”
I still have trouble buying this show’s premise that Picard was so adamantly against becoming a parent. I mean, in Generations, we were shown that being the father to a large family was literally his vision of paradise. After living through 50 years of Kamin’s memories of being a happy father and grandfather in “The Inner Light,” it seemed that Picard had outgrown his dislike of children and was ready for a family. So PIC tacking on this abusive past as a reason for him to rebel against the idea of parenting is a major inconsistency.
“Beyond this, there is the whole background of trauma that Beverly is responding to. She is right to note that all of her closest relatives—her parents, her husband, Wesley—have either died outright or are completely out of touch.”
But doesn’t that bring us back to Emmet’s core point about the season devaluing found family? Wouldn’t her sense of loss about her biological family give her an incentive to cling even harder to her friends and colleagues, instead of severing all ties and making herself even lonelier?
Hear, hear, Emmet! Really glad you said this, and said it so well.
The Carol Marcus approach might have worked better—Picard being aware of Jack’s existence, but respecting Beverly’s wishes to keep distant.
It’s not entirely clear to me whether Picard has outgrown the distaste for children we see at the beginning of TNG. His witnessing Wesley grow up may have mellowed him; by the end the relationship there is between two adults, albeit one being in position of mentor to the other.
Any other encounters he has with children that are (possibly) connected to him are with spawn that are already adults: Jason Vigo and Jason Vigo Mk.2 (AKA Jack Crusher). He’s never had to change their dirty nappies.
And as for Jack Crusher being an annoying presence on a Seven/Raffi helmed Enterprise-G, there’s always the David Marcus solution. Wouldn’t be the first time a character in the opening credits has been dispatched.
At least no one ever tried to convince us that David Marcus was a badass sexpot chosen one…
#24.
I remember Picard being stuck in an elevator with three brats for a whole episode. Though at first uncomfortable with them, he ended up enjoying their company. So I don’t why this would still be an issue for him. Then again, there are several issues brought up in Picard that he would’ve resolved decades ago.
Christopher Bennett:
“I still have trouble buying this show’s premise that Picard was so adamantly against becoming a parent. I mean, in Generations, we were shown that being the father to a large family was literally his vision of paradise. After living through 50 years of Kamin’s memories of being a happy father and grandfather in “The Inner Light,” it seemed that Picard had outgrown his dislike of children and was ready for a family. So PIC tacking on this abusive past as a reason for him to rebel against the idea of parenting is a major inconsistency.”
Being a father to a large family may have been Picard’s vision of paradise, but that paradise may not have been one he thought he could actually have. He seemed pretty conclusive in Generations when he told Troi that, with the death of René, the story of the Picard family was over. Picard had outgrown whatever dislike of children he may have had—were they uncomfortable reminders of a possibility not open to him, I wonder?—but that does not mean that he wanted to be a father, no more than his appreciation of the life of Kamin did. It could just as easily mean that he was comfortable enough with his destiny as someone bound not to be a father to let himself be close to children, to let him surrender to that simulated life.
I do not find the idea of Picard’s abusive childhood to be tacked on, FWIW. Before Season 2, all that we knew about Picard’s experience in his family is that while he was quite aware of the achievements of past members, he also kept quite a distance from the familial home and from his living family members, being quite at odds with his brother. A story of some sort of deep dysfunction seems better able to explain that than (say) Picard just not clicking. It would also provide a beat explanation for Picard not wanting to be a father: if you go over to r/childfree, you can find lots of people talking about how growing up in an unwelcoming household was enough to put them off from being parents themselves, with the fear that they might repeat their parents’ mistakes being frequently mentioned.
For me, it fits. YMMV.
“But doesn’t that bring us back to Emmet’s core point about the season devaluing found family? Wouldn’t her sense of loss about her biological family give her an incentive to cling even harder to her friends and colleagues, instead of severing all ties and making herself even lonelier”
Things would have been very different had Beverly not become pregnant with Jack, or if Beverly and Picard had had a stable relationship.
