this post was submitted on 30 May 2025
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TenForward: Where Every Vulcan Knows Your Name
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You have to remember Ro's back story:
As far as Riker knew, she was directly responsible for the deaths of 8 crewmates.
To put this into perspective: Derek Chauvin was a member of the US Army Reserve from 1996 through 2004. As a cop, he killed George Floyd in 2020. Imagine Donald Trump granting him a pardon, reinstating him into the Army, and assigning him to a Special Operations unit to handle an important mission. That's what Riker was dealing with.
Ro's Introduction
Picard held the same opinion of her, until Guinan vouched for her.
That makes her a troublemaker , sure. Still bullshit for him to attack her religious iconography when there's literal bridge officers flouting uniform regs.
Picard addressed her as "Ensign Laren", her given name, rather than "Ensign Ro', her surname. This indicates that even command level officers were not aware of Bajoran customs.
We were not aware the earring was religious iconography either: AFAIK, she was the first Bajoran we had seen on screen, and she only had one line before Riker ordered her to remove the earring. All we knew about her was that she was criminally responsible for the deaths of 8 Starfleet officers, and she appeared in the transporter room wearing an ostentatious earring.
Given his knowledge at the time, Riker's actions were not unreasonable in these specific circumstances.
Watson and doyle are not the same person my bean. The in-universe ignorance from multiple officers just compounds the issues.
Bajor was not a federation member - hell, not even an independent planet at that point, certainly not before her comission which meaning special dispensation and that usually comes with a shitload of cultural information.
Picard literally states he read about Bajor as a child, the naming convention was a huge gaffe.
The federation is not supposed to be punitive. She served time for the Garon II mission, and the fact she still had any position in Starfleet means that should have been the end of it.
Cracking the shits at her after she went rogue with meeting Orta? Totally excusable. But riker was swingjng his dick around needlessly as soon as she stepped on board.
Which would have been known to her commander in a normal assignment, sure. But the very beginning of this episode made it clear that Riker and Picard were not aware she was coming aboard until she requested to beam aboard.
My grandfather fought in Korea, and told me stories when I was a child. I watched MASH into my teens. I had classroom lessons on the background of the Korean war. Yet, I didn't learn about Korea's surname-first naming convention until I was almost 19 and studying the language. This was not at all a gaffe.
She didn't complete her sentence. She received a conditional pardon, ostensibly contingent on her assistance in tracking down "terrorists". Her return to duty was supposed to be temporary. The only reason she was out of the stockade was because Starfleet supposedly needed her.
I feel like you ignored my Derek Chauvin analogy when you referred to Ro as a "troublemaker". Riker wouldn't refer to Chauvin as a "troublemaker". Riker would call Chauvin a complete bastard. Justifiably.