Picard Season 3 Rant
Mar. 3rd, 2023 07:47 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
labingiWarnings: Spoilers and ranting
For the record: Much of this season of Picard S3 is good so far. I’m not going to discuss those things here or only tangentially.
Disclaimer: The following is a rant. I don’t mean any of it to personally attack anyone involved in ST: Picard. Writing and producing TV is incredibly hard. The pressures are many. I wouldn’t want to be in their place. I’m just talking about the product, not the process, intent, or underlying talent of the creators. Fundamentally, my critiques are aimed at our cultural assumptions, which are bigger than any one person.
Fun fact: I was once cited on Wikipedia for an essay I wrote about the trope of pregnancy in science fiction TV. Well, prepare for a retread because 15-20 years later, nothing has changed.
So in Picard Season 3, we learn that Picard and Beverly* have a son she never told Picard about. This is so many kinds of stupid that I need separate categories of stupid to divide it into.
*I feel weird using last name, first name combo, but I think of them as “Picard” and “Beverly,” so I’m just going with it.
Clichéd Writing
If someone sat me down and said, “List the most clichéd plotlines about two ex-lovers,” their having a secret son (even more than daughter) would probably be at the top of the list. It’s so clichéd and obvious that it’s the very first thing pretty much every internet article guessed from the first moment this young, male new character’s face was shown in the promos.
There’s a bit in the Blake’s 7 episode “Blake” (no B7 spoilers) where some of the characters start a fire in a woodstove, not considering the possibility that they’re being pursued by heat-sensing vehicles. It’s later observed that the pursuit vehicle’s computer almost rejected the heat signature of their fire as too extreme to be correct.
That was my response to the then-theory that Picard and Beverly were going to have a son. It seemed so grossly clichéd, so self-evidently stupid, that I had a fair degree of optimism that the truth would turn out to be something else... or at least that the explanation for his existence would, itself, not be the most tired of all clichés. Alas, the onboard sensors’ data proved correct.
Bonus cliché points. It’s already more-or-less been done (infinitely better) in Star Trek II and with slightly less levels of epic, inexcusable badness with Worf and K’Ehleyr. Plus, unexpected pregnancy due to unprotected sex has already been done (extremely badly—see worldbuilding below) with Sisko and Kasidy Yates on DS9. So it’s at least the fourth retread of that plot within Star Trek itself.
It’s Bad Worlding Building for Star Trek
Worldbuilding is my most significant complaint, and I would leave it for the pièce de résistance except that some later points will be based on it.
I would buy a lot in Star Trek. I’d buy (though not love) some weird alien intervention that forced Beverly to steal Picard’s DNA and create a child with it because of yadda some reason to do with his having been Borg and saving the galaxy. But no. The narrative they feed us is that she just got pregnant, implicitly accidentally.
Here are the things that have to be true for that to happen:
1. Beverly is not using contraception, or it fails.
2. Picard is not using contraception, or it fails.
3. a) Beverly is undergoing some sort of fertility procedure (for...?) or (b) general health and wellness in the future extends the “shelf life” of human eggs and, thus, delays menopause.
I could accept 3b. Out of all these propositions, it is the only one I can accept.
Contraception (technology): It’s the 24th century. They have faster-than-light travel and nanites. They can use sophisticated laser surgery to radically alter appearances and alter them back with no scars. They have contraception that works. They have it for both men and women. It could be as simple and effective as surgical sterilization (tying tubes), which they could absurdly easily reverse, and do again, and reverse again, etc. Yes, even this can fail, but the odds against it failing for two people at once are so astronomical as to be for all intents and purposes 0.
(Yes, I know DS9 canonically has contraception based on both partners having to remember to take a monthly injection—i.e. less effective than the pill was in the 1960s. That is stupid writing, and it is best forgotten. To DS9, I say, “I cannot and will not subscribe to your interpretation of this.”)
Contraception (society): The Federation is not a theocracy; Earth is not very religious at all: contraception is not prohibited. The Federation is a (mostly) moneyless state that cares for all its members’ basic needs: contraception is universally available. Textual evidence shows the default is to use it: most of the characters we see throughout Star Trek history have sexual relationships without regularly producing children, indicating that they are pretty much all using contraception.
Contraception (motives): When you are a professional, career-minded person, as both Picard and Beverly clearly are, and you are sexually active in a society that has readily available contraception and no prohibitions against using it, you will generally use it unless you are trying to have a child. Add to this, Picard canonically doesn’t like kids and he could be in the dictionary next to “responsible adult,” and he’ll be using contraception.
