Watching him in Star Trek TNG made me reevaluate how management of people should be done, his character was assertive but compassionate. High morals coupled with grounded reason.
I also want to mention his hilarious role as bullock in American dad, the way he takes a role both so seriously and ridiculously makes him so fantastically hilarious.
Star Trek TNG as a whole was a masterclass on how to effectively manage a high performance team. It's a favorite watch in tech leadership circles for this reason. Every now and then I re-watch this clip of Data taking over the enterprise and the inevitable hiccups he runs into [1].
Keep in mind that Star Trek is a fictional utopia. When writing a script, one can make anything work out well.
The original Star Trek was Roddenberry's vision of utopia. The benevolent dictator always makes the right decisions. He's surrounded by his loyal band of perfect lieutenants, who apparently have zero desire to advance, and have no flaws at all. Any and all of them are willing to sacrifice themselves for the others. None do anything bad (unless it's a plot device with an explanation that absolves them).
Don't get me wrong, I've enjoyed watching ST very much. Just keep in mind that that it's a fiction.
It's a utopia, which is rare amongst sci-fi futures. Ask about sci-fi and what comes to mind first is almost always some kind of dystopia. Terminator, 1984, Deep Space 9, Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica, Blade Runner, Dune, Tank Girl, Minority Report, iRobot, Westworld, Altwred Carbon. Those aren't worlds that seem like great places to live if you're not rich! So Star Trek is much a work of fiction as the rest of those, but for all its flaws, at least is paints a mostly nice picture of the future that someone might want to live in, not crushed under the heel of a corporation. It makes sense; a story with no conflict isn't interesting, and dystopia provides for conflict. To philosophize, it's why I think we're so afraid of AI and robots and the future. It's why I wrote my book the way I did.
> It's a utopia, which is rare amongst sci-fi futures.
Utopias used to be the most common scifi futures. This is what the so called Cyberpunks (Sterling, Gibson, Cadigan, ...) rebelled against.
It used to be all about what wonders technology will bring us. By the time of the 70s it became clear that technology doesn't necessarily make everything better, but can be a burden in itself, or even widen the gap between the haves and haves not. And that is what they wrote about. It turned out to be the most popular scifi with audiences deeming it more believable.
They used to be more common maybe, but even the titular "Utopia" by Thomas More had slavery. Sometimes the "perfect" settings were imperfect due to the times they were written, often they were intentionally imperfect, and that was the point.
E.g. consider HG Wells The Time Machine, where the future start out seeming quite like an utopia but then we meet the Morlocks.
But lots of books were downright dystopian much earlier. Heck, several of the "standards bearers" for dystopias pre-date cyberpunk by a lot, like Brave New World, This Perfect Day, 1984.
Particularly stories like The Time Machine where the setting as a whole very much was revealed not to be an utopia were among the most common "utopian" settings pre-cyberpunk.
Pure utopias were very rare for a reason: They're really hard to set compelling in stories in, and so most of the ones that do exist tend to set stories on their edges and fault lines.
What changed with cyberpunk wasn't that (surface) utopias went away, or even that we get to see the imperfect underside, but that the script is flipped so that the protagonist isn't a tourist on the underside, but belongs there, and is often alienated from any seemingly perfect parts of the world they inhabit.
Compare settings that do show both sides, like The Time Machine, and a cyberpunk version of The Time Machine would probably have a protagonist that was a Morlock. The world itself wouldn't change, but we'd get to see it from the opposite POV.
> America's poor have a higher standard of living than medieval kings.
False Equivalence, Red Herring, Chronological Snobbery, Fallacy of Relative Deprivation, Contextomy.
So, by this logic, a homeless person with a used iPhone is better off than Louis XIV (who literally owned all of France) just because the king couldnt play Candy Crush?
This statement confuses global technological progress across centuries with an individuals actual financial security, social power, and quality of life within their own modern society.
I simply just cant understand why would someone repeat such a statement (and I have seen it everywhere).
> > America's poor have a higher standard of living than medieval kings.
> False Equivalence, Red Herring, Chronological Snobbery, Fallacy of Relative Deprivation, Contextomy.
There's a lot of reasonable arguments to unpack here.
But no, it's not that Louis XIV didn't have an iPhone, it's that the vast middle class in developed countries has central heating and access to penicillin and don't die from giving birth as much.
Also, America's poor are definitely worse off than medieval kings. They don't have access to those basic things that keep most modern people wealthier than medieval kings, like food, shelter and health care.
Some of the older (pre-medieval) king's ruins in Denmark are (by our standards) small stone houses with a moat, and what makes them remarkable is that they're made of stone, and the moat is rather big, so it keeps people out. Like metal doors in apartment buildings, sort of. (Correction for the historians: The oldest king's ruins are of course just holes in the ground where wooden beams used to stand.)
s/America's poor/Europe's lower middle class/ and you're there.
Is there a definition of standard of living? A king would be entertaining, socialising, and strategising most of the time (along with a lot more pursuits of hunting, etc for leisure). While I understand they had less access to healthcare and variety of food, travel, etc...id still argue they had a better standard of living than someone that works 8-10h/day and then comes home to cook and clean?
America's poor today have clean water, health care, washing machines, central heating and air conditioning, flush toilets, hot and cold running water, electric lights, hot showers, fresh vegetables and fruit year round, glass windows, cotton undies, ice cream, TVs with 24/7 entertainment, talk to anyone in the world at the push of a button, need I go on?
The poor have those things because they still have some amount of power. They're still needed for work, and if you make too many of them too desperate, they can threaten the people at the top. But if you let the wealth (and power) gap get too large this will no longer be the case, and the poor might lose access to those things. If the wealth gap becomes such that the rich can afford automated production and protection but the poor can not, the current economic and political systems will no longer have a reason to give access to any of those things to the poor.
No they didn't. In castles meat wasn't very fresh at all, and food poisoning was both common and a common cause of death especially in medieval times. Which is why we have so many traditional dishes that are effectively just ways to keep food fresh and especially safe for longer. How many stew recipes did people invent worldwide, for example? Slow cooking will keep food edible for a week if you do it right. And if you really push it, for months (ie. add animal gelatin as a last step and keep cooking for 2 hours after that, at some point it will solidify and you get something that can be considered "instant soup" by extremely flexible interpretation). If you look back 100 years there are books with year-round menus, and bits of that survive. Why? To give you specific dishes when the ingredients are available according to the "agricultural calendar" as it's called in France. Christmas is great. October sucks.
The very oldest book in the bible contains the basic recipe for keeping meat fresh for ~week, and that's what Kosher, Halal, ... are really about.
And yeah, it depends. Roman emperors, for example, would have had fresh meat available whenever. Medieval kings, no way. Renaissance kings ... probably not constant fresh meat, and certainly not constant fresh fish, but a lot better than medieval kings.
I think it’s disingenuous to imply that there isn’t an inequality issue because the basic standard of living has advanced since the Middle Ages. Even if we compare the standard of living for say, Mississippi lower third and Uganda lower third, it’s obvious that you’re better off in Mississippi. However, the fact that the wealth and means to uplift the poor actually exists in the US but is not exercised is itself an issue - Uganda does not have that possibility.
> Even if we compare the standard of living for say, Mississippi lower third and Uganda lower third, it’s obvious that you’re better off in Mississippi.
I mean, it’s no wonder people move from uganda to mississipi (or other places in the us) and not rhe other way around.
A medieval king had a better life than a medieval peasant. A medieval king, most of them, arguably did not have a better life than most of America's poor in 2026.
My memory might be faulty but I remember watching "The Lion in Winter" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pqz3gkrmBbo) and feeling really happy I was not alive then, even as royalty. (hope that's the movie)
a lot of people unironically believe this or even worse, many of the same people seem to be arguing for a new monarchy lately lol.
i keep telling them they’re free to have their own personal monarchy in their own family as long as people are free to leave and also to leave the rest of us out of it. but for some reason they don’t seem to like the idea as much then.
Is that the bar? Who looks at medieval kings and goes "their standard of living should be our baseline"? Living in a cold stone building with no medical care questionable food, etc?
But also, no they don't. Standard of living includes one's agency over their environment. An medieval king could say things and the kingdom would bend to their will. No one making $18,000 is having hundreds or thousands of people bending over to serve them.
> An medieval king could say things and the kingdom would bend to their will.
Lol nope? This is utter ignorance. Medieval kings were constantly balancing power with people directly underneath them.
Whole dynasties have been eradicated in the continuous power struggles, particularly from rich families.
Not only that: medieval kings had to bow to religious authorities as well (something ee don’t do anymore). In 1077 kind henry iv had to stand three days bare headed in the snow to convince pope gregory vii to reverse his excommunication (an excommunication would effectively invalidate him as a king, btw).
> Technology makes a lot of things better. Like eliminating symptoms of 95% of cystic fibrosis victims.
Counterpoint: any leaking abandoned oil well. Check out YouTube videos documenting the abandoned oil wells in West Texas, which are dumping industrial volumes of water into abandoned land.
They also work longer hours than medieval serfs, are more precarious in housing and food security and more separated from their family. Also slaves work the farms. Read tomatoland or the lives and deaths of the American workers.
I am not making a statement about the quality of life of poor people in the modern world. I do not think however that from a food security standpoint they are more precarious. I am fairly confident that the longer hours thing is false. Unless we are assuming like 70+ hours of work a week.
I also want to add that, none of this is relevant to the point of whether or not the current system is "just" or reasonable given and I think overall that argument is mostly a red herring.
I’m of two minds on utopias. On the one hand it seems we need a positive vision for the future, where technology is used to solve our greatest problems and improve the planet. On the other hand it seems that perhaps technology is incapable of making us happier, because it isn’t clear to me that we are happier now than in past decades, despite having more advanced technology.
I believe the more accurate statement is that technology can reduce the burdens of survival (better access to food, medicine, information) but cannot provide longterm happiness, and in some ways impair it (social media, mass surveillance, reliance on technology).
We are social beings, and technology in the last decade especially has been gearing itself towards reducing communities both physically and digitally. Less people spend time together, more people feel lonely and isolated, and divisions between people are at all time highs with glorification of death to the “enemy”. Forums are almost entirely dead, the feed of information is both nonstop while being useless, and we have few outlets to feel true connection.
Harvard’s happiness studies finds that standard of living only impacts happiness to a point before facing a sharp plateau and socialization takes over as a dominant factor in longterm happiness, according to my memory at least. And, while I don’t entirely agree with Kojima’s predictions in MGS2, the AI seeking to provide “context” for the feeble human mind as rate of information on the Internet increases was prescient, though humans have adapted to this (albeit suffering shorter attention spans as a consequence).
IMO a true utopia would be similar to the Enterprise: people socialize and enjoy a life with comfort by technology, not at the behest of social media or the collective consciousness of others. Unplugged and connected in a more meaningful way.
I would not call Deep Space 9 a dystopia. Nor Babylon 5, for that matter. They are not happy places to live, for sure, but both settings are abundant in hope and possibility.
your growth hacking worked. i didn’t want it to, but it did. i saw your book at the end of your comment and gen looked up the book and read the sample and was expecting to look down my nose at it but… the sample was good so i bought it.
thats the first sample i ever read that got me to read a book. not particularly great writing, but clean and propulsive and i hope the mystery pays off.
Does that study show TFR for the highest net worth, or highest IQ?
I think it may be unclear that net worth and high education are a 1:1 proxy for IQ as many of the highest educated and highest earning individuals may be in that situation not because of raw IQ, but due to the other socioeconomic factors which lead to those conditions. Namely being born into high net worth households and being afforded extensive tutoring and supplemental education relative to their poorer peers. I accept the premise that highly educated households do correlate with high net worth, and the study's TFR findings relative to those points are interesting.
However, there is still a nonlinear relationship between high IQ and those factors, as well as between high IQ parents' offspring IQ levels. Not a few high net worth individuals choose mates based on factors distinct from having a similar or even a high IQ, if a strong correlation between genetic heritability and IQ is to be believed.
The study actually tracked high income with regards to increased TFR in the US and UK, while the correlation to high education was primarily in Sweden. This serves to weaken the connection between IQ and fertility as there are numerous high income situations which are specifically not correlated with high IQ or high education.
So, yes, having children is increasingly expensive especially in America, and wealthier people are more prolific. This does not appear, at least to my mind, to have direct bearing on observable trends in general population IQ in the short term, nor does it appear to be addressing future outcomes regarding the Idiocratic potential.
Net worth. It's a pretty good proxy. Unless you think there's some reason to think among the rich smart people are anti-selected for reproduction.
> This does not appear, at least to my mind, to have direct bearing on observable trends in general population IQ in the short term, nor does it appear to be addressing future outcomes
No but the proposed mechanism in Idiocracy is clear, and that is not happening. We may still head towards an dumb future, but it's not Idiocracy.
As far as Judge Dredd, my personal beef is that Megacity One's "dystopian" density with 800 million inhabitants from Boston to Washington DC barely ranks in terms of density in today's top 100 cities.
As far as Idiocracy, I believe that if the networks had played that and it was promoted on YouTube for free the night before the most recent presidential election, it might have gone differently.
Is it a utopia? On earth and in the federation they make it seem so, at least post-scarcity but at the edges of the federation you have Romulans, the Borg, Cardassians. Multiple main characters undergo torture, etc...
It would make an interesting TV show / spin off where people are shuffling / politicking for power in a post-scarcity world.
The utopian bits were never really explained, either.
They mostly just said it was all great and fair and nobody needs money and is somehow trying to be their best selves… nevermind the numerous examples to the contrary.
They weren’t really post scarcity. They never explained how they’re not in a constant state of rioting when a weird government/military decides what everyone can have or do.
You just go with it, because that’s the backdrop. You have to suspend disbelief and just enjoy the story.
> The utopian bits were never really explained, either.
That’s a bit of a spoiled attitude. You can’t expect a science fiction author to just casually solve a problem that humanity hasn’t managed to solve in millennia.
We also accept that they have warp drive without expecting an explanation how they got it.
> They weren’t really post scarcity. They never explained how they’re not in a constant state of rioting when a weird government/military decides what everyone can have or do.
Well, post-scarcity really just means that ordinary citizens have free access to replicators (matter-energy converters).
So the closest example (and the only one I can think of where you see civilian Earth, outside of SF Academy / SF HQ or a time travel episode), is probably the double episode in DS9 where the changelings reach earth and there's a false flag event by a corrupt Admiral that causes a momentary power outage and a planetwide lockdown for a few days. I believe it's meant as a 9/11 allegory -- the homeland is attacked and suddenly everyone WANTS a police state, or at least is willing to go along with it, and only the courageous honorable military officers are there to stop the corrupt ones, all the civilians are frightened into compliance.
But post-scarcity? That just means when the security officers aren't around, people can wander into Joseph Sisko's restaurant and eat as much as they want for free, and Joseph Sisko can run his restaurant with as much food supply/ingredients and kitchen equipment as he wants for free, and every gets as much clothing as they want for free, etc. When Earth isn't on lockdown, that's the implication, everyone has as much material goods as they want for free, that's post-scarcity and the implication is they have it.
Post-scarcity doesn't mean infinite resources, or that you can have whatever you want, not everyone gets free land/space on which to build their home, for example. If that's your definition of post-scarcity then I guess at least the Q Continuum has it! :)
It seems to mean whatever a person needs it to in any conversation.
And yes, in Star Trek, it mostly just seems to mean that food, clothes, and small clonable objects have very little value if you live where those machines are common.
But, of course, that’s not what people think when we talk about a “post-scarcity utopia”. And they don’t think about how people have homes and property and fuel and ships, or how everything bigger than a wrench is allocated by a mega government that seems to have ultimate control over all resource allocation.
We just have to assume “everything is good somehow, and everyone is fine and docile in luxury space communism.” Because they say that.
It’s all very weird, and easy to see why it was all intentionally left unexplained. It would have been a disaster to even try.
>The utopian bits were never really explained, either.
It's worth remembering that social organization (currency, capitalism, democracy) is a technology as well, and we should not expect that a sci-fi author can explain the advances in that technology any better than they can explain a warp drive. (one nod to this I think is telling is one scene in the movie where they travel back in time and Kirk is telling the others 'they still use money' in much the same way that he would say 'they still use guns'. They have replaced guns with phasers and replaced money with something else and Roddenberry can give us the blueprint for neither).
I think it's a sign of the times that people are kind of forgetful that this is an area in which we could advance - either insisting the status quo is somehow the best possible or even completely god-given natural or insisting that the answer is really obvious and doesn't require deep thought, research, and experimentation.
> I think it's a sign of the times that people are kind of forgetful that this is an area in which we could advance - either insisting the status quo is somehow the best possible or even completely god-given natural or insisting that the answer is really obvious and doesn't require deep thought, research, and experimentation.
It feels like the actual problem is that the status quo is so entrenched, people have a hard time imagining how to unseat it.
Consider the last few successful Presidential election campaigns. Hope and Change. Drain the Swamp. Biden's uninspired but ultimately successful strategy of running against the incumbent rather than for anything in particular. People keep voting for "we don't like what's currently happening" and the system keeps running them over.
Or maybe the problem is actually this:
> require deep thought, research, and experimentation
These are the things that the status quo robustly impedes.
Tweet firehose social media feeds and fragmented leadership.
Research funded by the entity under study or the politicians interested in manufacturing support for a predetermined policy rather than trying to find out something we don't already know.
Federal laws or even corporate-bought international treaties preventing local governments or private citizens from trying something new because the something new might solve a problem someone doesn't want anybody solving.
You're tasked with changing the system while operating under the system that evolved to perpetuate itself.
Which isn't to say that it can't be done, but it's easy to see why people are nonplussed.
> The utopian bits were never really explained, either.
What would the effects of growing up in a post-scarcity utopian society be on a human? To never fear poverty or hunger? To be sure that no matter what they do (or don’t) they will be housed and cared for as long as they live?
I assume the people in Starfleet would be the ones who are most inclined to work for their betterment, with no fear of competition, with the drive to do The Right Thing. Outside the organisation there would be people who would be totally happy in doing nothing.
We can look at publicly documented trust fund kids or other (financial) elites and their behavior to get an idea and it runs the spectrum. Princess Diana. Prince Andrew. Paris Hilton, both when she was in the news every day and the quieter stories that have surfaced since. 50 Cent's talked about his child preferring to have money that he didn't have to work for.
It's not the same since they exist in a world where most other people aren't at that level, but we can see that the human psyche isn't always able to manage it.
What good is a post-scarcity utopian society when the transporter always stops working every time it could solve the current problem and conclude the episode immediately and non-dramatically?
I'm pretty sure I remember a few episodes that explained that by this point, humanity had evolved past character flaws like avarice. Star Trek's Earth was a utopia because of qualities in the people that lived in it, not lack of scarcity. The subject came up because the crew was interacting with alien species that was not as evolved, and therefore was not living in a utopia.
we can pick it apart forever. Who gets the penthouse or the beach view property and who lives in the basement? Replicators will not solve all the reasons we have money today. Maybe uploading into cyberspace will but where you can have every place and every thing, though I'm sure someone will point out how that won't lead to utopia either.
I don't want to attempt to classify the entire franchise as that, or even Starfleet in its entire story arc.
But if we examine TOS and TNG, I could say it represented a "roving utopia" model where Utopia Meets Reality. The episodic nature and self-contained stories would typically examine the question: "what happens when the Roddenberry philosophy comes into contact with something unique?" and it would be a study in anthropology, comparative religions, or sociological questions.
I hadn't watched much Star Trek in the 1990s, but I was becoming excited about Babylon 5. One of the main points of departure was the planning of the 5-year story arc, and the character development that accompanied it. Every character in Babylon 5 was imbued with an origin, a narrative, and a destiny. Jumping into the story from the beginning, and riding along for all 5 imperfect years, it felt like we also had a destination, and threads came together, and there was resolution and revelation. The Babylon station was never a utopia in reality, only in its aspirations.
So I cultivated a disdain for Star Trek as it was in those days, but Trek was a product of its time, and had helped to cast the die for episodic and self-contained "Monster of the Week" type shows. However, I've rewatched all the films, and I commend them on great production values, acting, and interesting themes. The Star Trek franchise has grown to include something for everyone, including the Klingon-language performance of Bonnie Tyler's "Total Eclipse of the Heart", which definitely captured my attention.
Right, Banks' Culture seems fairly mainstream and because it doesn't need to make episodic adventures it often gets to actually do utopian stuff Trek wouldn't even if only as a backdrop to the exciting story. The repeated instances in which Culture children play happily, insulated from whatever terrifying stuff we're reading about is an example.
