Generations of Howard Women (Sub Rosa)

I just reached Sub Rosa during my rewatch and had a thought which didn't occur to me and doesn't seem to have been discussed in previous threads about this dreaded episode....


....Yes, the thread title is intentional to get people open it....

Anyway, I wonder if Ronin exaggerated number of generations he had been "bonded with". I thought about how the governor of the colony said it was intended to appear as if it's Scotland. It may be 200 years old. It could have been around then that the Ronin entity first found the first Howard woman to reach the colony...

I'm starting to suspect Ronin was never on Earth in the 17th Century. I don't know if rest of you had thought of this but I didn't.

 

Hilariously bad episode. Always worth a rewatch for the LOLs.

I didn't really believe anything the creepy ghost said. Ned Quint sounded like Scotty

 

Ronin = stereotyped male = what won't be exaggerated?

The early 1990s, the era when trashy FOX sitcoms and unaligned syndicated sci-fi shows all exploited the same thing...

But the real problem is, now we have to sit in front of the screen and re-watch the blu-ray and pick up on every disturbing scene - I'll admit, big kudos for sitting through that story and putting together plot pieces!

(But I'd still rather re-watch "Shades of Gray"'s clip selections a la carte...)

 

Since the name is carried by the males (traditionally) then how could the Howard females (who are not related at all to each other) share common traits (e.g. My wife is not related to my mother, herself not related to my paternal grandmother, the paternal line is the one that carries the family name)? This is a major oversight!

 

The whole episode should be forgotten for generations...

 

Not as major as it might appear.

Generally, people worry about the concept of "the Howard women" mentioned several times in the episode. Why would "the Howard women" refer to a long line of women all named Howard? It never does in everyday life. Rather, it refers to the women in the family line of the Howards, as opposed to the family line of the Crushers, from the POV of Beverly Crusher née Howard. Beverly just needs to distinguish between the Howards/the Howard women and the Crushers/the Crusher women here, and the Ghost adopts her vocabulary for its nefarious purposes, while Picard echoes it for quite the opposite reason. So this is not a problem at all.

The actual problem is more specific and concrete: the Ghost referring to a woman explicitly named Howard, who is not Beverly's mother but a woman from 800 years back - one Jessel Howard, the Ghost's supposed first "love"/victim!

Here we'd have to believe in a strange coincidence indeed. Why does the Ghost meet its final fate when randomly encountering (the daughter of) another woman who happens to be named Howard? We could argue the Ghost likes the name. But then it becomes the coincidence of it meeting a Howard who happens to be related to the original Howard.

But is that a coincidence - or is it a quest? In the 24th century, the Ghost has more freedom of movement than ever before, and access to vast databases. It could have homed in on Felicia Howard quite on purpose, for old times' sake. And the very circumstances that facilitated the reunion with a Howard named Howard would bring down the Ghost, as the world would have outpaced its methods of self-preservation, and the vast databases would defeat ignorance and superstition.

The secondary problem here is Crusher's casual reference to something called "the Howard clan" at one point. We may take that to mean there was a clan of that name, in which case it having anything to do with Jessel Howard would be a strange coincidence indeed. Or then we may insist it's Beverly's way of saying "my mother's Clan" as opposed to "my father's Clan" (assuming Crushers were Scots, too) or, say, "my uncle's Clan" (a putative major influence in her life, and the cause for a need to distinguish).

The tertiary problem is the green eyes thing: if it runs in the "Howard women" bloodline, which in the realistic model never met the Ghost between Jessel and Felicia, it can't be the doing of the Ghost. But nothing says it would need to be. It's just a green herring, a species commonly found in all ghost stories...

(And no, this has got nothing to do with writer intent. But it isn't supposed to.)

Timo Saloniemi

 

I am sorry but this is the most strained rationalization that I've heard in a long time.

When people refer to "Howard women" or any other family name you wish to use instead, they refer to what I said, IE women who were named "Howard" because they married a man of that name, IE women who while being associated with one family line are not related by blood with each other at all, except maybe if someone married their cousin or something (which could be really bad if it happened too often).

 

mods please help

 

Exactly. And it is only a question of how far back Beverly extends this definition.

By choosing to talk about the Howard women, i.e. the family line where the male name Howard comes from, she excludes half her female ancestors. Beyond that, she may consider including

a) those women of random genetic origin who happened to marry Howard men, or
b) those female blood relatives of hers that brought their genetic traits to the "actual" Howard woman, Felicia.

