Star Trek: 10 Things You Didn't Know About Beverly Crusher

She's the doctor without (space) borders with two sons who also like to travel, former CMO of the flagship, now head of Starfleet Medical. There might have been a running gag about how many patients died on her table in season one of Star Trek: The Next Generation, but Doctor Crusher was and is a skilled and compassionate physician to whom many owe their lives. Going above and beyond in her duty of care, Doctor Crusher also provided a much needed moral counterweight on matters such as the all-too-stringently applied Prime Directive.

Until very recently, it is true, Doctor Crusher wasn't really given the chance to shine in her own right. Whilst there are plenty of brilliant Beverly moments in The Next Generation (Descent, Remember Me, and Suspicions come to mind), the character was still often weighed down by writing that veered into sexist trope (especially in season one), or, in the films, simply not written for much at all. Then, of course, there's what happened with season two. Her turn in Star Trek: Picard was a triumph, however — opening, and effectively closing, the show with a command performance throughout.

So, never mind the 'boogers' (we'll pretend that never happened). Get the hyposprays out and the tap shoes on! It's time we found out a bit more about Starfleet's most famous 'dancing doctor'.

Gates McFadden and her Star Trek counterpart are two of the finest reasons to dismiss that old George Bernard Shaw binarism — "Those who can, do; those who can't, teach" — as the bunch of bull it is. McFadden has forged a supremely successful career out of doing both supremely well, and Beverly Crusher is doctor, surgeon, teacher, mother, researcher, head of Starfleet Medical, take your pick!

At the very beginning of the creation process for Star Trek: The Next Generation, Beverly Crusher was, in fact, the ship's schoolteacher. As cited in The Fifty Year Mission: The Next 25 Years: From the Next Generation to J.J. Abrams, it was story editor/creative consultant David Gerrold who suggested otherwise: "We don't have a ship's doctor yet, why don't we have Beverly Crusher be the ship's doctor?" Others were hesitant, "And then Gene started discussing it. By lunch, Beverly Crusher was the ship's doctor".

Doctor Crusher herself taught acting and was a playwright and producer, but before becoming Beverly, Gates McFadden had already spent several years as a theatre teacher in higher education at George Washington University, the University of Pittsburgh, and Harvard! She also continued to teach at several different universities (including her alma mater Brandeis) after The Next Generation had finished. McFadden is an accomplished theatre director and was artistic director of Ensemble Studio Theatre in Los Angeles for five years.