(I think Beverly is experienced enough to be deeply skeptical of the idea that bringing a baby into an unstable relationship would be enough to stabilize it, especially if the partner has repeatedly made their deep-seated opposition to fatherhood clear. Babies cannot fix things.)
I don’t think that the decision was cost-free for Beverly; I think she probably mourned the loss of her chosen family, and would note that Season 3 revalued the idea. I do think that the cutting of ties was perhaps the least bad solution that she saw. Imagine a scenario where Picard learns of the arrival of Jack and things go poorly, even as desperate people angry with the Federation learn of the existence of a vulnerable young Picard.The degree to which Crusher was driven by legitimate fear and by imperfect reactions to this fear cannot be understated.
@27/Randy McDonald: “He seemed pretty conclusive in Generations when he told Troi that, with the death of René, the story of the Picard family was over.”
The things that characters say in the first act of a movie are often assumptions they’re meant to rethink or outgrow as a response to the movie’s events. As I read it, the point is that Picard has always assumed he didn’t have to take responsibility for continuing the family line because Robert had handled that; but once Robert and Rene are gone, the responsibility falls on him, and despite his initial assumption that “there will be no more Picards,” he later finds himself in the Nexus and fantasizes about being a profligate father. So clearly he’s been thinking more about the possibility than he ever thought he’d have to.
I mean, really, what would’ve been the point of the writers killing off his brother and nephew if not to force Picard to rethink his responsibility for continuing the family? That part of the movie was about pushing Picard toward being ready to start a family, not closing it off permanently.
“Things would have been very different had Beverly not become pregnant with Jack, or if Beverly and Picard had had a stable relationship.
(I think Beverly is experienced enough to be deeply skeptical of the idea that bringing a baby into an unstable relationship would be enough to stabilize it, especially if the partner has repeatedly made their deep-seated opposition to fatherhood clear. Babies cannot fix things.)”
That isn’t a response to my question, though. Emmet’s whole point was that Picard was not the only person Beverly had a relationship with. Picard is irrelevant to the point here, because there are other people who matter too. Even if Beverly chose to transfer off the E, why wouldn’t she even tell her friends and loved ones that she was going to be a mother again? Having her keep it this deep dark secret from everyone doesn’t make sense; it’s a contrivance to justify Picard not knowing.
I agree with what a couple of other people have said: There was no good reason for Picard not to know he had a son. It would’ve made more sense if he’d known, but Beverly had chosen not to raise the child with him.
“The degree to which Crusher was driven by legitimate fear and by imperfect reactions to this fear cannot be understated.”
Which, to me, just underlines that this writing staff doesn’t understand Star Trek, let alone TNG. These characters should know better than to let themselves be driven solely by fear instead of reason and hope.
@Randy – These are great points and exactly why the storyline does work for me. I do think it was a sacrifice for Beverly to cut off her adopted family – she was so close to Deanna, Will, and Geordi – so I don’t think they were forgotten at all. But she was being driven by an imperfect reaction to understandable fear (based on her own life experience/trauma), and she truly believed she had to keep Jack hidden to keep him safe from all the threats that went along with being a son of Jean-Luc Picard. In the Seventeen Seconds conversation, it was called out there were three more high-stakes, life-threatening situations in the space of just that one month after she found out she was pregnant, and while she had always taken on those risks willingly for herself and accepted them with Picard, something changed when she felt she was protecting their child. If she had stayed in touch with her other friends, she would have been asking them to hide something significant from Picard, which she probably didn’t want to put on them. So that was a sacrifice for her. (In Seventeen Seconds, Jack said Beverly used to tell him stories about all of the TNG crew and her face would light up, but then she would be sad and stop.)
