#037 - Let Sleeping Jakes Lie

Context for the DS9 non-obsessives, this is extrapolated significantly from a very short scene in the pilot.

But, yes: I feel like Picard is really just wanting to read a nice Choose Your Own Adventure story in the privacy of his quarters. This whole group-interaction thing seems like it’s not really clicking for him.

Which, compare and contrast with the holodeck I guess, where he often seemed a bit stilted in dealing with surprises but didn’t get outright annoyed (at least usually) at the computer when games went in unexpected directions. Perhaps the distance of it just being The Computer helped keep him in check? Whereas here, he’s among people whom he trusts and relies on to Get Things Done during duty hours but they’ve all let their hair down and he can’t really command them to do anything at all in this context. And they keep doing the wrong things!

Also, I will never really stop finding the weird dynamic between Picard and Bev and Wes on the show interesting. I wish there had been a bit more to it in practice — we get a few different peeks into the sense of potential romance between Picard and Bev throughout the show, even a couple of genuine close calls, but it’s mostly kept at a stodgy, stoic, British Historical Costume Drama level of restraint and repressed emotion that may make for really cathartic shippin’ fanfic or whatever but is just sort of a letdown in the show itself.

I’m not saying Jean Luc and Beverly should have gotten together in the regular run of the series, I’m just saying it’s a bit of a shame that we didn’t get to see a more interesting portrait of why they didn’t. Dig a bit further into why they’d work and why they wouldn’t, really test in detail the conflict between Picard’s sense of duty and his attraction to not just Bev but the idea of a family life, suss out some more of the complicated feelings they must all have about Bev’s dead husband, Wes’ dead father, and Picard’s role at the time as CO and now as a close connection to that ugly time as well as his role as a sort of (however unwilling) proxy father figure to Wes himself.

But with Next Gen the whole episodic, status-quo-restored-weekly style of plot construction probably made that difficult to do in the way I’d have preferred. So the three of them spending some time playing around in the long-form sandbox that is Deep Space Nine might be good for them. Where of course I mean the version of them that lives in my head. So: good for me? I guess? This is a strange hobby I have lately.

Speaking, on what is otherwise the oddest possible tangent, of strange hobbies, another one that I have as of very lately is drawing pictures of US Presidents as if they were birds, complete with semi-punnish bird names and bird epigraphs. So if you’re like “this star trek / RPG humorjoke stuff is fine but what I’m really in the mood for is staid pen-and-ink portraiture of avian politicians”, this is your lucky day.

Also, I probably spent more time debating with friends what to use for x and y in the final panel’s “as alike as x and y” construction as I did putting together the rest of the ship. I put some of our other ideas in the mouseover title text. Feel free to share your own in the comments.