The death of Patrick Stewart last week generated an outpouring of grief for one of the greatest actors of our time.
Amid the mourning, there has been another lamentation, for Stewart’s most famous character, Captain Jean-Luc Picard, the commander of the U.S.S. Enterprise on the television series Star Trek: The Next Generation.
TNG, which aired from 1987 to 1994, offered a vision of sincere optimism and hope that today is often met with outright hostility. Picard is an avatar of classic liberalism. He is a champion of egalitarianism, tolerance, and (dare one say it?) diversity.
It was Stewart’s portrayal of Picard that imprinted a vision of enlightened leadership on generations of fans around the world — an ideal that is disappearing from American political life.
Compare Picard with the grubby politicians of our time, with their venal passions, petty tyrannies, and endless narcissism. Contrast the captain who never mistook violence for strength nor diplomacy for weakness with the bloodthirsty xenophobes who lead us today. Consider a cultured man of endless humility against the anti-intellectual poseurs and swaggering demagogues who dominate contemporary discourse.
Does America today offer leaders who compare favorably with the ideal manifested in Picard?
In “The Drumhead,” an episode of TNG that aired in 1991, an apparent act of sabotage aboard the Enterprise prompts an investigation. As suspicions of a traitor among the crew run rampant, an innocent officer whose racial ancestry singles him out becomes chief suspect. He is persecuted by investigators who use extraordinary powers to turn their inquiry into a paranoid witch hunt.
Picard is alert to the danger from the start. Rather than indulging investigators or capitalizing on the crisis for career advancement, he risks his professional reputation and freedom to stand against prosecutorial overreach, outraged at the idea that individual liberty must be sacrificed on the altar of national security.
“With the first link, the chain is forged. The first speech censured, the first thought forbidden, the first freedom denied — chains us all irrevocably,” he tells the chief investigator.
Patrick Stewart the actor did not create the lead character of Star Trek: The Next Generation, who is the brainchild of the series creator, Gene Roddenberry. Dozens of writers and producers labored for years to craft Picard into an icon.
Roddenberry’s earlier creation, Captain James T. Kirk, is the embodiment of Kennedy-era astronautical derring-do. The first Star Trek had the swashbuckling sensibility of midcentury adventure novels and 1950s Westerns, and Kirk is Gunsmoke’s Marshal Matt Dillon and C.S. Forester’s Horatio Hornblower, as much as he is John Glenn or Neil Armstrong.
But Picard is different. Although conceived in the 1980s, he isn’t a simple product of the Reagan-era late Cold War. He is a timeless Renaissance man cut from an eternal mold, an epic commander and statesman.
The idea of Picard is ridiculous: a valiant 24th-century Frenchman possessing a taste for Earl Grey tea, the sonorous accent and manners of a perfect English gentleman, and the can-do pragmatism of a Yankee engineer. All at once, he possesses the self-assuredness of De Gaulle, the rhetorical flair of Churchill, and the administrative skill of Eisenhower — free of the historical baggage and pedestrian political compromises that defined each in reality.
Picard is the embodiment of Enlightenment ideals, a Transatlantic hero so noble and fantastical that such a man can only exist on paper.
And yet.
Patrick Stewart made Jean-Luc Picard real.
Somehow he pulled this great captain out of the ether, as if plucking a star from the firmament of heaven and bringing it to life, to live amongst us earthbound. Who else could summon such a creation into being through sheer art? It is the performance that makes Picard.
The Star Trek universe has always been enthralled by Shakespeare, and it was the Shakespearean actor Stewart who returned the favor, bringing the Bard’s works to life throughout the series he led. Plays-within-plays lay scattered across The Next Generation’s seven-year run, and one never knew when they’d encounter Prince Hal or Prospero on the Enterprise’s holodeck — let alone Sherlock Holmes or Mark Twain.
Stewart made it convincing for a military technocrat to recite long passages of literature from memory, whether Shakespeare’s sonnets, the “Epic of Gilgamesh,” or Moby-Dick. Picard was interested in archaeology and history, in art and music. He could play a flute as adeptly as wield a phaser. The literature and the learning were central to the character — and to his leadership.
