What three relationships did Star Trek fans deserve to see eventually?
Over on Star Trek.com, the conversation is about romance. Why? Summer? I don’t know. They’re not alone, however, as Nerdist also posted an article recently about the mos ill-advised get-togethers between captains and, well, their paramours.
Which got me thinking, how can I piggyback off this theme? Well, I started thinking about the relationships that defined the series, or should have defined the series, and realized that in three of the four series from Rick Berman and Branan Braga, three of the four had a centralized romance that never materialized, despite the seeds being sown.
The one exception was Deep Space Nine, which saw Captain Benjamin Sisko and Kassidy Yates tye the knot. The other three series had major romances shelved and in the case of one, never concluded. So with that, here are three romances Star Trek fans deserved to see play out.
Three romances Star Trek fans deserved
Jean-Luc Picard and Beverly Crusher
Despite there clearly being history and an attraction between Jean-Luc Picard and Beverly Crusher, we never got to see it come to fruition. The series did a good job of teasing them, and making allusions to their history but never did they fully dive into it, despite a large section of the fans wanting it. Many had hoped it’d finally happen on Star Trek: Picard, but it seems like that is just a pipe dream at this point.
Kathryn Janeway and Chakotay
It’s always a bit iffy to write a romance between commanding officers, so you can understand why it doesn’t happen as often. Still, Picard and Crusher are possible because each has to listen to the other, as they are the captain and the chief medical officer. There’s some give and take there. She’s less a subordinate and more in charge of a different function of the ship; the crew.
When it comes to Chakotay and Kathryn Janeway, however, there is no duality. It’s simply Janeway’s world and Chakotay’s just living in it. This one not happening due to the power dynamics makes total sense, but you’re telling me, you couldn’t have finally given them that moment at the end of the series? When they were left behind on that planet, just the two of them, and Chakotay was doing his best Sam the Onion Man impersonation, you know knew they wanted each other. What a waste of a tease.
Jonathan Archer and T’Pol
Another interesting scenario, as T’Pol was part of the crew and followed Jonathan Archer’s commands, she was never a member of Starfleet. So again, that sketchy grey line of ambiguity arises. That said, like with Janeway and Chakotay, T’Pol and Archer had moments that seemed to suggest they were something more or at least could’ve been.
She defied the Vulcan High Council due to her, shall we say, affection for Archer as a leader. Then, in the episode where Archer gets infected by some random space parasite, which causes him to be unable to form new memories past the point of his infection, we see the two become more than they were. T’Pol remains with Archer despite his memory issues, and the implication is that she’s more than just his personal newspaper to catch him up on current events.
The series decided to abandon them as a couple and instead shoe-horned her with Charles “Trip” Tucker III.