Ergo, Jack Crusher should not exist unless he was a planned child (see below).
It’s Misogynistic Worldbuilding
(Note: I’m going to use a gender binary to make a point here. Obviously, these categories are complicated by trans and non-binary identities, but I think we can assume the majority of folks are still cis-men and cis-women, and that’s relevant to shaping social gender categories.)
One might say, “Well, it’s not a big deal. Lots of things in Star Trek aren’t realistic: warp drive, transporters, aliens with forehead ridges, etc.”
To that, I say, it is a big deal because the whole project of Star Trek is to present a hopeful future based on social equality and respect for diversity. It is inconceivable that such a society would not value and culturally support women’s reproductive freedom (and more broadly, all people’s, including men’s). Any society in which accidental pregnancy is so normative that it excites no incredulity or questions (as Picard S3 depicts) is a society in which, we must assume, women are regularly subjected to childbearing (or the choice of whether or not to have an abortion) without warning and without control. In such a society, women are subjected to men; they are socially inferior to men. They take on significantly greater risks and burdens in planning careers, enjoying sex, and physical health. That is very explicitly not the universe Star Trek has ever sought to depict. In times when it has depicted it (and they are many), it is an error, a production-level fault in the society producing the shows, as I am arguing it is here.
Or to put another way, the ideological world that Picard, Riker, and Crusher are inhabiting in their soap opera conversations about paternity could not have produced Michael Burnham. She would have been too much of a reproductive risk and too much at reproductive risk to be allowed to rise to the position of quasi-military authority we see her in. You don’t make someone who could be incapacitated by pregnancy at any time the captain of the flagship. You just don’t. There’s a reason why they didn’t in the Napoleonic naval wars that Star Trek is so influenced by.
Or to put it another way, a society that treats unplanned pregnancy as par for the course is a society that would overturn Roe v. Wade. It is a society that accepts that pregnancy is simply something that sometimes befalls women without their consent (or that you pre-consent to pregnancy every time you have sex), and that this is an indelible part of being Woman. In this view, Woman is not meant to have final say in her own motherhood. That kind of power is just not part of the possible social order. That is a world in which women will always be subjected to men, for the reasons stated above.
(Note: If we’re going to argue that Beverly did have full reproductive control because abortion is legal in the ST universe—as the episode with Troi’s alien pregnancy admirably indicates it is—that reduces to saying the Federation uses abortion as birth control, and that’s a cruel burden to impose. I would also note that being pregnant creates motherhood, and that having to choose whether or not to have an abortion is a mother’s decision. The right to abortion after pregnancy has occurred is important, but it does not erase the failure of a society to support women’s choice to get pregnant or not in the first place. These are separate, though related, issues.)
It Makes Picard and Beverly Look Stupid
Assuming all of the above about contraception in the Federation, Picard and Beverly have zero excuse for having an unplanned child. They would have to be towering idiots with the social responsibility of eleven year olds to let it happen. They would both have to actively shirk responsibilities that would be part of basic adulthood in their society.
It Makes Beverly Look Immoral
“Immoral” is a charged word in a way I don’t mean, but it’s the best I can find right now. Setting aside the contraception issues and just taking as read that Beverly got pregnant, her reasons for not telling Picard are all stupid and do not excuse the grave violation of not telling another person they have a child. Her best reasons boil down to “I wanted to keep him safe from people who might target a Picard.”
Okay, this is what you do about that: tell Picard and enlist him to keep Jack safe with you, even if that means pretending he doesn’t exist. At best, her course of action maybe motivated by genuine maternal concern but shows zero trust in Picard’s own ability to share in decisions to protect his own child, and I see no reason for assuming that. Picard is generally depicted as a very intelligent, responsible, rational, and, if needed, self-sacrificing person. To assume he somehow isn’t mature enough to be part of these decisions is an insult to him and based on zero evidence.
(I’ll note that this angle, too, was borrowed from STII, in which Carol didn’t want David traipsing around the galaxy with his father. That didn’t mean Kirk couldn’t know he existed. By the way, what makes David’s existence work is the possibility the movie’s silence allows that Kirk and Carol planned him and then broke up. I don’t remember how or if the novelization addresses this, and I don’t really care.)
