Gates McFadden had some standout episodes as Beverly Crusher on Star Trek: The Next Generation, including “The High Ground,” “Attached,” and the extremely rewatchable “Remember Me,” where the ship’s doctor got trapped in one of her son’s shrinking warp bubbles and had to understand a world where everyone else had simply ceased to exist. There was also the sex candle ghost episode “Sub Rosa,” which… well, perhaps the less said about that one the better.
Still, Doctor Crusher nearly always smashed it, and why wouldn’t she? After all, she was the chief medical officer of the Enterprise-D and at the same level of command as Captain Picard’s number one, Will Riker, but scenes of her taking charge in dangerous situations were few and far between compared to Riker, and now we know why.
During a recent panel at Fan Expo Portland (via Collider), McFadden was on hand to discuss her tenure on The Next Generation, revealing that the powers that be were reticent to place Beverly Crusher in the chair too often, lest it get in the way of their future plans.
“They knew they were going to have a female captain fairly early on,” she explained. “They knew they were going to do Voyager. So, while I was put sometimes in the captain’s chair, since I had the same rank as [Will Riker], they were careful about how much they wanted to do that, because they were saving that for when Voyager happened.”
