P/C run amok...

[Naraht]

She wanted Picard to face up to his paternal responsibilities at last!

No, seriously, I think it would be very difficult to turn down a job like head of Starfleet Medical if it were offered to you. I mean, what is she going to say: "I would leave, except there's this guy I kinda like, and I really think he'll start to notice me if I stick around a bit longer..."?

I think it's quite possible that she would take the job for the prestige, and then after a year, get itchy sitting behind desks instead of on top of them, and decide to return to the Enterprise. The real question is whether she had to pull any strings to do so...

 

[mon capitaine]

Seems a demotion to be back on a starship to me. Of course this is due the writers not expecting her back in the first place so they gave her an impossibly high-up job.

So was she sacked? To much time fixing her hair? Was the hair deemed unprofessional in itself? Did she say "I would stay, except there's this guy I kinda like, and I really think he'll start to notice me if I go back for a bit..."?

(I'm thinking of just adding one of these to my sig so I won't have to keeping typing the thing in).

 

[Naraht]

I think she would have seemed a little less carefree if she had been sacked! Also, I doubt that she would have got the offer again in Nemesis.

And of course the hair was unprofessional! We had a thread about that, remember? Why do you think that she arrived back in season three with that dorky bob?

On another note, I found this P/C artwork on the net somewhere. It is slightly drippy, as all these things are, but it still makes a nice montage:

 

[mon capitaine]

Posted by Naraht:
And of course the hair was unprofessional! We had a thread about that, remember? Why do you think that she arrived back in season three with that dorky bob?

the dorky bob, the new eyeliner... starfleet medical is just one big beauticians!

Very sweet montage. I've been saving up a new av on sort of the same theme. I'll put it up later today.

 

[RAMA]

Posted by Naraht:
To those of you who entered this thread expecting a discourse on the insidious spread of political correctness, I humbly apologise...

I've grown tired of derailing other people's threads with my usual comments about the whole Picard/Crusher thing. It's time for me to have my own thread, for other people to derail!

To start things off, a study of the times Beverly has sat on his desk; not nearly as many times as I had thought, actually, but spanning the whole run of TNG, from the second episode ever to the last movie. Ah, the memories!

The first time we thought it was just intoxication (The Naked Now)

But it was also the "Crusher manuever" that persuaded him to take shore leave ( Captain's Holiday)

Tell me again that this was just a friendly kiss (All Good Things)

At least some people were in character in the movies... ( Nemesis)

Tomorrow you can look forward to an examination of the breakfast scenes!

I'm not a "shipper", never will be, but dammit, Picard and Bev needed to have sex in ST: Nemesis.

RAMA

 

[FrontierTrek]

Posted by Naraht:
She wanted Picard to face up to his paternal responsibilities at last!

No, seriously, I think it would be very difficult to turn down a job like head of Starfleet Medical if it were offered to you. I mean, what is she going to say: "I would leave, except there's this guy I kinda like, and I really think he'll start to notice me if I stick around a bit longer..."?

I think it's quite possible that she would take the job for the prestige, and then after a year, get itchy sitting behind desks instead of on top of them, and decide to return to the Enterprise. The real question is whether she had to pull any strings to do so...

The whole issue of Beverly leaving her son on the ship while she jetted off to Stafleet Medical never sat right with me. It would be perfectly acceptable if he hot tailed it out of there with her, but to leave him like that, especially when it's already a single parent family seemed a bit cold.

That said, it's always fun to see protective-mother Bev go all Columbo on Picard and Guinan in "Evolution"

 

[mon capitaine]

Posted by RAMA:
I'm not a "shipper", never will be, but dammit, Picard and Bev needed to have sex in ST: Nemesis.

That's a fair point. Do we really want them to marry and be happy ever after? Isn't the Riker-Troi thing rather finished now they are married? I mean good for them, but it takes all the sparks out of it for the rest of us.

Picard and Bev just need a little action, not to become old boring married couple.

 

[Naraht]

Hmmm. Perhaps that's the lesson that Picard was supposed to learn from All Good Things... any attempt to settle down into married bliss is doomed to failure. Maybe they'll have one of those long distance relationships, with Beverly stopping by whenever the Pasteur is in the sector.

I can definitely imagine both of them being too set in their ways, and too individualistic, to make a go of living together. But anything less than that seems like, I don't know... a failure somehow. She was, after all, married to Jack, even if she didn't see very much of him.

It would all seem a bit more natural if they had had "a bit of action" during the series already. Say, during Attached, as the original script specified.

 

[FrontierTrek]

Posted by Naraht:
I can definitely imagine both of them being too set in their ways, and too individualistic, to make a go of living together. But anything less than that seems like, I don't know... a failure somehow. She was, after all, married to Jack, even if she didn't see very much of him.

I think that's spot on. Both characters are very headstrong as proven time after time throughout the series. I think another part of it is they seem to "work" best when they're flirting. Hooking them up together as a couple à la Riker/Troi or Jadzia/Worf would have taken a lot of the fun out of it for me. This way it's left up to the audience to analyse every look that lasts slightly too long and every encounter that pushes the boundaries of friendship

 

[mon capitaine]

Posted by Naraht:
I can definitely imagine both of them being too set in their ways, and too individualistic, to make a go of living together. But anything less than that seems like, I don't know... a failure somehow. She was, after all, married to Jack, even if she didn't see very much of him.