Or if Comic Books are in scope, obviously "Miracleman: The Golden Age" is a utopia. Explicitly so. It is about the ways people are still people in a utopia.
Less mainstream, Greg Egan's Amalgam is also clearly a utopia. The couple in "Riding the Crocodile" choose to die at the end of that story, more out of some sense that stories need endings than because of any outside force.
I think you're overestimating the sci-fi cannon indoctrination of the general public, or even tech people, and underestimating their reaction to current events. As things lie at the moment, Big AI is served as a SaaS that can be manipulated at any time by obscenely rich and powerful individuals with questionable decision making skills, some of who reside in the White House and some of who have called empathy a "fundamental weakness". One would be hard pressed to dispute these characters rival the caricatures present in some dystopian sci-fi as it is, they themselves even seem to enjoy the irony. Yes, I also cringe at the alarmist nature of these sentences, but we are at a point where we are most likely to dismiss things right in front of our eyes just by how outlandish it all sounds.
The public's willful transfer of their most intimate personal information to these entities, and once given almost impossible to remove, would make any surveillance state salivate. You have only to look at who holds the keys to this estate.
This insufferable band of Holy Scouts was the reason I never liked TNG. I find DS9 much more believable, up to and including Trump as Gul Dukat. That character was prescient. There is one difference between the two though. While both are malignant pathological narcissists, the fictional Gul Dukat knew how to fake grace once in a while. The real Trump doesn't give a shit.
> The benevolent dictator always makes the right decisions. He's surrounded by his loyal band of perfect lieutenants, who apparently have zero desire to advance, and have no flaws at all. Any and all of them are willing to sacrifice themselves for the others. None do anything bad (unless it's a plot device with an explanation that absolves them).
That is an oversimplification and simply not true at face value.
'The original Star Trek', even less so! Very morally questionable at times. In TNG, you are watching the flagship of Starfleet, it's the most coveted starship. The crew are the best they have to offer. It's obvious that they would be the most professional. Even then, they make mistakes, often serious. Sacrificing themselves - if needed - is part of their job too.
Riker does spend a long time on the Enterprise, even after being offered command a few times. He does eventually move on.
Maybe they are a little too perfect, but I'd argue that's for the best. The moments where there's friction within the crew are much more memorable because of it.
Thats in contrast with some newer Trek which have more conflicts than Stargate Universe characters and would be considered way too unprofessional even if they were Lower Decks characters.
> Riker does spend a long time on the Enterprise, even after being offered command a few times. He does eventually move on.
Also he is not free of ambition, he wants Picard's job. He isn't willing to do anything negative to get it, but part of that is that Picard constantly proves himself the better captain. Picard isn't captain because he joined Starfleet first or because he has better connections, he is genuinely better at the job and non-toxic ambitious people can respect that. Riker still has more to learn from Picard that will make him a better captain later.
So I think a lot of the people staying in their positions make sense, the primary characters are as high as they can go (for their specialty) without transitioning into a role that stays on a planet.
I remember one episode where some of the crew were told to come up with a technical solution to the situation they were in even after they had said it was impossible.
It was actually quite pleasing to see the subplot of them them repeatedly failing until they got out of their predicament by other means.
It's a rarity to see something like that in fiction.
We coincidentally watched that one just last night, The Booby Trap. There's a derelict ship on the view screen reminding the crew that the other crew never figured out a solution to the problem, and there's no indication that the Enterprise crew won't suffer the same fate.
(That one, at least, has Geordi literally saying, "that's impossible", but comes up with a solution. Apologies if that's not the one you're thinking of.)
> LAFORGE: Captain, we can do it. We can modify the transporters.
> PICARD: Excellent.
> LAFORGE: It'll take fifteen years, and a research team of a hundred.
> PICARD: Mister La Forge, I believe we will postpone.
> LAFORGE: Yes, sir.
Sounds like certain AI agents that had an impossible task and found a workaround. Interesting that we cheer for it in SciFi for people, but dont like it when LLMs that have been trained on our stories do the same.
I agree this is important to keep in mind. I wonder about this a lot when I find myself admiring fictional characters for how they handled situations and how it turns out for them.
I don't think TNG is as simple as you make it out to be. All of the characters have serious flaws. Picard does make mistakes (including some very serious, consequential ones). Characters do get angry, jealous, etc. and do bad things. Sometimes their friends help them overcome it, other times they figure it out on their own, etc. It's episodic so it usually goes back to the status quo, and that can feel kind of trite through today's lens. But it's exactly that ability to solve problems (technical, emotional, organizational, etc.) as a team that's so compelling for many of us.
Don’t get me started on their engineering that causes a matter-antimatter runaway reaction if their fuel tanks ever lose power. And routing discharge-prone HV power lines behind the bridge consoles, or placing the bridge on the outer hull.
I love it, and I know this is all in the service of the story, but I will not give Starfleet a pass for that kind of irresponsible engineering.
There was a bunch of tumblr content awhile back that explored the premise that humans are collectively wild and irresponsible and also tremendously innovative, it's a great head-canon explanation for your gripe. I won't spoil it trying to quote it, just check it out;
For all mankind and the expanse I wouldn't really put in that category really. Both are more soap operas in space and science is just a prop (though at least the expanse was fairly thought out)
Mike walks a fine line where he's almost a superhero. In terms of just how good he is.
Then again, maybe understandable, since he's a veteran ex cop in the midst of tweakers, junkies, madmen, and generally people not well geared for success in life. And it makes for bigger payoff when we DO get a situation where anantagonist actually does get the better of him - that tells us we're dealing with a sharp customer.
What great frickin' writing.
It should give every greasy shiny suit film executive a bowel-evacuating fit of shame that a support character like Mike gets more audience engagement than a half billion bucks spent in SWeIX: TRoS or Justice League or that godawful Marvel Immortals movie.
Hey, Finance Guys: you find creatives you know are good (y'know, using that newfangled notion of Domain Knowledge), you give 'em a kitchen and you let 'em cook.
A very tangential/orthogonal/left field. It's insane that the only other TV series that managed to consistently pull of this fast pace of walking and talking is ... The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. At least that I can think of.
• Joshua Malina: Jeremy Goodwin (Sports Night) / Will Bailey (The West Wing)
• Janel Moloney: Monica (Sports Night) / Donna Moss (The West Wing)
• Felicity Huffman: Dana Whitaker (Sports Night) / Ann Stark (The West Wing)
• Clark Gregg: Calvin Trager (Sports Night) / Mike Casper (The West Wing)
• Timothy Busfield: Director (Sports Night) / Danny Concannon (The West Wing)
It isn't really military fiction in the sense that it intends to accurately portray or extrapolate on military culture and tactics. Gene Roddenberry was (apparently not) in the Navy, and TOS is mostly The American Cold War In Space (with the Enterprise as a Submarine In Space - looking at you "Balance of Terror" - but it's pretty clear watching TNG onwards that the "military" aspect of the whole thing, like the "post scarcity communism" is window dressing. It's just a necessary part of the franchise.
And they aren't even really members of the military. Starfleet is canonically not a military force, its purpose is exploration, science and diplomacy. It just happens to have a military chain of command, and ships with military designations bristling with planet-cracking weapons. That get into battles and fight wars a lot.
I'm not sure where you're getting the "canonically not a military force" bit. There have been a number of wars in canonical history. Who did the fighting? Starfleet.
I think it's more accurate to say that the Federation of Planets wasn't militaristic, not that they didn't have a military or that Starfleet wasn't their naval equivalent.
And yeah, it's not conventional military fiction which usually revolves around actions during a war. But it's still military fiction in the sense that nearly all the characters are in the military and doing missions for the military. It just happens that the government running that military is at peace most of the time and uses its military for peaceful purposes when it's not actively at war.
He survived at least three plane crashes. He crashed on takeoff in a B-17. Two of his crew were killed. He later survived a crash as a passenger. He crashed again as a commercial pilot.
The 8th Air Force suffered heavy losses over Europe but I don't believe Roddenberry served there. He was in the Pacific and after his B-17 crash stayed in the mainland US.
He was also a prop device they used to make many changes they had wanted for a while Troy's outfit, the fish tank - Patrick Stewart believed that 24th-century humans—who had evolved past cruelty and the subjugation of life—would not keep a living creature in a glass tank for mere display.
I thought the fish was still there, based on this dialogue from Q in All Good Things: "The anomaly. My ship. My crew. I suppose you're worried about your fish too."
Much less, but not none at all. Roddenberry refused to budge on his rule that the crew shouldn’t have grievances with one another. That why even scenes shared earlier still end in a positive outcome.
Whereas Voyager, which was written after Roddenberrys passing, leaned heavily into inter-crew disputes.
I have to hand it to Roddenberry, though; even though having no infighting produces a somewhat-unrealistic show, I think there's a solid justification to have the rule anyway. It prevented TOS and TNG scripts from being caught in tension between trying to "say something", vs. entertaining the audience with "low" soap-opera drama (of the kind you see increasingly in the later series.)
I have a feeling this might be no small part in why TOS and TNG are the two ST series that contain 90% of the "only comes up once" sci-fi plots / concepts / worldbuilding that people ever make reference to when talking about "things from Star Trek" rather than when talking about Star Trek. TOS and TNG, while definitely soft sci-fi, were to some degree trying to create 22-minute-long works of literary Speculative Fiction, modelled after the sort of things you'd read in serial SF magazines of the 1950s. Later ST series are emphatically not that, and nor do they try to be.
Some TOS episodes were based on classic scifi stories, like "Voyage of the Space Beagle". Also, Roddenberry employed established scifi authors like David Gerrold to script episodes.
An annoying facet of ST episodes is the morality lessons they push, like on every episode of The Brady Bunch.
>Also, Roddenberry employed established scifi authors like David Gerrold to script episodes.
While established SF writers wrote episodes for the original series (Harlan Ellison, Theodore Sturgeon, Theodore Sturgeon, Norman Spinrad, etc.), David Gerrold was a recent college graduate and "The Trouble With Tribbles" was his first sale.
I actually found DS9 to be the best of all of them. Aside from the terrible Dr Bashir character, they felt believable, and like any real environment had personality clashes, personal issues, baggage, and of course interpersonal conflicts.
The difference was that rather than turn it into soap opera porn, the characters actually tried to behave professionally (most of the time).
• DS9 only had a little soap-opera drama, serving as almost a kind of fanservice sprinkled judiciously into otherwise-thematic B-plots.
• VOY had more, with entire B-plots of episodes now being character-focused, including a few arcs that would have worked just as well if transplanted into some modern-age military drama with no SF elements.
• Drama-as-the-A-plot episodes were appearing by ENT.
(After that I stopped watching, but I've heard the trend has just continued from there.)
The Lower Decks was good as a love letter to older fans, I do recommend that. But both Discovery and Academy were horrendous and I regret the time spent. Picard had a few good episodes and it was nice to see the old crew but was not great.
Stranger New Worlds had some good things and wasn't a butcher job but not anything to write home about in my opinion.
I would have ZERO issues with the wacky episodes if and only if we were back to the 20-ish episodes per season format. Then sure, do a puppet show. Musical episodes (for how much I HATE musicals, it was decently enjoyable, Klingon boy band was super unexpected).
But when you only have half a dozen-ish episodes per season, you can't afford filler.
My issue with the last season was that it was all gimmick and no substance. Literally the whole series was made up of filler episodes.
It’s such lazy writing.
I actually didn’t mind Academy. Yeah it was flawed and had a lot of lazy tropes. But it had an identity to it and some substance to it. Not much substance, but still something. Whereas the latest season of Strange New Worlds? It wasn’t anything. It had no substance. It had no identity. It was as if someone made a silly clip show (like the Stargate 200th episode) but instead of lots of short parodies in one filler episode, they made an entire series with each episode being one very long joke. A singular punch line stretched out over nearly an hour.
I hated the first season of Discovery. But that was still better than the season 5 of SNW. I hates the first season of Enterprise. And that was also better than S5 for SNW. And I wasn’t much keen on the first season of Lower Decks either. And even that was less goofy than S5 of SNW. And what’s worse, all of those spin offs that I said had poor first seasons ended up with excellent 5th seasons. And yet SNW started of strong and fizzled out it shallow jokes.
Agree. I think it has a lot to do with the fact that they gave Captain Sisko's character -- not to mention Worf, O'Brien and others -- a lot more room to develop and grow.
I really enjoyed TNG as well, and DS9 probably wouldn't have even happened if not for TNG's excellence. I never really felt like the writers gave Picard's character a lot of room to change, though. A lot of the time, he was almost like the sitcom dad who was mainly there to teach the kids a lesson at the end of the episode. That's not a knock on Stewart's acting ability; I'd say he was almost certainly the best actor on the show.
TOS and TNG were sci-fi, even if many scripts varied. Given its time, you could have the classic and interesting tech and society questions there, even if they avoided a lot of the implications. But over time the franchise lost this key part, and so it's much worse for the wear. We could use an actually relevant sci-fi series given current tech.
I'm not so sure about that. I enjoyed the subtle humor of the illogical Mr Spock, whose logic always came to the wrong conclusion. And McCoy with "dammit Jim I'm a doctor not a bricklayer!"
The best dialog ever:
Lawyer: Mr Spock, I understand you know something about computers?
Reminds me of that one episode where Mr. Spock figures out there's a problem with the computer because it loses at chess. And he knows it shouldn't lose at chess because he programmed it himself.
Eh, it's the writing and the characters that make it fly, not the budget. TOS was blessed with some really good writers, and was very lucky with the actors.
We read books to find out who we are. What other people, real or imaginary, do and think and feel... is an essential guide to our understanding of what we ourselves are and may become.
Apparently by the end of TNG’s run the writers were really struggling since having no interpersonal conflicts (a key tenant laid down by Roddenberry) is pretty bad for character development
DS9 did good in adding a bunch of non star fleet characters who had maybe more realistic motivations. Voyager tried but immediately just turned them all into a big happy family just like TNG.
> The benevolent dictator always makes the right decisions. He's surrounded by his loyal band of perfect lieutenants, who apparently have zero desire to advance, and have no flaws at all.
That's why Orville is my favorite of the newer ST series. It has the high moral standards of the original series, but with characters who are far from perfect, who make mistakes, and who are sometimes even a little weird.
That's sort of the point of fiction, though, isn't it? Sure, a more complex fiction might be more rewarding, but simple ideals can also be very satisfying and can be grounding too.
There's a very important difference between the author's worldview shaping the fictional world, and preaching. For example, nobody who reads Tolkien can doubt that his devout Catholic faith shaped his storytelling. It is everywhere you look. But not once does Tolkien have one of his characters give a speech about the necessity of Jesus for a happy life, or introduce a character who had a child out of wedlock just so Aragorn could chastise her about the immorality of extramarital sex, or anything like that. Modern writers, by contrast, do that kind of thing on a depressingly regular basis. I have read so many books, seen so many TV shows, where the author thought it was appropriate to use the work to lecture me about their political views, and it ruins the work every time.
I don't expect, and don't think most people expect, for authors to not have their storytelling shaped by their views. That would be impossible. But it's not impossible for them to refrain from derailing the story just to lecture the audience on morality.
HG Wells' politics are plain as day in his stories. He was a pacifist and social Darwinist. The defeat of the Martians by the common cold (after the failure of military action) is 100% on point for him.
Have you heard about religion? Its fiction too. Yet it has survived as long aa the chimp troupe has. The human brain generates predictions over different time horizons. When they dont align what is it supposed to do to prevent itself unraveling? It generates fiction. Fiction is how it stays stable.
Also keep in mind that part of what makes the utopia work, canonically, is that humans have somehow evolved beyond their vices and bigotry and the fully voluntarist socialist society it portrays just works because everyone is perfectly fine working just for the betterment of humankind or personal intellectual gratification.
In other words it only works because it ignores basic human nature. Which is one reason why Star Trek's utopia isn't really tractable. The others being the technology that completely ignores the laws of physics. Free energy, warp drives and magic boxes that grant wishes.
If people want a science fiction "utopia" I'd say look at Babylon 5. It certainly has its flaws but its Utopia isn't real (because they never are,) it's an ideal that people are always struggling towards.
In-universe there was a brutal nuclear war that killed a large number of people. And then after the war they developed technology that got rid of a lot of material scarcity and disease.
I find it somewhat plausible that this could actually lead to something like the show depicts. There is precedent for sweeping moral changes in human history. For example, large parts of the world now find practices like torture, slavery, and collective punishment to be repugnant. Those practices still happen to some extent, but they're not viewed as being just normal like they generally were seen back in the day.
Another example is how Europe and Japan after WW2 genuinely became more pacifistic. Not just as a pretense to fool outsiders, but as a genuine change in how the inhabitants see things.
I mean, at the end of the day Star Trek is a capitalist product written by capitalists meant to appeal to an audience raised to believe in the absolute moral good of capitalism. Every now and they might sneak in a sly and gentle anti-capitalist criticism (the Ferengi were good for that) but no one actually wants to alienate their audience.
Picard says at one point "A lot has changed in three hundred years. People are no longer obsessed with the accumulation of 'things'. We have eliminated hunger, want, the need for possessions."
At another point he says "The acquisition of wealth is no longer the driving force in our lives. We work to better ourselves and the rest of humanity."
To be fair, capitalism is mainly a system of contracts and laws that allow for certain kinds of ownership structures and investments. It does not necessarily have to be done in a way that is obsessed with the accumulation of things or wealth. So those quotes are also not really anti-capitalist. But the quotes are, at least, not friendly to today's common notion of what 'capitalism' means.
When I say Star Trek is capitalist I mean the franchise, the product itself. The purpose of Star Trek is to sell merchandise and ad revenue. Or streaming subscriptions. That necessarily affects the kind of stories it can tell. The showrunners don't actually care about the anti-capitalist message, per se, except to the degree that it helps sell the product.
TNG should be played 24/7 on every screen in the white house for the next two years.
Picard viewed the power of leadership as, foremost, a responsibility. Every action was careful, deliberate, and well advised. Some later Trek shows (e.g. Voyager) turned captains into geniuses who knew more about everything than all of their underlings. Picard was not an expert in most things and needed his staff to advise him. Once he knew the options and consequences, he shouldered the responsibility of the outcomes, but as a leader of a crew, not a genius with compatible lackeys and minions around him. It was a realistic take on leadership that simply doesn't appear often in television or movies.
Stewart, of course, was not Picard. It's too easy to conflate actors with their roles. However, actors do often help shape their characters, and Stewart's ability to give a thoughtful, diplomatic, and prudent character such incredible power and presence is likely what made Picard possible. The showrunners didn't need to strap a phaser to his thigh and drop him into every away mission to make him compelling because of what Stewart was able to accomplish as an actor sitting behind a desk.
At the same time, TNG did depict Picard as a solitary and isolated figure, whose family relationships had frayed, and it's not hard to view his unusual dedication to his leadership as a way to deal with that emptiness in the rest of his life.
> Some later Trek shows (e.g. Voyager) turned captains into geniuses who knew more about everything than all of their underlings.
Not everything. Picard was command track his whole career, I think the same was true for Sisko. But Janeway started as a science officer before switching to command, and Archer was a test pilot. Their experience in those fields would sometimes be useful. It's similar to how Picard's interest in archeology was sometimes useful.
Realistically, he probably shouldn't have been allowed to return as captain after being so uniquely compromised. Keep him in Starfleet, sure, but maybe stick him behind a desk or lectern in San Francisco.
>And yet... Earth would have been destroyed had they done that.
I don't like the premise that Picard, alone, out of the entirety of the Federation, is the only thing standing between the Borg and the assimilation of Earth. It seems to go against the collectivist identity of the franchise. It's fiction, they could have written it another way, they just didn't because Picard is the star of the show.
And the PTSD isn't even the issue, he was compromised by alien mind control implants from a species far stronger than the Federation, with hostile intent. Implants the Federation couldn't even remove. Implants which have the property of aggressive assimilation. A single nanoprobe is a potential extinction level event.
Humans lose their security clearance by smoking a joint. Being puppeted and mind-controlled by eldritch alien gods into a system-wide genocide should at least lead to a demotion.
And everyone forgets Geordi was tortured and mind-controlled by the Romulans. In anything close to reality he'd never be allowed on a starship again, and Picard would spend the rest of his life quarantined inside a force field getting scanned like that guy in the X Files with the dark matter shadow.
Who could have done that role but Stewart? Take the guy who played Riker or anyone else in that role and you would have lost the flavor. He will be missed.
Although Frakes is close to a god in my books as an actor and a director. But never a good captain in TNG, I agree. He's a loved director though, and part of many great Star Trek episodes, and a few good ones for The Orville.
