Nana Visitor's 'A Woman's Trek' book coming in 2022

[Turtletrekker]

Still seems sus.

 

[Tosk]

Still seems sus.

What does?

 

[Turtletrekker]

Still seems sus.

What does?

All of it. I agree with every word Nana said in that book.

 

[Tosk]

Okay.

But how does that make Zarm's post suspicious?

 

[Zarm]

And how do you know she's twisting facts? Seems suss to me.

She claims that Gates McFadden wanted to have her pregnancy, which she found out about just after the filming a Remember Me, written into the show so that she didn't have to hide her pregnancy. Nana then claims she was told that they couldn't do that because another actor was already pregnancy and having it written into the show- which was her, with the whole 'carrying Keiko's baby' thing, and, she concludes, 'there was only one 'slot' for a pregnant woman in Star Trek, and I was already occupying it.' (I can cite page numbers if necessary).

Only Gates pregnancy happened in 1990, 3 years before DS9 began, and Nana's was in 1996.



Don't get me wrong- I think Nana raises a lot of valid points in the book. I'm not saying her takes are wrong, per se. But when she throws in clearly-false anecdotes or really tenuous interpretations to support them, it makes her points seem less credible, and her research questionable. Which, I think, is a shame, because her points- and these women's stories- would stand well enough on their own. She didn't need to exaggerate or twist Trek's narratives to make her case, her case would have worked well enough without them. But because she does choose to do so, it (to me) instead casts doubt on how much else that we can't concretely verify is also exaggerated or twisted. It casts doubt on her work- and again, I think, sadly uneccessarily, because her overall thesis would have stood up just fine without trying to invent more supporting points.

 

[Ray Hardgrit]

Maybe she was thinking of Roxann Dawson, who was pregnant during season 4 of Voyager.

 

[Zarm]

Maybe she was thinking of Roxann Dawson, who was pregnant during season 4 of Voyager.

It is possible. The timelines still don't quite align, but they are close enough that the producers cold have said 'we just did that' as opposed to 'we're already doing that.'

But the book's statement is pretty explicit about Gates and referencing her actual pregnancy (which she famously didn't yet know about when performing wirework in Remember Me). Either way, it... raises questions about her fact-checking of the final text, at the very least. :-)