W hat 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. It didn’t help that the Picard-era movies were made on substantially lower budgets than many of their contemporary sci-fi rivals, and often really looked like it.
And yet, even here, there were victories that only Stewart could have pulled off. First Contact (1996) cast Picard as a Captain Ahab-style avenger pursuing the technological white whale known as the Borg, which had briefly assimilated him into its remorseless hive mind during the TV show. Few other actors could have taken their best-known character into such unfamiliar territory unscathed, but Stewart’s years performing Shakespeare had prepared him for men whose public authority conceals private torment. He understood how eloquence could give destructive passions the appearance of reason, and how frightening rage becomes when it erupts from someone we have spent years watching display formidable self-control. By disrupting the qualities that had made his Picard so reassuring, Stewart was able to show how profoundly the Borg had wounded him.
The final Next Generation-era movie was 2002’s poorly received Star Trek: Nemesis, by which time Stewart had found a new multiplex audience as Charles Xavier in 2000’s X-Men. Despite his continuing prominence in genre fare, he never returned for the rebooted film series that began with 2009’s JJ Abrams-directed Star Trek, which instead turned to Nimoy for its elder-statesman gravitas.
Television eventually welcomed him back in Star Trek: Picard, which ran for three seasons from 2020, reuniting him with his old Enterprise colleagues for its highly acclaimed final run. Once a gamble on Star Trek’s future, Stewart had become one of the great reasons to revisit its past. His success helped establish that the saga could flourish beyond its original cast, opening the way for the political intrigue of Deep Space Nine and the stranded explorers of Voyager. And his legacy is perhaps even more apparent today in the tonal confidence of Strange New Worlds , which shares The Next Generation’s willingness to move between moral inquiry, cosmic peril and outright whimsy.
As much as anyone, Stewart gave Roddenberry’s faith in progress a persuasive human form. If Star Trek was always about showing us how far humankind might travel in the next four centuries, he helped us believe we might actually have grown up by the time we got there.