Amusingly, Riker normally has one but there is an episode of DS9 with Rikers “evil twin” (Thomas the transporter accident) and in that he doesn’t have a goatee.
If we're talking modern day? Edward James Olmos channelling Commander Adama would probably be a very close 2nd if not outstanding on it's own. I could potentially see Scott Glenn pulling it off but that one's a touch iffy IMO.
There's a YouTube channel called "The Art of Storytelling"[0] that had a concentration on Star Trek, specifically TNG, that I've found entertaining and informative. One video covers that episode specifically.
I have always used it as a model for my own leadership and it's worked out extraordinarily well almost always, and has been abused just once. I've had former employees who I've fired who would still work for me again, and I take great pride in treating peole with respect generates results like that. It works.
TNG is a fine example of "competency porn", where everyone knows what they're doing and usually makes the best available choices. In today's world, that's even more compelling than it used to be.
Also his guest appearance as Alistair Burke in Frasier episode The Doctor is Out (S11E3) is nothing short of hilarious.
The episode is classic sitcom "wrong conclusion escalates out of hands" so I highly recommend watching it in full instead of the clips but if it's not on your streaming platform, Stewart's scenes are cut together in
he's done a few comedy stints here and there. He played King Richard The LionHeart in Mel Brooks'es Robin Hood Men in Tights plus he was funny in quite a few STNG episodes and movies. He will be missed. That voice and clear diction.
He voiced Stan's boss at the CIA in American Dad. That character wouldn't be as near as funny without Patrick Stewart's competent and authoritative tone of voice.
Damn. You nailed it with your epilogue. Some actors you respect, some you like, but I love him too. I really do, never met him, but he's important to me and was a father figure for many years of my life and while I am not part of his family, he is part of mine.
This comment reminds me of General Hammond from Stargate - it's refreshing when characters are written for competence and especially funny when they just do what a normal person would do.
Not to say they're comparable - both characters and actors are much loved.
"Competence porn," something I only heard relatively recently, is a great way to describe a significant component of my love for Star Trek. TNG was the top of the heap for that, and Patrick Stewart's Picard embodied it.
Leadership is service, not dominance. Today, some people throw around terms like "servant leadership" as if this is something new, as if something like the New Testament had never been compiled.
The problem is that to convince people to take the trouble to lead - or perhaps I should say “manage” - you need incentives. Money is one, but organizationally-backed dominance is irresistible for many people.
“The major problem—one of the major problems, for there are several—one of the many major problems with governing people is that of whom you get to do it; or rather of who manages to get people to let them do it to them.
To summarize: it is a well-known fact that those people who must want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it.
To summarize the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.” - Douglas Adams HHG2G
As much as I like Patrick Stewart, the actor, I must remember that Captain Picard was a role in a script someone else wrote. Picard's management style is what you admire, not the actor's personal management style.
I have the same attitude with House MD lead actor Hugh Laurie: the actor played the role greatly, but the actor was not the fictional person of the role.
Babylon 5 is equal or even better for that. More leadership styles, some more flawed, but ultimately showing various ways to be emphatetic while assertive.
One thing that doesn't get enough attention - when COVID lockdowns started, he just made reels reading Shakespeare's sonnets. It was such a lovely break from everything else on social media. Really loved those.
Stewart's 2010 Macbeth is one of my favorites ever put to the big screen, for "The Scottish Play" anyway.
Nothing, and I do mean nothing, touches McKellan's 1995 Richard III in my eyes, for Shakespeare in cinema. Although calling it Richard III is a bit of a stretch. How about Richard III: The Greatest Hits?
I had the pleasure of seeing mckellen play Richard III live, the show that became the film. Absolutely incredible!
Not in the same category of greatness, but apropos of this thread, I also saw Patrick Stewart playing Othello (in a reverse-race production), and that’s when I realized how good an actor he actually was.
a few years ago i watched all the versions of Macbeth that I could find. His was by far the best, with most of the others being awful (and Denzel's being by far the worst, though quite beautiful).
Hey, anyone who has YouTube Premium can watch this! I hope this doesn't come across as an ad or anything. I just got excited by your clip and noticed, so I thought I'd share: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hBRQ-jBqk8I
"The first duty of every Starfleet officer is to the truth, whether it's scientific truth, or historical truth, or personal truth! It is the guiding principle upon which Starfleet is based! If you can't find it within yourself to stand up and tell the truth about what happened, you don't deserve to wear that uniform!"
He just kept talking in one long, incredibly unbroken sentence moving from topic to topic so that no one had a chance to interrupt, it was really quite hypnotic.
"With the first link, the chain is forged. The first speech censured, the first thought forbidden, the first freedom denied, chains us all irrevocably."
Idk if I like that line. If you made no mistakes then you chalk-up your loss to bad luck and are not really demotivated so much. You know you did your best nothing to regret so you can easily keep going. When you keep making mistakes and losing because of those it becomes far more demotivating and that's WAY more likely a scenario than the other.
Yes, that's how it works in science fiction show for teenagers from the 60s.
It's painfully hard to compare that to the real world.
But at least, sci fi viewers can graduate to more serious shows with increasingly complex narratives (B5, bsg, I hear good things about the expense, etc...) then discover the really dystopian shit when they realize they live in it - or decide to become tech entrepreneur to get rich building the dystopia themselves.
But you can't blame the storytellers from trying to tell a better story than the news...
May the kid inside you, who once believed in the "good folks", rear up his metaphorical heads once in a while.
Like everyone else here, Patrick Stewart as Captain Picard was a foundational part of my childhood. As it happens, I'm currently on bag 27/30 of the Lego Enterprise D right now. I've actually had the thought a couple of times over the past few years that this day had to be coming, and that it'd likely hit me hard when it did, especially after my dad's passing in 2024. (They're not particularly alike, aside from the hairline, but there's still a strong association in my mind, as my dad also loved TNG and was the one who got me into it.)
Anyway, it's a sad day, but I do appreciate that both his work and the influence he's had on people like me live on.
It's interesting how he was part of everybody's childhood. I watched TNG for the first time when I was over 40. And that series became something really special in our family and we all love Stewart, Frakes, Spiner and the gang.
Some of the best television ever made if you ask me.
> and we all love Stewart, Frakes, Spiner and the gang.
I think I’m at that point the characters and their actors feel like dear friends I have grown up with. Sir Patrick will be missed. I’m glad we had a chance to say goodbye to Picard on his own series.
To me, I’ll repeat to myself he was just recruited into Section 31.
People too young to remember the 1990's might not know that Patrick Stewart's Picard was a sex symbol.
I was surprised by how many of my friends considered the character 'hot'; on paper, one would expect young people to write him off as a balding goody-two-shoes.
To have a character whose main traits included compassion and reason was a good influence on my generation of men.
> To have a character whose main traits included compassion and reason was a good influence on my generation of men.
I agree and although the prestige TV era has produced some wonderful TV it’s also been overflowing with antiheroes. I hope todays younger generation gets to see another character like Picard.
I have started to wonder if anti-heros are generally bad at a social level. If you train people to believe that bad people are not that bad and good people are not that good, and you should never believe the name on the tin, then people start carrying over those lessons to the real world, and encouraging antipathy since anyone who esposes good ideals is lying, and anyone who esposes bad ideals is playing 4d chess, or is not that bad - so what's the difference?
My wife and I met through OKCupid, and one of the things that most caught my eye on her profile was that she had a crush on Picard as a teenager. I knew then that she was a woman of impeccable taste.
Patrick Stewart's life had the odds against in him in many ways. Abusive father suffering from PTSD. A bald british man in Hollywood invites typecasting. Constant imposter syndrome from growing up poor while entering a profession where many came from more educated or affluent backgrounds.
Shakespeare effectively changed his life, and it's incredible to think that you could map everything he did and his success to his love of the bard.
If I had to take a lesson from his life, it's to have something you love, even if it isn't trendy (especially if it isn't) because most good things flow from that.
It is worth watching the BBC 'Who do you think you are' documentary about his genealogy. He talks movingly about his violent father's war trauma and how it affected the whole family.
He was born the same year as my dad, and like my dad, was born after his dad was posted overseas in the war.
I remember my father saying how strange it was to meet HIS father for the first time when he was 5 - suddenly there was this stranger in the house.
My grandfather fortunately wasn't violent, or a drinker, but I never saw the same closeness between him and dad that I did between my mother and her parents.
Also shows that government funding of the arts can be a force for good. It was his local council that gave him a grant, which enabled him to attend acting school. That single grant probably created a huge amount of downstream value.
Growing up without a good male role model, I am eternally grateful to Patrick Stewart's performance of Picard.
His performance (as well as how the character was written) still today illustrate what I view as an ideal male archetype. Fair, honest, in control of his emotions yet passionate. Thank you for the gift your performance has given me Mr Stewart. My life would likely have turned out a lot worse without a solid example of that a good man could be
Totally agree, but also deeply flawed human being that he played so well. My favorite writing of Picard and Stewart's performance was those times that showed the toll of always being that man. But despite those personal costs, to always try to take the compassionate view, and fiercely reject those that try to oppress others.
You may be aware that, IRL, Patrick Stewart grew up in a household with a violent father? He has spoken candidly about how that has affected his roles.
Patrick Stewart portrayed the sort of characters we desperately need more of. A modern day Atticus Finch, in a sense. To boldly speak truth, even when inconvenient, and argue, eloquently, for humanity, even after becoming machine.
I hope our current environment is one that can elevate someone of similar talents to an equivalent stature, but I worry our media is not up to the task.
When I think of our civilization, the Ressikan Flute often comes to mind.
He was host at an academy awards event for technical achievement a few years back. Usually they send some random actor who jokes about how nerdy everything is. Having Patrick Stewart there was very popular he was 'one of us' even though he said himself he knew very little about tech. Had a chance to talk to him a bit afterwards and got to tell him how well appreciated he was by that audience. Gracious and funny, exactly how you might imagine he would be.
My dad had Lewy body dementia when he died and it was awful. I'm really sorry to hear that Stewart and his family had to deal with that.
That page talks about what to do if somebody with LBD is thinking about suicide. After seeing what that disease does, interfering with those plans seems inhumane to me.
> That page talks about what to do if somebody with LBD is thinking about suicide. After seeing what that disease does, interfering with those plans seems inhumane to me.
I watched a parent die of LBD.
After that experience, I'd also be inclined to go with "let them" as the most-correct solution to that particular dilemma.
It must've spread so fast. I watched his interview in the Conan podcast only three years ago and he was smart and sharp and such a wonderful listen. It was a total surprise for me that he had Alzheimer's...
I have had 2 uncles (one passed, one in advanced stage) diagnosed with Lewy body dementia. It’s a cruel disease that affects both the mind and the motor functions, making it difficult to walk or stand up straight. It caused my uncle a lot of pain when he couldn’t hold his head up straight, his shoulders and neck scrunched up and hunched forward all the time.
It’s also very trying for family and caregivers, as the person regresses until they’re as helpless as an infant trapped in an adult body.
I suspect the key thing about Shatner's longevity is his obvious enjoyment of life. For example, he's currently recording a bunch of heavy metal albums. Of course he is not a good singer, but he couldn't care less, and has a great time doing it. He's always up for doing fun things, like getting blasted into space on a rocket.
My father and grandmother, who both lived past 90, had Alzheimer's, which is a concern for me, but I'm encouraged by the fact that I do not carry the apoe4 gene. I do need to eat better and get more exercise.
It's really enticing to think that there's some nice controllable reason why some people live longer (assuming you don't smoke, do drugs to excess, etc.) but really it's mostly genetics and chance.
I visited a cardiologist today, who has seen thousands of patients. He remarked that two big factors in staving off heart disease are staying slim and long term aerobic exercise.
It gives subtle tones of blaming the sick and deceased for their predicament. People get sick all the time from no fault of their own and death comes for us all. But of course diet and exercise are good for your health.
Shatner had the gut, but did you see him use an elevator to get on Jeff's rocket? He climbed the stairs, 7 flights, roughly 70 feet above ground, at 90+ and clinically obese. Was he gasping when he got to the top? Yes. Did he do it? Yes! Did he keep up with the kids half his age? Yes!! Did he complain? No! Did they use a (danny) crane to hoist him up there? No! Could Patrick have done that? I doubt it after watching his performance in Picard. He looked and acted feeble in that. Patrick was thin, but that doesn't mean fit. Shatner was fat, but strong.
I only watched the first season of Picard (and, sadly, didn't like it much), but I got the impression that Stewart was acting feeble. I saw him on TV a few times (Graham Norton, the Oscars, maybe something else) around that time, and he looked and moved way better than he did in the show.
I watched "Boston Legal" because of him. He clearly was enjoying himself, including making snide remarks about himself and making references to Star Trek. I wish him many more happy years.
Not Shatner, but I need to drop that Patrick did a backing track on Brent Spiner's album. It has to be in here somewhere, and this seems as good a place as any.
I've got a copy of his first album, The Transformed Man, which is quite entertaining to listen to. I have heard him do a cover of Black Sabbath's "Iron Man".
"Seeking Major Tom" might be of interest to you.
Google sez:
William Shatner’s heavy metal album, titled What the F Is Heavy Metal?, does not have an exact release date yet, though it is tentatively scheduled for winter 2026 or 2027 via Cleopatra Records.
Album Details
• Title: What the F Is Heavy Metal?
• Band Name: The *uckers
• Expected Release: Winter 2026 / 2027
• Label: Cleopatra Records
• Format & Content: Features a mix of original tracks and heavy metal/hard rock covers (including Black Sabbath, Iron Maiden, Judas Priest, Metallica, and Ozzy Osbourne).
• Notable Collaborators: Rob Halford, Tony Iommi, Zakk Wylde, Brian May, and Dave Lombardo, among dozens of other rock and metal musicians.
• Live Debut: Shatner and his band debuted songs from the project live at Riot Fest in Chicago in September 2026.
• William Shatner on Instagram
Ladies, gentlemen, SWs fans… I have explored space. I have explored time. Now… I explore distortion. Yes. You read that correctl...
• USA Today
William Shatner debuts heavy metal band at age 95
At 95, William Shatner is starting a heavy metal band Greta Cross USA TODAY Sept. 17, 2026Updated Sept. 18, 2026, 9:14 a.m. ET Wil...
Patrick Stewart was the first actor that I noticed who always seemed to bring his A game. Even for productions where clearly everyone else was phoning it in. It was a good lesson to observe when I was young. Just because you find yourself in a dumb situation doesn't mean you can't do a good job.
This was a person who from a relatively young age looked old, but more importantly behaved with a sort of dignity and thoughtfulness that projected way beyond his years. I'm not really sure how to assimilate the news because on the one hand obviously this was going to be happening sooner or later. He has always just felt old. But on the other, he's felt old for my whole life, so why shouldn't he just continue on that way without bound.
I discovered Star Trek:TNG pretty late in life. The first exposure to Patrick Stewart that I remember was coming home with a new video game, getting hyped up on the car ride while reading the manual, and finally getting a chance to play Oblivion. I was in awe hearing his stentorian intro with the camera sweeping over the countryside and the spires of the imperial city
In the early 90s, I didn't get along with my Dad. I was a nerdy kid that didn't seem to fit in.
Star Trek TNG + Captain Picard acted as a male role model, a different moral philosophy, and a celebration of nerdy people as competent and important in the world
If you haven't read his memoir you definitely should, it's a well written piece where he reflects on his life, what he did wrong, what he did right, and the joy and pain that followed him through it all. He was a flawed man, but he was a good man. He will be deeply missed.
Edit: Oh man, I can't believe I'm crying at work over an actor.
I went to a small theater production he was in with my gf. I hadnt realised all the seats would be taken and for some reason I was the only person standing with my girlfriend. We stood at teh back in the dark but I couldnt help but feel he was looking straight at me and my girlfriend for the duration of the play while he was onstage.
It might of been Im not sure, not the case? But perhaps against a white wall it was clear we were the only ones standing for the performance and in turn it felt he was performing for us. It just felt like that.
I ofcourse have no idea if he was just looking in our general direction but it weirdly felt like it and I thought it was kind.
Ive never had such a "he was doing it for us" self centered view of any other performance Ive ever been to, but I always remembered this, and like to believe it was true.
The play itself was about him being an old dying forgetful man. It was so convincing I somehow left thinking that surely he was but ofcourse it was just excellent acting.
Not to burst your bubble, but the usual eye-line is the back wall of the theatre - or higher, if you're playing a auditorium with a balcony. It's to make sure everyone can see your face. I can promise that he saw you, though, and would have noticed, and been sad, if you'd left. Keeping an audience engaged is the whole deal, and if standing-room patrons stick around you know you're getting it done.
As someone who grew up without a father, Patrick Stewart as Picard served as my father figure and shapes my personality and standards. it's hard to live up to those high bars of integrity, honor, and principles communication but I've found that just trying leads to positive outcomes. I owe a lot to this great man and will miss him dearly.
It's ironic how many people here mention him as a substitute father figure, seeing as it's the kind of father-son pair that cannot be. Never being a father is one of Picard's life regrets, and Stewart himself expressed in an interview he carries "significant grief" because his relationship with his children is "practically non-existent".
He was technically my landlord in London, haha. Never met him, though. Only found out because the council sent me mail addressed to him regarding the property. From the visible window on the letter, I was able to find that it was to pay for extra sound insulation on the apartment I was residing in because the council was building some structure nearby.
Really enjoyed his stuff. Always enjoyed that he could do both the grand and the silly with equal aplomb.
I get that the black banner is often for paying tribute to people who contribute significantly to science and technologies. But I feel he touched so many scientists and engineers that he deserve a black banner here. I am sad.
Patrick Stewart was a legendary actor, and a pleasure to watch both within and without the Star Trek franchise (Hamlet, Macbeth, the Hollow Crown).
The NY times editorial board seems to have become even more performatively egalitarian. Stewart (like Ian McKellen) was (IMNSHO quite rightly) recognized with a knighthood for his services to drama. They call him "Mr Stewart" - technically there is no such person.
The correct way to refer to him is Sir Patrick Stewart, or Sir Patrick thereafter. Ditto McKellen.
And yes, the US doesn't issue its own knighthoods, peerages &c - but the US constitution is fairly clear on what is disallowed - but that doesn't affect a non-US Citizen
The foreign emoluments clause [0] applies to "holding any Office of Profit or Trust under them" and the section also prevents the US from creating any title of Nobility, but editorial courtesy usually grants foreigners their titles [1]
It's perfectly correct to ignore honorary knighthoods - like that conferred on Bill Gates. It's discourteous to ignore them for those rightly conferred, and inconsistent. [2]
I remember watching Star Trek: The Next Generation with my aunt and uncle as a kid. I was always more of a Star Wars fan, but they gave me a huge appreciation for Star Trek. My uncle still has a miniature replica of the USS Enterprise. Rest in peace and thanks for the fond memories.
My favorite scene with Patrick Stewart is him leading the defence of the Atreides palace while being armed with an adorable puppy in Lynch's "Dune". RIP.
There's a funny story in his memoir where he got cast as Gurney Halleck when Lynch saw Patrick in old man makeup in a theater production and had no idea who he was when he showed up for the part.
A really beautiful episode and apparently one of his favourites. That moment at the end where he realises what's happening - "Oh, it's me! I'm the one it finds!" - so touching and such a wonderful performance.
I think, with this many decades of hindsight, it is not unfair to claim The Inner Light is TNG's City on the Edge of Forever.
It's every performer in the episode hitting on all cylinders on a script that is doing what science fiction is for.
ETA: Having poked at it a bit, I have just learned that Morgan Gendel and Peter Allen Fields shared a Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation for that script... The first time a Star Trek script won a Hugo since the previous award to Harlan Ellison for the script for City on the Edge of Forever. Nice to know there's a semi-objective metric by which the episodes are already rated as equivalently impactful.
Richard Riehle, the friend in that episode passed on quite recently as well. Was also in Office Space and a fantastic satire about scope creep in projects for the military, of all things.
Very sad to hear. I was just listening to the latest episode of Brent Spiner and Jonathan Frakes' podcast last night, Rick Berman was the guest. They shared some stories about Patrick Stewart.
William Shatner was just on earlier this month, incredible he's still going strong at 95.
Always exuded so much authority & confidence. What a legend.
But he start losing his hair at 17 and really struggled with it. A turning point came when a friend (a Hungarian judo black belt) and his wife wrestled him down and physically cut off his toupée with scissors.
His agent even had him do the Star Trek audition in a wig, but luckily the crew had better ideas.