And both are fine for the purposes of "Sub Rosa". The Ghost is wooing "Howard women", not "people genetically related to Beverly Crusher". If those two things are the same, fine. If those two things are not the same, fine. (With the above caveat that Jessel Howard is not a limiting factor or a cosmic coincidence but merely the expression of the Ghost's obsession, a rare return to a woman actually named Howard.)

Timo Saloniemi

 

I disagree.
If I heard someone use the phrase "the (my family name) women," what I'd think of is my father's sisters, my grandfather's sisters, and my brothers' daughters, almost all of whom married and took their husband's name.
If somene said "the (family name) women have a fierce temper", I'd never think they were referring to my mother. Perhaps because she never had a daughter, because I can kinda see including my father's mother.

And one step weirder: I can see it applying to my cousins, most of whom have a different family name.
I guess I would see it applying to any female descendants of my great-grandfather, and only putting the start with him because he didn't keep close contact with his parents or siblings the way my grandfather did. My grandfather hosted Thankgiving dinners where all his children and their spouces and children were guests, as were his sisters and their children, for about a dozen years. In contrast, my father met his grandfather's brother twice, about 30 years apart.


So for me, it would have made far more sense if the ghost had used a family name that was neither Howard nor Crusher, and the most sense if it had been Beverly's mothers maiden name.(wow: there's a term that needs an updating.)

 

^Yes, that has been my thought after my most recent viewing. Ronin had been bullshitting Beverly's nana and her ancestors who had gone to the Caldos colony. I suspect the meeting of Ronin with the first of Beverly's ancestors occurred either in the transit between Earth and Caldos following the founding of the Federation, or at Caldos.

 

Appreciate the Howard lineage discussion. The only thing I could add - sometimes in small rural communities, everyone has the same last/family name...

I love Sub Rosa. It's my fave 'bad' TNG episode, or at least the most fun 'bad' episode to rewatch.

Something I love to do is expose this episode to casual TNG fans - who have either never seen it before, or had only watched it once. It originally broadcast January 31st, 1994. Can you imagine forgetting about this episode and rediscovering it? Good times. It's late TNG but it sometimes feels as camp as TOS.

 

Have you ever heard of matrilineal succession, when a heritage was passed from mother to daughter to grand daughter to great granddaughter? I always assumed that the Howard women were all descended in female lines of descent from the original Howard woman.

And for centuries they would have used the names of their husbands and fathers. But for maybe the last 400 years before the episode the Howard women might have had the freedom in whatever societies they lived in to chose their own surnames, and maybe the ghost influenced the women to adopt the surname Howard and pass it down from mother to daughter to granddaughter, even if the sons in the families took their fathers' surnames.

So there could be a Howard clan where the surname Howard was passed down from mother to daughter to granddaughter over the generations.

Furthermore, there are no genetic problems with marrying a second cousin or more distant relative, so possibly the ghost influenced Howard women to marry men with the surname Howard who were not their close relatives. In the last 400 years before the episode, beginning about 1970 according to the official chronology, people have traveled and moved around a lot in first world countries and meet people and marry people from far away. So there are many examples of people marrying people who have the same surname but are not closely related to them.

 

I just checked the list and there isn't a Howard clan - though there is a Blackadder!

 

Three hundred years between now and TNG, plenty of time for new clans to establish themselves. Maybe there's a big shakeup due to WWIII.

Kor

 

It’s rarely how it works. But to be fair, clan can also be a colloquialism. People can refer to their clan without it truly being an official clan as it were. Have we checked to see if Scotty was accurate in his tartan or anything?

 

I believe Scotty wears the same tartan in both "The Savage Curtain" and "Is There in Truth No Beauty."
Somebody on a kilt forum (source) identifies it as ITI 1826, Scott black and white, which looks like this: http://www.tartansauthority.com/tartan-ferret/display/1826/scott-1850-b-w-clan

Kor

 

He also plays the bagpipe.

 

Thats at least one thing authentically Jockanese about him then (family term for our Scottish ancestry...I am a eighth or a quarter or something, on both my parents having one Scots grandparent each. That and being raised on haggis, and possibly whiskey if I was teething.)
Howard, amusingly, is about as English as it gets. Probably in a Norman sort of way. Which we also get in Scotland. Those Norse sure got around.