When Star Trek: The Next Generation (Amazon affiliate link) premiered on September 28, 1987, it faced what looked like an impossible assignment. Star Trek had been off television for nearly twenty years, kept alive by reruns, conventions, and four feature films. Now Paramount was launching a new crew, a new Enterprise, and a new captain — and doing it without a network, selling the show directly into syndication. The whole gamble depended on audiences accepting a stranger in the captain's chair. The man chosen for that chair was, by almost every conventional measure, the wrong choice.
The casting fight
Gene Roddenberry's original conception of the new captain owed a great deal to C. S. Forester's Horatio Hornblower, the literary seaman Roddenberry admired: a virile, youthful, swashbuckling Frenchman. Patrick Stewart was none of those things. He was 47, bald, English, and a Royal Shakespeare Company veteran virtually unknown to American television audiences.
The casting happened almost by accident. In 1986, producer Robert Justman — a veteran of the original series — saw Stewart give a Shakespeare reading at UCLA and decided he had found the captain. He pressed the case to Roddenberry, who would not have it. After their first meeting, Roddenberry reportedly told Justman flatly, "I won't have him."
Justman persisted, joined by producer Rick Berman and the casting team, and Roddenberry eventually relented — with a condition. Stewart would wear a wig for his audition. Stewart had his old audition hairpiece flown from London to Los Angeles for the occasion, and wore it through the screen test. The performance won the room; the hairpiece did not. The story goes that when a studio executive questioned whether a bald man could plausibly command a starship in a century when anything was medically possible, Roddenberry answered with the line that settled the matter: "In the 24th century, no one will care."
Stewart was not the only name in contention. A Paramount memo dated April 13, 1987, listing the finalists for the major roles, had Stewart as the top choice for Picard, with Mitch Ryan, Roy Thinnes, Patrick Bauchau, and Yaphet Kotto also under consideration. But it was Stewart who got the part, signing a six-year contract while privately assuming the show would not last. As he later recalled, people told him he would be lucky to make it through the first season.
The response: skepticism, then conversion
The skepticism was real and public. The Washington Post's Tom Shales dismissed Picard as "a grim bald crank who would make a better villain," and early fan reaction on the bulletin boards of the day was no kinder — a new crew with a bald English captain with a French name, a Klingon on the bridge, and a blind man at the helm struck many as a betrayal of the original. Jonathan Frakes, who played first officer William Riker, later summed up the mood honestly: "Audiences were not ready for a bald English captain with a French name."
The turnaround was gradual, then decisive. The first two seasons were uneven, but by the third the show found its voice, and Stewart's performance was at the center of it. Fans who had grumbled about Kirk's successor began arguing that Picard might be the better captain — not a replacement Kirk, but a different kind of captain altogether. By 1992, TV Guide had named Stewart the sexiest man on television, a punchline that would have been unthinkable five years earlier. The Next Generation ran for seven seasons and 178 episodes, from 1987 to 1994, and Stewart carried the role into four feature films, ending with Star Trek: Nemesis in 2002.
A fictional biography: Jean-Luc Picard
Within the fiction, Jean-Luc Picard was born on July 13, 2305, in the village of La Barre, France, the younger son of Maurice and Yvette Picard. His older brother Robert stayed to run the family vineyard; Jean-Luc left for the stars, and the tension between the rooted, traditional Picard family and the restless younger son would shadow him for decades.
He entered Starfleet Academy in 2323 and graduated in 2327, the first freshman ever to win the Academy marathon. His early career nearly ended before it began when, fresh out of the Academy, he was stabbed through the heart by a Nausicaan in a bar fight — an injury that left him with an artificial heart and a lifelong lesson in his own fallibility, one he would revisit in the episode "Tapestry."
He served aboard the Stargazer, taking command in 2333 after the ship's captain was killed, and held that command for twenty-two years. At the Battle of Maxia in 2355, facing a Ferengi vessel, he invented the maneuver that bears his name — a warp jump that made the Stargazer appear in two places at once — and destroyed his opponent, but lost his ship in the process. He was court-martialed and acquitted, and the experience left him a captain without a ship for nine years.
In 2364, Starfleet gave him the newest Enterprise, the Galaxy-class flagship, and the command that defined him. Over seven years he became the Federation's diplomat of first resort: negotiating with the Romulans, making first contact, defending the rights of artificial life in "The Measure of a Man," and enduring the defining trauma of his life when the Borg assimilated him in 2366, turning him into Locutus and using him as the instrument of the massacre at Wolf 359. He was rescued, but the guilt and trauma of Locutus never fully left him — it became the wound at the center of the character, explored again and again across the films and, decades later, in Star Trek: Picard.
His tastes were as distinctive as his command style: Earl Grey tea, hot; Shakespeare; archaeology; the Dixon Hill detective stories on the holodeck; and the haunting flute melody of a life he lived in "The Inner Light," when an alien probe gave him forty years as another man in a single afternoon. He lost his brother Robert and nephew René in a fire in 2371, a grief that stripped away his last illusions about the safety of home. He commanded the Enterprise-E from 2372, faced the Borg again in First Contact, and ended his film career confronting a clone of himself, Shinzon, in Nemesis.
The long impact of Stewart's portrayal
Stewart's Picard changed what a starship captain could be. Kirk had been the action hero, the man of instinct and fists. Picard was the man of deliberation: a captain who solved problems by talking, by quoting law and literature, by insisting on the dignity of adversaries and artificial beings alike. That model — the captain as diplomat and moral philosopher — reshaped not only Star Trek but the broader idea of heroic leadership on television. The later captains of the franchise, from Sisko to Janeway, owe something to the permission Picard gave the chair to be thoughtful rather than merely daring.
The performance also changed Stewart's own life and career. A classical stage actor who took the job expecting a quick failure became a global icon, and he carried Picard with him for nearly forty years — returning in 2020 for Star Trek: Picard, which ran three seasons and closed the character's story with a reunion of the Next Generation crew, seventeen years after Nemesis. The phrases entered the language: "Make it so." "Engage." "There are four lights!" — the last of these, from the torture episode "Chain of Command," a distillation of Picard's defining creed: that truth is not whatever power declares it to be.
Perhaps the most telling measure of the portrayal's impact is how completely it erased the original objection. The baldness that Roddenberry feared would disqualify Stewart became the character's most recognizable feature; the Shakespearean gravity that seemed wrong for space adventure became the reason the show is still argued over, quoted, and loved. Stewart did not play the captain Roddenberry imagined. He played a better one — and in doing so, he made the impossible assignment work.
Comments
Post a Comment