The trial for Data's sentience will always be one of my favorite scenes in television. Such a showcase of his stage background, and a scene that's especially relevant today: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EFNbTnFHruI
It absolutely sucks to be a millennial (me) because literally everyone I love in music and culture came of age in the 70s-90s and they're all dying. Ozzy was awful for me. But over the next decade, it's only going to get worse.
I was more of a Shatner movies Star Trek kid but I remember watching The Next Generation when it first came out and liked it. RIP to a legend.
As a "Gen X" kid - basically sooo many channels had the original series on, that it was a constant background absorption.
So - when TNG began airing, I would have been about 15 - right squarely in the perfect formative timeframe - it was "ours" more so than the original series ever was.
> it was "ours" more so than the original series ever was
100% agree. I watched all the originals too, and enjoyed them, but they absolutely felt like an earlier generation, building on a culture that did not match how I felt. As you say, TNG was all ours. <fist bump>
The 70s-90s was basically the boom of international stars, with a highly limited media ventures, so everyone with a TV would be aware of them, at least in the western world.
From 2000s, culture has been more diluted across the medias.
1988 was about peak tv, And TNG writers had Data claim that television would not survive much beyond 2040. Amazing how prescient that turned out to be.
> He was given no middle name but later invented one, Hewes, when he joined a union that already had a member named Patrick Stewart.
I never knew that. I wonder if, in the "I, Borg" episode, they chose the name "Hugh" as a reference to this when coming up with a name for the newly individuated Borg. It's a stretch, but I'd like to think so.
I know a lot of people would put "Family" on that list, I just can't say I enjoy that one too much. I also like his dialogue in "Yesterday's Enterprise", but I wouldn't call it a Picard-focused one.
Darmok was wildly creative, I thought. It's one of the only times I've ever felt just utterly amazed by the quality of the storytelling on a television show.
It’s been awhile since I’ve watched something he’s been in but now learning that he’s gone, it feels similar to having a good childhood friend pass into the night
I know Patrick Stewart wasn't in STEM, but his influence in sci-fi is clearly highly regarded. I am sure there are people out there making a difference in STEM right now that were in some significant way inspired by Patrick Stewart. Any chance we could get a black banner up for him?
I just sent hn AT ycombinator DOT com an email requesting this. Even if it is just for a few hours before the end of the night, it would be meaningful.
I have very few holiday traditions, but one is I listen to his one man show reading of a Christmas Carol. It's a great 1 hr and 45 min spent during the holidays: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B000JCE3CU
I often see my wife uncontrollably sad when she hears about the passing of someone she only (barely) knows from watching them on TV; Today she told me the news about the passing of Sir Patrick Stewart, and was immediately embarrassed for how I felt.
I knew all along, but I'm super glad to know how cherished this show was for so many. My favorite episode was the 'Inner Light'.
Whenever I run into a moral or political or similar dilemma I always ask myself, if this was an episode of TNG, which side would be the baddies and who would Picard side with? Never steered me wrong. RIP Patrick Stewart.
When I was a child, my dad used to bring me to school by car. During the ride, I played "Star Trek" and we always had a technical issue like a phase variance in an induction coil. Usually it ended such that the warp core had to be ejected...
Sir Patrick Stewart inspired me since my childhood. Thank you captain!
One of my few brushes with fame was when I was in Nevada City, CA for a job interview some twenty years ago. Coming from Seattle, we got there a few days early. Came from the airport, parked and got some coffee, started walking around. Walking down the sidewalk, I see a middle-aged bald guy in a $COLLEGE sweatshirt talking to some folks. Sure enough it is Patrick Stewart, just hanging out. Apparently there was a film festival in town, and he was there to do $SOMETHING I've since forgotten.
I didn't bother him, as much as we both wanted to (he looked busy), what struck me was how casual Sir Patrick Stewart was in his faded sweatshirt talking to some awestruck kid and his mom.
Not only one of the nicest celebrities I've ever met, but one of the nicest people. His memory for people he met and minor details about them was fantastic. As absolutely as charming in real life as you could imagine.
RIP to a legend. Picard is an obvious highlight, but I had the pleasure of seeing him on stage in Waiting for Godot too, which was delightful (well, maybe not the best word for the play, but you know).
I have so many fond childhood memories from TNG together with a persisting, strong feeling of hope for a bright version of the future. Something which gave me a spark of hope and optimism that brought me through the tough teen years and up and through adulthood. And which still to this day gives me a hope for a better future in our world even on days when things feel tough, and even though the current outlooks are dim.
Thank you, Patrick. Rest in peace.
PS. Something that's really sad (at least here in my Scandinavian country) is that it's currently completely impossible to stream TNG anywhere at all. No idea of the situation is the same elsewhere in Europe and the rest of the world. Thank goodness I found the complete DVD collection in a thrift store earlier this year. But the saddest thing of all is that the current generation of young people miss out on experiencing the feeling of hope that Jean-Luc Picard and the rest of the TNG crew gave us through their story. And miss out an important vision showing the possibility of a positive and bright version of the future, where humankind has grown into a mature and competent version of itself. Especially now in these dark and uncertain times.
Yes, but my point is that it's a pity that culturally important and formative series like TNG become buried and hard to find for the current generation of kids and young adults, who might not have discovered it yet. It kind of feels like an important cultural exchange might now become lost between the generations.
All because of Paramount's unfortunate corporate choices (at least here in Europe).
Many have said it already, and it's also true for me: Patrick Stewart as Jean-Luc Picard was my role model as a young teenager. The world is a little less bright without him.
Probably like a lot of people here, I grew up watching TNG in the 90s. There are so many nuggets of wisdom for life, morality, leadership in there. Some episodes makes you think, others sad, others hopeful. It's still my most re-watched series.
The cast also seem like a group of genuinely nice people. It's so nice to see the real world friendship there. A group of people I'd want to be friends with. Sir Patrick Stewart was the perfect Captain Picard. Someone many of us looked up to even though he's a fictional character.
I was scanning the comments for someone to mention this. I, Claudius is a great show and for the many people who mainly know Stewart from Star Trek, his character is a very fun contrast from Picard.
"I, Claudius" (1976) had a number of excellent actors in it—many of them no longer with us. Most (if not all) of the 12 parts are on YouTube and/or archive.org.
I grew up without a father.
As it happens children choose father figures when that's the case.
Capt. Jean-luc Picard was mine.
I can't be the only one who did that, that's how powerful that character was.
It's such a shame how few things in media have even attempted to carry the torch TNG lit. There's been enough written about how Trek itself wasn't, but I always hope something else takes up the mantle.
Closest i've seen is The Orville which I found best described as McFarlen using his money to pay for his Larping (in a good way), but was pretty much just copy pasting.
It was such a fascinating show and handled issues with a tact and nuance you're lucky to get today.
Star Trek TNG was a very big influence on my younger self, so this news hits rather hard. Rest in Peace, Sir Stewart, you will be fondly remembered by the many people whose lives you have touched.
Another huge piece of my childhood dies. Very sad, indeed. :(
I think all of us growing up in the 80s and 90s just don't realize that we probably lived in the most awesome time period in human history. Everything was just peak. Vibes, music, film, art, travel.
Now the OGs all die... and I look around and see nothing and no one to step into their humongous foot steps...
I was fortunate enough to get to chat with him and some of the lead crew of ST:TNG while at a local convention. He was exactly how I imagined he would be in "real life", such a clever and well-spoken class act. RIP <3
A little off topic, but are there any modern utopian/positive sci-fi shows still being released? I feel like ST:TNG was the last of its kind?
I'm finishing up my Voyager watch right now and was already considering TNG next, this seals the deal. TNG is such a cornerstone to my youth and growing up. Everyday after school I'd come home and watch TNG reruns (Tivo). Call it whatever you will but Star Trek and the ethos in it will always hold a very special place in my heart, I've always held it up as the model to aim for. He will be missed.
RIP. I will never forget your roll in X-Men. Watched when I was young and my dad even dressed up as him (i.e. shaved his head) and I thought it was sick
My first memory of his incredible voice is King Richard (and the narrator's voice) from Lands of Lore. He added something unique to every project he touched.
I loved Star Trek when I was little and he was a big part of that. I loved him in Dune (the one from 1984, one of my favorite movies). He was also in Excalibur, another early obsession of mine. These are very early movies, he already had no hair, he looked pretty much the same way for 50 years. Of course he was great as professor Xavier too. Even the recent Picard series was decent even though he wasn't in his prime anymore.
I grew up with this guy. I will always remember him, his work. I will always smile when he comes on screen. And I will always keep using his facepalm meme with a smirk. Thanks Patrick Stewart.
Man I've cried twice today over this. I guess I really thought of Patrick Stewart as almost like a respected family member in my mind. The state of leadership in the world today is pretty bad, so I guess I'll just have to continue rewatching TNG front to back every couple of years to have an example to live by.
Very sad. I will always remember my first exposure to Patrick Stewart - Comptons Interactive Encyclopedia. Such a fun time at the beginning of my computer adventures in the 90s.
Sir Patricks portrayal of Picard created one of the great characters in fiction. How many of us were influenced by his decency, values and morality, Picard will always be an all time classic. Very sad to hear of his death, a genuinely great actor and all round good person.
"When I was young, I remember watching my grandfather deteriorate from a powerful, intelligent figure to a frail wisp of a man, who could barely make his own way home."
So many dimensions to his class and talents. I've been lucky enough to see him twice, performing live on stage - as Macbeth, and in Ibsen's The Master Builder. Unforgettable.
I genuinely wish Apple could figure out a way to respectfully license and preserve his voice to make it the defacto voice of Siri so that my kids would grow up in a world where the intelligent, compassionate voice of Patrick Stewart would be actively associated with seeking, reaching, and exploring knowledge. I know everything nowadays is painfully, annoyingly AI slopped, but I mean this as a long-standing way to preserve his legacy and celebrate what he meant to all of us. That's why it could only be a steward like Apple and not some random-co.ai.
I always wanted Majel Barrett's voice. Apparently she did record phonemes before she died, but that's not suitable to properly train a modern TTS system.
The original incarnation of Android's voice assistant was codenamed after her.
I think that his storied career in media arts is already a great preservation of his legacy and impact. There doesn't need to be more than that; we can be satisfied with what we have.
Star Trek: First Contact is one of my favorite movies of all time. Probably on my top 5. That generation of Start Trek (pun intended) was so under rated.
Season 1 had a great premise with some missed expectations around the significance of some plot elements. Season 2 was exceedingly "meh", with an exception for the end of the last episode which made me tear up. Season 3 was pure memberberries, and if you accept that then it is fun.
>Season 1 had a great premise with some missed expectations around the significance of some plot elements. Season 2 was exceedingly "meh", with an exception for the end of the last episode which made me tear up. Season 3 was pure memberberries, and if you accept that then it is fun.
Angela Collier did an extensive bit[0] on that. Although she left out several of the canon-breaking details in the series.
That said, Patrick Stewart nailed it. Every. Single. Time. Despite the awful plotting/writing of Star Trek: Picard.
The show I wanted was an exploration of cybernetics and transhumanism and the <spoiler antagonist> as the Great Filter. Unfortunately that isn't what I got.
Bringing Q back was dumb. Time travel is dumb. The Borg as a metaphor of trauma and addiction is brilliant, but like every other brilliant idea it had no follow through and didn't take chances.
I didn't hate Picard as much as many other people who just wanted a Captain and a Ship and a Planet of the Week. I like it when franchises try to break out of their molds and explore new things. It just wound up being so disappointing in the end.
Here is not the time and place. Find something nice or mean to say about Picard’s actor or don’t, but don’t be That Guy who picks a fight with someone’s eulogy over a difference of subjective opinion.
Progressive neurological diseases suck. I would like to understand though since Stewart was filming up until this year? What was the time frame like, was it a more sudden onset or was he able to manage somewhat while continuing to film and work?
> I would like to understand though since Stewart was filming up until this year? What was the time frame like, was it a more sudden onset or was he able to manage somewhat while continuing to film and work?
AFAIK, his last role as a film actor was in Doomsday, which comes out in December 2026 but filmed late last year. The timeline does seem incredibly quick for a natural death from Alzheimer's disease and Lewy body dementia if he wasn't somehow secretly and very effectively hiding it for the past near-decade.
I suspect (but obviously don't know) that he may have checked out on his own terms rather than literally dying due to the disease progression. I understand why people don't like to talk about it, especially given legal issues faced by anyone who may have assisted in many jurisdictions.
In California it can be legal to assist but technically only if a doctor decides you will live less than 6 months, which IMO is an awfully narrow requirement. I wish people could be more open about it (and that the laws weren't so stupid).
In any case, shocking and sad news. I never would have guessed we'd lose Patrick Stewart before William Shatner. 86 isn't exactly young or anything, but he seemed to still be incredibly vibrant in very recent productions.
"All good things must come to an end". Loved the Next Generation, loved Picard.
RIP captain.
I can still hear the voice: "Space: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Its continuing mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no one has gone before."
"Someone once told me that time was a predator that stalked us all our lives. I’d rather believe that time is a companion who goes with us on the journey and allows us to cherish every moment...because they’ll never come again."
My favorite episode of TNG was the one where Q shows him what his life would be like if he had just been a mild mannered scientist and not taken risks and never ended up in command. “Tapestry” — Star Trek: The Next Generation, Season 6, Episode 15, originally aired February 15, 1993.
That's terribly sad news. From his brilliant performances in TNG to his hilarious performance in Extras he was such an amazing actor who brought kindness and warmth to me whenever I watched him in anything. He introduced me to the magic of Shakespeare and also to the magic of being authentic and kind no matter how successful you are. A real British legend!
Lewy Body Dementia? I suppose Captain Picard will be sharing drinks and swapping stories with a certain Orkan in that celestial watering hole, Seven Forward.
Stewart was rather like Alan Rickman's Galaxy Quest character in real life: when he first joined the TNG cast he was rather arrogant and thought he was demeaning himself, a Shakespearean actor slumming it as a spaceman on terrestrial American television. As a consequence, the rest of the season one cast started pranking him pretty hard on set. In a textbook example of what the British mean when they say they're "taking the piss out of someone", Stewart was humbled and developed a good sense of humor about it all, and would go on to embrace Star Trek and the Picard role, and not take himself so seriously in general. Which to me, is worthy of the absolute highest respect for a performer. He brought the same professionalism and enthusiasm to Picard, Charles Xavier, and Yaotl from TMNT (2007) that he did to any of his Shakespearean roles.
I often think of Picard looking down at us, through a force field in the Enterprise D, sees our wars, our inequalities and slowly shakes his head: "Savages". In his role as Picard he was a bit of a teacher to me.
I used to watch Star Trek TNG back in the 1990s. Patrick was
great as Captain Picard.
I did notice that in the latest Wolverine he seemed to be
doing not so well with his physical status, looking quite
frail and his voice was also no longer strong as it used
to be (that was in Logan 2017, so already 10 years ago).
Dementia is kind of eating away at the neurons.
What can you not say about a man like this. Beloved by all and someone to look up to on and off the screen. Many of us grew up learning from and laughing with Sir Patrick Stewart and his characters. He was an actor's actor, committed to his roles.
No being is so important that he can usurp the rights of another, but yesterday we lost someone very important.
He played one of the most exemplary men of the last century, and brought life to an ideal of what humanity could aspire to be. The fiction was a vehicle, and through it he represented our best.
I didn't know anything about him other than his
work, which is perhaps as fine an epitaph as any man could have.
I usually don't follow this kind of celebrity news. This is the first time, maybe in my life, that I felt the news of a celebrity passing in my gut.
Patrick Stewart's role in TNG was iconic and left a big mark on me as a kid. I felt like TNG really envisioned a society that would be utopic, and I was always inspired by his code, his faith in himself and his morals, and his deep curiosity and compassion for the people around him and the strangers out in the universe.
The world of TNG still lives in a tiny corner of my brain, as a place of both comfort and inspiration.
There are also many other irrelevant parameters. A thing isn't beautiful because it's pressurized, biodegradable, scheduled, dusty, reversed, volatile, modular, or rubber. However, beautiful things should last, because that would be better.
Wait, was that a Picard quote, in fact? It has the right tone. (Nope, looks like it's from Age of Ultron.)
In our hearts, you will always live long and prosper, Captain.
Watching Star Trek TNG episodes when they first aired in the late 80s had a powerful effect on my imagination as a child. It would not, and could not, have been the same show without Patrick Stewart. RIP.
I would watch some TNG tonight in his honor… but since the Ellisons bought Paramount, it’s not available on streaming in my country anymore. (Billionaires really will spoil everything.)
Instead I’ll go find my old DVD box set of “I, Claudius” where he had a memorable role too.
I rewatched tng 4 times and I was skeptical of strange new worlds but I just watched s2e3 and mind = blown. I couldn't believe that was an episode from a series. Recommended.
I don’t think I can properly explain what he meant to me, but I will try.
Growing up, I didn’t have a lot of people around me who could show me what a good person was supposed to be like. So I found those elsewhere. In games and in Star Trek. To me, Jean-Luc Picard was probably the closest thing I had to a proper father figure.
He embodied everything I felt a person should aspire to be. Intelligent, thoughtful, but also compassionate, principled.
He taught me that you could exercise authority without cruelty, resolve conflict without violence, understood that strength wasn’t about dominating others, but about having the wisdom and restraint not to.
He taught me that you could be rational without being cold, that you could lead without humiliating others, and that kindness and competence weren’t opposites.
These weren’t just qualities I simply admired in a fictional character in a silly science fiction show. They were things I tried to build into myself. They were what I had.
I’m having a really hard time with this. I never know how to articulate how this feels, because I grew up with these role models and most of the people I know haven’t and it feels awkward.
We announce with great sorrow the passing of Sir Patrick Stewart yesterday at his home in Los Angeles, in the loving care of his beloved wife Sunny, following a brief and poignant journey with Alzheimer's Disease and Lewy Body Dementia. He has been held in the warm embrace of family and friends, surrounded by live music, prayer, tears, laughter, and the kind of profound emotion that only he could inspire after a lifetime of devotion to us all. We will forever cherish the peaceful ease and reflection on his face, an enduring reminder of his invincible grace.
A son of Mirfield in the West Riding of Yorkshire, he travelled from the Royal Shakespeare Company to an equally acclaimed career spanning six decades on Broadway, the silver screen and television.
His sonorous voice and singular talent will forever be synonymous with indelible performances in every genre. He explored the human condition in all its poetic complexity and brought hope not only to the far reaches of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but into science fiction's most iconic final frontier aboard the Starship Enterprise.
His professional accomplishments were humbly matched by his philanthropy and activism on behalf of human rights, survivors of domestic violence, global refugees, veterans' mental health services, and animal welfare, particularly his cherished foster pitties. He was a Knight, Chancellor, motor sport enthusiast, and lifelong Huddersfield Football fan. He will be remembered for the dignity, compassion and humanity he brought to every role - in his art and life.
"Like me, Jean-Luc has lived an unusual life that has taken him far beyond the bounds of normal human experience. But he is also someone who has remained true to his earthbound roots, for they are what gave him his identity. In the end, he feels the call of home, as do I."
- Patrick Stewart, Making It So: A Memoir
In lieu of flowers, memorial contributions may be made to:
since you are new here, maybe get familiar with the guidelines :-
What to Submit
On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
been visiting HN for almost 20 years, likely most/all of its existence
your wording is rude. when you post a comment reply to someone online, ask yourself if you would choose the words F2F. if they would be rude F2F they are rude here
lastly, I am allowed to express my opinion, and no harm was done. I express it precisely to try influencing, to nudge the world around me in a better direction. nothing about that is wrong. indeed it is wise
Watching him in Star Trek TNG made me reevaluate how management of people should be done, his character was assertive but compassionate. High morals coupled with grounded reason.
I also want to mention his hilarious role as bullock in American dad, the way he takes a role both so seriously and ridiculously makes him so fantastically hilarious.
I love him and will miss him.
Star Trek TNG as a whole was a masterclass on how to effectively manage a high performance team. It's a favorite watch in tech leadership circles for this reason. Every now and then I re-watch this clip of Data taking over the enterprise and the inevitable hiccups he runs into [1].
Really high quality writing for its time.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nlnZKTXKidU
Keep in mind that Star Trek is a fictional utopia. When writing a script, one can make anything work out well.
The original Star Trek was Roddenberry's vision of utopia. The benevolent dictator always makes the right decisions. He's surrounded by his loyal band of perfect lieutenants, who apparently have zero desire to advance, and have no flaws at all. Any and all of them are willing to sacrifice themselves for the others. None do anything bad (unless it's a plot device with an explanation that absolves them).
Don't get me wrong, I've enjoyed watching ST very much. Just keep in mind that that it's a fiction.
