What would Star Trek: The Next Generation be without Sir Patrick Stewart as Captain Jean-Luc Picard?
The prospect raises its head at the end of the series’ third season, when Commander Riker orders an attack on a Borg starship with his assimilated captain aboard. Riker’s command – “Fire” – remains one of television’s greatest cliffhangers. Why? Because there was a genuine sense of jeopardy; a sense that the future of TNG might be with the swashbuckling Captain Riker at the helm of the USS Enterprise-D, rather than the austere Captain Picard.
I’m generally in favour of these kinds of changes in long-running TV series. They shake up the status quo and force characters to grow in new and interesting ways. But for all that I would have enjoyed watching this alternate TNG, I can’t say I’m disappointed it never materialised.
Patrick Stewart’s superlative performance is the heart of the series. His Picard is strange and magnetic: a beguiling combination of gravitas and cold authority, titanic intellect and emotional withdrawal. He’s a diplomat, an arbitrator, a professional. He’s a boss you respect, admire and want to impress, but who stands aloof, just out of reach. Other characters might be more immediately compelling, but the enigmatic Jean-Luc Picard has incomparable depth.
In honour of Stewart, here are 10 episodes that showcase him at his best as Star Trek’s definitive captain.
Q Who is TNG’s best Q-centric episode. As the series progresses, the character becomes more benign: an irritating prankster rather than an outright villain. Here, though, he’s still at his malevolent best, sending the Enterprise-D hurtling across the galaxy and into its first confrontation with the Borg.
Why? He wants to show Picard how woefully unprepared Starfleet is for what lies ahead. There are forces in the universe that the captain cannot overcome through intellect or military might, and Q intends to introduce him to one.
This gives Stewart something interesting to work with: Picard’s arrogance. There’s an important caveat here: Picard isn’t arrogant, per se. But he does have a certain arrogance. He believes in absolutes, absolutely. He unshakeably believes in Starfleet’s moral and practical worldview. As he tells Q: “Your help is not required.” Q sets out to prove him wrong, and does so with drama and glee.
The episode depends on Stewart’s ability to portray Picard’s weaknesses as well as his strengths. His performance reaches its crescendo when the captain is forced to swallow his pride and plead with Q to save his ship.
Sarek: season 3, episode 23
In Sarek, Mark Lenard reprises his role as Spock’s father.
Lenard’s performance is extraordinary. The sight of him shedding a tear during a music recital is one of TNG’s most moving moments. But the episode is a true two-hander, revolving around his relationship with Picard: the parallels between these two restrained men, and the captain’s eventual agreement to take on Sarek’s emotional burden through a mind meld.
We watch Picard himself break down, sobbing, furious, completely unable to control his emotions. We’re so used to the captain’s composure that watching it collapse is shocking. Stewart delivers it masterfully.
Family: season 4, episode 2
The Best of Both Worlds is, technically, a two-part episode. But that’s not really true. Actually, it’s TNG’s only three-parter.
Picking up in the aftermath of Picard’s assimilation by the Borg, the episode sees him return to Earth to spend time with his brother, Robert, at their family vineyard. Here, we see him outside the familiar structures of Starfleet: not as a Starfleet captain, but as a normal person, with a normal family. And like any normal family, not everything’s easy. Picard and Robert have a difficult relationship. Robert resents his brother’s success, while Jean-Luc is jealous of the simplicity of Robert’s life and his family.
The two eventually reconcile as Picard begins to confront the guilt and shame he feels over what he was forced to do while assimilated. His vulnerability has such an impact because Stewart has done so much to establish his apparent invulnerability. It’s the contrast that makes the episode – and the performance – so memorable.
Captain Picard only has a secondary role to play in The Wounded, which, really, is an episode about Colm Meaney’s ever-reliable transporter chief, Miles O’Brien (Meaney, many are surprised to learn, has the second-most Star Trek credits to his name).
The episode introduces the Cardassians and reveals that O’Brien has a fraught history with them. It explores loyalty, trauma and unacknowledged prejudice. It’s a great episode, with a great performance from Meaney.
But its best scene comes at the end, when Picard makes it clear to the departing Cardassian commander that his commitment to peace should not be mistaken for naivety. He knows more than he has let on, and the Cardassians will be watched. Picard might be diplomatic, but he certainly doesn’t shy away from confrontation. He has a backbone of absolute steel. It’s a moment that reframes the episode, and Stewart’s understated delivery seals it.
The Drumhead: season 4, episode 21
The Drumhead sees the Enterprise-D embroiled in an investigation into suspected sabotage and conspiracy. There’s absolutely no action in the episode, directed brilliantly by Jonathan Frakes, and the tension is entirely rooted in character drama.
Frakes undoubtedly pulls the best from his co-star, and Stewart is brilliant as Picard throughout, frustrated and increasingly angry at the suspicion directed at him and his ship. This frustration reaches a boiling point in a courtroom interrogation. It’s a scene that cements this as one of Stewart’s finest performances, and one of TNG’s best episodes, full stop. Subjected to questioning himself, Picard delivers a speech on the dangers of prejudice and witch-hunts. It’s riveting, delivered with the precision of a dart hitting a bull’s-eye.
“The first time any man’s freedom is trodden on, we’re all damaged.”
