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Comment by vigilantpuma | Hacker News Reader

Big fan of Star Trek and Picard is my captain forever, but this credit seems more due to Gene Roddenberry.

it does also take an actor to sell the vision of a character. an unconvincing portrayal would make the vision seem more like a farce or caricature and if anything undermines the morals

It’s true, and Stewart was a great actor. But he would have sold a vision of a morally compromised captain just as well. The vision is Roddenberry’s.

I think it's fair to attribute the result to both the writer and the actor. You're right that Stewart could've sold a morally compromised captain, but equally so he brought something to the Picard role that other actors would not have necessarily brought. One can commonly see in theatre how with the same vision by the playwright, two actors can turn out wildly different results for that character. The same would have happened to Picard if he had been played by someone else.

He was terrifying as the leader of a neo-Nazi group in Green Room.

The original Janeway for Star Trek Voyager only filmed like one episode and her take was very different (French actress I think. And maybe they were aiming for a Picard analog).

In part, yes of course. One thing that I respect a lot about Roddenberry was that when Isaac Asimov gave Star Trek a "bad review" publicly, he reached out and asked for feedback. They ended up becoming friends and Asimov helped advise him on the character development of Kirk and Spock's friendship that became central to the original series.

But, if you watch the first season of TNG, it feels like there is a turning point where Patrick Stewart starts taking the role seriously (Symbiosis) and understands that he's depicting Starfleet as an institution and the restrictions (the prime directive) that institutions must enforce. The fellow actors also seem to take the series more seriously after that episode while before it felt campy.

It's clear he brought a gravitas to the role that inspired a team of young/new actors around him. As he later joked in Making it So, he once took things too seriously on set yelling "We're not here to have fun!" It became more than a job/role to him and in doing so he and the other actors inspired a science-inclined subset of a generation and brought Roddenberry's utopia vision to life.

> It's clear he brought a gravitas to the role that inspired a team of young/new actors around him

That's a lesson everybody on this site should learn — Every senior is a leader, even if they don't think they are. People (mostly the more junior sorts) look up to you as a role model whether you (or they) know it or not, and that's very real power that you must learn how to wield.

I've given negative reviews to technically excellent candidates in the past because just about everybody in the org would look up to them if they got hired, and they would be a terrible role model.

I read your "senior" in the general "aged human" sense and I think there's value there to.

Until dementia kicks in anyway

Unless, not until.

Dementia is a disease associated with age, not a result of age.

> But, if you watch the first season of TNG, it feels like there is a turning point where Patrick Stewart starts taking the role seriously (Symbiosis) and understands that he's depicting Starfleet as an institution and the restrictions (the prime directive) that institutions must enforce.

There was an interesting essay about Star Trek's depiction of society over time largely coming to the conclusion that modern writers/audiences don't seem to believe in the idea of duty to an institution.

https://www.thebulwark.com/p/are-we-all-too-cynical-for-star...

Patrick Stewart was no slouch in using what power he had to protect, either: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TqFaiVNuy1k

At the same time he was making way too many calls in the "Picard" series.

I disagree. Not only did he continually & substantially contribute to Picard's character, it clearly aligns with his own values and ethics as demonstrated over and over in interviews. Why not both? That seems like the obviously best perspective.

This reminds me of how it's a software developer's ultimate power that he or she gets to bring the vision to life. If you disagree with the implementation of a requirement, you can build it the "right" way, and let them choose to fire or replace you. If your judgement is good, they probably won't.

Similarly, Patrick Stewart assumed a written role, but he was responsible for its ultimate execution, which have him influence over the immediate execution in small ways, and likely, increasingly powerful influence over its future execution.

He deserves a great deal of credit for how Picard ultimately came to be represented.

I think this is quite common in tv where the relationship among writer, director, actor evolve over the seasons.

...who who once said "The strength of a civilization is not measured by its ability to fight wars, but rather by its ability to prevent them" which I find very Trecklike. Live long and Prosper.

This very much. Post-Roddenberry Trek mostly misses the point.

What do you mean by post-Roddenberry? Most of the TNG era was created without his direct input.

Yes and no. DS9 plays with things at the edges, much like Ian Banks’ novels deal with the behavior that lies at the edge of the Culture and is part of what permits a utopian society to exist at all. It cuts directly to the question of when and if martial force —or other, more subversive mechanisms of power — must be deployed for protection against a force that threatens the existence of an otherwise non-violent society. I think these are criticisms of visions like Roddenberry’s without necessarily undermining them or missing the point entirely. I also think it’s been an ongoing commentary on modern civilization as much as speculative fiction.

Some of the other series and movies miss the point more dramatically for me by just becoming space opera. Star Trek was always political.

Your point on the organisation that the Culture setup "Special Circumstances" to solve the "Paradox of Tolerance" problem and Starfleet having similar issues is an interesting one.

Though I'd say that Starfleet is in itself too "noble" to solve the problems that Special Circumstances solves in the Culture universe (though Section 31 isn't and they do feature heavily in DS9).

Frankly I think that Banks was smart enough to realise that if he want to have compelling narratives in a universe where you have near godlike AI's and everyone (including them) is nice, you need that edge somewhere.

Asher's universe which has a similar premise to the Culture (having come after it) solves it differently, some of the AI's aren't nice or even nice adjacent which also works.

> Banks was smart enough to realise that [...] you need that edge somewhere.

In fact, pretty much all compelling pro-utopia fiction is almost invariably dealing with the fringes of such utopia - both because it avoids getting bogged down in the details of utopia (and risk valid criticism), and because there is no real substitute for conflict as narrative engine. So inevitably you have to go where the rubber meets the road, so to speak.

Yes it becomes space liberalism rather than space communism.

Hilariously this was also around the time that the Ferengi started being written more sympathetically.

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