First off, Trys isn't a slacker.
That is how she was written.
Anyone who deliberately pawns off work on someone else just because it is "boring" kind of fits the definition of a slacker.
No. If she "pawned off" her bridge shift so she could sit in her quarters and listen to music, then she'd be a slacker. Instead, she asked her superior officer to give her a different assignment more to her interest. Unprofessional? Yeah, but more for the fact that she wheedled like an eight-year-old to get switched. But the slacker label does not fit.
"pawning off" menial work to get a bigger assignment is exactly the opposite of a slacker. She considered her original assignment to be boring, so she wanted something MORE, not less. A slacker wants less work not more.
Both true. She wanted to be on the away team, in the thick of the action, rather than sitting at a console monitoring other people's work. Although it's true that she was doing that out of a desire for activity and excitement rather than a sense of responsibility.
But as I said before, her characterization in the Prologue of the novel does not represent the way she was throughout the entire book. She started out being less than an ideal officer, but her survivor's guilt made her want to change. She feared that her selfishness and tendency to retreat from rough situations had condemned another person in her place, and that motivated her to change. Didn't I make that extremely clear in the text?
Christopher said: “I think that people in the 24th century have outgrown the idea of elitism and competing to be “the top”. This is not what I remember from episodes or stories dealing with the Starfleet Academy. Have institutions (or whatever you want to call it) like Red Squad and other elitist groupings been abolished? It doesn`t look that way to me.
Red Squad was not a standard group within the Academy, but more of an aberration. While it's true that there will always be people who fall short of their culture's ideals, I think that the institutions of the 24th-century Federation aspire to be fair and give everyone a chance to fulfill their potential, rather than being consciously designed to create an unjust hierarchical system in which a few people's advancement comes at the expense of the majority. If there are people who miss the point and try to advance on the backs of others, that's a breakdown of the system, not an embodiment of how it's supposed to work.
Besides, what we're specifically talking about here is Jean-Luc Picard and why he gave T'Ryssa Chen a chance. And Picard has made it very clear in the past that he believes the purpose of our existence is to better ourselves, to strive toward our full potential. He saw that Trys was willing to try to do that, and all he did was give her an opportunity to do so.
After all, it's that fire and determination that make a great officer, not what's written in the record. Someone who's "kept their head down" and met all the formal requirements and never made waves might look impressive on paper, but would probably just be an average, uninspired follower. Alternatively, someone who's always been a golden child and breezed through all obstacles might feel a sense of entitlement, of expectation to succeed, and might not have that extra strength and imagination needed when the ship encounters an unprecedented situation and that officer is thrown totally outside their comfort zone. So you can't assume that the best person for the job is the one with the best on-paper qualifications.
Chen in that situation had experiences and insights no other officer had and was therefore valuable for the mission. Picard put her on probation and saw potential because of his personal experiences with officers like Barclay, Worf and Calhoun. He could see that with proper guidance, patience, tolerance and, of course, also work on their part, all of them became excellent officers. These are or were people who were a challenge for Starfleet but whose unique or rare talents made it worth it for Starfleet. I like it a lot that Picard, who is a very experienced captain, is mentoring another young officer with a lot of potential.
Yes, that's a good point. I was just about to make it with other of Picard's past crew choices. Data was someone that most people in Starfleet dismissed as a piece of hardware and tried to shove aside so they didn't have to think about him (according to
The Buried Age, anyway). But Picard recognized his wish to grow and better himself, and he encouraged Data to pursue opportunities to do that. Wesley was an arrogant brat that nobody took seriously, but Picard recognized his engineering genius and chose to nurture it by giving him a bridge posting, no doubt a position that many older, more experienced officers were thus passed over for. Ro Laren was a convicted mutineer, but with a little nudge from Guinan, Picard came to appreciate the passion and sense of principle that drove her, and so he gave her a post in his crew so that he could guide her in a more constructive direction. Picard is as much a teacher as an officer, and he has a canonical history of taking problem cases under his wing to help them fulfill their untapped potential.
Of course, the (I hesitate to use that word) average officer who is working hard but doesn`t stick out should not be disadvantaged. Therefore I found the scene showing Picard in an episode with Q in which Picard never had the opportunities to shine and was kept in a repetitive job disturbing.
Picard had the same opportunities in that reality as he had in the main one. He just didn't
take those opportunities because he'd been too cautious, because in that timeline he lost the youthful fire and arrogance that led him to seize the opportunities that came to him.
That's the key. Equal opportunity doesn't guarantee equal success. An opportunity is just an open door; you have to choose to step through it, and you have to live up to what's expected of you once you do step through. But everyone should be given the chance to step through that door.
Uhh... yeah, that's what I was hired to do. In most of the post-finale series, and obviously in the book-only series, the authors have created their own Trek characters, and naturally they had to make them important to the stories, or what would be the point? I created Trys and Rennan Konya. Keith created Miranda Kadohata. Dave created Dina Elfiki, and he and I jointly created Jasminder Choudhury. And all of them have been made important to various stories, just as the author-created characters in the DS9 and VGR post-finale series, and those in the original-to-books series, have been made important to various stories. That's what they're there for -- to have stories told about them.