Incredible work.
The Inner Light: season 5, episode 25
One of the quirks of this list is that these episodes aren’t entirely representative of Captain Picard. In a typical episode of TNG, he cuts an isolated, intimidating, authoritative figure. He’s restrained and calculating. These episodes give Stewart some of his best material by offering a contrast.
Case in point: The Inner Light. Often cited as one of the best Star Trek episodes of all time – and one of the finest 45 minutes of sci-fi television – it sees Picard rendered unconscious by an energy beam. For the rest of the crew, he’s out for 25 minutes. In his mind, he spends decades on another world, living another life as a man named Kamin. Waking from that experience is a defining moment for the character.
Stewart’s achievement is to make Kamin both recognisably Picard and a man in his own right. The captain’s familiar traits are still there, but we see them expressed across a life far removed from the Enterprise. It’s poignant and affecting: great science fiction, carried by the weight of Stewart’s performance.
Alongside Worf and Dr Crusher, Picard is assigned to a covert mission to infiltrate a Cardassian facility believed to be developing a metagenic weapon.
This is instantly notable, because it gives Stewart so much new material to work with. Firstly, it takes Picard off the Enterprise-D: away from the captain’s chair that he so effortlessly occupies. Secondly, it effectively turns him into a secret agent. Both of these changes are unnatural to Picard, and Stewart channels that unease perfectly.
But that’s all just the starter. The main course comes in the second half of this two-parter (the only TNG two-parter that stands on par with The Best of Both Worlds), which sees Picard captured and placed at the mercy of the Cardassian interrogator Gul Madred, played by Stewart’s fellow thespian David Warner. Madred subjects Picard to abhorrent abuse and torture, doing his best to strip away the captain’s dignity.
Stripped naked, powerless, he becomes a pitiable figure, completely vulnerable to another’s whims. Previously, whenever we’ve seen Picard in danger, he’s always met it with stoic steel. Watching that fray is genuinely distressing. Stewart’s depiction of Picard pushed to – and beyond – his limits is incredible. It’s one of the defining episodes of the Picard canon.
Tapestry: season 6, episode 15
What do you regret? All of us have our own answers. And while the stalwart Captain Picard might seem like a man so absolutely sure of himself that he lives without regret, that’s not true.
Picard is dying on an operating table, and Q – here in his increasingly benevolent form – offers him a chance to return to his youth and correct his regrets. What Picard comes to realise is that his regrets are central to who he is. Changing those decisions would mean pulling out a thread from the greater tapestry of his life.
There is a particular moment in Tapestry when Q shows Picard a version of his life had he made different decisions to the ones he now regrets. And in this parallel universe, rather than a Starfleet captain, Picard is instead an anonymous, inconsequential junior officer, “bereft of passion and imagination”. As Picard puts it: “That is not who I am.”
It’s not a treatise on living without regret, but more an invitation to acknowledge that we are who are we because of our mistakes. And if you’re not happy with your lot in life? You have the power to act.
Lessons: season 6, episode 19
Right from the off, Captain Picard had a slightly tortured, on-off relationship with his chief medical officer – and friend – Dr Beverly Crusher. But, ever the professional, Picard refused to engage with these feelings, setting them aside to be Picard the captain, rather than Picard the man.
But when a new science officer boards the ship – one who looks incredibly like Crusher, it has to be said – Picard’s instincts about his romantic boundaries are put to the test.
Over the course of the episode, we watch him fall for Lieutenant Commander Nella Daren, come to terms with his feelings for her, and then have to set them aside as he’s required to send her on a mission that risks her life: a reminder of why he had those boundaries in the first place.
It’s an important moment in the history of Picard: a justification for his emotional detachment from his crew, more than anything, but also a reminder that beneath the red Starfleet uniform is a man with a heart – albeit a mechanical one.
View Green Video on the source websiteAll Good Things...: season 7, episodes 25 and 26
After TNG ended with All Good Things… (one of the best TV finales of all time), Patrick Stewart would go on to reprise his role as the indomitable captain across four feature films and the sequel series, Star Trek: Picard.
But none of these (no, not even Star Trek: First Contact) ever felt quite the same. Partly, that’s because the character of Picard changed so much. On the big screen, Picard took on an energetic, aggressive action-hero role. The character changed, too, in the much-maligned Star Trek: Picard, becoming gushing and emotional. None of these are negative traits. But they felt incongruous with Picard: the character who had become so firmly established across nearly 180 episodes of television.
I don’t think the follow-ups’ failure to match their predecessor is necessarily anything to be ashamed of. All Good Things… is such a satisfying ending to both the series and Picard’s story that almost any sequel risks feeling superfluous. Where do you go after a perfect ending?
And make no mistake: it is a perfect ending, with Picard at its centre. TNG is an ensemble series, but it inevitably orbits its captain. The finale makes that literal narrative focus explicit, leaving him unstuck in time, slipping between his past, present and possible future.
The episode, and the series, ends with a poker game between the ship’s senior staff: a regular occurrence that Picard never joins, isolated from the rest of his crew. This time, he joins in. it’s understated: it’s not saccharine or mawkish. And it’s the perfect end to TNG – and the perfect goodbye to Patrick Stewart as Captain Picard.
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