Also, she wasn’t an outlaw (or however the Doctors Without Borders setup left them) for the entire time. Jack apparently went to school in London, so in the complete safety of Earth, just relatively anonymous. And once he was a little older (I took that as maybe 16 or 17?) she did tell him about Picard and encourage him to connect with him. If I had to guess, I would say that she thought that it wouldn’t be fair for her to ask for any kind of forgiveness for herself, so she didn’t try to reconnect with Picard by herself (even though she still loved him – I think still playing the mixtape was evidence of that), but she did encourage Jack to. Once he was older and had adopted some of her ideals on his own, they went out to do the DWB missions together. Beverly frequently chafed against injustice and Starfleet regulations when they clashed with what she thought was right, so the gray legal actions in pursuit of obtaining medicine and medical supplies to help people sounds in character.
I am a little baffled by how many people were bored with Jack’s character or thought he was a stereotypical rogue. I guess I could see it? But I LOVED the character. I thought he was a great mix of Beverly and (younger) Picard character traits, and those were shown with a lot of depth. The “rogue” part was much more an act, it seemed to me. He had swagger and bravado (“cocky” like young Picard) but he was actually pretty compassionate and intelligent.
As far as Emmet’s thoughts on found family vs. children, I think the show did a pretty good job of showing that BOTH matter a lot, especially for the Trek crew. But while not necessary for everyone, having children really does change something profound in many people’s lives – well, certainly it has in mine!
@28/CLB – I agree with you about Picard growing more open to fatherhood over time. Ultimately it’s why I like his arc in the Litverse better than the show. I have your book upstairs on my shelf – don’t remember exactly at the moment, but you have Picard and Beverly having some of these exact conversations in Greater than the Sum, right? I loved seeing Picard as a father from the end of Destiny through the subsequent books. (And loved the maturity of Beverly and Picard’s relationship overall, which tracked with how I always saw their characters.)
The relevant “but” is that Picard the show decided to give Picard a super-tragic backstory with his mother’s mental illness and suicide (a storyline I REALLY disliked about Season 2, since it was out of Victorian drama and seemed more part of Patrick Stewart’s conception of Picard than what we’d ever seen of Picard). So the show’s depiction of Picard’s approach to fatherhood was different. If we have to take S2 into account, then S3 becomes more plausible, at least.
@28 Yes. I have to agree. What Doc Crusher did was a jerk (dare I say, asshole?) move not only to Picard, but to all the other friends and found family on the Enterprise. The reasons she gave doesn’t even begin to justify the actions she took toward them.
And you’re right….what the hell wrong with her saying, “Jean Lucy, I’m having our child, but I can’t have an ongoing relationship with you because of all the danger you attract. I’m moving to Cygnus VIII…visit, but only if you bring a lot of Starfleet Security.”
The Doc Crusher I knew wasn’t an asshole.
@30/Kallie: “If we have to take S2 into account, then S3 becomes more plausible, at least.”
Which just underlines how problematical both seasons are. It’s ironic that they’re both driven so fully by nostalgia and continuity porn, yet create so many inconsistencies with previous series.
Christopher:
“The things that characters say in the first act of a movie are often assumptions they’re meant to rethink or outgrow as a response to the movie’s events. As I read it, the point is that Picard has always assumed he didn’t have to take responsibility for continuing the family line because Robert had handled that; but once Robert and Rene are gone, the responsibility falls on him, and despite his initial assumption that “there will be no more Picards,” he later finds himself in the Nexus and fantasizes about being a profligate father. So clearly he’s been thinking more about the possibility than he ever thought he’d have to.
I mean, really, what would’ve been the point of the writers killing off his brother and nephew if not to force Picard to rethink his responsibility for continuing the family? That part of the movie was about pushing Picard toward being ready to start a family, not closing it off permanently.”
I do not think I read it that way at the time. In the first act Picard was confronted with the death of his nephew and the end of his family. Later, in the Nexus, he was presented an image of perfect happiness in the form of a family of his own, an image that he rejected. At the end of the movie, outside of the Nexus and with the threat dealt with, we see a reenergize Picard prepared to go on. I did not see anything in the movie that made me think that Picard was moving towards creating a family of his own; there was no romance subplot, say. I read the ending as Picard being prepared to continue a life that might not include family.