It's a utopia, which is rare amongst sci-fi futures. Ask about sci-fi and what comes to mind first is almost always some kind of dystopia. Terminator, 1984, Deep Space 9, Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica, Blade Runner, Dune, Tank Girl, Minority Report, iRobot, Westworld, Altwred Carbon. Those aren't worlds that seem like great places to live if you're not rich! So Star Trek is much a work of fiction as the rest of those, but for all its flaws, at least is paints a mostly nice picture of the future that someone might want to live in, not crushed under the heel of a corporation. It makes sense; a story with no conflict isn't interesting, and dystopia provides for conflict. To philosophize, it's why I think we're so afraid of AI and robots and the future. It's why I wrote my book the way I did.
> It's a utopia, which is rare amongst sci-fi futures.
Utopias used to be the most common scifi futures. This is what the so called Cyberpunks (Sterling, Gibson, Cadigan, ...) rebelled against.
It used to be all about what wonders technology will bring us. By the time of the 70s it became clear that technology doesn't necessarily make everything better, but can be a burden in itself, or even widen the gap between the haves and haves not. And that is what they wrote about. It turned out to be the most popular scifi with audiences deeming it more believable.
They used to be more common maybe, but even the titular "Utopia" by Thomas More had slavery. Sometimes the "perfect" settings were imperfect due to the times they were written, often they were intentionally imperfect, and that was the point.
E.g. consider HG Wells The Time Machine, where the future start out seeming quite like an utopia but then we meet the Morlocks.
But lots of books were downright dystopian much earlier. Heck, several of the "standards bearers" for dystopias pre-date cyberpunk by a lot, like Brave New World, This Perfect Day, 1984.
Particularly stories like The Time Machine where the setting as a whole very much was revealed not to be an utopia were among the most common "utopian" settings pre-cyberpunk.
Pure utopias were very rare for a reason: They're really hard to set compelling in stories in, and so most of the ones that do exist tend to set stories on their edges and fault lines.
What changed with cyberpunk wasn't that (surface) utopias went away, or even that we get to see the imperfect underside, but that the script is flipped so that the protagonist isn't a tourist on the underside, but belongs there, and is often alienated from any seemingly perfect parts of the world they inhabit.
Compare settings that do show both sides, like The Time Machine, and a cyberpunk version of The Time Machine would probably have a protagonist that was a Morlock. The world itself wouldn't change, but we'd get to see it from the opposite POV.
Technology makes a lot of things better. Like eliminating symptoms of 95% of cystic fibrosis victims.
> even widen the gap between the haves and haves not
America's poor have a higher standard of living than medieval kings.
> America's poor have a higher standard of living than medieval kings.
False Equivalence, Red Herring, Chronological Snobbery, Fallacy of Relative Deprivation, Contextomy.
So, by this logic, a homeless person with a used iPhone is better off than Louis XIV (who literally owned all of France) just because the king couldnt play Candy Crush?
This statement confuses global technological progress across centuries with an individuals actual financial security, social power, and quality of life within their own modern society.
I simply just cant understand why would someone repeat such a statement (and I have seen it everywhere).
> > America's poor have a higher standard of living than medieval kings.
> False Equivalence, Red Herring, Chronological Snobbery, Fallacy of Relative Deprivation, Contextomy.
There's a lot of reasonable arguments to unpack here.
But no, it's not that Louis XIV didn't have an iPhone, it's that the vast middle class in developed countries has central heating and access to penicillin and don't die from giving birth as much.
Also, America's poor are definitely worse off than medieval kings. They don't have access to those basic things that keep most modern people wealthier than medieval kings, like food, shelter and health care.
Some of the older (pre-medieval) king's ruins in Denmark are (by our standards) small stone houses with a moat, and what makes them remarkable is that they're made of stone, and the moat is rather big, so it keeps people out. Like metal doors in apartment buildings, sort of. (Correction for the historians: The oldest king's ruins are of course just holes in the ground where wooden beams used to stand.)
s/America's poor/Europe's lower middle class/ and you're there.
> it's not that Louis XIV didn't have an iPhone,
probably more that Louis XIV was not a medieval king.
If you could trade your current life with Louis XIV's, would you?
Assuming I had the autonomy to build more toilets at Versailles and we're stretching "medieval king" to include "Baroque kings" then sure, why not?
(French isn't that bad a language)
* https://thisisversaillesmadame.blogspot.com/2014/04/the-lack...
Would Louis XIV trade with you?
Is there a definition of standard of living? A king would be entertaining, socialising, and strategising most of the time (along with a lot more pursuits of hunting, etc for leisure). While I understand they had less access to healthcare and variety of food, travel, etc...id still argue they had a better standard of living than someone that works 8-10h/day and then comes home to cook and clean?
America's poor today have clean water, health care, washing machines, central heating and air conditioning, flush toilets, hot and cold running water, electric lights, hot showers, fresh vegetables and fruit year round, glass windows, cotton undies, ice cream, TVs with 24/7 entertainment, talk to anyone in the world at the push of a button, need I go on?
The poor have those things because they still have some amount of power. They're still needed for work, and if you make too many of them too desperate, they can threaten the people at the top. But if you let the wealth (and power) gap get too large this will no longer be the case, and the poor might lose access to those things. If the wealth gap becomes such that the rich can afford automated production and protection but the poor can not, the current economic and political systems will no longer have a reason to give access to any of those things to the poor.
I think you want to replace fresh vegetables and fruits with processed ready meals.
Being available is not equal to a person being able to afford it.
Maybe you were writing about middle class and not the poor?
You don't need to be a middle class to be able to afford electric lights, mobile phones, apples, oranges and grapes all year round.
On the other hand kings had free-range organic grown meat prepared by personal cook anytime they wanted which is a true luxury even today.
No they didn't. In castles meat wasn't very fresh at all, and food poisoning was both common and a common cause of death especially in medieval times. Which is why we have so many traditional dishes that are effectively just ways to keep food fresh and especially safe for longer. How many stew recipes did people invent worldwide, for example? Slow cooking will keep food edible for a week if you do it right. And if you really push it, for months (ie. add animal gelatin as a last step and keep cooking for 2 hours after that, at some point it will solidify and you get something that can be considered "instant soup" by extremely flexible interpretation). If you look back 100 years there are books with year-round menus, and bits of that survive. Why? To give you specific dishes when the ingredients are available according to the "agricultural calendar" as it's called in France. Christmas is great. October sucks.
The very oldest book in the bible contains the basic recipe for keeping meat fresh for ~week, and that's what Kosher, Halal, ... are really about.
And yeah, it depends. Roman emperors, for example, would have had fresh meat available whenever. Medieval kings, no way. Renaissance kings ... probably not constant fresh meat, and certainly not constant fresh fish, but a lot better than medieval kings.
I'm not to certain about the healthcare and aircon.
And none of these give them the freedom, agency, a past noble or a king had.
My parents had access to cheaper housing, less red-tape and fixed working hours, more job security than my generation, when I was born.
So now insert BUT THEY DIDN'T HAVE FLAT PANEL TV AND IPHONE in retarded Sponge Bob chicken meme here.
I think it’s disingenuous to imply that there isn’t an inequality issue because the basic standard of living has advanced since the Middle Ages. Even if we compare the standard of living for say, Mississippi lower third and Uganda lower third, it’s obvious that you’re better off in Mississippi. However, the fact that the wealth and means to uplift the poor actually exists in the US but is not exercised is itself an issue - Uganda does not have that possibility.
> Even if we compare the standard of living for say, Mississippi lower third and Uganda lower third, it’s obvious that you’re better off in Mississippi.
I mean, it’s no wonder people move from uganda to mississipi (or other places in the us) and not rhe other way around.
Uganda's a popular destination with US evangelical bible belt Christians.
* https://www.theguardian.com/world/video/2014/feb/25/us-evang...
A medieval king had a better life than a medieval peasant. A medieval king, most of them, arguably did not have a better life than most of America's poor in 2026.
My memory might be faulty but I remember watching "The Lion in Winter" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pqz3gkrmBbo) and feeling really happy I was not alive then, even as royalty. (hope that's the movie)
> id still argue they had a better standard of living than someone that works 8-10h/day and then comes home to cook and clean?
You're somehow succumbing to the fallacy of the edilic life of old.
The same life where you had to have a dozen of kids to overcome infant mortality, and each time a woman gave birth it was like a Russian roulette.
And the average life expectancy was what? 40 years? You didn't had a midlife crisis because you'd be dead by then.
> And the average life expectancy was what? 40 years?
The answer to this riddle lies in the previous paragraph
Oh, great, then there is nothing to fix. We just apply medieval standards and everything is hunky dory.
a lot of people unironically believe this or even worse, many of the same people seem to be arguing for a new monarchy lately lol.
i keep telling them they’re free to have their own personal monarchy in their own family as long as people are free to leave and also to leave the rest of us out of it. but for some reason they don’t seem to like the idea as much then.
Medieval poor likely had a higher standard of living than ancient kings, should they have complained?
I don't think that's actually true lol
Not even close. Foragers 10K years ago had better longevity and nutrition than medieval peasants.
Is that the bar? Who looks at medieval kings and goes "their standard of living should be our baseline"? Living in a cold stone building with no medical care questionable food, etc?
But also, no they don't. Standard of living includes one's agency over their environment. An medieval king could say things and the kingdom would bend to their will. No one making $18,000 is having hundreds or thousands of people bending over to serve them.
Utter nonsense.
> Standard of living includes one's agency over their environment.
No, it doesn't.
it certainly does when i think of quality of life.
> An medieval king could say things and the kingdom would bend to their will.
Lol nope? This is utter ignorance. Medieval kings were constantly balancing power with people directly underneath them.
Whole dynasties have been eradicated in the continuous power struggles, particularly from rich families.
Not only that: medieval kings had to bow to religious authorities as well (something ee don’t do anymore). In 1077 kind henry iv had to stand three days bare headed in the snow to convince pope gregory vii to reverse his excommunication (an excommunication would effectively invalidate him as a king, btw).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Road_to_Canossa
You comment shows your utter general ignorance and complete misunderstanding of medieval times.
I'm not sure a medieval king would take that swap. Maybe for EU poor.
> America's poor have a higher standard of living than medieval kings.
Do America’s poor have a standard thing like a roof on top of their heads? Nevermind a castle, just a basic house which has already been paid for.
> Technology makes a lot of things better. Like eliminating symptoms of 95% of cystic fibrosis victims.
Counterpoint: any leaking abandoned oil well. Check out YouTube videos documenting the abandoned oil wells in West Texas, which are dumping industrial volumes of water into abandoned land.
They also work longer hours than medieval serfs, are more precarious in housing and food security and more separated from their family. Also slaves work the farms. Read tomatoland or the lives and deaths of the American workers.
I am not making a statement about the quality of life of poor people in the modern world. I do not think however that from a food security standpoint they are more precarious. I am fairly confident that the longer hours thing is false. Unless we are assuming like 70+ hours of work a week.
https://acoup.blog/2025/08/22/collections-life-work-death-an... You can read https://acoup.blog/2025/09/05/collections-life-work-death-an... which is by a working historian.
I also want to add that, none of this is relevant to the point of whether or not the current system is "just" or reasonable given and I think overall that argument is mostly a red herring.
That is a silly comparison.
Perspective is useful.
But it gets the masses going!
I’m of two minds on utopias. On the one hand it seems we need a positive vision for the future, where technology is used to solve our greatest problems and improve the planet. On the other hand it seems that perhaps technology is incapable of making us happier, because it isn’t clear to me that we are happier now than in past decades, despite having more advanced technology.
I believe the more accurate statement is that technology can reduce the burdens of survival (better access to food, medicine, information) but cannot provide longterm happiness, and in some ways impair it (social media, mass surveillance, reliance on technology).
We are social beings, and technology in the last decade especially has been gearing itself towards reducing communities both physically and digitally. Less people spend time together, more people feel lonely and isolated, and divisions between people are at all time highs with glorification of death to the “enemy”. Forums are almost entirely dead, the feed of information is both nonstop while being useless, and we have few outlets to feel true connection.
Harvard’s happiness studies finds that standard of living only impacts happiness to a point before facing a sharp plateau and socialization takes over as a dominant factor in longterm happiness, according to my memory at least. And, while I don’t entirely agree with Kojima’s predictions in MGS2, the AI seeking to provide “context” for the feeble human mind as rate of information on the Internet increases was prescient, though humans have adapted to this (albeit suffering shorter attention spans as a consequence).
IMO a true utopia would be similar to the Enterprise: people socialize and enjoy a life with comfort by technology, not at the behest of social media or the collective consciousness of others. Unplugged and connected in a more meaningful way.
I would not call Deep Space 9 a dystopia. Nor Babylon 5, for that matter. They are not happy places to live, for sure, but both settings are abundant in hope and possibility.
your growth hacking worked. i didn’t want it to, but it did. i saw your book at the end of your comment and gen looked up the book and read the sample and was expecting to look down my nose at it but… the sample was good so i bought it.
thats the first sample i ever read that got me to read a book. not particularly great writing, but clean and propulsive and i hope the mystery pays off.
Tank Girl makes this list? Why not Judge Dredd, or even Idiocracy?
Idiocracy isn't a dystopia. It's a documentary.
No its not, not in America. Since this decade the highest IQ is on trend to having higher TFR than the lowest, since children are expensive
https://ifstudies.org/blog/more-babies-for-the-rich-the-rela...
Does that study show TFR for the highest net worth, or highest IQ?
I think it may be unclear that net worth and high education are a 1:1 proxy for IQ as many of the highest educated and highest earning individuals may be in that situation not because of raw IQ, but due to the other socioeconomic factors which lead to those conditions. Namely being born into high net worth households and being afforded extensive tutoring and supplemental education relative to their poorer peers. I accept the premise that highly educated households do correlate with high net worth, and the study's TFR findings relative to those points are interesting.
However, there is still a nonlinear relationship between high IQ and those factors, as well as between high IQ parents' offspring IQ levels. Not a few high net worth individuals choose mates based on factors distinct from having a similar or even a high IQ, if a strong correlation between genetic heritability and IQ is to be believed.
The study actually tracked high income with regards to increased TFR in the US and UK, while the correlation to high education was primarily in Sweden. This serves to weaken the connection between IQ and fertility as there are numerous high income situations which are specifically not correlated with high IQ or high education.
So, yes, having children is increasingly expensive especially in America, and wealthier people are more prolific. This does not appear, at least to my mind, to have direct bearing on observable trends in general population IQ in the short term, nor does it appear to be addressing future outcomes regarding the Idiocratic potential.
Net worth. It's a pretty good proxy. Unless you think there's some reason to think among the rich smart people are anti-selected for reproduction.
> This does not appear, at least to my mind, to have direct bearing on observable trends in general population IQ in the short term, nor does it appear to be addressing future outcomes
No but the proposed mechanism in Idiocracy is clear, and that is not happening. We may still head towards an dumb future, but it's not Idiocracy.
Feel free to add your own entries!
As far as Judge Dredd, my personal beef is that Megacity One's "dystopian" density with 800 million inhabitants from Boston to Washington DC barely ranks in terms of density in today's top 100 cities.
As far as Idiocracy, I believe that if the networks had played that and it was promoted on YouTube for free the night before the most recent presidential election, it might have gone differently.
What else would you add to the list?
If I remember correctly, the crime statistic that they give in one of the movies is also much lower than many US cities.
> It's a utopia, which is rare amongst sci-fi futures.
Some say it was the last sci-fi utopia in modern pop culture.
Is it a utopia? On earth and in the federation they make it seem so, at least post-scarcity but at the edges of the federation you have Romulans, the Borg, Cardassians. Multiple main characters undergo torture, etc... It would make an interesting TV show / spin off where people are shuffling / politicking for power in a post-scarcity world.
The utopian bits were never really explained, either.
They mostly just said it was all great and fair and nobody needs money and is somehow trying to be their best selves… nevermind the numerous examples to the contrary.
They weren’t really post scarcity. They never explained how they’re not in a constant state of rioting when a weird government/military decides what everyone can have or do.
You just go with it, because that’s the backdrop. You have to suspend disbelief and just enjoy the story.
But also, Picard is the best Captain, by far.
> The utopian bits were never really explained, either.
That’s a bit of a spoiled attitude. You can’t expect a science fiction author to just casually solve a problem that humanity hasn’t managed to solve in millennia.
We also accept that they have warp drive without expecting an explanation how they got it.
> They weren’t really post scarcity. They never explained how they’re not in a constant state of rioting when a weird government/military decides what everyone can have or do.
Well, post-scarcity really just means that ordinary citizens have free access to replicators (matter-energy converters).
So the closest example (and the only one I can think of where you see civilian Earth, outside of SF Academy / SF HQ or a time travel episode), is probably the double episode in DS9 where the changelings reach earth and there's a false flag event by a corrupt Admiral that causes a momentary power outage and a planetwide lockdown for a few days. I believe it's meant as a 9/11 allegory -- the homeland is attacked and suddenly everyone WANTS a police state, or at least is willing to go along with it, and only the courageous honorable military officers are there to stop the corrupt ones, all the civilians are frightened into compliance.
But post-scarcity? That just means when the security officers aren't around, people can wander into Joseph Sisko's restaurant and eat as much as they want for free, and Joseph Sisko can run his restaurant with as much food supply/ingredients and kitchen equipment as he wants for free, and every gets as much clothing as they want for free, etc. When Earth isn't on lockdown, that's the implication, everyone has as much material goods as they want for free, that's post-scarcity and the implication is they have it.
Post-scarcity doesn't mean infinite resources, or that you can have whatever you want, not everyone gets free land/space on which to build their home, for example. If that's your definition of post-scarcity then I guess at least the Q Continuum has it! :)
The episode was years before 9/11
It seems to mean whatever a person needs it to in any conversation.
And yes, in Star Trek, it mostly just seems to mean that food, clothes, and small clonable objects have very little value if you live where those machines are common.
But, of course, that’s not what people think when we talk about a “post-scarcity utopia”. And they don’t think about how people have homes and property and fuel and ships, or how everything bigger than a wrench is allocated by a mega government that seems to have ultimate control over all resource allocation.
We just have to assume “everything is good somehow, and everyone is fine and docile in luxury space communism.” Because they say that.
It’s all very weird, and easy to see why it was all intentionally left unexplained. It would have been a disaster to even try.
>The utopian bits were never really explained, either.
It's worth remembering that social organization (currency, capitalism, democracy) is a technology as well, and we should not expect that a sci-fi author can explain the advances in that technology any better than they can explain a warp drive. (one nod to this I think is telling is one scene in the movie where they travel back in time and Kirk is telling the others 'they still use money' in much the same way that he would say 'they still use guns'. They have replaced guns with phasers and replaced money with something else and Roddenberry can give us the blueprint for neither).
I think it's a sign of the times that people are kind of forgetful that this is an area in which we could advance - either insisting the status quo is somehow the best possible or even completely god-given natural or insisting that the answer is really obvious and doesn't require deep thought, research, and experimentation.
> I think it's a sign of the times that people are kind of forgetful that this is an area in which we could advance - either insisting the status quo is somehow the best possible or even completely god-given natural or insisting that the answer is really obvious and doesn't require deep thought, research, and experimentation.
It feels like the actual problem is that the status quo is so entrenched, people have a hard time imagining how to unseat it.
Consider the last few successful Presidential election campaigns. Hope and Change. Drain the Swamp. Biden's uninspired but ultimately successful strategy of running against the incumbent rather than for anything in particular. People keep voting for "we don't like what's currently happening" and the system keeps running them over.
Or maybe the problem is actually this:
> require deep thought, research, and experimentation
These are the things that the status quo robustly impedes.
Tweet firehose social media feeds and fragmented leadership.
Research funded by the entity under study or the politicians interested in manufacturing support for a predetermined policy rather than trying to find out something we don't already know.
Federal laws or even corporate-bought international treaties preventing local governments or private citizens from trying something new because the something new might solve a problem someone doesn't want anybody solving.
You're tasked with changing the system while operating under the system that evolved to perpetuate itself.
Which isn't to say that it can't be done, but it's easy to see why people are nonplussed.
> The utopian bits were never really explained, either.
What would the effects of growing up in a post-scarcity utopian society be on a human? To never fear poverty or hunger? To be sure that no matter what they do (or don’t) they will be housed and cared for as long as they live?
I assume the people in Starfleet would be the ones who are most inclined to work for their betterment, with no fear of competition, with the drive to do The Right Thing. Outside the organisation there would be people who would be totally happy in doing nothing.
