Spoilers On the subject of Riker/Troi's kid
- Thread starter chrinFinity
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There's no need to reconcile. I think that the Kestra we get on-screen is far superior to anything we've gotten in the novels. The actress killed it.
I was really excited to see that Lulu Wilson was cast in that role. In my opinion, she's one of the best actresses under 20 working today. She came onto my radar as one of the orphans in the film Annabelle: Creation, and was absolutely haunting as the main character's dead sister on HBO's Sharp Objects. She has an otherworldly quality to her that feels very suited to the quarter-Betazoid daughter of Deanna Troi.
For just a moment seemed to stretch credibility that Deanna would have had a daughter around age fifty, but then I remembered that Lwaxana Troi was pregnant on DS9, when Majel Barrett was in her mid-sixties. So it seems fair to say that Betazoid women (and presumably half-Betazoid women) do not become infertile in middle age like human women do.
I loved how much Will, Deanna, and Kestra felt like a family -- and how each of them carries the loss of Thad with them in different ways. And their home was absolutely idyllic. It reminded me a bit of Kirk's cabin in the Nexus, only I think even more lovely.
Speaking of Thad Riker, his too-short life served two purposes: 1) It helped fill out Riker and Troi's lives between Star Trek: Nemesis and Picard -- this show is really good about filling the time-jump with meaningful occurrences, so the audience feels the passage of time; and 2) It helped demonstrate the cost of Starfleet retreating from its ethos of boldly going where no man has gone before, since the synth-ban is what cost Thad his life.
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To go back to the original topic of the thread, trying to say that Natasha from the books was transgender and transitioned to Thad, just seems to be getting a bit to desperate to reconcile things that really don't line up to me. There has been nothing to indicate in either the books with Natasha or the episode that the Riker's kid was transgender.
I actually think it would have been a great way to end the show, if it was a standalone series.
They actually originally did consider having the very last scene of DS9 be Benny Russel on a TV set with a DS9 script. I think pretty quickly realized that that really didn't work for the wider franchise.If dreams and visions experienced by Star Trek characters were meant to be taken literally then it would be very likely that every bit of Star Trek since "The Cage(TOS)" has been a direct or at least indirect result of a mid-20th century science fiction magazine writer inventing a 24th century space station. Everything we'd have seen over the past half-century of the franchise would be a fantasy from the mind of Benny Russell.
I actually think it would have been a great way to end the show, if it was a standalone series.
Nothing showed but when I tried searching for a Twitter page for Les Landau on Yahoo, but Marina Sirtis is on there and she might be able to give a bit of first hand insight into what the intentions were with the episode. If not her I'm pretty sure you could probably find surviving members of the TNG Writers Room who are still active like Ron Moore or Naren Shankar who might also be able to give some insight into the episode's creation. I'm not on Twitter myself, but if I was I'd be very tempted to try Tweeting one of them and see if I could get a response. Naren Shankar was the story editor at the time, so he might be the one with the most knowledge of the thought process behind it.
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It is consistent with what is actually shown on screen though. And nobody actually says "drowned," and yet we do see a wolf chase in the episode as well as hearing a wolf growling at the same time the dog is barking (...and just what is the dog barking at??). And don't forget, Ian was a Starfleet officer. Bravery comes with the uniform, and they are taught combat skills at Starfleet Academy, probably including hand-to-hand combat against animals.
Or that 24th century medicine offers many better options where women's reproductive health is concerned.
That's the beauty of it. Transgender people are just normal people. Being trans isn't the most interesting thing about Thad, his language skills are. And nothing in the interactions we saw in Nepenthe would necessitate a discussion of his transness... Although, the fact that Picard didn't seem to immediately realize he had met Thad before as a baby could hint that whom he met as a baby was a "girl" by the name of Tasha.
And there's one other very good reason to suggest this theory. Representation. If Riker and Troi's eldest child can be trans and accepted and nobody makes a big deal out of it in the 24th century, then anyone can. Gays finally got their screen-Trek characters this decade. Trans folk are still waiting to see that. It would be nice to be acknowledged as real and legitimate.
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It would have to be a Betazoid wolf because Lake El'nar is on Betazed. How would an Earth wolf get to Betazed? That would be a bit of a stretch. Also why would Lwaxana, a Betazoid, conjur the image of an Earth animal in her mind when she was raised on Betazed and has never lived on Earth? Given the evidence, it makes much more sense that the wolf was Betazoid.
You're missing the point. The wolf is a metaphor. Lwaxana is using the image of a ferocious animal to shield that part of her mind which contains kestra's death. Troi literally says this in the episode. Also watch videos of how dogs react when their owners pretend to drown, they either bark hysterically like the trois dog did or they jump into the water. How can you not understand this?
As a fellow trans person, I'm all in favor of having trans people on Trek, but, out of all the characters in Trek that could be trans (which are just about al of theml, except for Kelvin Kirk, cause we saw his birth), the dead child doesn't strike me as the prime candidate.
