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shadow-academic · 2 years

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Sorting Star Trek: The Next Generation: Part 1

I first discovered the Sorting Hat Chats through @wisteria-lodge’s excellent posts about Elim Garak and Julian Bashir, and they’ve also done a good writeup of The Original Series’s Power Trio (and Scotty), but I haven’t seen anyone do The Next Generation yet, so here I am! I intend to Sort the whole TNG cast, but that’s a lot for one post, so I’m going to split it into multiple parts.

A more detailed break-down of the system I’m using is right here, but the basics are these:

PRIMARY (ie MOTIVE)

BADGER ~ Loyal to the group.

SNAKE ~ Loyal to yourself and your Important People.

LION ~ Subconscious Idealist. Ideals are linked to feelings and instincts.

BIRD ~ Conscious Idealist. Ideals are linked to built systems and external facts.

SECONDARY (ie METHOD)

BADGER ~ Connect with the group. Make allies, work steadily and well. Be whatever the situation calls for. If you find a locked door, knock.

SNAKE ~ Connect with the environment. Notice things. Tell people what they want to hear. If you find a locked door, get in through the window.

BIRD ~ Collect skills, knowledge, personas, useful friends. If you find a locked door, track down the key or try to pick the lock.

LION ~ Be honest, be direct, speak your truth. Either the obstacle is going down or you are. If you find a locked door, kick it in.

Worf, Son of Mogh

Worf is perhaps the most straightforward character in the whole show. A Klingon orphan raised on Earth (in Minsk. Minsk.) by adoptive human parents, Worf held onto his Klingon heritage by adopting a Klingon code of honor. Even when he meets other Klingons, almost none of whom take that code quite so seriously, Worf holds himself rigidly to his system, checking every choice he makes to make sure it is honorable. It’s honestly the clearest Bird primary I’ve ever seen.

Worf’s secondary is also very clear. When faced with any problem, his first instinct is to charge in, phasers blazing, mek’leth at the ready. He is unflinchingly honest in all things. He’s got one of the loudest Lion secondaries in the whole franchise.

Lieutenant Commander Data

Bird primaries have a constructed system that they check their decisions against to determine whether something is right or wrong, whether it is constructed by them or something given to them wholesale, and I think Data’s ethical subroutines definitely count as a system that was given to him wholesale. But the ethical subroutines aren’t the whole of Data’s Bird primary. Data is constantly questioning the world around him, trying to understand what humanity is and what it means to be human. He is constantly gathering data (pun not intended) and evolving his system to account for it.

Speaking of gathering data, Data also has a Bird secondary. His knowledge is vast, and on the rare occasions that he lacks an appropriate toolset for a situation, his android brain can learn one very quickly. In short, Data is the Double Bird Spock can only dream of being.

Dr. Katherine Pulaski

Dr. Pulaski doesn’t get nearly as much screentime as her crewmates, only lasting for one season, but I honestly really like her character. She was very obviously conceived as “female Dr. McCoy”: an older down-home Southern doctor who wears her emotions on her sleeve and is brutally honest. But does she house-match him? Well...yeah! Like McCoy, she will go out of her way to help people because they’re people. The best example of this comes in her one and only focus episode, “Unnatural Selection”. (I’m still salty about the fact that not only is Pulaski in only one season, but it’s also the shortest season due to a writer’s strike.) Captain Picard believes the risk of contagion to his crew is too great to help the crew of Darwin Station, but Pulaski refuses to abandon them, because those are people down there. So she ends up beaming one of the patients into a shuttle where the only people aboard are her and Data (because he’s immune to disease) and even though she gets infected and has to be rescued by Chief O’Brien doing some transporter technobabble, she does solve the medical mystery of the day and saves whomever she can.