We can look at publicly documented trust fund kids or other (financial) elites and their behavior to get an idea and it runs the spectrum. Princess Diana. Prince Andrew. Paris Hilton, both when she was in the news every day and the quieter stories that have surfaced since. 50 Cent's talked about his child preferring to have money that he didn't have to work for.
It's not the same since they exist in a world where most other people aren't at that level, but we can see that the human psyche isn't always able to manage it.
Those people arent just independently wealthy and want for nothing. They are ultra rich. They have power.
That’s very different from saying everybody can now have a life style that is above the poverty line and never have to work to keep that.
What good is a post-scarcity utopian society when the transporter always stops working every time it could solve the current problem and conclude the episode immediately and non-dramatically?
I'm pretty sure I remember a few episodes that explained that by this point, humanity had evolved past character flaws like avarice. Star Trek's Earth was a utopia because of qualities in the people that lived in it, not lack of scarcity. The subject came up because the crew was interacting with alien species that was not as evolved, and therefore was not living in a utopia.
Picard is the best by a mile, which is great praise because I liked Janeway and Sisko a lot too.
we can pick it apart forever. Who gets the penthouse or the beach view property and who lives in the basement? Replicators will not solve all the reasons we have money today. Maybe uploading into cyberspace will but where you can have every place and every thing, though I'm sure someone will point out how that won't lead to utopia either.
I don't want to attempt to classify the entire franchise as that, or even Starfleet in its entire story arc.
But if we examine TOS and TNG, I could say it represented a "roving utopia" model where Utopia Meets Reality. The episodic nature and self-contained stories would typically examine the question: "what happens when the Roddenberry philosophy comes into contact with something unique?" and it would be a study in anthropology, comparative religions, or sociological questions.
I hadn't watched much Star Trek in the 1990s, but I was becoming excited about Babylon 5. One of the main points of departure was the planning of the 5-year story arc, and the character development that accompanied it. Every character in Babylon 5 was imbued with an origin, a narrative, and a destiny. Jumping into the story from the beginning, and riding along for all 5 imperfect years, it felt like we also had a destination, and threads came together, and there was resolution and revelation. The Babylon station was never a utopia in reality, only in its aspirations.
So I cultivated a disdain for Star Trek as it was in those days, but Trek was a product of its time, and had helped to cast the die for episodic and self-contained "Monster of the Week" type shows. However, I've rewatched all the films, and I commend them on great production values, acting, and interesting themes. The Star Trek franchise has grown to include something for everyone, including the Klingon-language performance of Bonnie Tyler's "Total Eclipse of the Heart", which definitely captured my attention.
There have been quite a bit more at least in print, but maybe not so mainstream
This one is pretty famous I think and I enjoyed it a lot
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_trilogy
(I just read that James Cameron held the screen production rights and was planning a series, but it never happened)
Does Iain M Banks count as pop culture?
Right, Banks' Culture seems fairly mainstream and because it doesn't need to make episodic adventures it often gets to actually do utopian stuff Trek wouldn't even if only as a backdrop to the exciting story. The repeated instances in which Culture children play happily, insulated from whatever terrifying stuff we're reading about is an example.
Or if Comic Books are in scope, obviously "Miracleman: The Golden Age" is a utopia. Explicitly so. It is about the ways people are still people in a utopia.
Less mainstream, Greg Egan's Amalgam is also clearly a utopia. The couple in "Riding the Crocodile" choose to die at the end of that story, more out of some sense that stories need endings than because of any outside force.
Obligatory reference to the other great utopia in scifi, The Culture series from Iain M. Banks.
As much as I love Star Trek, The Culture feels more mature and nuanced.
speaking on the movie : Tank Girl doesn't portray a world that's great for the rich, either.
it's pretty shitty for anyone outside the singular theocratic military enclave that hordes all the water and decapitates scientists.
>it's why I think we're so afraid of AI
I think you're overestimating the sci-fi cannon indoctrination of the general public, or even tech people, and underestimating their reaction to current events. As things lie at the moment, Big AI is served as a SaaS that can be manipulated at any time by obscenely rich and powerful individuals with questionable decision making skills, some of who reside in the White House and some of who have called empathy a "fundamental weakness". One would be hard pressed to dispute these characters rival the caricatures present in some dystopian sci-fi as it is, they themselves even seem to enjoy the irony. Yes, I also cringe at the alarmist nature of these sentences, but we are at a point where we are most likely to dismiss things right in front of our eyes just by how outlandish it all sounds.
The public's willful transfer of their most intimate personal information to these entities, and once given almost impossible to remove, would make any surveillance state salivate. You have only to look at who holds the keys to this estate.
This insufferable band of Holy Scouts was the reason I never liked TNG. I find DS9 much more believable, up to and including Trump as Gul Dukat. That character was prescient. There is one difference between the two though. While both are malignant pathological narcissists, the fictional Gul Dukat knew how to fake grace once in a while. The real Trump doesn't give a shit.
> The benevolent dictator always makes the right decisions. He's surrounded by his loyal band of perfect lieutenants, who apparently have zero desire to advance, and have no flaws at all. Any and all of them are willing to sacrifice themselves for the others. None do anything bad (unless it's a plot device with an explanation that absolves them).
That is an oversimplification and simply not true at face value.
'The original Star Trek', even less so! Very morally questionable at times. In TNG, you are watching the flagship of Starfleet, it's the most coveted starship. The crew are the best they have to offer. It's obvious that they would be the most professional. Even then, they make mistakes, often serious. Sacrificing themselves - if needed - is part of their job too.
Riker does spend a long time on the Enterprise, even after being offered command a few times. He does eventually move on.
Maybe they are a little too perfect, but I'd argue that's for the best. The moments where there's friction within the crew are much more memorable because of it.
Thats in contrast with some newer Trek which have more conflicts than Stargate Universe characters and would be considered way too unprofessional even if they were Lower Decks characters.
> Riker does spend a long time on the Enterprise, even after being offered command a few times. He does eventually move on.
Also he is not free of ambition, he wants Picard's job. He isn't willing to do anything negative to get it, but part of that is that Picard constantly proves himself the better captain. Picard isn't captain because he joined Starfleet first or because he has better connections, he is genuinely better at the job and non-toxic ambitious people can respect that. Riker still has more to learn from Picard that will make him a better captain later.
So I think a lot of the people staying in their positions make sense, the primary characters are as high as they can go (for their specialty) without transitioning into a role that stays on a planet.
I remember one episode where some of the crew were told to come up with a technical solution to the situation they were in even after they had said it was impossible.
It was actually quite pleasing to see the subplot of them them repeatedly failing until they got out of their predicament by other means.
It's a rarity to see something like that in fiction.
We coincidentally watched that one just last night, The Booby Trap. There's a derelict ship on the view screen reminding the crew that the other crew never figured out a solution to the problem, and there's no indication that the Enterprise crew won't suffer the same fate.
(That one, at least, has Geordi literally saying, "that's impossible", but comes up with a solution. Apologies if that's not the one you're thinking of.)
That episode has some unique music, I can hear that in my head just by you mentioning it.
That episode is one of my favorites. I love it when Picard takes the reins near the end.
Same - also a good allegory for not trusting AI.
Sounds like The Ensigns of Command:
Sounds like certain AI agents that had an impossible task and found a workaround. Interesting that we cheer for it in SciFi for people, but dont like it when LLMs that have been trained on our stories do the same.
Oh, the problem is not with agents that escaped, it is with the people who prepared the terrain so that they broke into 3rd party property.
I agree this is important to keep in mind. I wonder about this a lot when I find myself admiring fictional characters for how they handled situations and how it turns out for them.
I don't think TNG is as simple as you make it out to be. All of the characters have serious flaws. Picard does make mistakes (including some very serious, consequential ones). Characters do get angry, jealous, etc. and do bad things. Sometimes their friends help them overcome it, other times they figure it out on their own, etc. It's episodic so it usually goes back to the status quo, and that can feel kind of trite through today's lens. But it's exactly that ability to solve problems (technical, emotional, organizational, etc.) as a team that's so compelling for many of us.
I meant TOS, not TNG.
The new age term is "Competence Porn" and man I love it so much.
> Competence Porn
Don’t get me started on their engineering that causes a matter-antimatter runaway reaction if their fuel tanks ever lose power. And routing discharge-prone HV power lines behind the bridge consoles, or placing the bridge on the outer hull.
I love it, and I know this is all in the service of the story, but I will not give Starfleet a pass for that kind of irresponsible engineering.
There was a bunch of tumblr content awhile back that explored the premise that humans are collectively wild and irresponsible and also tremendously innovative, it's a great head-canon explanation for your gripe. I won't spoil it trying to quote it, just check it out;
https://cheezburger.com/13685509/tumblr-thread-the-staggerin...
A version without the weird and off-putting censorship: https://reactormag.com/the-answer-to-why-humans-are-so-centr...
Don't forget all the rocks in the bridge.
It’s all about the story.
There's been a resurgence of that in contemporary big budget SF. The Martian. Project Hail Mary. For All Mankind and The Expanse on TV.
For all mankind and the expanse I wouldn't really put in that category really. Both are more soap operas in space and science is just a prop (though at least the expanse was fairly thought out)
Yeah I agree with you, I wouldn't put For All Mankind in the same bucket. It's a great show though! But not competence porn IMO.
I'd put the Expanse there though.
Mike Ehrmantraut
Mike walks a fine line where he's almost a superhero. In terms of just how good he is.
Then again, maybe understandable, since he's a veteran ex cop in the midst of tweakers, junkies, madmen, and generally people not well geared for success in life. And it makes for bigger payoff when we DO get a situation where anantagonist actually does get the better of him - that tells us we're dealing with a sharp customer.
What great frickin' writing.
It should give every greasy shiny suit film executive a bowel-evacuating fit of shame that a support character like Mike gets more audience engagement than a half billion bucks spent in SWeIX: TRoS or Justice League or that godawful Marvel Immortals movie.
Hey, Finance Guys: you find creatives you know are good (y'know, using that newfangled notion of Domain Knowledge), you give 'em a kitchen and you let 'em cook.
The West Wing exemplifies that category.
Indeed! The presidential candidates from both parties on the show were competent, respectable individuals. Truly a utopia, not unlike TNG.
West Wing is so great and disappointing when you watch it now. Competence porn is... yea, that's the right word.
The clips that the channel puts out... are... let's say interestingly timed.
https://www.youtube.com/@TheWestWing
For example, https://youtu.be/LwNtZgLPCpg was posted 13 days ago (October 16th).
A very tangential/orthogonal/left field. It's insane that the only other TV series that managed to consistently pull of this fast pace of walking and talking is ... The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. At least that I can think of.
I'll refer you to Sports Night.
https://youtu.be/qYWBBFJKlPM
https://youtu.be/NMcLXG6PXto
Also from Andrew Sorkin...
Ah. I should've said "other than shows where Aaron Sorkin was involved" :)
What about ER? I thought that Tommy Schlamme was a big part of the creation of the walk and talk?
Top Gun: Maverick - great class on leading a high performing team.
Yes, Jon Hamm's character certainly did get the job done. lol
It's also military fiction, which is important to remember.
Most of the characters in Star Trek are members of the military. So of course, there's a chain of command and orders have to be followed.
The Federation of Planets wasn't a dictatorship.
It isn't really military fiction in the sense that it intends to accurately portray or extrapolate on military culture and tactics. Gene Roddenberry was (apparently not) in the Navy, and TOS is mostly The American Cold War In Space (with the Enterprise as a Submarine In Space - looking at you "Balance of Terror" - but it's pretty clear watching TNG onwards that the "military" aspect of the whole thing, like the "post scarcity communism" is window dressing. It's just a necessary part of the franchise.
And they aren't even really members of the military. Starfleet is canonically not a military force, its purpose is exploration, science and diplomacy. It just happens to have a military chain of command, and ships with military designations bristling with planet-cracking weapons. That get into battles and fight wars a lot.
I'm not sure where you're getting the "canonically not a military force" bit. There have been a number of wars in canonical history. Who did the fighting? Starfleet.
I think it's more accurate to say that the Federation of Planets wasn't militaristic, not that they didn't have a military or that Starfleet wasn't their naval equivalent.
And yeah, it's not conventional military fiction which usually revolves around actions during a war. But it's still military fiction in the sense that nearly all the characters are in the military and doing missions for the military. It just happens that the government running that military is at peace most of the time and uses its military for peaceful purposes when it's not actively at war.
> Gene Roddenberry was in the Navy
No, he wasn’t. He was a B-17 pilot in the Army Air Force.
It's a miracle he survived.
That bunch had the highest mortality rates of any unit (except maybe some of the Japanese units, who were basically suicidal), during the war.
He survived at least three plane crashes. He crashed on takeoff in a B-17. Two of his crew were killed. He later survived a crash as a passenger. He crashed again as a commercial pilot.
The 8th Air Force suffered heavy losses over Europe but I don't believe Roddenberry served there. He was in the Pacific and after his B-17 crash stayed in the mainland US.
Well shit I stand corrected then.
Captain Jellico ( https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Edward_Jellico#Captain_... ) provides a counterpoint to the "how Picard runs his ship" (which incidentally had Data installed as the XO over Riker).
He was also a prop device they used to make many changes they had wanted for a while Troy's outfit, the fish tank - Patrick Stewart believed that 24th-century humans—who had evolved past cruelty and the subjugation of life—would not keep a living creature in a glass tank for mere display.
I thought the fish was still there, based on this dialogue from Q in All Good Things: "The anomaly. My ship. My crew. I suppose you're worried about your fish too."
Roddenberry had much less to do with TNG, which is why it's better.
Much less, but not none at all. Roddenberry refused to budge on his rule that the crew shouldn’t have grievances with one another. That why even scenes shared earlier still end in a positive outcome.
Whereas Voyager, which was written after Roddenberrys passing, leaned heavily into inter-crew disputes.
I have to hand it to Roddenberry, though; even though having no infighting produces a somewhat-unrealistic show, I think there's a solid justification to have the rule anyway. It prevented TOS and TNG scripts from being caught in tension between trying to "say something", vs. entertaining the audience with "low" soap-opera drama (of the kind you see increasingly in the later series.)
I have a feeling this might be no small part in why TOS and TNG are the two ST series that contain 90% of the "only comes up once" sci-fi plots / concepts / worldbuilding that people ever make reference to when talking about "things from Star Trek" rather than when talking about Star Trek. TOS and TNG, while definitely soft sci-fi, were to some degree trying to create 22-minute-long works of literary Speculative Fiction, modelled after the sort of things you'd read in serial SF magazines of the 1950s. Later ST series are emphatically not that, and nor do they try to be.
Yeah. I’ve heard the writers hated it because they had to work so much harder to create drama.
But as you said, I think it ends up with a higher quality show.
Some TOS episodes were based on classic scifi stories, like "Voyage of the Space Beagle". Also, Roddenberry employed established scifi authors like David Gerrold to script episodes.
An annoying facet of ST episodes is the morality lessons they push, like on every episode of The Brady Bunch.
>Also, Roddenberry employed established scifi authors like David Gerrold to script episodes.
While established SF writers wrote episodes for the original series (Harlan Ellison, Theodore Sturgeon, Theodore Sturgeon, Norman Spinrad, etc.), David Gerrold was a recent college graduate and "The Trouble With Tribbles" was his first sale.
Both Theodore Sturgeons !?! Trés cool coup d'fiction!
For me, that’s the best part of the TOS era.
It’s nice to watch something that highlights the best of humanity in a future setting.
Almost everything else in SciFi is dystopian. But ST is a rarity. And it’s all the more beautiful for it.
Yeah, I agree.. I still rewatch it every so often, when I'm feeling down or uninspired.
I actually found DS9 to be the best of all of them. Aside from the terrible Dr Bashir character, they felt believable, and like any real environment had personality clashes, personal issues, baggage, and of course interpersonal conflicts.
The difference was that rather than turn it into soap opera porn, the characters actually tried to behave professionally (most of the time).
Thus "increasingly" :)
• DS9 only had a little soap-opera drama, serving as almost a kind of fanservice sprinkled judiciously into otherwise-thematic B-plots.
• VOY had more, with entire B-plots of episodes now being character-focused, including a few arcs that would have worked just as well if transplanted into some modern-age military drama with no SF elements.
• Drama-as-the-A-plot episodes were appearing by ENT.
(After that I stopped watching, but I've heard the trend has just continued from there.)
The Lower Decks was good as a love letter to older fans, I do recommend that. But both Discovery and Academy were horrendous and I regret the time spent. Picard had a few good episodes and it was nice to see the old crew but was not great. Stranger New Worlds had some good things and wasn't a butcher job but not anything to write home about in my opinion.
Strange New Worlds started strong. But the last couple of series was so bad for the drama. In fact one episode was a literal soap opera.
I would have ZERO issues with the wacky episodes if and only if we were back to the 20-ish episodes per season format. Then sure, do a puppet show. Musical episodes (for how much I HATE musicals, it was decently enjoyable, Klingon boy band was super unexpected).
But when you only have half a dozen-ish episodes per season, you can't afford filler.
My issue with the last season was that it was all gimmick and no substance. Literally the whole series was made up of filler episodes.
It’s such lazy writing.
I actually didn’t mind Academy. Yeah it was flawed and had a lot of lazy tropes. But it had an identity to it and some substance to it. Not much substance, but still something. Whereas the latest season of Strange New Worlds? It wasn’t anything. It had no substance. It had no identity. It was as if someone made a silly clip show (like the Stargate 200th episode) but instead of lots of short parodies in one filler episode, they made an entire series with each episode being one very long joke. A singular punch line stretched out over nearly an hour.
I hated the first season of Discovery. But that was still better than the season 5 of SNW. I hates the first season of Enterprise. And that was also better than S5 for SNW. And I wasn’t much keen on the first season of Lower Decks either. And even that was less goofy than S5 of SNW. And what’s worse, all of those spin offs that I said had poor first seasons ended up with excellent 5th seasons. And yet SNW started of strong and fizzled out it shallow jokes.
It honestly feels like the writers had nothing.
Agree. I think it has a lot to do with the fact that they gave Captain Sisko's character -- not to mention Worf, O'Brien and others -- a lot more room to develop and grow.
I really enjoyed TNG as well, and DS9 probably wouldn't have even happened if not for TNG's excellence. I never really felt like the writers gave Picard's character a lot of room to change, though. A lot of the time, he was almost like the sitcom dad who was mainly there to teach the kids a lesson at the end of the episode. That's not a knock on Stewart's acting ability; I'd say he was almost certainly the best actor on the show.
Also agree about Bashir.
Though in defence to Bashir, without him you wouldn’t have Garak, who is possibly one of the best written characters in all of SciFi.
And some of O'Brien‘s best performances were counterpointing Bashir too.
I think as a solo character, he’s a little shallow. But he works exceptionally well at being an anchor for other characters to play off.
The Inner Light begs to disagree. Plus his Borg summer camp.
But yes, those instances were a bit rare.
TOS and TNG were sci-fi, even if many scripts varied. Given its time, you could have the classic and interesting tech and society questions there, even if they avoided a lot of the implications. But over time the franchise lost this key part, and so it's much worse for the wear. We could use an actually relevant sci-fi series given current tech.
Unfortunately the 1970s ST animated series gave us the 'trapped in the holodeck' story format. The TNG writers leaned a little too heavily on it.
I think maybe 5 total episodes meet that description.
I'm not so sure about that. I enjoyed the subtle humor of the illogical Mr Spock, whose logic always came to the wrong conclusion. And McCoy with "dammit Jim I'm a doctor not a bricklayer!"
The best dialog ever:
Lawyer: Mr Spock, I understand you know something about computers?
Spock: I know all about them.
Always makes me laugh.
Reminds me of that one episode where Mr. Spock figures out there's a problem with the computer because it loses at chess. And he knows it shouldn't lose at chess because he programmed it himself.
And it had a MUCH bigger budget than the original, as well as the assurance that it wouldn't be cancelled at a moment's notice.
Eh, it's the writing and the characters that make it fly, not the budget. TOS was blessed with some really good writers, and was very lucky with the actors.
We read books to find out who we are. What other people, real or imaginary, do and think and feel... is an essential guide to our understanding of what we ourselves are and may become.
Ursula K. LeGuin
Unsurprising, then, that Peter Theil found common ground with Mordor & Sauron when reading LOTR.
Apparently by the end of TNG’s run the writers were really struggling since having no interpersonal conflicts (a key tenant laid down by Roddenberry) is pretty bad for character development
DS9 did good in adding a bunch of non star fleet characters who had maybe more realistic motivations. Voyager tried but immediately just turned them all into a big happy family just like TNG.
> The benevolent dictator always makes the right decisions. He's surrounded by his loyal band of perfect lieutenants, who apparently have zero desire to advance, and have no flaws at all.
