What might humanity look like in 400 years’ time if we really do become wiser and more compassionate with each passing decade? The creators of Star Trek: The Next Generation clearly felt the answer closely resembled Patrick Stewart, who has died aged 86 after a short illness. Their decision may well have opened up an entirely new future for Gene Roddenberry’s enduring, resolutely utopian space saga.
Prior to the casting of the classically trained Yorkshireman in 1987, Star Trek was best known for the interplay between William Shatner’s charismatic, impulsive Captain Kirk and Leonard Nimoy’s drily logical Spock. Stewart brought something of both men to the captain’s chair as Jean-Luc Picard, combining analytical rigour with a depth of feeling his imposing formality could never quite conceal. The bald, cerebral Englishman was a bold choice to succeed Shatner’s swaggering Canadian alpha male – but his ability to bring quiet authority and conviction to even the most outlandish of scenes gave the Enterprise an entirely different centre of gravity.
Through seven seasons and four feature films, Stewart made audiences believe that the most interesting person in the room might also be the most thoughtful and humane. The difference between the two captains is perhaps best exemplified in the famous 1989 episode The Measure of a Man, in which Picard must defend the android Data against an overzealous Starfleet scientist’s attempts to dismantle him in the name of progress. Where Shatner might have chewed up all the available scenery before challenging the prosecution to a shirtless fistfight in a nearby space quarry, Stewart lets the legal arguments themselves become the drama.
His measured questions on the nature of sentience expose the enormity of what is being proposed, the gathering anger in his voice conveying a civilised man discovering how much barbarism still lurks within his supposedly enlightened society. Stewart also gave Star Trek an emotional scale to match the extravagance of its ideas. In the 1992 episode The Inner Light, an alien probe from a long-dead civilisation entrusts Picard with decades of another man’s existence so that it might live on in his memory.
He acquires a wife, children and a whole domestic life, even entering old age, before suddenly awakening aboard his ship to discover that only minutes have passed. The premise has something of Borges about it, an entire existence unfolding in a few minutes. Stewart makes us feel the weight of years that nobody else aboard the Enterprise has lived; he later called it his favourite episode.
It was perhaps inevitable that this blend of intellectual ambition and emotional intimacy didn’t always translate so effectively to the more bombastic world of the big screen, where Picard and his crew arrived in 1994 with the uneven Star Trek Generations. At times it was tempting to wonder if Stewart might have been better suited to the pre-blockbuster science fiction of the early 1970s, when Solaris and Silent Running could build entire worlds around questions of memory or conscience. The Star Trek films sometimes seemed uncertain about what to do with an actor who could make deliberation so compelling, handing him a phaser when unpicking a moral conundrum may have better suited his skills.
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