Who would have predicted a fictional bald Frenchman with an English accent would be an intergenerational model of living well?
There is a particular kind of immortality to television reruns.
Actors age and story lines end. But on dusty VHS tapes and streaming back catalogs, Captain Picard remains at his post.
Star Trek is a mass intergenerational inheritance. My earliest acts of “intellectual debate” were arguments over Enterprise captains, conducted with friends recruited into the franchise by comic shops and evangelizing relatives. Some of those relatives had once felt obliged to conceal their nerdy enthusiasm. Their kids proved receptive targets.
Sir Patrick Stewart’s Captain Jean-Luc Picard was my perpetual champion in these arguments. Captain Kirk walked so Picard could run, despite whatever William Shatner may want you to think. Stewart and the Next Generation team ushered in what I’ll happily defend as Trek’s golden age.
Whether verbally sparring with the omnipotent Q over the fate of humanity or mediating the everyday drama of a starship, Picard commanded with extraordinary gravitas.
Someone had to make deliberations about the fate of a civilization sound credible while surrounded by people wearing prosthetic foreheads. Stewart could. More than that, he made the deliberation itself worth watching.
Stewart brought an older tradition of great men and their stories aboard the Enterprise. In Star Trek: Nemesis, Picard says, “And like a thousand other commanders on a thousand other battlefields, I wait for the dawn.” The starship captain belongs, for a moment, to a recognizable human history: a commander waiting to discover what his judgment will cost him and the people entrusted to him. Viewers came for the aliens and found themselves contemplating command, duty, and honor. The aliens remained a considerable attraction.
For a young viewer, that was a gift. Amid some honestly heinous attempts at futuristic costuming stood a captain who took courage, literature, and the obligations of command seriously. Stewart made restraint, eloquence, leadership, and responsibility worth admiring through the approachable absurdities of serialized science fiction.
Picard was my first picture of what it meant to be a properly understood humanist: to cultivate the mind, seek truth, and recognize obligations to others. Those were substantial things to inherit from a television show. Relatives passing along their enthusiasm for aliens and galactic political drama had inadvertently given us a bald Frenchman with an English accent as a model of moral and intellectual seriousness. That it worked is a testament to Stewart’s height of craft.
Eventually, however, the illusion of television falters. A passing headline announces that Sir Patrick Stewart has died — or, in my case, every friend assumes the duties of Paul Revere and texts at once — and the familiar business of watching an old episode feels different. Picard remains at his post. The man who put him there is gone, though.
Reruns preserve the performance that actors cannot give forever. Those who love the stories and art pass along the reasons they mattered. Somewhere, even now, an evangelizing relative is introducing a new viewer to Captain Picard.
I have no doubt, even now, that those new viewers will encounter the same lessons and gifts that Stewart brought to the screen. They’re worth passing down still.