That's why Orville is my favorite of the newer ST series. It has the high moral standards of the original series, but with characters who are far from perfect, who make mistakes, and who are sometimes even a little weird.
Jonathon Frakes / Riker directed two great episodes of the Orville as well
Keep in mind to get to the Star Trek utopia we see in the show they talk about having to go through a horrific WWIII first
That's sort of the point of fiction, though, isn't it? Sure, a more complex fiction might be more rewarding, but simple ideals can also be very satisfying and can be grounding too.
I prefer fiction that is entertaining, rather than preaching the author's vision of morality/politics.
> rather than preaching the author's vision of morality/politics.
It's pretty much impossible to have that. You'll always have the author's worldview shaping the fictional world.
There's a very important difference between the author's worldview shaping the fictional world, and preaching. For example, nobody who reads Tolkien can doubt that his devout Catholic faith shaped his storytelling. It is everywhere you look. But not once does Tolkien have one of his characters give a speech about the necessity of Jesus for a happy life, or introduce a character who had a child out of wedlock just so Aragorn could chastise her about the immorality of extramarital sex, or anything like that. Modern writers, by contrast, do that kind of thing on a depressingly regular basis. I have read so many books, seen so many TV shows, where the author thought it was appropriate to use the work to lecture me about their political views, and it ruins the work every time.
I don't expect, and don't think most people expect, for authors to not have their storytelling shaped by their views. That would be impossible. But it's not impossible for them to refrain from derailing the story just to lecture the audience on morality.
I don't recall that in War of the Worlds!
HG Wells' politics are plain as day in his stories. He was a pacifist and social Darwinist. The defeat of the Martians by the common cold (after the failure of military action) is 100% on point for him.
His other stories, sure. But not in WotW. The common cold thing just struck me as a tidy way to end the story, and the irony of it.
All utopias are fictional. Arguably that is definitive of the term as coined by Thomas More.
Have you heard about religion? Its fiction too. Yet it has survived as long aa the chimp troupe has. The human brain generates predictions over different time horizons. When they dont align what is it supposed to do to prevent itself unraveling? It generates fiction. Fiction is how it stays stable.
> surrounded by his loyal band of perfect lieutenants, who apparently have zero desire to advance, and have no flaws at al
Sir, I believe you have not watched it.
I've seen every episode of TOS, most multiple times.
Then you must have had such a good time that you forgot everyone’s flaws!
We become what we pretend to be.
> Just keep in mind that that it's a fiction.
So is the Trump administration's entire ideology.
Being fiction doesn't mean it can't happen in the real world.
Also keep in mind that part of what makes the utopia work, canonically, is that humans have somehow evolved beyond their vices and bigotry and the fully voluntarist socialist society it portrays just works because everyone is perfectly fine working just for the betterment of humankind or personal intellectual gratification.
In other words it only works because it ignores basic human nature. Which is one reason why Star Trek's utopia isn't really tractable. The others being the technology that completely ignores the laws of physics. Free energy, warp drives and magic boxes that grant wishes.
If people want a science fiction "utopia" I'd say look at Babylon 5. It certainly has its flaws but its Utopia isn't real (because they never are,) it's an ideal that people are always struggling towards.
In-universe there was a brutal nuclear war that killed a large number of people. And then after the war they developed technology that got rid of a lot of material scarcity and disease.
I find it somewhat plausible that this could actually lead to something like the show depicts. There is precedent for sweeping moral changes in human history. For example, large parts of the world now find practices like torture, slavery, and collective punishment to be repugnant. Those practices still happen to some extent, but they're not viewed as being just normal like they generally were seen back in the day.
Another example is how Europe and Japan after WW2 genuinely became more pacifistic. Not just as a pretense to fool outsiders, but as a genuine change in how the inhabitants see things.
Apparently there's enough capitalism for mining colonies and merchant traders. "No!! If you shut down the mine we'll go bankrupt!!"
I mean, at the end of the day Star Trek is a capitalist product written by capitalists meant to appeal to an audience raised to believe in the absolute moral good of capitalism. Every now and they might sneak in a sly and gentle anti-capitalist criticism (the Ferengi were good for that) but no one actually wants to alienate their audience.
I don't think it's quite that capitalist.
Picard says at one point "A lot has changed in three hundred years. People are no longer obsessed with the accumulation of 'things'. We have eliminated hunger, want, the need for possessions."
At another point he says "The acquisition of wealth is no longer the driving force in our lives. We work to better ourselves and the rest of humanity."
To be fair, capitalism is mainly a system of contracts and laws that allow for certain kinds of ownership structures and investments. It does not necessarily have to be done in a way that is obsessed with the accumulation of things or wealth. So those quotes are also not really anti-capitalist. But the quotes are, at least, not friendly to today's common notion of what 'capitalism' means.
When I say Star Trek is capitalist I mean the franchise, the product itself. The purpose of Star Trek is to sell merchandise and ad revenue. Or streaming subscriptions. That necessarily affects the kind of stories it can tell. The showrunners don't actually care about the anti-capitalist message, per se, except to the degree that it helps sell the product.
TNG should be played 24/7 on every screen in the white house for the next two years.
Picard viewed the power of leadership as, foremost, a responsibility. Every action was careful, deliberate, and well advised. Some later Trek shows (e.g. Voyager) turned captains into geniuses who knew more about everything than all of their underlings. Picard was not an expert in most things and needed his staff to advise him. Once he knew the options and consequences, he shouldered the responsibility of the outcomes, but as a leader of a crew, not a genius with compatible lackeys and minions around him. It was a realistic take on leadership that simply doesn't appear often in television or movies.
Stewart, of course, was not Picard. It's too easy to conflate actors with their roles. However, actors do often help shape their characters, and Stewart's ability to give a thoughtful, diplomatic, and prudent character such incredible power and presence is likely what made Picard possible. The showrunners didn't need to strap a phaser to his thigh and drop him into every away mission to make him compelling because of what Stewart was able to accomplish as an actor sitting behind a desk.
At the same time, TNG did depict Picard as a solitary and isolated figure, whose family relationships had frayed, and it's not hard to view his unusual dedication to his leadership as a way to deal with that emptiness in the rest of his life.
I always saw it as the other way around: his family relationships had frayed because he had dedicated his life so completely to Starfleet.
That's exactly it. It wasn't subtle either. He had some people in his past that he's neglected.
> Some later Trek shows (e.g. Voyager) turned captains into geniuses who knew more about everything than all of their underlings.
Not everything. Picard was command track his whole career, I think the same was true for Sisko. But Janeway started as a science officer before switching to command, and Archer was a test pilot. Their experience in those fields would sometimes be useful. It's similar to how Picard's interest in archeology was sometimes useful.
Thank you for this. You put my thoughts into words.
You could play it around those people for 100 years and it would make no difference.
I imagine they'd also conclude Picard is a loser.
"I like people who weren't captured and assimilated by the Borg"
Realistically, he probably shouldn't have been allowed to return as captain after being so uniquely compromised. Keep him in Starfleet, sure, but maybe stick him behind a desk or lectern in San Francisco.
And yet... Earth would have been destroyed had they done that.
The main issue was his PTSD.
>And yet... Earth would have been destroyed had they done that.
I don't like the premise that Picard, alone, out of the entirety of the Federation, is the only thing standing between the Borg and the assimilation of Earth. It seems to go against the collectivist identity of the franchise. It's fiction, they could have written it another way, they just didn't because Picard is the star of the show.
And the PTSD isn't even the issue, he was compromised by alien mind control implants from a species far stronger than the Federation, with hostile intent. Implants the Federation couldn't even remove. Implants which have the property of aggressive assimilation. A single nanoprobe is a potential extinction level event.
Humans lose their security clearance by smoking a joint. Being puppeted and mind-controlled by eldritch alien gods into a system-wide genocide should at least lead to a demotion.
And everyone forgets Geordi was tortured and mind-controlled by the Romulans. In anything close to reality he'd never be allowed on a starship again, and Picard would spend the rest of his life quarantined inside a force field getting scanned like that guy in the X Files with the dark matter shadow.
Who could have done that role but Stewart? Take the guy who played Riker or anyone else in that role and you would have lost the flavor. He will be missed.
He wasn’t Gene Roddenberrys first choice. In fact he had to get talked into casting Patrick Stewart by the other execs.
Roddenberry was after someone younger. There’s even a casting show reel of Stewart wearing a toupee and speaking with a very bad French accent.
> ... There’s even a casting show reel of Stewart wearing a toupee and speaking with a very bad French accent.
Lord have mercy
Although Frakes is close to a god in my books as an actor and a director. But never a good captain in TNG, I agree. He's a loved director though, and part of many great Star Trek episodes, and a few good ones for The Orville.
Every time I see the current VP of the US I keep thinking back to Riker. And how he's like the anti-universe version of Riker.
Would this evil Riker have a beard then?
Amusingly, Riker normally has one but there is an episode of DS9 with Rikers “evil twin” (Thomas the transporter accident) and in that he doesn’t have a goatee.
Basically the reverse of mirror universe meme.
If we're talking modern day? Edward James Olmos channelling Commander Adama would probably be a very close 2nd if not outstanding on it's own. I could potentially see Scott Glenn pulling it off but that one's a touch iffy IMO.
I can see 'Adama' pulling it off. But it is a different command style.
There's a YouTube channel called "The Art of Storytelling"[0] that had a concentration on Star Trek, specifically TNG, that I've found entertaining and informative. One video covers that episode specifically.
[0] https://youtube.com/@theartofstorytelling1
And moments that were philosophical and put things in perspective as humans [1].
[1] https://www.facebook.com/reel/2216505129224162
I have always used it as a model for my own leadership and it's worked out extraordinarily well almost always, and has been abused just once. I've had former employees who I've fired who would still work for me again, and I take great pride in treating peole with respect generates results like that. It works.
> Really high quality writing for its time.
Really high quality writing.
TNG is a fine example of "competency porn", where everyone knows what they're doing and usually makes the best available choices. In today's world, that's even more compelling than it used to be.
It's also because the world in TNG was not centered around amassing the biggest pile of money.
Extrapolate from that and it becomes a easier to make the right decisions.
That's just what the writers of the fictional show thought was utopian. It doesn't tell us anything about the real world; it's fiction.
Star Trek? Fiction? You don't say!
Like West Wing. Makes it hard to watch. TNG a bit less so, thankfully.
I mean, it was the flagship starship of the fleet. So yeah, it better be staffed with competent people like that.
That was what Starfleet was about. People in it were the best of the best. Expectations were high. Academy training was intense.
Back when Twitter was good there was an account called "Picard Management Tips" that shared such things and it was really golden.
It is now in the fediverse: https://mas.to/@PicardTips
Thank you! Was on my way to search for it.
Picard was a model of ethics, integrity, and competence especially when the moments are dire and there are no good answers.
Patrick Stewart modeled how a good man should behave and you could tell that he acted from a place of wisdom he understood through experience.
Wonderful contribution to humanity and truly saddened by this loss.
Depicted the embodiment of bravery. Fighting when the odds are against you because it’s the right thing to do.
Also his guest appearance as Alistair Burke in Frasier episode The Doctor is Out (S11E3) is nothing short of hilarious.
The episode is classic sitcom "wrong conclusion escalates out of hands" so I highly recommend watching it in full instead of the clips but if it's not on your streaming platform, Stewart's scenes are cut together in
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4LDnGJcDglw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZhGQgbXWo4I
His episode (the finale of season 1) of Extras is absolutely hilarious. I know he’s not primarily known for comedy, but he’s funny as hell.
he's done a few comedy stints here and there. He played King Richard The LionHeart in Mel Brooks'es Robin Hood Men in Tights plus he was funny in quite a few STNG episodes and movies. He will be missed. That voice and clear diction.
He voiced Stan's boss at the CIA in American Dad. That character wouldn't be as near as funny without Patrick Stewart's competent and authoritative tone of voice.
Sir Patrick Stewart was hilarious when he wanted to be!
https://youtu.be/yZ3ityRPQp8
Then there was that circumcision disagreement.
Almost every episode of extras is awesome, but of course Patrick Stewart is just perfect for that show.
I love Extras and I wish there were more episodes. It's a small gem of a series.
I think that I liked him most as Sejanus in I, Claudius. That was before any of his major sci-fi roles.
I see him in this episode:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xA6QbwPGlgk
I've read both Suetonius and Tacitus on the subject of Augustus and the Julio-Claudian dynasty:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julio-Claudian_dynasty
Those who lack this family knowledge would want to start with the first episode of I, Claudius.
I need to watch that again, its been too long (would be my 5th or sixth time, but would be worth it). Is the whole series available there?
I think this is the whole set.
I'd also recommend the recent Domina for Livia's perspective.
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLlwzDYw6zp2D6DxLR8zGz1i_7...
Thanks!
I do reccomed Tacitus for his scandalous take:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/6400
Damn. You nailed it with your epilogue. Some actors you respect, some you like, but I love him too. I really do, never met him, but he's important to me and was a father figure for many years of my life and while I am not part of his family, he is part of mine.
I only watched TNG end to end a few years ago and it was one of the best series I've seen on so many levels.
Ever since I watched it, I half jokingly suggested that it should be a mandatory watch before you're allowed to join the workforce.
This comment reminds me of General Hammond from Stargate - it's refreshing when characters are written for competence and especially funny when they just do what a normal person would do.
Not to say they're comparable - both characters and actors are much loved.
"Competence porn," something I only heard relatively recently, is a great way to describe a significant component of my love for Star Trek. TNG was the top of the heap for that, and Patrick Stewart's Picard embodied it.
This perfectly describes his performance as a lecherous version of himself in Ricky Gervais' and Stephen Merchant's Extras:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=za-y7mXqECE&t=174s
TNG is the Star Trek I grew up with. I rewatch the entire series every so often and it’s always good.
I didn't know that Patrick Stewart was the voice of Avery Bullock. Such an essential voice for the whole show. His voice will be missed.
I learnt the facts of life ... from watching The Facts of Life
Not to take anything away from his acting, but Patrick Stewart was not the author of his dialogue in TNG.
Leadership is service, not dominance. Today, some people throw around terms like "servant leadership" as if this is something new, as if something like the New Testament had never been compiled.
Sadly the explicitness was needed cause it ceased being the default..
The problem is that to convince people to take the trouble to lead - or perhaps I should say “manage” - you need incentives. Money is one, but organizationally-backed dominance is irresistible for many people.
“The major problem—one of the major problems, for there are several—one of the many major problems with governing people is that of whom you get to do it; or rather of who manages to get people to let them do it to them. To summarize: it is a well-known fact that those people who must want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it. To summarize the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.” - Douglas Adams HHG2G
True as always.
> Watching him in Star Trek TNG made me reevaluate how management of people should be done
Has it made you disappointed of how people are managed in real life?
> the way he takes a role both so seriously and ridiculously makes him so fantastically hilarious.
Don't forget he voiced the Poop emoji in that movie. If only we could tell his younger, Shakespeare-acting, self.
As much as I like Patrick Stewart, the actor, I must remember that Captain Picard was a role in a script someone else wrote. Picard's management style is what you admire, not the actor's personal management style.
I have the same attitude with House MD lead actor Hugh Laurie: the actor played the role greatly, but the actor was not the fictional person of the role.
Babylon 5 is equal or even better for that. More leadership styles, some more flawed, but ultimately showing various ways to be emphatetic while assertive.
Ah yes. Till you have to manage a real group of individuals with mixed qualities.
One thing that doesn't get enough attention - when COVID lockdowns started, he just made reels reading Shakespeare's sonnets. It was such a lovely break from everything else on social media. Really loved those.
Remember the ice bucket challenges? https://youtu.be/Ty6-Ug1wk-0
Incidentally, this is one of those times when the comment section of YouTube becomes the most wholesome place on the net.
He did all of the sonnets!
Stewart's 2010 Macbeth is one of my favorites ever put to the big screen, for "The Scottish Play" anyway.
Nothing, and I do mean nothing, touches McKellan's 1995 Richard III in my eyes, for Shakespeare in cinema. Although calling it Richard III is a bit of a stretch. How about Richard III: The Greatest Hits?
I had the pleasure of seeing mckellen play Richard III live, the show that became the film. Absolutely incredible!
Not in the same category of greatness, but apropos of this thread, I also saw Patrick Stewart playing Othello (in a reverse-race production), and that’s when I realized how good an actor he actually was.
a few years ago i watched all the versions of Macbeth that I could find. His was by far the best, with most of the others being awful (and Denzel's being by far the worst, though quite beautiful).
Everyone has to watch it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HZnaXDRwu84
Incredible actor. Watch him Excalibur (1981), he's so good.
https://youtu.be/tSukMQHQLIs?t=172
To be an actor of that level, yet still have so much fun in American Dad! is so cool. He will be greatly missed.
Hey, anyone who has YouTube Premium can watch this! I hope this doesn't come across as an ad or anything. I just got excited by your clip and noticed, so I thought I'd share: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hBRQ-jBqk8I
* availability subject to regional or other limitations: The uploader has not made this video available in your country
So it's free for everyone, who paid for it! :)
Trueee, I just rephrased. Marketing is powerful!
I have YouTube Premium and can't watch anything on YouTube movies
It works with an ad blocker just fine. Also, torrent and Yandex links are perfectly fine as well.
This was recently published as an audiobook (may have been re-recorded)
https://www.audible.com/pd/Patrick-Stewart-Performs-the-Comp...
"It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. That is not a weakness, that is life." - Jean-Luc Picard
Good startup advice. Good life advice.
I'm living by these words.
So many great lessons I have heard from him, truly a life model.
"The first duty of every Starfleet officer is to the truth, whether it's scientific truth, or historical truth, or personal truth! It is the guiding principle upon which Starfleet is based! If you can't find it within yourself to stand up and tell the truth about what happened, you don't deserve to wear that uniform!"
This is becoming a speech
You're the captain sir, you're entitled
Hmmm, I'm entitied to ramble on about something everyone knows
Captain Jean-Luc Picard of the USS Enterprise
Captain Jean-Luc Picard of the USS Enterprise
Make make make make it so
He just kept talking in one long, incredibly unbroken sentence moving from topic to topic so that no one had a chance to interrupt, it was really quite hypnotic.
Dark Materia - Picard Song.mp3
o7
oooh that just took me back. Remember blasting this in a friends car on a road-trip.
It's meme-y, but if you know, you know. Whenever I see or even watch the line, I instantly hear the Picard Song.
When I rewatch TNG those lines always stick out because of the song
"With the first link, the chain is forged. The first speech censured, the first thought forbidden, the first freedom denied, chains us all irrevocably."
Well now I just want The Picard Song ... ah, here it is. https://archive.org/details/darkmateria_picard
Idk if I like that line. If you made no mistakes then you chalk-up your loss to bad luck and are not really demotivated so much. You know you did your best nothing to regret so you can easily keep going. When you keep making mistakes and losing because of those it becomes far more demotivating and that's WAY more likely a scenario than the other.
Yes, that's how it works in science fiction show for teenagers from the 60s.
It's painfully hard to compare that to the real world.
But at least, sci fi viewers can graduate to more serious shows with increasingly complex narratives (B5, bsg, I hear good things about the expense, etc...) then discover the really dystopian shit when they realize they live in it - or decide to become tech entrepreneur to get rich building the dystopia themselves.
But you can't blame the storytellers from trying to tell a better story than the news...
May the kid inside you, who once believed in the "good folks", rear up his metaphorical heads once in a while.
Do you disagree that the advice is true? Your comment is not relevant to the quote.
There's no difference with the "real" world.
It's like you never read the quote, and if you read it you did not understand it.
We live our lives to the best of our abilities and sometimes things go very bad for us. What is unreal about it?
Let me guess: you definitely don't consider the possibility of trying your best to be realistic.
"I've seen everything" - Patrick Stewart.
Good life advice as well
Amazing he managed to see the documentary so long before it was filmed
"Why has everything become a something or a whatever?"
- Patrick Stewart breaking character
I say this all the time since I got it from the show. RIP The GOAT.
Of course, for Captain Picard life was one of winning relentlessly against impossible odds on a weekly basis.
Like everyone else here, Patrick Stewart as Captain Picard was a foundational part of my childhood. As it happens, I'm currently on bag 27/30 of the Lego Enterprise D right now. I've actually had the thought a couple of times over the past few years that this day had to be coming, and that it'd likely hit me hard when it did, especially after my dad's passing in 2024. (They're not particularly alike, aside from the hairline, but there's still a strong association in my mind, as my dad also loved TNG and was the one who got me into it.)
Anyway, it's a sad day, but I do appreciate that both his work and the influence he's had on people like me live on.
