LogFAQs > #933221278

33. Beverly Crusher
In the future, people will still dye their hair red. Look, shut up.

Crusher is the defining Im here for the whole duration, and nothing interesting will be done with me ever character of fiction, even though she misses season 2. Everyone else grows as a character, even if in negative ways, but season 1 Crusher and season 7 Crusher are distinguishable only through their haircuts.

They needed a doctor. Done. Thats why shes in the show. Its not to tell really interesting Beverly Crusher stories, its because the ship logically has to have a doctor and that doctor logically has to be a main character so the camera can zoom in dramatically when someone has medical problems. Shes a doctor and shes a girl, so she gets the caring persona to contrast with everyone else. Thats probably all the thought they put into this character before casting her. I want to believe they named her Crusher because its so inappropriate for a doctor, but its probably just a coincidence.

60% of the reason Crusher is above non-characters like Sulu is that she does provide one very important use in the show: Picard treats her differently from everyone else. Crusher and Guinan are the only characters who can through Picards persona and get him to speak his mind, but Guinan is like this otherworldly immortal being while Crushers still a human on equal terms. Shes a satellite character, but at least she has the good sense to be a satellite for a much more interesting and important character.

Crusher also has one really killer episode, the one where people keep disappearing from the ship and only she remembers them, and she has to logically deduce whats going on. That one episode of a tertiary TNG character puzzling out whats happening to her friends is worth a million times more than all of the I like sciences of Discovery and Voyager combined. Very often, Star Trek doctors arent portrayed as particularly geniuses, and theyre just sort of smart compared to the Worfs and Tom Parises, but no Crusher is a scientist and she should be able to figure things out in the same way as Spock or Data, just not as well. Those rare occasions when she gets to do stuff besides patch up wounds show so much untapped potential.

By the way, Crusher is my first TNG character to drop since Yar and Wesley. TNG has by far the strongest cast in the franchise and its not even close.

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Started: July 6, 2005