The Return of Picard: A Warning from Star Trek History

You can’t really be a Star Trek fan if you didn’t feel a fleeting moment of elation, something like orgasm, at the news delivered by Patrick Stewart in Las Vegas on Saturday August 4th, that he would be returning to the role of Jean-Luc Picard after an 18-year absence.

However, your fan credentials are also contingent on feeling a profound and deep sense of trepidation. For many people this isn’t just an actor returning to a role, it’s the return of a lost father figure. As I was grown in a lab, my daily routine consisting of accelerated growth shakes and TNG episodes in the TV room, I had no strong male role models to respect and learn from. That’s where Captain Picard came in. Strength, he taught me, wasn’t about imbecilic acts of masculine aggression (more on which later) and posturing, rather liberal enlightenment values, intellectual curiosity, rationalism. I didn’t practice any of this you understand, but I innately understood it to be the most desirable constitution one could possess.

Picard embodied these values. He was more than just the personification of Star Trek’s optimistic future, but also a cultural touchstone for the prevailing consensus of the age; the sum-total of Western values up to that point. He was the arc of history stretching just a little further into the future. Today, Picard seems like a character from the distant past rather than the twenty-fourth century. We can no longer count on any kind of consensus about the principles he represents, nor the type of diplomacy he offers, nor his ethical treatment of others. As reactionary forces sweep the world, the politics of self-interest and alienation (re)asserting themselves, the return of Picard promises to be a tonic, not to mention an outlier in a TV landscape populated by dark, morally ambiguous characters – byproducts of the troubled zeitgeist.

Trekkies are optimists, they know people can be inspired to do better, be better – so Stewart bounding onto a Vegas stage, his arms outstretched like a hope preacher (though the religious comparison is inappropriate, for Gene Roddenberry envisioned us growing out of such things) was a promise to broken people; folk who’ve been starved of reassuring content for decades and still are, thanks to Star Trek: Discovery.

What you make of Stewart’s announcement in Las Vegas will depend on whether you believe the man’s had time to reflect on the character’s legacy and the body of work he headlined between 1987 and 1994, reaching the right conclusions. Trekkies with long memories will know that not even Stewart himself could be counted on to understand the central appeal of his character back when. One could argue that Stewart was unlucky, not having the same amount of time that his predecessor William Shatner did, to reflect on his character’s contribution to popular culture, and in so doing build a degree of reverence for what said character was thought to represent. Stewart went straight from filming his TV series to making his movies, and what’s clear with hindsight is that nobody, including Stewart, thought The Next Generation’s cerebral approach to storytelling would play on the big screen.

On TV, Stewart was content to play Picard as Roddenberry conceived him, statesmanlike and diplomatic. This held for Star Trek: Generations, despite the depressing spectre of a third act fist fight (and the unforgivable destruction of Picard’s family for the sake of that laziest of plot points – the hero and villain having something in common/being flip sides of the same space coin). But it’s clear that in the movies that followed between 1996 and 2002, Stewart, now enjoying a degree of creative autonomy and power as an executive producer with story input, sought to change a character that bored him, into something that better suited his big screen ambitions. Thoughtful, peace-loving Picard was out; impulsive, combative, insubordinate action man Picard was in. Stewart, it should be noted, will be a producer on the new series.

This imposter smashed model ship cabinets, phasered crewmen, disobeyed orders, sent his ship on a Kamikaze suicide run into the enemy’s prow, and spouted action movie clichés. In short, to appeal to a general audience, who cared not a jot about the character and didn’t buy tickets, and to meet the demands of Stewart’s ego, one of the greatest characters in TV fiction was comprehensively, but perhaps not irreversibly, ruined.

Trekkies are romantics; they like to remember the television series and not those terrible, schlocky movies. They’ve long forgiven Patrick Stewart for this act of cultural vandalism, the desecration of Gene Roddenberry’s greatest creation. Stewart wasn’t alone of course, Brent Spiner, the actor who played the android Data on the show, was also guilty of adding testosterone to his characterization and lowering its IQ in a bid to break free of the twin shackles of intellect and curiosity that cut through to so many millions. This myopia extended to another members of the cast. Marina Sirtis, who played Troi, cites her character getting drunk in Star Trek: First Contact as her favourite all-time Deanna moment. Actors not taking their characters or indeed their responsibility to the audience seriously, matters. It inevitably manifests itself in the material.

When Trekkies think of Picard and Data they don’t think of those big screen aberrations, with their nonsensical plotting and casual disdain for what came before, rather what came before. This is why the return of Picard is a huge risk both for Patrick Stewart and fans alike. If Stewart gets Picard wrong this time, it will be on the far less forgiving stage of television. Stewart’s giving himself an opportunity to atone for those terrible movies, restoring a little prestige and dignity to the character he once embodied. It’s a second chance. There won’t be a third.

So the big question is, can we trust Stewart to deliver Captain Picard as we remember, that is, in essence, not necessarily in rank or deed? Stewart was careful to say in Las Vegas that this might not be the Picard of old. Hopefully, here he was alluding to the fact that any series set twenty years after The Next Generation will inevitably have a different setting, dynamic, a new set of supporting characters, and therefore will take the character in a fresh and hopefully interesting direction.

Trekkies must pray that what Stewart doesn’t mean is that he intends to play the character differently, that is to say, with some of the idiocy we witnessed on the big screen. After all, fans who’ve done their homework will know that it was Stewart that wanted Picard to have a greater action hero role in those movies. Anyone who’s read Michael Piller’s account of the making of Star Trek: Insurrection, will have noted Stewart’s insistence that the character move beyond the diplomacy that characterised his time aboard the Enterprise D, as if that fundamental character trait was old hat.

In other words, back then Stewart was bored of being the thoughtful and intelligent Captain Picard, and favoured something closer to a caricature – a man who liked off road driving and machine gunning the enemy. Stewart tells us he’s watched all of Star Trek: The Next Generation in order to prepare for his reprise. We must hope that he has rediscovered the character’s central appeal, his purpose, and is minded to play him accordingly. The Captain Picard we know and love respected authority, revered the federation constitution, and believed in Starfleet values and their ability to bring moderation and justice to the galaxy. Playing Captain Picard any other way, in an era when that kind of thoughtful and temperate attitude to social and political affairs is under threat as never before, would not only be irresponsible, but an absolute betrayal of Gene Roddenberry’s legacy.

If a new series is to succeed, and to be an honourable sequel to Star Trek: The Next Generation, it must be written by people who respect it, and have the ability to write with the kind of natural intelligence it brought to audiences. A portent of doom is the show being produced by Star Trek: Discovery’s Alex Kurtzman, the man also responsible for the idiotic Kirk reboot movies. Kurtzman may be a fan of Star Trek, but he has shown none of the thoughtfulness of those that worked on the franchise in the ’80s and ’90s. Therefore, the hope must be that the search is now on for scribes whose creative load up is to this monumental task.

Time enough has passed for The Next Generation’s place in popular culture to become cemented and the appeal of its very best episodes to be understood. Consequently, anyone signing up to write this TV sequel can have no excuses. After the debacle that was Star Trek: Nemesis, Captain Picard’s story deserves to be ended in a way that dignifies both the character and the television series he led. Whether the creative team working on the project are capable of delivering on that almighty expectation only time will tell. What’s certain, is that if those responsible get it wrong, the damage to the franchise overall will be considerable, and perhaps this time, irreversible.