It Sabotages Picard as a Role Model
This is my weakest objection, but in its small way, I think it’s real. Picard (considered across his whole existence in ST) is a special character in that he is a very admirable role model of a moral, intelligent, courageous, audacious leader, who is also (overall) rather cool, inhibited, introverted, and at times socially awkward. He’s not the typical American TV hero. He’s stiff; he’s not great with kids and he’s fundamentally built to be a bachelor. Yes, he evolves. He softens and broadens in his later years in a way I think Picard S1 depicted very well. But he’s still a rare example of a character who can be single with no kids, across a whole, long life, and still be looked up to. It’s rarer for women, but it’s pretty rare for men. Picard’s life illustrates to the viewer that you don’t have to get married (or the relationship equivalent) to be a successful person, and you don’t have to be a parent to be a successful, real, mature, legitimate, basically contented person. Ending his life arc, with “and now he’s a dad” and it apparently what he always wanted undercuts that role.
Picard S2 had a weird project of trying to convince us that Picard wasn’t well-rounded and admirable because he didn’t have a long-term girlfriend. Now, Picard S3 is playing into the trope that life is only fulfilled if it ends with kids (though it’s not saying this directly). That’s unfortunate. It removes something special from what Picard has brought to ST. I want to cry out, “Just let the man be! He’s actually okay as a single, childless guy. It’s okay. It’s not a sin.” And by extension, it’s not a sin for any of the viewers who look up to him either.
The Parent-Child Bond Is Being Used to Excuse Unethical Behavior
This relates to episode 2, and it’s not about Jack existing per se, but about what the writers have done with that fact. Episode 2 sees Picard hem and haw over whether Jack can be turned over to Vadic until he internalizes that Jack is his son, whereupon he suddenly decides to risk the life of everyone on the Titan to save his son. Now in fairness, Picard was already leaning toward not turning him over, and he has a good ethical justification for this in arguing that the Federation will not abandon people to summary execution without due process. That’s all fine. But it’s explicitly not his reason for risking the Titan’s crew to save Jack. His reason is that Jack’s his son. Ethically, this boils down to “My personal feelings are more important than hundreds of people’s safety,” and that’s unethical. The fact that the episode presents it is touching—and that many viewers seem to view it this way too, frankly, disturbs me. It’s an endorsement of exceptionalism, which the United States already has enough of.
I will concede, however, that episode 3 somewhat dealt with this by having Picard say he owed Shaw an apology (for the whole fiasco from the start, I assume), to which I say, yeah, he really does.
Okay, I think I’m out of gas. I still have reasonable hopes for the other plotlines of the season. Vadic is fun and so far very well written, and I am enjoying Shaw too.
For the record: Much of this season of Picard S3 is good so far. I’m not going to discuss those things here or only tangentially.
Disclaimer: The following is a rant. I don’t mean any of it to personally attack anyone involved in ST: Picard. Writing and producing TV is incredibly hard. The pressures are many. I wouldn’t want to be in their place. I’m just talking about the product, not the process, intent, or underlying talent of the creators. Fundamentally, my critiques are aimed at our cultural assumptions, which are bigger than any one person.
Fun fact: I was once cited on Wikipedia for an essay I wrote about the trope of pregnancy in science fiction TV. Well, prepare for a retread because 15-20 years later, nothing has changed.
So in Picard Season 3, we learn that Picard and Beverly* have a son she never told Picard about. This is so many kinds of stupid that I need separate categories of stupid to divide it into.
*I feel weird using last name, first name combo, but I think of them as “Picard” and “Beverly,” so I’m just going with it.
Clichéd Writing
If someone sat me down and said, “List the most clichéd plotlines about two ex-lovers,” their having a secret son (even more than daughter) would probably be at the top of the list. It’s so clichéd and obvious that it’s the very first thing pretty much every internet article guessed from the first moment this young, male new character’s face was shown in the promos.
There’s a bit in the Blake’s 7 episode “Blake” (no B7 spoilers) where some of the characters start a fire in a woodstove, not considering the possibility that they’re being pursued by heat-sensing vehicles. It’s later observed that the pursuit vehicle’s computer almost rejected the heat signature of their fire as too extreme to be correct.
That was my response to the then-theory that Picard and Beverly were going to have a son. It seemed so grossly clichéd, so self-evidently stupid, that I had a fair degree of optimism that the truth would turn out to be something else... or at least that the explanation for his existence would, itself, not be the most tired of all clichés. Alas, the onboard sensors’ data proved correct.
Bonus cliché points. It’s already more-or-less been done (infinitely better) in Star Trek II and with slightly less levels of epic, inexcusable badness with Worf and K’Ehleyr. Plus, unexpected pregnancy due to unprotected sex has already been done (extremely badly—see worldbuilding below) with Sisko and Kasidy Yates on DS9. So it’s at least the fourth retread of that plot within Star Trek itself.
