Captain Shaw’s Characterization Of Jack Crusher In Picard Season 3 Episode 2 Doesn’t Make Sense In The Franchise’s Timeline – Looper

In “Star Trek: Picard” Season 3, Episode 2, “Disengage,” Captain Liam Shaw (Todd Stashwick) discovers that Jack Crusher (Ed Speleers) has multiple aliases and warrants out for his arrest and insists on turning him over to Captain Vadic (Amanda Plummer). In the process, Shaw refers to Crusher as an “intergalactic fugitive.” That certainly makes him sound like a master criminal, but either Shaw or the writers made an important mistake with that phrase.

The Season 3 premiere of “Picard” establishes that we’re in the 25th century, so it can be pretty certain that humans haven’t suddenly started hopping between galaxies considering the immense difficulty the USS Discovery has when crossing the galactic barrier 700 years later, in the 32nd century. Admiral Charles Vance (Oded Fehr) says early on in the “Star Trek: Discovery” Season 4 episode that the Federation has never done this before, so it’s hardly possible that Crusher has been committing crimes in other galaxies that Starfleet is aware of. It’s more likely that Crusher is merely an interplanetary fugitive, or maybe even an inter-quadrant fugitive, but he could hardly be an intergalactic one.