Patrick Stewart and the Pleasures of Fandom

For readers steeped deeply in National Review Online lore it must feel odd not to see notice on the Corner of the passing of Patrick Stewart, most famous for portraying Captain Jean-Luc Picard on Star Trek: The Next Generation and in subsequent films and series. More properly, it must feel odd not to have notice of Stewart’s passing followed almost immediately by an admonishment by a certain someone not to write about Star Trek in the Corner.

I’ll ask forgiveness rather than permission for breaking the no–Star Trek rule just to say that I’ve been awash in appreciation and not a little nostalgia for my youth in watching clips of Stewart in Trek, or in Marvel films, or in David Lynch’s Dune, or as compellingly menacing villains with bad American accents in movies like Conspiracy Theory and Green Room; or as MacBeth or Othello(!) or in any number of other productions of the Royal Shakespeare Company.

Stewart’s “Tomorrow” soliloquy in a modernized film production of MacBeth is to my mind only surpassed by his buddy Ian McKellen’s. The trick with Shakespeare seems to be that you can either do the text poetic justice or dramatic justice but not both at the same time. Stewart and McKellen come close; there’s no mistake these are trained thespians who know the orthodox methods, but both still manage to give the speech life and relevance and pathos.

Oh, but back to Star Trek. Stewart’s passing has got me thinking about the pleasures of fandom. It gets a bad rap these days, and for extremely good reasons. Fan culture has become the province of a bunch of emotionally stunted, purple-haired weirdos bathing in a mix of wokeism and sociopathy that makes everything it touches toxic. Sci-fi, fantasy, and relatedly pulpy genres get the worst of it, as the infinite varieties of their worlds appeal to the neurodivergence and meticulous compulsions of the worst people you meet at conventions, and those worlds’ susceptibility to allegory and utopian thinking invite people with the most fanciful politics. Star Trek in particular has veered in recent decades into sloppy, treacly juvenilia that somehow manages to be both irony-drenched and overly earnest, and the last few series have been so legitimately bad that for the first time in almost 60 years there isn’t a single piece of Trek content in production.

But it wasn’t always so. I don’t think so, anyway. I’ve got to reserve the possibility that the Trek stuff I loved as a kid was just as bad as the new stuff, but that I was too young and naïve to realize it. Allowances have to be made for that sort of thing — for the fact that lightsaber and phaser stuff isn’t about middled-aged tastes but young ones, and if you didn’t like the last Star Wars or Star Trek production that maybe that’s because it wasn’t made for you.

In any event, the great pleasure of fandom is dramatic context; the way a single moment or plot development can be invested with everything you know about everyone in it, and what comes before or after it. The thing that makes even mediocre serialized pulp like a great work of literature is that you’ve gotten to sit with these characters and so your despair and delight when they do something inevitable or unexpected is felt more acutely.

That’s why to me the greatest Stewart moment in Trek comes from 1996’s First Contact film. All you need to know is that Captain Picard is resisting the idea of scuttling his ship to avoid its capture by an extremely powerful and malevolent alien species called the Borg, and he’s confronted by his tactical officer, Worf, who disagrees with his proposed course of action.

Except, that’s not all you need to know at all. You need to know the sort of character Picard is. You need to know how insanely out of character it is for him to casually order men to their deaths in a hopeless rearguard action. You need to know how insane it is that Picard is in favor of a more bellicose course of action than Worf is. You need to know how much Picard hates the Borg, and why he hates them, and you need to know how much of an off-the-top-rope elbow-drop Picard calling Worf a coward is.

And if you know all that, then watching Worf get up in Picard’s face and snarl, “If you were any other man, I would kill you where you stand!” only to have Picard unflinchingly bark back, “Get off my bridge!” hits you like a ton of bricks. It might seriously be my favorite exchange in any film, including all the froofy ones and the ones with subtitles and Criterion Collection releases. Because it pays off having watched a hundred-some-odd hours of these characters (and, I’ll admit, plenty of comic books and trade paperbacks featuring them, too).

I don’t have the time to invest in any work of fiction, high or low, that requires that much commitment these days. But I sure as hell did when I was ten years old, and that means that even when I’m 60, this scene will give me a goose bump or two.

R.I.P.