Star Trek : The Next Generation faced a challenge so vast that the producers thought it insurmountable.
Captain Kirk, as Gene Roddenberry wrote him, was a warrior king. William Shatner played the role with such buccaneer spirit that it was hard to imagine any one man matching Captain Kirk.
And so The Next Generation initially split Kirk in two. A strapping Yankee first officer to play warrior. And a genteel English captain as king.
But within a few episodes it became clear that Patrick Stewart as Captain Picard was more than man enough to fill both uniforms.
On October 28th, aged 86, and 39 years after his first appearance as Captain Picard, Patrick Stewart died.
I have never felt the loss of an actor so deeply.
Sir Patrick Stewart was one of the all time great English actors. His roles in I, Claudius, Excalibur and as Gurney Halleck in Dune will always have cult status. His turn as Vladimir Lenin is one of my favourites. And there could be no greater Professor X.
But it is as Captain Jean-Luc Picard that Patrick Stewart will live on in the hearts of so many of us Trekkies.
The starship Captain is a truly mythic figure for our modern times.
Starfleet Captains wield power beyond any human who has ever lived. They could devastate worlds. But they choose instead to save them. They have near absolute authority, that they wield with humility.
Each Captain has given us a different ideal.
Kirk is the warrior king. Janeway the patrician queen. Sisko the reluctant prophet.
And Picard?
Like my entire generation of nerds, I grew up watching Captain Picard. Wednesday nights on BBC2. Then in the cinema. And many times over as I bought box sets then DVDs then streamed Next Generation.
We watched Captain Picard make not just one world a better place, but many worlds. Whether he needed to drill through the planetary crust or negotiate a treaty, Picard was our Captain.
We watched him treat Data, a collection of positronic circuits, with more humanity than most of humanity treats other humans. Never more so than in The Measure of a Man. And then watched the favour returned.
We watched Picard struggle with the cost of command. His distance from family. The isolation that comes with power, illustrated in Next Gen’s greatest episode, The Inner Light. And his…discomfort…with the kids.
And we watched Captain Picard fight against the Borg. From the first encounter in Q Who, to the battle at Wolf 359 and Picard’s “assimilation” into the collective in The Best of Both Worlds, and the defence of Earth’s past in First Contact, Picard struggled against the machine.
For his and our humanity.
Maybe I was a naive kid. Maybe I am still a naive adult. But I have never quite gotten over the injustice that Captain Picard is not a real starship captain. Or that the Enterprise is not coming to save us.
If Picard and the Enterprise-D did appear in orbit above us, I’m certain ship and crew would diagnose the root cause of our many problems. We seem to have given up on humanity, and are instead becoming the Borg. Picard would have a stern word or two for the current Captains of our ship.
Patrick Stewart was born into a working class family in Yorkshire, to a soldier father who came home from the war traumatised and violent. Stewart was a patron of Refuge and Combat Stress. He brought to Picard the edge of a man who is reluctant to use violence because he has seen what it does.
Picard filled both uniforms, warrior and king. But a warrior with the wisdom to know when not to fight…a philosopher.
Which made him the starship captain who best embodied the ideal of the philosopher king. Described by Plato as the leader who combines the power of kings with the wisdom of philosophers.
No true philosopher king has ever existed. The emperor Ashoka and Marcus Aurelius are two who came close…by the standards of ages past
Now we have a philosopher king for our age. Jean-Luc Picard.
We must not simply mourn Picard. We must learn from him. Our leaders will never be great or wise. Unless each of us can be a measure of both, and hold them to those high standards.
Sir Patrick Stewart as Jean-Luc Picard can
and must
live on in each of us.
As the Captain of Humanity.