After Generations, meanwhile, we did not see Picard love towards forming a family. The closest we got to that was his Insurrection romance with Anij. Picard’s post-TNG trajectory was not taking him in the direction of forming a family.
“That isn’t a response to my question, though. Emmet’s whole point was that Picard was not the only person Beverly had a relationship with. Picard is irrelevant to the point here, because there are other people who matter too. Even if Beverly chose to transfer off the E, why wouldn’t she even tell her friends and loved ones that she was going to be a mother again? Having her keep it this deep dark secret from everyone doesn’t make sense; it’s a contrivance to justify Picard not knowing.”
Picard actually is relevant to the question of Beverly’s other ties. There is no prospect, I would say, of Beverly thinking that she could tell Deanna that she was leaving the E because she was pregnant with Picard’s child and asking Deanna to keep this secret from Picard. Beverly would either have to share the news with everyone or with no one at all. Since Beverly thinks that sharing this news with everyone would mean exposing Jack to a non-trivial risk of harm …
Things might well have been very different if the two had had a solid relationship, one not prone to periodic breakups. They were in the litverse, as a result of a series of events in Death in Winter that made them decide to commit to each other. That did not happen here; the only mention I can recall of their relationship was in The Last Best Hope, when Picard briefly considered inviting Crusher to work alongside him in the Romulan relocation mission but waited too late. “He had never quite summoned up his courage, when it came to Beverly Crusher.”
One thing he had apparently been clear about was his disinterest in fatherhood. I look a bit askance at his suggestion, in his Seventeen Seconds discussion, that she was unfairly using his statements against him. What is the point of saying anything if you don’t mean it? Indeed, Picard _did_ mean it at the time; he just objected (fairly) that she did not give him then a chance to evolve as he did two decades later.
From Beverly’s perspective, the plausible worst-case.scenarios were pretty bad. If she did tell everyone about Jack, the result being the rupture of her relationship with Picard and her son getting used as a playing piece by the desperate people caught up in the implosion of a superpower, would she just not have hurt a lot of people?
“Which, to me, just underlines that this writing staff doesn’t understand Star Trek, let alone TNG. These characters should know better than to let themselves be driven solely by fear instead of reason and hope.”
I do not see this rupture with continuity. All of the major elements that resulted in this—the difficulty of Beverly and Picard in committing to each other, Picard’s difficult relationship with his family and discomfort with children—were signaled explicitly in multiple episodes. Elements that were not were reasonable extrapolations: Beverly losing all of her closest family members to space would have to have an impact on her, while Picard having a traumatic childhood would be one explanation for the traits he demonstrated. Lots of characters in Trek have made arguably or inarguably wrong choices based on their pasts and the information that they had on hand. We have a degree of confidence in the idea that Beverly and Picard could have handled an unexpected pregnancy.that neither would have had at the time.
Beyond that, I would note that Season 3 is one that sees fixes. The importance of the chosen family is reiterated.and acted upon, with mistakes being dealt with and everyone uniting in a sustainable way at the end. Things get fixed.
Gwangung:
“what the hell wrong with her saying, “Jean Lucy, I’m having our child, but I can’t have an ongoing relationship with you because of all the danger you attract. I’m moving to Cygnus VIII…visit, but only if you bring a lot of Starfleet Security.””
She would.know as well as anyone that Starfleet Security is not that secure. She is the one who discovered the evidence that revealed a respected Vulcan ambassador to actually be a deep-cover Romulan operative, in “Data’s Day”. Especially when the Romulan empire is coming apart violently in ways that keep affecting Picard, she would have to assume that the Romulans would find out about Jack sooner rather than later.
@34/Randy McDonald: “Later, in the Nexus, he was presented an image of perfect happiness in the form of a family of his own, an image that he rejected.”
Not because he didn’t personally want it, just because he recognized he had a higher duty to others. The whole point of the Nexus was that it gave you your own personal paradise, the ideal life you’d choose for yourself. The only reason to reject it was duty and selflessness. So if duty didn’t get in the way, if Picard could’ve had anything he wanted, GEN was telling us it would’ve been a family.
