Jack Crusher was kind of a crappy dad

I've been working on my ST Timeline over the last week or so, and when adding in some 24th Century TNG dates, I realized something: Jack Crusher was kind of a crappy dad.

In the 4th season episode "Family," Wesley receives a holomessage that his father Jack recorded for him when Wesley was 10 weeks old. He intended to leave a series of them for Wesley as his son grew up, but Beverly says that he never got the chance to record any more before his death. It's never said outright, but the implication is that Jack died not too long after he recorded the first message.

So far, so good. This more or less jibes with what Wesley tells Riker in "Encounter at Farpoint":

But a couple of seasons later in "True Q", Beverly tells Amanda Rogers that her husband died when Wesley was five.

Which means that either Jack Crusher recorded his initial message to Wesley when his newborn son was 10 weeks old and then didn't bother to record another one for more than four and a half years, or else that Beverly accidentally erased the rest of Jack's messages and then gave Wes a clumsy lie to cover up her mistake. But I guess it worked, because apparently supergenius Wesley never did the math to figure it out.

I'm not serious, of course, but I thought it was pretty funny.

 

It seems like he wanted to record "growing up" messages for when shut up Wesley was older, but only recorded one..
Doesn't mean he wasn't in Wesley lives at all, to the contrary, plenty of cannon evidence that he was in his life plenty. With a possibility Beverly was on the stargazzer for awhile, maybe with Wesley..
Jack just sucked at recording stuff

 

I guess it's a good thing that nothing terribly significant happens in a child's first five years of life, then.

 

Well.. He is a Starfleet officer.. He probably knew his chances went a 100% on coming back..

 

Just because Jack didn't record messages for later in Wesley's life, doesn't mean he didn't speak directly to Wesley himself as he grew up.

 

That's because after making the first one Beverly finally came clean and admitted that Jean Luc is really Wesley's dad. He didn't want to lie to Wesley on them by making up fake stories so he simply quite making them.


Jason

 

He wasn't making the messages because he was away at that moment. He was making the messages for Wesley to watch when he grew up.

And even if he was away on assignment somewhere, he could've found the time to record a quick message or two. After all, the initial message we saw was, what? Two minutes, maybe?

 

Since Wesley was Wonderboy(tm), he learned to talk a communicate at third grade level by age 1.47.

That or this is a great example of season 4 being worse than season 1, noting "Family" was a bit of a clunky soap opera tale...

 

There's an excellent novel called Q Squared where we meet Jack Crusher from an alternate timeline, and it turns out he's a bit unhinged to say the least.

I love the idea that his loved ones paint him as a saint, his holotapes show him at his best, but the man himself doesn't live up.

 

I wouldn't go that far, but to each their own. I like the first half of S4 quite a bit.

 

I think it was more meant to be the kind of thing where someone puts off doings something important until later, and until later, and until later again since they think they will still be alive at that point.
And then they die before ever fulfilling their plans/promise/resolution and it's meant to be all tragic and stuff.
Pretty much like a soldier not writing his family at home about how much they love them "because they can tell them in person once they're back home" and then they're killed.

Things like that happen all the time even in real life, doesn't make the person in question a crappy person or parent based solely on that alone.

 

Well, that Jack was a victim of extenuating circumstances as well, among them the fact that in that universe his Wesley died after falling out of a tree...that he'd climbed so he could wave hello to Jack.

 

Judging from Wesley's psych test in "Coming of Age" Jack wasn't the most well balanced guy in the fleet.

 

It's perfectly normal for parents to record / write a time-capsule message to their kids immediately after they're born. I did for my daughter.

 

Only because of Trelane's goading.

 

When did I say that it wasn't? It was the four & a half year break I was questioning.

 

Maybe he did, and they were lost on the Stargazer?