Speaking of Pulaski and Data, let’s address the elephant in the room. The thing that Katherine Pulaski is most infamous for is her being an enormous dick to Data in her earliest episodes. That’s very much a Badger primary falling into the trap of dehumanization, just like McCoy with Spock, but the big difference in the dynamic is that Data is not Spock. Spock can answer McCoy’s snark with snark and it’s incredibly entertaining to watch, but Data is far too innocent and earnest for that, and it just comes across as Pulaski being mean. But what all those Pulaski-haters pointedly ignore is that Pulaski goes through some really serious character development over her limited screen time. When she gets to know Data, she stops dehumanizing him, and indeed becomes one of his biggest advocates. In the episode “Pen Pals”, when Data has the personal issue of the day, it is Pulaski who argues most fervently in favor of helping him, because Data is their crewmate, he is their friend, he is a person. Pulaski even comes to believe in Data’s personhood in ways that Data himself tends to dehumanize himself. When Data explains how he cannot feel emotions, Pulaski’s like “Really? Because your reaction back there seemed pretty emotional.” Pulaski continues challenging Data throughout her screentime, but she goes from being dismissive of him to asking Data to challenge his limits in ways he hadn’t even considered.

As to Pulaski’s secondary, she has the same uncompromising Lion that McCoy had. She is going to charge in and make sure people get the medical attention they need, and nothing, neither Captain Picard nor getting infected with a fatal illness herself, is going to stop her. (Yes, I’m bringing up “Unnatural Selection” again. It’s just the best Pulaski episode.) At the beginning of “Unnatural Selection”, Counselor Troi even straight-up calls her out as being almost too dedicated to her work as a doctor.

Dr. Beverly Crusher

Speaking of doctors, let’s move on to the Chief Medical Officer of the Enterprise for the rest of the show. Beverly Crusher is also a Badger primary. Her priority is her patients, and her patients are anyone who is hurt. She doesn’t care about the context; she sees someone hurt, so she charges in to heal them. (That’s her Lion secondary, too.) She’s very straightforward: charge in and heal people, no matter the consequences, which can honestly cause problems, because on multiple occasions, she ends up doing something like violating the Prime Directive, which Picard then has to call her out on.

Crusher: “I couldn’t just leave them there!” Picard: “Why not?”

The fact that this exact quote is an exchange they’ve had multiple times is, I feel, very telling for both of them. Picard knows that the rules exist for a reason, but Beverly’s not gonna let a little thing like rules get in the way of helping people.

Beverly’s also doing a spot of modeling; she’s got a Badger secondary model that comes in the fact that she kind of holds the role of “everybody’s mom.” Beverly is a caring, nurturing, maternal figure not just to Wesley but to the rest of the crew as well. But it is a model; when the chips are down, Beverly’s first move is to Charge.

Captain Jean-Luc Picard

Captain Picard is a phenomenally eloquent man. He’s downright famous for his speeches about how humanity can be better than anyone gives them credit for, about standing firm to ideals in the face of adversity, about never hesitating to do the right thing. This shows that he’s put a lot of thought into his own moral system; I don’t think a Felt primary would feel comfortable putting so much thought into examining their morals just to articulate them better. Picard sees value in the systems of Starfleet and the ideals of what Starfleet is supposed to stand for, and his Bird primary has incorporated them into his own personal system of what is right and wrong.

Like Kirk, and indeed like all Captains, Picard has a solid Lion secondary model; a natural necessity of the job is the skill to make snap decisions and judgment calls in the moment, and he’s quite good at them. But he only uses that model when it’s absolutely necessary. Picard’s preferred method of problem-solving is to trust in his crew. When faced with a problem, Picard will call a meeting of the senior staff and possibly the odd relevant specialist like O’Brien, and ask for their input on the issue at hand. What we’re seeing there is a Badger secondary leaning on the strengths of his community.

I’ve every intention of doing the rest of the crew at a later date, but this post is already very long, and I want to do more research (read: watch more Star Trek) before I tackle the rest of them. So, to sum up:

Worf: Bird/Lion Data: Double Bird Dr. Pulaski: Badger/Lion Dr. Crusher: Badger/Lion (Badger secondary model) Picard: Bird/Badger (Lion secondary model)

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