It’s Bad Worlding Building for Star Trek
Worldbuilding is my most significant complaint, and I would leave it for the pièce de résistance except that some later points will be based on it.
I would buy a lot in Star Trek. I’d buy (though not love) some weird alien intervention that forced Beverly to steal Picard’s DNA and create a child with it because of yadda some reason to do with his having been Borg and saving the galaxy. But no. The narrative they feed us is that she just got pregnant, implicitly accidentally.
Here are the things that have to be true for that to happen:
1. Beverly is not using contraception, or it fails.
2. Picard is not using contraception, or it fails.
3. a) Beverly is undergoing some sort of fertility procedure (for...?) or (b) general health and wellness in the future extends the “shelf life” of human eggs and, thus, delays menopause.
I could accept 3b. Out of all these propositions, it is the only one I can accept.
Contraception (technology): It’s the 24th century. They have faster-than-light travel and nanites. They can use sophisticated laser surgery to radically alter appearances and alter them back with no scars. They have contraception that works. They have it for both men and women. It could be as simple and effective as surgical sterilization (tying tubes), which they could absurdly easily reverse, and do again, and reverse again, etc. Yes, even this can fail, but the odds against it failing for two people at once are so astronomical as to be for all intents and purposes 0.
(Yes, I know DS9 canonically has contraception based on both partners having to remember to take a monthly injection—i.e. less effective than the pill was in the 1960s. That is stupid writing, and it is best forgotten. To DS9, I say, “I cannot and will not subscribe to your interpretation of this.”)
Contraception (society): The Federation is not a theocracy; Earth is not very religious at all: contraception is not prohibited. The Federation is a (mostly) moneyless state that cares for all its members’ basic needs: contraception is universally available. Textual evidence shows the default is to use it: most of the characters we see throughout Star Trek history have sexual relationships without regularly producing children, indicating that they are pretty much all using contraception.
Contraception (motives): When you are a professional, career-minded person, as both Picard and Beverly clearly are, and you are sexually active in a society that has readily available contraception and no prohibitions against using it, you will generally use it unless you are trying to have a child. Add to this, Picard canonically doesn’t like kids and he could be in the dictionary next to “responsible adult,” and he’ll be using contraception.
Ergo, Jack Crusher should not exist unless he was a planned child (see below).
It’s Misogynistic Worldbuilding
(Note: I’m going to use a gender binary to make a point here. Obviously, these categories are complicated by trans and non-binary identities, but I think we can assume the majority of folks are still cis-men and cis-women, and that’s relevant to shaping social gender categories.)
One might say, “Well, it’s not a big deal. Lots of things in Star Trek aren’t realistic: warp drive, transporters, aliens with forehead ridges, etc.”
To that, I say, it is a big deal because the whole project of Star Trek is to present a hopeful future based on social equality and respect for diversity. It is inconceivable that such a society would not value and culturally support women’s reproductive freedom (and more broadly, all people’s, including men’s). Any society in which accidental pregnancy is so normative that it excites no incredulity or questions (as Picard S3 depicts) is a society in which, we must assume, women are regularly subjected to childbearing (or the choice of whether or not to have an abortion) without warning and without control. In such a society, women are subjected to men; they are socially inferior to men. They take on significantly greater risks and burdens in planning careers, enjoying sex, and physical health. That is very explicitly not the universe Star Trek has ever sought to depict. In times when it has depicted it (and they are many), it is an error, a production-level fault in the society producing the shows, as I am arguing it is here.
Or to put another way, the ideological world that Picard, Riker, and Crusher are inhabiting in their soap opera conversations about paternity could not have produced Michael Burnham. She would have been too much of a reproductive risk and too much at reproductive risk to be allowed to rise to the position of quasi-military authority we see her in. You don’t make someone who could be incapacitated by pregnancy at any time the captain of the flagship. You just don’t. There’s a reason why they didn’t in the Napoleonic naval wars that Star Trek is so influenced by.
Or to put it another way, a society that treats unplanned pregnancy as par for the course is a society that would overturn Roe v. Wade. It is a society that accepts that pregnancy is simply something that sometimes befalls women without their consent (or that you pre-consent to pregnancy every time you have sex), and that this is an indelible part of being Woman. In this view, Woman is not meant to have final say in her own motherhood. That kind of power is just not part of the possible social order. That is a world in which women will always be subjected to men, for the reasons stated above.
