#038 - ...was how to pistol-hands somebody who outdrew ya, hallelujah
I had such a good time following the comments from friday’s strip talking about Picard’s complicated romantic relationship with Bev that this seemed like a good next bit to tackle. And for a guy who was just giving other people a hard time for breaking character, Picard sure is having trouble keeping it together here.
The question in my mind is this: is Bev actually wanting to flirt with Riker, or is she just enjoying having Dax flirt with Bashir? Or is the latter allowing an excuse for the former? Or is she mostly just using this as an excuse to get up Jean Luc’s shirt a little bit and make him uncomfortable? Or some sort of n-dimensional chess gambit to get him to wake up and smell the Crusher? And is Picard thinking through the “why would you go after her, she’s super old and gross?” argument?
I feel like maybe none of them have thought this through super carefully, in any case. Off-screen: Troi taking copious notes.
tk
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more like miles o’beamin
Sometimes you fall in love the the dumbest parts of things you make. Pistol hands / pistol fingers makes me smile like an idiot every single time, it turns out.
There's a whole sort of psychosexual angle you could read into the idea of Beverly choosing to play as a gender-swapping Trill as contrasted with her canonical in TNG (but as discussed previously, not yet canonical in Larp Trek because it hasn't happened yet, if it ever will) romance with a Trill hybrid and ultimate rejection of its new late-episode female-host. Is this a journey of radical self-acceptance on Bev's part, a realization (across the strange tapetestry of multi-canonicity) that perhaps the reason she couldn't love a Trill-as-woman was because she hadn't learned to truly love herself-as-woman? Beverly needing the freedom of an explicitly fictive context to be comfortable examining her own internalized homophobia and gender rigidity, so that she can embrace a notion of womanhood that is not so much an axiomatic fact of the universe as it is a choice to embrace one possiblity among many?
Queer awakenings and eggs cracking at the gaming table wouldn't exactly be a new phenomenon, granted.
But for TNG/DS9 network television era of the late 80s / early 90s the idea of Dax being, even as an alien species with lots of handwaving, explicitly transgender was a little daring. I don't recall the show doing a great deal with that over the run of DS9, other than other characters being generally pretty chill about it and Sisko sticking with the affectionate "old man!" as a term of endearment, but that's not really surprising given how spotty the treatment of trans/queer identity issues is most media even today. DS9 explored social justice stuff better than most mainstream, high profile TV at the time, but it was still of its time and working within those constraints and that zeitgeist.
Anyway, Riker is down to clown, good on him.