Picard settled down in The Inner Light. Assuming he had free will in that experience, then presumably he does have the capacity to adapt to someone elses needs.

 

[Naraht]

Yeah, but in The Inner Light he had very little choice in the matter. And he had an extremely agreeable wife who seemed to have devoted her life to him, and who put up with him spending ages being uncommunicative, staring at the stars, and playing his flute. Would Beverly have been half as patient? Not on your life!

 

[mon capitaine]

Why do you say he had very little choice? He could have left her surely.

 

[Naraht]

Oh, yeah, pick on that part of it! Yes, I guess he could have left her if he wanted. Obviously, he didn't want to. Obviously, he did fall in love with her.

However, there is a very real reason why, having found himself marooned on a planet where he doesn't understand the culture or the way of life, he would end up staying where he was. In safety, with a roof over his head and someone to cook him a nice meal.

Eline, seriously, comes very close to the Victorian ideal of "the angel in the house". Easy to live with, but not at all fitting Kamala's description of how Picard liked his women. And not at all like Beverly Crusher...

 

[mon capitaine]

Speaking of Victorian Ideals and home-making, I suppose we have to consider Picard's faux wife in Generations. I can't imagine anyone less like Beverly, and yet it was his subconscious that conjured up that ghastly christmas spectacle. Perhaps he believes there are only two types of women for him: the wives like Eline and the wilder girls like Vash. Confusingly for him, Bev falls into neither camp.

 

[Naraht]

True; I forgot about Generations.

What this basically boils down to is the good old fashioned angel/whore dichotomy. And it may be the fault of the producers rather than Picard, who after all is a progressive 24th century man, even if he did have a very traditional upbringing. (Interesting, this links back to what we discussed earlier about who cooks breakfast for whom.)

Surely the fantasy that he was living in Generations would be the sort of thing that Picard only hauls out once a year at Christmas, if that? This having to choose between your career and a family is really just an excuse that he's used. I'm sure that if he wanted a wife and a houseful of kids back in La Barre, whom he would see when he was home on leave, he could have managed it. But no, Picard has other fish to fry. The women that he's actually had relationships with in real life have tended to be very independent characters.

I suppose the fascination with Beverly is that she skirts the boundary... a good mother, but likely good in other departments as well, if you know what I mean. When he met her, she was living the domestic idyll with Jack, but she always had that fiery independent streak as well.

Beverly, clearly, represents the Holy Grail of womanhood for Jean-Luc Picard... He wants to have his cake and eat it too. (Any dirty images that conjures up are purely your own fault.)

 

[Gold Grizzly]

There's been a lot of comparsions between Picard's love interests and Crusher, but not much the other way around (unless I've missed it, I must confess to a habit of skimming through long posts).

The Crusher love interests we've seen actually don't seem all that Picard-like. Odan, Ronin etc tend to be more dashing and rogueish. I'm not sure how well old Jean-Luc fits into that ...

 

[chrisbd1]

Posted by RAMA:
reakfast scenes!

I'm not a "shipper", never will be, but dammit, Picard and Bev needed to have sex in ST: Nemesis.

RAMA

[/QUOTE]
Can I get a Hell yeah?
Hell Yeah.

 

[mon capitaine]

Posted by Gold Grizzly:
The Crusher love interests we've seen actually don't seem all that Picard-like. Odan, Ronin etc tend to be more dashing and rogueish. I'm not sure how well old Jean-Luc fits into that ...

Well I should probably leave the floor to Naraht on this issue, but I can't resist throwing in my two cents.

Aren't all the guys introduced for the Trek women rather fanciful sterotypes? I suspect the writers of not really knowing what BC's type is so they fall back on the tall dark and handsome type. The short bald geeky-looking thoughtful guys never seem to get a look in.

 

[Naraht]

Posted by mon capitaine:
Aren't all the guys introduced for the Trek women rather fanciful sterotypes?

Yes, yes, and yes again.

I suspect the writers of not really knowing what BC's type is so they fall back on the tall dark and handsome type. The short bald geeky-looking thoughtful guys never seem to get a look in.

This is the thing; due to their incompetence, I can't figure out what her type is either, and it's really starting to bother me.

Riker obviously isn't her type; we can tell that from Encounter at Farpoint, and from the way that she reacts in The Host. But Jack is, and Odan is, and Ronin is, and Picard is. I feel that the best way to present this conundrum is with that song from Sesame Street: "one of these things is not like the other, one of these things just doesn't belong..." I'm not saying that Picard isn't attractive, because he certainly is, but he definitely doesn't fit the pattern...

And if she does like the tall, dark, handsome guys, then what's wrong with Riker?

 

[Gold Grizzly]

I sort of got the impression in EAF that she had something against First Officers, or at any rate was slightly predisposed to dislike Riker before she met him. By the time of "The Host", as she says, she thinks of him more as a brother-like character.

As to Picard, I wonder whether he might still have had a rogueish quality to him when she first met him? There's got to be a transition period between the wild boy he was in "Tapestry" and the Picard we're accustomed to.