“I did not see anything in the movie that made me think that Picard was moving towards creating a family of his own; there was no romance subplot, say.”
Of course not, because that’s not what the film was about. The point is that if he had this deep-seated aversion to family as PIC S2 asserted, it’s inconsistent that his Nexus fantasy would’ve been to be the father of a happy family. GEN was telling us that he wanted that in his heart, that on some level he was open to it, whether or not he chose to pursue it. PIC S2 told us something completely different, that he still had a deep-seated resistance to the idea nearly 30 years later.
” There is no prospect, I would say, of Beverly thinking that she could tell Deanna that she was leaving the E because she was pregnant with Picard’s child and asking Deanna to keep this secret from Picard.”
Which, again, is exactly my point. Why does it have to be about Picard and only Picard? Why does he have to be the one thing that every decision in her life is defined by? It’s a sexist assumption, or at least a metatextual assumption that reduces her to a supporting character in Picard’s life rather than someone with a life of her own and a right to make choices that aren’t about him.
Again, why did she have to keep it secret from Picard at all? There was no good reason for that. It was an arbitrary choice by the writers in order to make it a surprise reveal to Picard, when it didn’t even need to be. I mean, heck, they were ripping off The Wrath of Khan, and in TWOK, Kirk already knew about David — at least in the final cut of the film, though not in the script or novelization. There, the writers cut out the part about it being a secret from the father, because they realized it wasn’t necessary.
“I do not see this rupture with continuity.”
I wasn’t talking about continuity. Too many people these days are so obsessed with continuity and whether the surface facts and events fit together that they ignore the deeper, more important matter of the ideas, meaning, and themes behind a story. The theme of Star Trek, going back to “The Corbomite Maneuver” at the very start of TOS, is that it’s self-defeating to let yourself be ruled by fear. Star Trek is a series about the value of optimism and hope, about reasonable, capable people striving for the best and making things better because they believe in the possibility. It’s also about people being fair to each other, not mistreating each other because of their own hangups. What Beverly did to Picard by not telling him he was a father was a pretty reprehensible thing to do. I mean, he wasn’t abusive or dangerous. He had a right to know, and the fact that other people might have been a threat to him was not his fault.
All these issues and more are the direct result of the choice to give Picard a secret love child he didn’t know about, because once you’re committed to that story, then everything else has to happen.
Picard and Crusher have to have been having unsafe (by 24th Century standards) sex. Crusher has to have wanted to keep the child. She has to have wanted to keep that fact from Picard. She has to have cut herself off from all of their mutual friends, lest someone mention her kid to him. None of that really tracks, but it all has to happen in order to tell the story Season 3 wanted to tell.
So here we are. Perhaps the writers would have given all of this more thought if the show were called Star Trek: Crusher. Maybe that’s the show people should be campaigning for.
@37
Which is why on reflection Season 3 feels hollow to me. So much of it was setup — setup to the big reunion, setup to the Borg reveal, setup to the spinoff. Plenty of pieces being moved around but with little actual story that landed on a real emotional level. Aside from the lovely Data and Lore finale and Picard saving Jack from the Borg dreamland, the season will mostly likely be remembered for the easy nostalgia, and, once that hoopla dies down, I think it will age like a fine bottle of milk.
@38/Wilson: “I think it will age like a fine bottle of milk.”
That is a fantastic turn of phrase!
@39
Thank you, I can’t claim it as my own though. I think I heard it on some old comedy. Jack Benny maybe…?
@38 “little actual story that landed on a real emotional level”
Wow, agree to disagree I suppose. I thought there was quite a bit that worked on an emotional level in addition to the Data/Lore merging and Picard saving Jack on the cube. For just a few examples: Riker’s coping with ongoing grief and despair over his son’s death, then reconnecting with Deanna; Geordi’s relationship with his daughters and remembering the importance of family beyond just the nuclear; the return of Ro and her reconciliation with Picard and sacrifice; Shaw’s backstory; Geordi and Data’s relationship; and Picard and Jack’s bumpy attempts at forging a relationship.
