Even now, if a husband wanted to legally take his wife's surname, in some states it would be a somewhat complex process, while the reverse is easier because it is considered a "naturally" part of marriage.
Interesting. My wife and I got married last October and decided to hyphenate our surnames. Hers went before mine. Maryland law allows people who have gotten married to change their names without need of a court order, so we just made an appointment to go to the local Social Security office, gave them certified copies of our marriage certificates and existing I.D. documents, and received new Social Security cards. From there, we made appointments at the local DMV to get new driver's licenses, and then from there we mailed in applications for new passports along with certified copies of our marriage certificates. It's been tedious and time-consuming, but I haven't run into any real problems with adding her name to mine. Only hurdle so far was that my new passport came back with my birth name (I assume because of a clerical error), so I sent back a new application using the passport office's "oops we messed up" form.
I'm reasonably sure they weren't more enlightened in '87 than that. I mean, Star Trek was just AMERICA IN SPACE. Before the new series the characters were very fond of saying how progressed and brightened the future was, but you rarely saw any evidence of that on screen. I mean, during TOS they thought it was incredibly modern to have a black woman be a glorified receptionist in a miniskirt, whereas in the contemporary "Mission Impossible" a black man was a scientific genius and was treated on a par with other team members.
Yeah.
Star Trek does deserve some credit for some of its progressive vision, but that credit definitely needs to be tempered with an understanding of the ways in which it still depicts as natural the entrenched racialized and sexual hierarchies of mid-20th Century America.
In Nemesis. Picard even jokes by calling Riker MR Troi
Which was an incredibly misogynistic joke that should never have been there.
Does anyone else find it wholly …inappropriate that Beverly names her and Picard’s secret son after her long dead husband?? I mean, talk about adding insult to injury. She really must have had it in for Jean-Luc for whatever reason.
She sure got a LOT of explaining to do.
There's
nothing wrong with it. Beverly is not Jean-Luc's property; she has the right to love the men whom she has loved, and she has the right to name her son in honor of her first husband. It would be incredibly inappropriate of Jean-Luc to be offended by her choice of name, particularly since
Beverly was at no point in a monogamous relationship with him.
Someone mentioned it already, but in the novels he was named Jacques after Jack Crusher.
To be specific, in the novels set in the First Splinter Timeline, Beverly and Jean-Luc get married in 2380 and have a child in 2381 named René Jacques Robert Francois Picard.
René after Jean-Luc's late nephew,
Jacques after Beverly's first husband, and
Robert after Jean-Luc's late brother. Jack seems to have been born a year or two before René, so I would be inclined to interpret them as separate characters rather than as alternate timeline versions of the same character.
I think I just came up with a perfect time for Picard/ Crusher to have hooked up! It could’ve happened in the gap between Generations and First Contact and that would be perfect. The time factor is just about right and Picard was very distraught over the loss of his brother and nephew. Would make sense for him to seek comfort with Bev
Star Trek: Generations was set in 2371.
Star Trek: First Contact was set in 2373.
Star Trek: Nemesis was set in 2379.
It beggars credibility to imagine that Beverly could have conceived a child, carried him to term, delivered him, and raised him for seven years, all the while serving as chief medical officer aboard a starship under Jean-Luc's command, without Jean-Luc or anyone else noticing.
Yeah the "kid" looks much older than 20. He looks closer to 35. They need to come up with solution to that.
I mean, no, they really don't. It's not a big deal; we can suspend a bit of disbelief. (Maybe during one of his adventures, Jack got caught in a rapid aging machine or something.)
he seemed really fine to me. Both him and worf proved that that the “old” makeups are totally still viable today, imho.
I mean, the character design for Sneed certainly hews close to the look of the Ferengi from the Michael Westmore era, but it's also very clear that the makeup techniques used to achieve that character design are now very, very different. Sneed's skin tone is much more naturalistic than, say, Quark's -- the orange-ish base is gone. There's no eye shadow on Sneed, and the delineation between the actor's natural skin and the appliance is much less obvious than it used to be. Westmore's makeup techniques were built around low-resolution CRT television sets; they weren't designed to withstand the scrutiny of ultra-high-resolution modern televisions. So while the character designs are similar, the makeup itself is very different.
there was always a sense that Federation society was trying to live the higher ideals even if they never quite achieved it. Picard might have been a more ardent promotor of said ideals, than most, but he believed in them. Even as messed up as they are, the crew of the Cerritos still largely holds true to those ideals later.
The future of Picard is a bleak fucked up dystopia
Even at its absolute darkest, the Federation of
Star Trek: Picard is not a dystopia. It is clearly still a constitutional liberal democracy in which poverty, disease, and most systems of oppression have been eliminated.