The captain of the Enterprise is a warrior poet. He is a statesman, a scientist, and a practical philosopher of formidable intellect and fierce passion. Picard commands men in battle with courage, defends their rights with acuity, and pacifies them with reason. He is a man of physical courage and boundless curiosity, of infinite compassion and deep learning — and he will never back down from a fight when it matters.
Moral conundrums are as central to TNG’s plots as any prosthetic-foreheaded aliens, action sequences, or space battles. Most episodes feature an intractable dilemma that requires much rhetorical debate before the protagonists arrive, some 40 minutes later, at a satisfactory conclusion.
That a broadcast television space opera was often formulaic is immaterial. It wasn’t the action or the special effects, but the ethical and moral debates that set the show apart, the running trial of high ideas and principles. And in that trial, Picard would take the role of prosecution or defense, as warranted. But win or lose, he was ever the Platonic philosopher-king, seeking virtue and justice for the betterment of all.
To Picard, duty and principle outweigh personal interests. Authority carries with it obligations. While it is noble to commit oneself to larger-than-life institutions and the greater good, sometimes bureaucracy gets it wrong and hierarchies must be challenged. Picard scorns tyrants. While rank and discipline matter, the chain of command never trumps right action. And always must the individual be protected from arbitrary abuses of power.
Because on Picard’s ship, everyone matters — or no one does.
In an interview in 1991, after the fall of the Berlin Wall and shortly before the collapse of the Soviet Union, Roddenberry described what was distinct about Picard over the earlier Kirk. Picard was the product of a civilization that had matured not just technologically, but morally, Roddenberry said. He was intended to be the paragon of what humanity could become.
Stewart’s accomplishment was making that paragon human. His acting was the reason Americans sat, week after week, watching a series of morality plays featuring a bald, middle-aged, cerebral European in a space opera.
If one considers the grim and bloody chapter of the 20th century that was drawing to a close in the late 1980s through the early Nineties when TNG aired, it isn’t surprising that a show espousing optimism, and a character defined by enlightened leadership, became such a sensation.
My grandparents, who grew up in Depression-era Dust Bowl Kansas, loved Star Trek: The Next Generation, watching each new episode as it was broadcast on Sunday night. They died around the same time the show completed its original run, long before I ever considered questioning them about it.
But it’s easy to imagine the show’s steady idealism resonated, that they saw in Picard a reflection of their own values. There was a time in America when people aspired to be like Stewart’s character: intelligent, cultured, and self-reliant; a time when Americans thought public servants should be restrained, considerate, and wise.
At the end of the Cold War, it was easy to believe that humanity had overcome some of its greatest challenges, that history is an endless upward trajectory of progress and improvement.
TNG’s United Federation of Planets is Pax Americana, a noble alliance of willing participants all shouldering their share of the burden in a quest for greater prosperity and a better life. Starfleet is collective security in space, a disparate group of alien peoples all bound together by shared values, willing to stand firm against threats to peace and liberty.
It’s become quite difficult to believe in such things now.
Perhaps all of it was always an illusion. Perhaps the post-World War II order the United States helped build is, and always was, no more real than the imagined universe of a science-fiction show. No more real than the words enshrined in America’s founding documents: “All men are created equal.”
Many argue that all high-minded ideals are a utopian pipe-dream, that in the real world, might makes right and power is acquired through blood and conquest.
TNG, for all that it was often just a silly sci-fi show, was a dream of a brighter future. It was a fantasy of humanity living its most meaningful existence.
If you want to tear it down, you must reckon with Captain Picard, a fictional character who lives on in the minds of millions because of Patrick Stewart.
In one of TNG’s most powerful episodes, “Darmok,” an alien captain sacrifices his life fighting alongside Picard against a great beast, trying to establish understanding despite his race speaking only in unintelligible allegories. As his counterpart lays dying, Picard relates to him the ancient Sumerian tale of Enkidu’s death, quoting King Gilgamesh as he mourns his friend’s passing.
“He who was my companion, through adventure and hardship, is gone forever.”
Captain Picard may be gone, but his legacy remains. Among the many heartfelt tributes being shared in the wake of Stewart’s passing, one fan summed it up simply.
“If ever you don’t know what the right thing to do is, just do what Captain Picard would do.”