In this great essay, lawyer and writer Mirah Curzer examines the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “Remember Me” from a feminist lens. The episode centers on Dr. Beverly Crusher, who begins to notice that people are disappearing and she’s the only one who can remember that they ever existed. Curzer writes:
What surprised me the most about the episode was how long it took for anyone to question Beverly’s reliability.
She says someone is missing, but no one remembers him coming onto the ship, and they can’t find any record of him ever being born. And yet they mobilize all resources to find him and the other missing people only Beverly remembers. They sideline their mission and change course more than once based on her unconfirmed claim that something is wrong. It is only 20 minutes into the episode that Picard gently and hesitantly suggests that maybe the problem could be her memory.
And even after Picard has asked Beverly to see the counselor because he thinks she may be having memory issues, he still trusts her. She asks him to turn the ship around even though she has no evidence to present but her own memory—which is contradicted by everyone else’s memory as well as all the physical evidence. And still, he responds:
“Your word has always been good enough for me.”
You can read the full essay over on Medium.