Picard S1 begins at the tail end of a time when the Federation has betrayed some of its values, but the plot of S1 is literally Jean-Luc Picard leading the Federation into realizing it has done wrong and making amends for it. I mean, it literally ends with the Federation Starfleet sending an armada to protect the androids whom it had once banned from being genocided and rescinding their laws against synthetic lifeforms.
where you are constantly reminded that the universe is under never ending threat,
Star Trek: Picard S2 is not about a universe-ending threat. Its primary story is about how someone who began as an adversary of Jean-Luc's has come to love him so much that, at the end of his life, he gives of himself to nudge Jean-Luc into confronting the trauma that had previously prevented him from establishing healthy romantic relationships. S2's secondary plot is about how the Federation's deadliest enemies come to be redeemed and then join the Federation as friends and allies.
Beverly, at this moment, believes that there is a mole within Starfleet but cannot identify who it is, and therefore asks Jean-Luc not to involve Starfleet. Jean-Luc turns around and involves Starfleet, because to do otherwise is impossible. This is no more an example of "
Star Trek: Picard says you can't trust anyone!" than was the alien parasite infiltration of Starfleet in
Next Generation S1, or Admiral Satie's Romulan spy witchhunt from "The Drumhead," or the evil admiral who conspired to use Ensign Ro to frame the Bajorans in "Ensign Ro," or the evil admiral who conspired to retrieve an illegal cloak in "The
Pegasus," or the Changeling infiltration of Starfleet in
Deep Space Nine.
Hell, it's
Deep Space Nine S3 that ends with a Founder saying, "It's too late -- we're
everywhere!"
todays children are tomorrows murder victims,
Star Trek has
always depicted a universe in which terrible things sometimes happen to people who do not deserve such fates.
and no one is protecting or guarding anything.
Absolutely false. We see Starfleet protecting the Coppelius Androids in "Et in Arcadia Ego, Part II;" we see Starfleet protecting the Federation from an apparent Borg threat in "The Star Gazer," and then joining Jurati's Borg Commonwealth as friends and allies to protect inhabited systems from the anomaly in "Farewell;" and we see Captain Shaw and the crew of the USS
Titan act to protect the
Eleos right here in "Disengage."
No one has a happy ending, even an agreeably calm one.
Absolute nonsense. For one thing -- none of the legacy characters' stories have ended!
Jean-Luc is in a
much happier place at the start of
Picard S3 than he was throughout all of
Next Generation! We have no reason to think at this time that Worf is unhappy in his life, nor Geordi. Will and Deanna have obviously gone through the pain of losing a child, but they've clearly also built a life for themselves and were able to find happiness again in spite of that loss. Wesley seems perfectly happy in his life as a Traveler. Obviously Beverly's going through some crap but we don't know the details yet, and there's every possibility that her story may yet end happily.
So far, the only
Next Generation character to be definitively denied a happy ending is Tasha Yar -- who received not one, but
two unhappy endings (one killed by the evil tar monster in S1, and one where she was taken prisoner, sexually assaulted, and forced to bear a child with her Romulan captor after traveling to the 2340s from the alternate timeline of "Yesterday's
Enterprise")... and she received those horrible, unhappy endings
on Next Generation!!
The future of Picard sucks. They don't show a single enjoyable facet. I don't know why trillions of people aren't just phasering their brains out.
You are either arguing in bad faith, or you just
really overreact to slightly darker tones in your works of art. If that is the case, do yourself a favor, and don't ever watch, say, the 2012 French movie
Amour, or read John Green's 2005 novel
Looking for Alaska, because your words imply that you don't like the idea of finding aesthetic pleasure or catharsis leading to hope for the future through an artistic confrontation with mortality.
Clearly it's not going to get better, and whatever tools that had to keep the UFP dream in play (it was never utopia but it had aspirations), it's all over now.
Again, pure nonsense. Even at its darkest, when the Federation walked away from rescuing the Romulan people from their supernova and banned synthetic organisms, the Federation was clearly still a constitutional liberal democracy without poverty, disease, or more systems of internal oppression. We
see Romulan immigrants living on Earth peacefully. We see the Federation realize it was wrong, act to protect the Coppelius Androids, and rescind its ban on synthetic lifeforms. We see the Federation has, in spite of the supernova, established a positive relationship with the Romulan Free State, since there is no more neutral zone and the RFS is allowing Federation citizens to help them study the Artifact and revive and treat XBs from that cube. We see the Federation is building a positive relationship with the Coppelius Androids in S2, that it has embraced Jean-Luc without reservation in spite of his new status as a Synth, and that it is willing to embrace the Jurati Borg as friends, allies, and potential Federation Members. A large part of the story of
Star Trek: Picard is the story of the Federation redeeming itself from its mistakes and becoming a better society than it already was.
Hell,
Star Trek: Voyager arguably depicted the Federation as far worse than
Picard ever did, since it depicted the Federation as using sentient EMHes for slave labor in "Author, Author."
