Movies - TV
The Star Trek Episode Gates McFadden Wishes She Could Do Differently
By COLLIER JENNINGS
In a 2021 interview, Gates McFadden (Dr. Beverly Crusher) talked about her feelings about a controversial "Star Trek: Next Generation" episode in Season 4, titled “The Host.” Crusher falls in love with the Trill mediator, Odan, who is secretly a symbiotic alien and suffers a fatal accident that leads him to leave his host body and bond with Commander William Riker.
Odan ends up finding a female Trill to be his permanent host, and they don’t end up in a relationship. McFadden admits that there wasn’t enough time to show Crusher processing the loss of someone she was getting close to, and then all of a sudden, their “parasite [goes] into another body. It could have been anybody's body [and] she doesn't know [if] she's going to be attracted to that person."
McFadden also mentioned how when an actor gets a script, there’s not much they can change but wishes the audience could’ve seen everything the character had to mentally and emotionally process. Since the show aired before genre shows embraced multi-episode story arcs, there was only so much that McFadden could show in a single episode.