Proximity, Yearning, and Professional Distance
Plot Beats
The narrative micro-steps within this event
Phillipa abandons the desk, closes physical space, and delivers a charged line—her body yearning while her tone remains flippant—Picard stiffens, reads personal history, and begins to leave; Phillipa backpedals, awkwardly admitting she’s glad he came, exposing a private tether beneath the legal talk.
Picard names trust as too painful, shutting down the intimacy with a guarded, wounded cipher; Phillipa answers with a quiet wish that things were different, leaving the personal wound exposed as they return to duty and law.
Who Was There
Characters present in this moment
Distant; characterized through others' suspicion and anxiety rather than direct action.
Maddox is absent but invoked by Picard as the agent who will control Data; his presence is a rhetorical antagonist motivating Picard's mistrust and urgency.
- • (Inferred) To conduct authorized research on Data's positronic brain.
- • (Inferred) To exercise technical control over transferred personnel as allowed by orders.
- • Procedural authority permits him to carry out technical protocols.
- • Scientific inquiry justifies invasive examination (as implied by the controversy).
Measured and slightly teasing outwardly, but inwardly wistful and conflicted—her movement betrays unresolved affection and regret.
Phillipa receives Picard with composed professionalism, answers legal questions bluntly, then moves around her desk and physically closes the gap with a flirtatious, wistful closeness that converts the exchange into an intimate, emotionally charged moment.
- • Provide Picard with an honest appraisal of legal options.
- • Signal personal compassion and perhaps reopen an emotional connection with Picard.
- • Remind Picard of institutional realities while softening their personal history.
- • Duty and procedure constrain what she can legally and officially do.
- • There is a private, unresolved personal history with Picard that colors professional interactions.
- • Emotional honesty can complicate but also humanize bureaucratic exchange.
Urgent and principled on the surface; privately vulnerable and defensive—he masks personal hurt with procedural rhetoric and flinches when intimacy threatens exposure.
Picard initiates the meeting with urgent, procedural language, pleads for legal avenues to prevent Data's transfer, paces, then physically recoils when Phillipa closes the distance, admitting emotional pain rather than continuing the legalistic argument.
- • Find a legal mechanism to block or impede Data's transfer.
- • Protect Data from being subjected to Maddox's dangerous procedure.
- • Avoid letting personal feelings compromise his advocacy or decision-making.
- • The law/procedure should be used to protect the rights of those under his command.
- • Maddox cannot be trusted with Data's safety and autonomy.
- • Personal attachments make him vulnerable and may cloud his judgment.
Implied endangered/threatened in others' discourse; the speakers project concern and protective urgency onto him.
Data is discussed as the object of Picard's plea—his transfer and impending procedure drive the conversation, and his fate is the immediate moral stake though he is physically absent from the room.
- • Remain unharmed and retain autonomy (as argued by Picard).
- • Avoid being reduced to 'machine' in legal terms.
- • Those who care for him believe he deserves rights and protections.
- • His personhood is contested within Starfleet legal structures.
Objects Involved
Significant items in this scene
Picard and Phillipa use the Captain's-ready-room-like desk as a physical marker of professional distance. Phillipa rises and comes around the desk to close space; the desk functions as both barrier and threshold that is breached when the conversation turns intimate.
The Maddox Data Disassembly Procedure is invoked verbally as the dangerous, stepwise protocol threatening Data's integrity; it functions narratively as the procedural hammer that forces Picard to seek legal relief and sets the emotional stakes of the dialogue.
Location Details
Places and their significance in this event
Sector Twenty-Three's JAG office provides the institutional frame: a restrained, procedural environment where legal realities are spelled out and private histories briefly intrude. The office constrains Picard's appeals with cold legality while also serving as the arena for a vulnerable personal confrontation.
Narrative Connections
How this event relates to others in the story
No narrative connections mapped yet
This event is currently isolated in the narrative graph
Key Dialogue
"PICARD: I need your help."
"PHILLIPA: He can refuse to undergo this procedure, but we can't stop the transfer."
"PICARD: Trust is too painful a word."
"PHILLIPA: I wish things were different for us."