@41. I think the big problem is that almost ONLY worked on an emotional level. There was very little that stood up to the kind of scrutiny that this article is putting it up to.
@41
Mileage will vary, of course, concerning what worked for you on an emotional level or not. Honestly, most of those fell flat for me.
I’m not saying there weren’t attempts, but I do think what was there could have been expanded a great deal. If the La Forge family has issues, could we get the mother to make an appearance? Can she at least get a name? The scenes with Troi and Riker were nice, sure, but where’s their daughter? Is she okay? What else was Beverly Crusher up to during those years? Does Jack Crusher have some aspect to his character other than standard charming rogue?
This goes back to what I was saying about the writers being overly concerned with setups. Remove a couple of those grand designs and suddenly you have much more room to let the characters breathe. The TNG episode “Family” worked because it was about family, not about saving the planet from the Borg. That had already been done, and at this point done to death.
Well, among other things, the discussion is making me realize that my initial assertion that it was a bit ooc for Picard to suddenly care about a family was incorrect (I honestly forgot about some of the movie related developments), so I guess I can release some of my irritation with that aspect.
But I think David Pirtle kind of hits the nail on the head with the idea that it seems like they decided they wanted a ‘secret love child’ so then had to work backwards to get the character actions required for that to happen, and so it doesn’t really feel quite as organic to the characters and where they are/what the previous seasons already established.
@30/Kallie: “If we have to take S2 into account…” Sorry, I read that and all I could think of was, “Why? It isn’t like the people behind S3 were doing so.” I
@43 – I recall that before the relevant episodes aired, there was speculation as to whether we would meet Geordi’s wife, and whether it would turn out to be a divorced-from her-first-marriage Leah Brahms. Also that there were quite a few people who were hostile to that notion. Perhaps the showrunners decided avoidance was simply the better part of valor?
Honestly, given everything else in the season, I think that Geordi’s wife was kept deliberately anonymous as a compromise between not wanting to give up the member berry of making her Leah Brahms (as was the case in “All Good Things”, where the names Sidney and Alandra were taken from) and recognizing that a lot of fans (and Levar Burton too, if memory serves) consider the idea of such a relationship to be kind of creepy.
However, I don’t think that she could be Leah Brahms: given how often Sidney mentions that her father is one of the most famous engineers in Starfleet history, it doesn’t make sense that she would ignore that her mother is also a famous engineer.
Yes! Thank you! I haven’t understood the tremendous outpouring of love for this season, which seemed to me to be deeply flawed and not terribly Trekkian, in spite of all those familiar faces.
Jack is important because he’s Picard’s son? Funny, I thought here in the Federation, we thought EVERY Federation citizen was a valuable and important person, not just those with surnames we recognize.
The idea that they all stopped to consider whether killing Jack to prevent the Borg takeover of all of Federation space was worth it … don’t any of them remember the end of “The Best of Both Worlds, Part 1,”? Riker says, “Fire,” because he’s a freaking Starfleet officer, and he knows that protecting the Federation from the Borg is the right thing to do, even if firing on his captain will tear his heart out. Have all these characters DEvolved since then?
Gates McFadden has said that she was thrilled to get a large role and thrilled to get to fire a phaser and be a badass. All the script had to do was to destroy her character, but evidently she was fine with that.
*sigh*
Picard finally found and understood love with Yaris, why couldn’t a pregnancy be hers? He is married to her not Beverly. He is happy with her when she urges him to help Dr. Crusher. She could have even appeared with a Romulan fleet to save the Federation. Finally, after all shape shifters in Ro’s org chart earring, was there a ‘lame” sentence a year afterwards saying not so many people died as feared. We saw dozens being totally destroyed including the last words from the Intrepid. Postscript: young Jack could have been Beverly’s current lover….the unwanted pregnancy could have been part of the Crusher/Picard intense first meeting. Jean-Luc with a young rival might have been interesting
Glad I wasn’t the only one who saw Jack’s total lack of regard for the entire lifetime of love his mother gave him as a misogynistic plot line.