But the growling sound over the dog is shown in the memory part of the sequence, not the metaphorical dream sequence part. We see a representation of Ian in both sequences (Ian is not a metaphor), we see Lwaxana in both sequences (Lwaxana is not a metaphor), and though we only see the wolf in the dream part, we hear the wolf (and see the dog's very real reaction) in the real part of the memories.
You've reversed the order of the events in order to support your drowning theory-- The dog reacted angrily to the wolf's proximity and growling before Kestra ran away from the picnic to chase the dog. So the dog definitely wasn't reacting to Kestra pretending to drown. And we never see the dog again after that.
I understand what you're saying, but I tend to discount characters played by cis actors and I don't read transness into cis characters in order to manufacture representation. I want real trans characters played by trans actors. Fortunately (barring the infant in the photograph), nobody has played Thad on screen, so I can still read into it. And yeah a dead character isn't ideal but there aren't a lot of options out there.
For screen characters, if they end up making Narissa into Narek's not-actually-dead brother, that's just about as bad or worse as the dead kid... Because Narissa has already been characterized as the archetypical irredeemable evil bitch. I don't really want her playing for our team, especially as the first trans character in Trek and especially because she's played by a cis actor. Gross.
As for other litverse characters, I've been thinking Anita Smrhova might be trans? We don't know much about her childhood.
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That's fair. From what I gather there will be a non-binary person on Discovery next season, so maybe we get lucky there.
Oh, that sounds like mirror Georgiou all over again.
There is actually a trans character in "Live by the Code", who technically is a canonical character (just not canoically trans). Morgan Kelly is described as "having been a "he", at least physically" before and during the Romulan War, and refers to her having had a "sex change".
I am not too fond of the terminology used. (I should note that I'm reading the German edition of the book, so maybe it's better in the original). The whole idea that she was a "physical he" kinda leads the way to misgendering trans people based on the state of their medical transition. I generally don't like the term sex change, as sex and genitals aren't exclusively the same things, and people usually mean genital reassignment surgery when they say sex change, but since this is the future, I guess it could be possible to also change chromosomes and gonads, so I'm inclined to let it slide.
The book was written by a cis writer, so yeah. He also uses some other not great terminology in his annotations, which again, I'm not a fan of. That all being said, I've seen him be a trans ally time and again on this board, and it's been a few years since this book came out, so I'm sure he's since changed some of his terminology and is be generally open to do so. So, I'm not throwing shade or anything. At least we have a trans character at all.
That sounds promising, but I try not to count chickens before they're hatched... And even then, it would still necessitate watching Star Trek Discovery.
ಠ_ಠ Super.
Personally, I hope that when Star Trek does decide to represent transgender people onscreen, they choose someone better than the character who's been dead for a few years prior to that episode. To do that, just strikes me as the tired old "bury your LGBTQs" trope. Which Disco already came under fire for after Culber was killed.
IIRC, the decision to make Morgan Kelly transgender was based on the fact that various novels over the years have been very inconsistent about Morgan Kelly's gender, with them being referred to interchangeably as he or she from novel to novel, so the character became transgender as a means of reconciling that. I agree, the execution of the idea was kind of sloppy, but I won't argue with the sentiment behind the idea.
From what I gather from the author's annotations and memory alpha the only book she appeared in or was mentioned before ROTF is Starfleet: Year One, where she is portrayed as a woman. Apparantly, the author was "unable to decide whether to make Kelly male or female, so I decided, heck, why not both? At least, sequentially both." So, it seems the inclusion of a trans character doesn't really come from a some higher ideals, but rather indecisiveness and somewhat uninformed-ness (is this a word), regarding real life trans people. The only "inconsistency" I can find (that was also noted in the author's annotations), is that in ROTF Kelly is black and in Year One she's a readhead, even though these aren't mutually exclusive.
Ah, I could have sworn there was a book that depicted the character was a male. Maybe I'm thinking of someone else, or confusing things with the fact the alien pretending to be Morgan Kelly possessed O'Brien in Power Play.
Out of curiosity, I checked with the Memory Beta page history, and they list Kelly as male, back in 2014, but as far as I can tell by their citations, not on any real evidence.
The way I've always read that scene was that the dog took off after something, and that Kestra ran after the dog and fell in the lake and drowned.
I have no problem with wanting to include trans people in the franchise, but it just seems like a really weird way to go about it. There was no indication in the episode that that was the intent, and at this point the books are so far off from Picard that it just feels unnecessary in that regard.
Kestra Troi drowned.
If a wild wolf had killed her then it would have been spoken that it indeed happened. TNG wasn't the kind of series that let self-contained, standalone episodes end on misdirection that gave you the wrong answer just for the "HUH" factor. If it was said she drowned then she did. It wasn't a two-part episode where we came back the next week to discover that Ian Andrew Troi had his wife's memory altered so that she wouldn't remember her eldest child being torn apart by a wild native animal and both Lwaxana and Deanna had to live with his decision.
Kestra drowned. The wolf is interesting and very vivid imagery but it's just symbolism to represent the threat that took her life.
Kestra drowned. The wolf is interesting and very vivid imagery but it's just symbolism to represent the threat that took her life.
