#015 - He assimilates entire background characters and I fall back. Not again. The line must be drawn here!
Oh Six Hundred already
I was just in the middle of a dream
I was kissin’ Ashley Judd
By a bloody red Cardassian stream
It turns out that I can’t think of anything good to rhyme with Wednesday, at least not at seven in the morning, so let’s just put down The Bangles right there for your sake and mine.
Would it be unreasonable to suggest that a central part of Picard’s character is a disinclination to share? I’m not busting on him here, I mean that more in a straight-faced characterological way, as part of what makes him an interesting and complicated guy. He’s a thoroughly decent man, with strongly-held principles and an apparent desire to do good and see that others do good in the universe, but he’s also clearly ambitious and occasionally impulsive and it seems like messing with his stuff is about the best way for someone to get on his bad side.
The “someone” in the show when it comes up tends to be an alien race treating the Enterprise or by extension Starfleet as an entity or a concept with disrespect — e.g. shooting at his shit, ignoring his ethical boundaries, turning him into a Borg, being Q at all — but it’s there in his discomfort in crew interactions too if you look. Arguably the series ends on an admission of this, with Picard’s acknowledgement when finally joining the crew at the poker table (1) at the end (“I should have done this a long time ago…”) that he has been too reticent about sharing simple ritual fun-times with his own senior staff, the folks who are mostly clearly his friends at this stage in his life.
So Wes bogarting his fictional kid seems like it would set him off pretty well in its own right, is my feeling.
- And don’t think that poker table scene at the end of All Good Things… hasn’t kept me up at night given its implication that Picard wouldn’t go in for This Sort Of Thing. Though that is in itself a bit of an odd scene, because there were plenty of episodes where Picard holodecked it up with other crewmembers. Maybe he meant specifically confining himself around a gaming table in a small room, disintermediated from the protective conceit of a holoscenario? Which required a massive meta-existential life event to get him over? Which sounds like about what the holodecks going down would represent to the crew. Et voila, the circle has been squared and this all makes perfect sense after all.
Anyway: Jean Luc!
tk
I think this was part of my initial pitch to my friends, of Wes unintentially annoying Picard by deciding to play as his character's son and thereby being able to inhabit finally the father-son relationship lacking in his life and for which he clearly yearns, on TNG, to have with an emotionally unavailable (and, to be fair, somewhat busy) Picard.
And it's a good riff as far as that goes, but I wander away from it fairly quickly and I'm glad I did -- there's just not that much for Jake Sisko to do in the game based on his screen time in DS9, and Wesley just chasing fatherly love would have been a very one-note joke to run with. And one-note jokes are what Riker is for.