The only good thing about Jack Crusher the younger that we’ve been given so far is: he’s a great contrast to show all the Weskey haters of old what a good character Wesley Crusher was. Wesley would never be so stupid as to run right into the arms of the Borg queen. You can definitely see that Jack is Picard’s kid, just by this intelligence contrast. It seems to show us that Picard’s intelligence and wisdom all came from experience, not natively inborn.
@47/ jamiebabb: Leah Brahms is arguably *more* famous than Geordi given that she was apparently a public figure long before anybody knew who he was.
@48/ Corylea: I’m always bothered when the doctors end up firing weapons in the shows or movies. It seems like a real failure of imagination to have the healers doing pew-pews.
My problem with “Oh, Dr. Crusher is a badass now! She’s like Sarah Connor! See her shoot people!” is that it feels like it seriously devalues the skills and aptitudes that she showed on TNG:science, medicine, ethical reasoning, and everything that isn’t related to ‘splosions. Which I think is pretty much par for the course for this season, unfortunately.
@47 – If Geordi LaForge is such a hotshot engineer (which I’m not disputing), why was he relegated to being basically a museum curator? Whys isn’t he, say, head of the engineering faculty at Star Fleet Academy?
(Or maybe that’s now Miles O’Brien’s current job …)
@53/markvolund – There are only so many academy positions to go around, and O’Brien has tenure.
Seriously, depending on whether we’re keeping the backstory to Season 1 canon, Geordi was actually in charge of Utopia Planitia at the time of the Synth attack. Perhaps he just wanted a cushy job after that.
@53 – Maybe he didn’t want it. I suspect curating the fleet museum is a less taxing job than being the head of the Engineering department at Starfleet Academy, or running the entire Engineering Division, or for that matter being chief engineer of an active service starship. Leaves more time for family, which he may have decided to prioritize (and, based off the text of the show, does indeed seem to have).
@52/jaimebabb: On the other hand, TNG did show Crusher violently dispatching villains in “Sub Rosa,” “Suspicions,” and “Descent Part 2” (ruthlessly destroying a whole ship that probably had thousands of people aboard). That bothered me every time it happened in TNG, so there’s nothing new about PIC portraying her that way, unfortunately.
@53/markvolund: Why assume Geordi didn’t want to be in charge of the Fleet Museum? Museums are awesome! The Federation is supposed to be a society that values learning and culture, and museums are a vital repository of learning and culture. Museums are just as important to educating people as academies are.
Not only was Geordi a great engineer in TNG, he was also a history buff (then again most characters in Star Trek are).
But remember how he nerded out at seeing the D under construction in the Brahms simulation. There’s also the episode where he’s shown building a model sailing ship in engineering. Curator of the Fleet Museum then? Yeah, that makes sense.
So the other “gift” to the fans was a 90s era attitude to women/family/children/reproduction in the writers’ room – hooray!
It feels like Nemesis could have almost been salvaged if some ideas about cloning and parents had been seriously explored. Clones are people too?
Contrast that with how T’Pol and Trip reacted when confronted by baby Elizabeth, created from combining their DNA. That was way before the 23rd C reproduction era which presumably had advanced somewhat.
Nostalgia only goes so far, but it would be nice to have the TNG crew through the lens of 2020s, not 1990s.
Don’t get me started how no writers could cope with Seven and Raffi being in a same sex relationship on screen.
It’s not hard people…
There definitely need to be more women in television who don’t want children.
I’m not sure Beverly Crusher really is the best example for such.
Also, Beverly didn’t leave her career, she became a frontier doctor without (stellar) borders. At a time when the Federation was becoming more isolationist, she continued her role as a bringer of hope.
It’s not like the crew hadn’t broken up to do their own thing anyway.