The greatness of Patrick Stewart

Patrick Stewart made us believe. Now he’s gone.

I have been a science fiction fan since I became able to read, raised on Asimov, Heinlein, and Clarke. Star Trek was a natural affinity. It was the first television program to do what science fiction should do: speculate about a future world and how human beings’ behavior and relationships would be different in that world.

Because of what television was in the 1960, that future had to include fistfights and romance and banter and crude but still groundbreaking special effects. But when it wasn’t trying to be a western set in space, “Star Trek” actually made you think about concepts like doomsday machines and intelligent computers and forever wars.

I was totally bought in. I was the treasurer of Penn State’s United Federation of Star Trek Fans. One evening, when my college girlfriend was subtly hinting that we should go back to her room and lose our mutual virginity, I obliviously insisted we stick to our nightly ritual and watch a Star Trek rerun in the dorm common room. (The inevitable event eventually did happen, just a little bit later.)

After the original series and the reruns and a dreadful movie (Star Trek: The Motionless Picture), Star Trek seemed dead.

Then The Next Generation arrived. And it, unfortunately, sucked.

What Patrick Stewart meant to science fiction

This post is not a tribute to Patrick Stewart, whose death was revealed yesterday. It is a tribute to Patrick Stewart’s portrayal of Captain Jean-Luc Picard. I’m well aware that he had an illustrious career before and after Star Trek: The Next Generation, but that’s where he made the sharpest impact, not just on me, but on the world of science fiction.

The science fiction of the novelists of the sixties, seventies, and eighties was not primarily about space or technology. It was about ideas. It made you think. It challenged your ideas about the world. It asked “What if . . .,” extrapolating plausibly from the present day, and made you wonder what it was about people that was essential even in strange and unfamiliar settings, and how we would deal with powers beyond what we could imagine.

But the science fiction of the movies and television programs of the time, except for Star Trek, tended to focus on laser weapons and special effects. It was not science fiction, it was “sci-fi.” Sci-fi was, for the most part, about visual spectacle, about creating unlikely worlds and making them believable.

When “Star Trek: The Next Generation” came out in 1987, it was swept up in that movement, with scripts too heavy on effects and too light on story, ideas, plot, and acting. That’s why it sucked at first, and why I almost gave up on it after a long history of fan service.

What saved it was better writing and Patrick Stewart.

Patrick Stewart as Captain Picard was plunged into the most unlikely and outlandish situations with incredible scripts, and I don’t mean incredibly good, I mean “not quite credible.” But as a classically trained actor, rather than treat the whole exercise as a bunch of silly effects-heavy silliness, he actually asked the fundamental actor’s question: How would a human leader behave, speak, and act in the face of these unprecedented challenges? He sold the concepts by turning every one of them into a believable human experience. And to their credit, Star Trek’s writers and producers began to write to his strengths, creating a series of dramatically compelling and thought-provoking teleplays that would showcase his ability to connect and emote in the oddest settings.

We were immersed in those experiences and left breathless.

We believed, in “The Inner Light,” that a man could experience an entire lifetime as a dream, wake up 25 minute later, and be deeply affected by his perception of relationships with people hundreds of thousands of years dead.

We believed, in “The Best of Both Worlds,” that a man we had grown to love and admire could be subverted, turned into a robotic, relentless automaton, then rescued by the ingenuity and love of his crew’s devotion. And in “Family,” that he would come away from that experience with real and debilitating post-traumatic stress that had to be expressed in ugly and cathartic ways with a highly relatable set of idiosyncratic family members.

We believed, in “Darmok,” that an alien race could communicate only in metaphor, and that its captain and Picard could navigate that communications void because of a universality of emotions and empathy that transcended species boundaries.

We believed, in “The Measure of a Man,” that an android would have to fight for his rights as a sentient being, and only the most intelligent, logical, and human arguments could preserve his self-determination in the face of prejudice.

We believed, in “Sarek,” that he could embody and contain the madness of an alien character so that character could do his job in an emotionless way, and that Picard’s strength of ego alone could enable him to survive that trial.

And in “Chain of Command, Part II,” we were witness to a character study in torment, in which a civilized tyrant, a good parent, could skillfully torture Picard, the most noble of men, breaking him down to the point where, harried and weary, he could no longer believe his senses — and yet, somewhere deep down, he could retain his humanity.

Patrick Stewart carried these experiences. While he was surrounded by a talented collection of actors and guest stars, a highly improved set of scripts, a well established world-building mythology, and of course, the special effects, it was only Patrick Stewart’s ability to make us believe that ultimately mattered. His fellow cast members were often showily “acting” in ways that drew attention to their personas (including Jonathan Frakes doing his own over-the-top version of William Shatner), but Patrick Stewart was simply inhabiting Captain Picard, doing what Captain Picard would do, and inviting us into that experience. It was compelling because it reached a higher level of performance. It made us think.

And that is what science fiction ought to do.

Thank for a wonderful career, Patrick Stewart. Your work will live on.