It's in the Federation. The Fed let Riker and Troi's son die rather than reactivate a synth,
And then the Federation realized its terrible mistakes in "Et in Arcadia Ego, Parts I & II." Why do you keep citing the fall into darkness but ignore the redemption back into light?
we're all but told that the Federation wasn't a safe place for Crusher and her son to be a family with Picard on Earth,
We do not yet understand the nature of the threat Beverly perceived or why she chose to raise Jack away from Jean-Luc. Don't jump to conclusions.
Seven is immediately paired with Shaw who still has Borg issues rather than letting him truly heal from them *before* assigning him with an ex-Borg,
1) Everyone has jumped to this conclusion about Shaw, but we don't know his deal yet. Don't jump to conclusions.
2)
If Shaw has anti-Borg prejudices, so what? Miles O'Brien displayed prejudice against Cardassians multiple times, especially in "The Wounded" (TNG) and "Cardassians" (DS9). Kirk himself was prejudiced against Klingons in
The Undiscovered Country. Bones was
constantly bigoted against Vulcans in
The Original Series, especially in "The
Galileo Seven." Individualized prejudice is a recurring feature throughout
Star Trek's depiction of the Federation. But even as Shaw might have issues with the Borg, we literally just saw the Federation embrace a Borg community as friends and allies in the S2 finale!
and Raffi is given the one job in the Federation that immediately opens her to underworld elements giving her constant opportunities to relapse into whatever she was addicted to before.
What the hell does that have to do with the fundamental structure of Federation society? Yeah, you've discovered that characters have to struggle with bad things in a story. The fact that Raffi has had to go to a foreign planet and deal with drug pushers does not make the Federation a dystopia.
That's not even getting into what everyone has to look forward to come the future shown in Discovery.
You mean, a society that has bounced back from near-collapse and is now on the upswing?
Seriously, it's like people thinks stories should never feature bad things happening.
Was it?
I was under the impression, that dilithium based warp travel was threatened by resource shortages, resulting in cultural and political pressures before the burn.
Hence the Ni’var and other factions researching for alternative propulsion methods.
They pushed their experiments so far that they were not convinced they didn’t cause the Burn themselves somehow.
I don’t remember if they had already left the Federation at that point, but other members had for sure.
They were on a decline for about a century before the Burn.
Yeah, and dilithium scarcity is still a problem the 32nd Century Federation is coping with. But, again, the 32nd Century Federation of
Discovery S3-4 is on the upswing -- it's recovering from near-collapse at an
astonishing rate!
And even during that period (which we did not see, bear in mind) when the Federation was having some serious problems in the century leading up to the Burn? There was still some serious progress! I mean, the Romulans and Vulcans reunified! That's
amazing!
Why ate you even counting Gary Mitchel? The guy was charged by the charge fe got from the great barrier. How about Charlie. He wasn't raised by humans but instead by bodiless aliens.
So you concede that characters' individual personalities are not necessarily fundamental indictments of Federation society?
Star Trek has never been perfect and yes there have been bad people that were crazy or mad but on the whole the society was closer to a idealized societythN what we have been getting lately especially in STD or Picard.
No. The Federation of
Next Generation was a society with serious systemic issues and a lot of internal corruption. In substance, the Federation of
Picard is not that different from the Federation of
Next Generation -- what you are responding to is
tone, not substance.
I mean Picards mom committed suicide. She couldn't get any help.
False. The failure there was
Maurice, who chose not to get the help Yvette needed and left Yvette unsupervised during a suicidal episode. There was never any indication whatsoever that she could not have gotten any help. The failure here was individual, not systemic.
There are drunks and drug addicts in starfleet
Raffi did not develop her addiction until she left Starfleet. She has stayed sober since returning until she was coerced into using the Space Drug in "Disengage."
I am furthermore at a loss as to how one could clutch one's pearls over "drunks" in Starfleet given, y'know, Montgomery Scott.
and 7 kills a unarmed woman begging for her life.
Seven kills an unrepentant murderer who poses an ongoing threat to the lives of innocent people and who lives on a planet where there is no rule of law. I repeat: Bjayzl lived above the law on Freecloud, a non-Federation world. Killing organized crime leaders in an environment where the rule of law does not exist is a
very different moral question than in one where there is the rule of law.
Sorry butthe society as a whole seems closer to 21st century earth than the 25th.
Most of the examples you cite are frankly comparable to the examples of Charlie X or Gary Mitchel: individual issues rather than systemic failures or people living outside of the Federation.
If Starfleet has simply lost its way, become complacent, and needs to be gently nudged back on the path to righteousness, I can definitely get behind that.
That's exactly what happened at the end of
Picard S1
three years ago, but for some reason the haters never mention that part of the show.