(Note: If we’re going to argue that Beverly did have full reproductive control because abortion is legal in the ST universe—as the episode with Troi’s alien pregnancy admirably indicates it is—that reduces to saying the Federation uses abortion as birth control, and that’s a cruel burden to impose. I would also note that being pregnant creates motherhood, and that having to choose whether or not to have an abortion is a mother’s decision. The right to abortion after pregnancy has occurred is important, but it does not erase the failure of a society to support women’s choice to get pregnant or not in the first place. These are separate, though related, issues.)
It Makes Picard and Beverly Look Stupid
Assuming all of the above about contraception in the Federation, Picard and Beverly have zero excuse for having an unplanned child. They would have to be towering idiots with the social responsibility of eleven year olds to let it happen. They would both have to actively shirk responsibilities that would be part of basic adulthood in their society.
It Makes Beverly Look Immoral
“Immoral” is a charged word in a way I don’t mean, but it’s the best I can find right now. Setting aside the contraception issues and just taking as read that Beverly got pregnant, her reasons for not telling Picard are all stupid and do not excuse the grave violation of not telling another person they have a child. Her best reasons boil down to “I wanted to keep him safe from people who might target a Picard.”
Okay, this is what you do about that: tell Picard and enlist him to keep Jack safe with you, even if that means pretending he doesn’t exist. At best, her course of action maybe motivated by genuine maternal concern but shows zero trust in Picard’s own ability to share in decisions to protect his own child, and I see no reason for assuming that. Picard is generally depicted as a very intelligent, responsible, rational, and, if needed, self-sacrificing person. To assume he somehow isn’t mature enough to be part of these decisions is an insult to him and based on zero evidence.
(I’ll note that this angle, too, was borrowed from STII, in which Carol didn’t want David traipsing around the galaxy with his father. That didn’t mean Kirk couldn’t know he existed. By the way, what makes David’s existence work is the possibility the movie’s silence allows that Kirk and Carol planned him and then broke up. I don’t remember how or if the novelization addresses this, and I don’t really care.)
It Sabotages Picard as a Role Model
This is my weakest objection, but in its small way, I think it’s real. Picard (considered across his whole existence in ST) is a special character in that he is a very admirable role model of a moral, intelligent, courageous, audacious leader, who is also (overall) rather cool, inhibited, introverted, and at times socially awkward. He’s not the typical American TV hero. He’s stiff; he’s not great with kids and he’s fundamentally built to be a bachelor. Yes, he evolves. He softens and broadens in his later years in a way I think Picard S1 depicted very well. But he’s still a rare example of a character who can be single with no kids, across a whole, long life, and still be looked up to. It’s rarer for women, but it’s pretty rare for men. Picard’s life illustrates to the viewer that you don’t have to get married (or the relationship equivalent) to be a successful person, and you don’t have to be a parent to be a successful, real, mature, legitimate, basically contented person. Ending his life arc, with “and now he’s a dad” and it apparently what he always wanted undercuts that role.
Picard S2 had a weird project of trying to convince us that Picard wasn’t well-rounded and admirable because he didn’t have a long-term girlfriend. Now, Picard S3 is playing into the trope that life is only fulfilled if it ends with kids (though it’s not saying this directly). That’s unfortunate. It removes something special from what Picard has brought to ST. I want to cry out, “Just let the man be! He’s actually okay as a single, childless guy. It’s okay. It’s not a sin.” And by extension, it’s not a sin for any of the viewers who look up to him either.
The Parent-Child Bond Is Being Used to Excuse Unethical Behavior
This relates to episode 2, and it’s not about Jack existing per se, but about what the writers have done with that fact. Episode 2 sees Picard hem and haw over whether Jack can be turned over to Vadic until he internalizes that Jack is his son, whereupon he suddenly decides to risk the life of everyone on the Titan to save his son. Now in fairness, Picard was already leaning toward not turning him over, and he has a good ethical justification for this in arguing that the Federation will not abandon people to summary execution without due process. That’s all fine. But it’s explicitly not his reason for risking the Titan’s crew to save Jack. His reason is that Jack’s his son. Ethically, this boils down to “My personal feelings are more important than hundreds of people’s safety,” and that’s unethical. The fact that the episode presents it is touching—and that many viewers seem to view it this way too, frankly, disturbs me. It’s an endorsement of exceptionalism, which the United States already has enough of.
I will concede, however, that episode 3 somewhat dealt with this by having Picard say he owed Shaw an apology (for the whole fiasco from the start, I assume), to which I say, yeah, he really does.
Okay, I think I’m out of gas. I still have reasonable hopes for the other plotlines of the season. Vadic is fun and so far very well written, and I am enjoying Shaw too.