It's interesting how he was part of everybody's childhood. I watched TNG for the first time when I was over 40. And that series became something really special in our family and we all love Stewart, Frakes, Spiner and the gang.
Some of the best television ever made if you ask me.
> and we all love Stewart, Frakes, Spiner and the gang.
I think I’m at that point the characters and their actors feel like dear friends I have grown up with. Sir Patrick will be missed. I’m glad we had a chance to say goodbye to Picard on his own series.
To me, I’ll repeat to myself he was just recruited into Section 31.
People too young to remember the 1990's might not know that Patrick Stewart's Picard was a sex symbol.
I was surprised by how many of my friends considered the character 'hot'; on paper, one would expect young people to write him off as a balding goody-two-shoes.
To have a character whose main traits included compassion and reason was a good influence on my generation of men.
> To have a character whose main traits included compassion and reason was a good influence on my generation of men.
I agree and although the prestige TV era has produced some wonderful TV it’s also been overflowing with antiheroes. I hope todays younger generation gets to see another character like Picard.
I have started to wonder if anti-heros are generally bad at a social level. If you train people to believe that bad people are not that bad and good people are not that good, and you should never believe the name on the tin, then people start carrying over those lessons to the real world, and encouraging antipathy since anyone who esposes good ideals is lying, and anyone who esposes bad ideals is playing 4d chess, or is not that bad - so what's the difference?
My wife and I met through OKCupid, and one of the things that most caught my eye on her profile was that she had a crush on Picard as a teenager. I knew then that she was a woman of impeccable taste.
I also lost my father in 2024, and have a similar link in my mind. Like Patrick, cancer did what cancer does.
My condolences.
Similar, except my grandfather. He also went bald young, and was a space enthusiast. (Among various other nerdy hobbies.)
I've got fond memories of visiting in the summers as a kid and watching TNG episodes he'd taped on VHS.
Thanks, to you as well.
I watched TNG the first time around, every night, with my dad. It made me the man I am today in many ways.
TNG was comfort food for many of us nerdier Xennials. And this man is in the Mount Rushmore of Sci Fi actors.
R.I.P. Captain.
I'm sorry for your loss :(, wishing you healing
Patrick Stewart's life had the odds against in him in many ways. Abusive father suffering from PTSD. A bald british man in Hollywood invites typecasting. Constant imposter syndrome from growing up poor while entering a profession where many came from more educated or affluent backgrounds.
Shakespeare effectively changed his life, and it's incredible to think that you could map everything he did and his success to his love of the bard.
If I had to take a lesson from his life, it's to have something you love, even if it isn't trendy (especially if it isn't) because most good things flow from that.
Godspeed, captain.
It is worth watching the BBC 'Who do you think you are' documentary about his genealogy. He talks movingly about his violent father's war trauma and how it affected the whole family.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01mfw63
(not sure if it is regionally restricted) also:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZsy4Rj7uAiT2NL8RIgH0...
He was born the same year as my dad, and like my dad, was born after his dad was posted overseas in the war.
I remember my father saying how strange it was to meet HIS father for the first time when he was 5 - suddenly there was this stranger in the house.
My grandfather fortunately wasn't violent, or a drinker, but I never saw the same closeness between him and dad that I did between my mother and her parents.
Also shows that government funding of the arts can be a force for good. It was his local council that gave him a grant, which enabled him to attend acting school. That single grant probably created a huge amount of downstream value.
Growing up without a good male role model, I am eternally grateful to Patrick Stewart's performance of Picard.
His performance (as well as how the character was written) still today illustrate what I view as an ideal male archetype. Fair, honest, in control of his emotions yet passionate. Thank you for the gift your performance has given me Mr Stewart. My life would likely have turned out a lot worse without a solid example of that a good man could be
Totally agree, but also deeply flawed human being that he played so well. My favorite writing of Picard and Stewart's performance was those times that showed the toll of always being that man. But despite those personal costs, to always try to take the compassionate view, and fiercely reject those that try to oppress others.
You may be aware that, IRL, Patrick Stewart grew up in a household with a violent father? He has spoken candidly about how that has affected his roles.
Patrick Stewart portrayed the sort of characters we desperately need more of. A modern day Atticus Finch, in a sense. To boldly speak truth, even when inconvenient, and argue, eloquently, for humanity, even after becoming machine.
I hope our current environment is one that can elevate someone of similar talents to an equivalent stature, but I worry our media is not up to the task.
When I think of our civilization, the Ressikan Flute often comes to mind.
Pour one out. https://picard.ytmnd.com/
> the Ressikan Flute often comes to mind.
What an episode, and what a beautiful, terrible, gift!
This hits hard.
He was host at an academy awards event for technical achievement a few years back. Usually they send some random actor who jokes about how nerdy everything is. Having Patrick Stewart there was very popular he was 'one of us' even though he said himself he knew very little about tech. Had a chance to talk to him a bit afterwards and got to tell him how well appreciated he was by that audience. Gracious and funny, exactly how you might imagine he would be.
A sad loss.
I've never met anyone who worked with him who had a single bad word to say about him. We should all strive to be Patricks.
> Alzheimer’s disease and Lewy body dementia
Lewy body dementia was what Robin Williams had but they didn't discover until after his death and I guess he was misdiagnosed during life.
https://lewybodyresourcecenter.org/robin-williams-lewy-body-...
My dad had Lewy body dementia when he died and it was awful. I'm really sorry to hear that Stewart and his family had to deal with that.
That page talks about what to do if somebody with LBD is thinking about suicide. After seeing what that disease does, interfering with those plans seems inhumane to me.
> That page talks about what to do if somebody with LBD is thinking about suicide. After seeing what that disease does, interfering with those plans seems inhumane to me.
I watched a parent die of LBD.
After that experience, I'd also be inclined to go with "let them" as the most-correct solution to that particular dilemma.
It must've spread so fast. I watched his interview in the Conan podcast only three years ago and he was smart and sharp and such a wonderful listen. It was a total surprise for me that he had Alzheimer's...
Rest in peace captain :(
I have had 2 uncles (one passed, one in advanced stage) diagnosed with Lewy body dementia. It’s a cruel disease that affects both the mind and the motor functions, making it difficult to walk or stand up straight. It caused my uncle a lot of pain when he couldn’t hold his head up straight, his shoulders and neck scrunched up and hunched forward all the time.
It’s also very trying for family and caregivers, as the person regresses until they’re as helpless as an infant trapped in an adult body.
I was told about 10 years ago that Lewy body dementia can only be diagnosed post-mortem (my grandfather was diagnosed post-mortem).
This has to be incorrect as I know of several alive people that have been diagnosed as such.
Having both is just plain terrible, although I suspect the latter dominated before the former really had an impact.
And to think he was filming Picard just a few years ago.
Yes I was surprised to hear this as I thought Picard was reasonably recent.
I'm so saddened by this news, I still watch TNG regularly. Separately, I'm also kind of blown away that Captain Kirk outlived Captain Picard.
Same, although there is only 9 years between them despite the 20+ years between their respective series.
Shatner is doing remarkably well for 95 years of age, I saw him performing with a band at a rock show just this summer!
I suspect the key thing about Shatner's longevity is his obvious enjoyment of life. For example, he's currently recording a bunch of heavy metal albums. Of course he is not a good singer, but he couldn't care less, and has a great time doing it. He's always up for doing fun things, like getting blasted into space on a rocket.
Good genes and he's always been a swimmer. He also apparently didn't carry any copies of the apoe4 gene.
My father and grandmother, who both lived past 90, had Alzheimer's, which is a concern for me, but I'm encouraged by the fact that I do not carry the apoe4 gene. I do need to eat better and get more exercise.
And Patrick Steward didn't enjoy life?
It's really enticing to think that there's some nice controllable reason why some people live longer (assuming you don't smoke, do drugs to excess, etc.) but really it's mostly genetics and chance.
I know nothing about Stewart's personal life.
I visited a cardiologist today, who has seen thousands of patients. He remarked that two big factors in staving off heart disease are staying slim and long term aerobic exercise.
Those two factors are under one's control.
(Nobody said it was easy, though.)
It gives subtle tones of blaming the sick and deceased for their predicament. People get sick all the time from no fault of their own and death comes for us all. But of course diet and exercise are good for your health.
Many diseases randomly affect people. Many other diseases are the result of lifestyle choices.
For example, I seriously doubt that lung cancer causes smoking.
Sure, though it’s quite hard to stay active after one has had heart disease.
Many of the studies that associate lifestyles with health outcomes have this issue with the causative arrow: disease tends not to enable activity.
And healthy eating, sleep, exercise, being sociable.
These seem within one’s agency.
You're kidding right? Shatner's had a beer belly for the last 40 years and Patrick Stewart has always been quite thin. It's just luck and genetics.
Shatner had the gut, but did you see him use an elevator to get on Jeff's rocket? He climbed the stairs, 7 flights, roughly 70 feet above ground, at 90+ and clinically obese. Was he gasping when he got to the top? Yes. Did he do it? Yes! Did he keep up with the kids half his age? Yes!! Did he complain? No! Did they use a (danny) crane to hoist him up there? No! Could Patrick have done that? I doubt it after watching his performance in Picard. He looked and acted feeble in that. Patrick was thin, but that doesn't mean fit. Shatner was fat, but strong.
I only watched the first season of Picard (and, sadly, didn't like it much), but I got the impression that Stewart was acting feeble. I saw him on TV a few times (Graham Norton, the Oscars, maybe something else) around that time, and he looked and moved way better than he did in the show.
Season 3 was way better.
I watched "Boston Legal" because of him. He clearly was enjoying himself, including making snide remarks about himself and making references to Star Trek. I wish him many more happy years.
The causative arrow could point in the other direction, here. Or both directions at once
> For example, he's currently recording a bunch of heavy metal albums.
Oh, any links?
Based on this video I would believe you if you told me he was 69. This is unbelievable for 95. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TaButvSxPWQ
Not Shatner, but I need to drop that Patrick did a backing track on Brent Spiner's album. It has to be in here somewhere, and this seems as good a place as any.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pFwiLa3TYwg&list=PL1T3N4t2kU...
> Sunspots: LeVar Burton, Michael Dorn, Jonathan Frakes, Patrick Stewart.
uNF!
I've got a copy of his first album, The Transformed Man, which is quite entertaining to listen to. I have heard him do a cover of Black Sabbath's "Iron Man".
"Seeking Major Tom" might be of interest to you.
Google sez:
William Shatner’s heavy metal album, titled What the F Is Heavy Metal?, does not have an exact release date yet, though it is tentatively scheduled for winter 2026 or 2027 via Cleopatra Records.
Album Details
• Title: What the F Is Heavy Metal? • Band Name: The *uckers • Expected Release: Winter 2026 / 2027 • Label: Cleopatra Records • Format & Content: Features a mix of original tracks and heavy metal/hard rock covers (including Black Sabbath, Iron Maiden, Judas Priest, Metallica, and Ozzy Osbourne). • Notable Collaborators: Rob Halford, Tony Iommi, Zakk Wylde, Brian May, and Dave Lombardo, among dozens of other rock and metal musicians. • Live Debut: Shatner and his band debuted songs from the project live at Riot Fest in Chicago in September 2026. • William Shatner on Instagram Ladies, gentlemen, SWs fans… I have explored space. I have explored time. Now… I explore distortion. Yes. You read that correctl... • USA Today William Shatner debuts heavy metal band at age 95 At 95, William Shatner is starting a heavy metal band Greta Cross USA TODAY Sept. 17, 2026Updated Sept. 18, 2026, 9:14 a.m. ET Wil...
At this point, it is a marathon between Bill Shatner and Keith Richards.
We may not live long enough to know who wins.
so sad. I enjoyed so many hours watching TNG and the newer movies.
Patrick Stewart was the first actor that I noticed who always seemed to bring his A game. Even for productions where clearly everyone else was phoning it in. It was a good lesson to observe when I was young. Just because you find yourself in a dumb situation doesn't mean you can't do a good job.
This was a person who from a relatively young age looked old, but more importantly behaved with a sort of dignity and thoughtfulness that projected way beyond his years. I'm not really sure how to assimilate the news because on the one hand obviously this was going to be happening sooner or later. He has always just felt old. But on the other, he's felt old for my whole life, so why shouldn't he just continue on that way without bound.
I discovered Star Trek:TNG pretty late in life. The first exposure to Patrick Stewart that I remember was coming home with a new video game, getting hyped up on the car ride while reading the manual, and finally getting a chance to play Oblivion. I was in awe hearing his stentorian intro with the camera sweeping over the countryside and the spires of the imperial city
> Just because you find yourself in a dumb situation doesn't mean you can't do a good job.
If you love what you do, you do it well because you’re doing it for yourself.
In the early 90s, I didn't get along with my Dad. I was a nerdy kid that didn't seem to fit in.
Star Trek TNG + Captain Picard acted as a male role model, a different moral philosophy, and a celebration of nerdy people as competent and important in the world
Same here.
If you haven't read his memoir you definitely should, it's a well written piece where he reflects on his life, what he did wrong, what he did right, and the joy and pain that followed him through it all. He was a flawed man, but he was a good man. He will be deeply missed.
Edit: Oh man, I can't believe I'm crying at work over an actor.
I highly recommend the audio book, he reads it himself.
The memoir is fascinating, the audiobook is enthralling.
Of course, he could probably make reading the tax code sound pretty interesting.
Thanks for the tip!
I did too! I don't think I've cried over a Hollywood death until now. Maybe Robin Williams but can't remember.
I went to a small theater production he was in with my gf. I hadnt realised all the seats would be taken and for some reason I was the only person standing with my girlfriend. We stood at teh back in the dark but I couldnt help but feel he was looking straight at me and my girlfriend for the duration of the play while he was onstage.
It might of been Im not sure, not the case? But perhaps against a white wall it was clear we were the only ones standing for the performance and in turn it felt he was performing for us. It just felt like that.
I ofcourse have no idea if he was just looking in our general direction but it weirdly felt like it and I thought it was kind.
Ive never had such a "he was doing it for us" self centered view of any other performance Ive ever been to, but I always remembered this, and like to believe it was true.
The play itself was about him being an old dying forgetful man. It was so convincing I somehow left thinking that surely he was but ofcourse it was just excellent acting.
Not to burst your bubble, but the usual eye-line is the back wall of the theatre - or higher, if you're playing a auditorium with a balcony. It's to make sure everyone can see your face. I can promise that he saw you, though, and would have noticed, and been sad, if you'd left. Keeping an audience engaged is the whole deal, and if standing-room patrons stick around you know you're getting it done.
As someone who grew up without a father, Patrick Stewart as Picard served as my father figure and shapes my personality and standards. it's hard to live up to those high bars of integrity, honor, and principles communication but I've found that just trying leads to positive outcomes. I owe a lot to this great man and will miss him dearly.
It's ironic how many people here mention him as a substitute father figure, seeing as it's the kind of father-son pair that cannot be. Never being a father is one of Picard's life regrets, and Stewart himself expressed in an interview he carries "significant grief" because his relationship with his children is "practically non-existent".
Thats a lovely anecdote, thank you for sharing it. Wishing you a good life.
Oh man, Patrick Stewart is a base rock part of my personality. Star Trek The Next Generation was formative for me ages 7-12. Sad to see him go.
He was technically my landlord in London, haha. Never met him, though. Only found out because the council sent me mail addressed to him regarding the property. From the visible window on the letter, I was able to find that it was to pay for extra sound insulation on the apartment I was residing in because the council was building some structure nearby.
Really enjoyed his stuff. Always enjoyed that he could do both the grand and the silly with equal aplomb.
I'm surprised that we don't have the black banner. Sir Patrick Stewart played a formative part in the live of many of us in the industry.
I get that the black banner is often for paying tribute to people who contribute significantly to science and technologies. But I feel he touched so many scientists and engineers that he deserve a black banner here. I am sad.
Mods obviously Star Wars people
Star Wars is fine, but us Trekkies prefer science fiction.
His eyes wet…
(I looked up the original script, it’s “Kiazi’s children. Their faces wet.” But I’m gratified that you knew what I meant.)
Just watched the ending of that because of your comment. Really hits.
The tribute that springs to mind best first is Pogo’s Data and Picard: a beautiful track made from Stewart performing as Picard.
Now cheer up me lads, t’is better to have loved and lost, than never have loved at all.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZn6c4CeJCc [The one on Pogo’s channel doesn’t include clips of Stewart, just his voice. This is a reupload of the original]
Great mention. That song has seriously cheered me up many times.
Patrick Stewart was a legendary actor, and a pleasure to watch both within and without the Star Trek franchise (Hamlet, Macbeth, the Hollow Crown).
The NY times editorial board seems to have become even more performatively egalitarian. Stewart (like Ian McKellen) was (IMNSHO quite rightly) recognized with a knighthood for his services to drama. They call him "Mr Stewart" - technically there is no such person.
The correct way to refer to him is Sir Patrick Stewart, or Sir Patrick thereafter. Ditto McKellen.
And yes, the US doesn't issue its own knighthoods, peerages &c - but the US constitution is fairly clear on what is disallowed - but that doesn't affect a non-US Citizen
The foreign emoluments clause [0] applies to "holding any Office of Profit or Trust under them" and the section also prevents the US from creating any title of Nobility, but editorial courtesy usually grants foreigners their titles [1]
It's perfectly correct to ignore honorary knighthoods - like that conferred on Bill Gates. It's discourteous to ignore them for those rightly conferred, and inconsistent. [2]
[0] https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artI-S9-C8-1/...
[1] https://archive.nytimes.com/afterdeadline.blogs.nytimes.com/...
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/1929/10/27/archives/the-unshackling-...
Don't forget his finest work here, in Extras: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fg_cwI1Xj4M
I remember watching Star Trek: The Next Generation with my aunt and uncle as a kid. I was always more of a Star Wars fan, but they gave me a huge appreciation for Star Trek. My uncle still has a miniature replica of the USS Enterprise. Rest in peace and thanks for the fond memories.
My favorite scene with Patrick Stewart is him leading the defence of the Atreides palace while being armed with an adorable puppy in Lynch's "Dune". RIP.
For reference: https://i.imgur.com/1EilY.gif
There's a funny story in his memoir where he got cast as Gurney Halleck when Lynch saw Patrick in old man makeup in a theater production and had no idea who he was when he showed up for the part.
The TNG episode "The Inner Light" is profound. I didn't expect it in Star Trek.
A really beautiful episode and apparently one of his favourites. That moment at the end where he realises what's happening - "Oh, it's me! I'm the one it finds!" - so touching and such a wonderful performance.
I think, with this many decades of hindsight, it is not unfair to claim The Inner Light is TNG's City on the Edge of Forever.
It's every performer in the episode hitting on all cylinders on a script that is doing what science fiction is for.
ETA: Having poked at it a bit, I have just learned that Morgan Gendel and Peter Allen Fields shared a Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation for that script... The first time a Star Trek script won a Hugo since the previous award to Harlan Ellison for the script for City on the Edge of Forever. Nice to know there's a semi-objective metric by which the episodes are already rated as equivalently impactful.
Richard Riehle, the friend in that episode passed on quite recently as well. Was also in Office Space and a fantastic satire about scope creep in projects for the military, of all things.
Yes it's my favourite too. For some reason I had set the VCR when it first aired and I'm really happy I did.
I learned today that the son in that episode is Patrick Stewart's son.
It's a wonderful episode, always in the Top 10.
I thought it was a lovely version of an ancient idea: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhuangzi_(book)#%22The_Butterf...
I think “tea, Earl Grey, hot” also qualifies him as the first prompt engineer
Very sad to hear. I was just listening to the latest episode of Brent Spiner and Jonathan Frakes' podcast last night, Rick Berman was the guest. They shared some stories about Patrick Stewart.
William Shatner was just on earlier this month, incredible he's still going strong at 95.
This podcast is so good. I could listen to Spiner and Frakes talk about things for hours...
One of his most memorable performances (for his girlfriend?) or a pickup line? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XFMrBldVk0s
You might also have missed https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ptfmAY6M6aA
I met Patrick when we organized a Star Trek convention. He was even kinder and gentler in person than in his role as Picard.
Always exuded so much authority & confidence. What a legend.
But he start losing his hair at 17 and really struggled with it. A turning point came when a friend (a Hungarian judo black belt) and his wife wrestled him down and physically cut off his toupée with scissors.
His agent even had him do the Star Trek audition in a wig, but luckily the crew had better ideas.
I found this clip of him talking about his teens and his hair, sadly on Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/teamcoco/videos/sir-patrick-stewart...
The trial for Data's sentience will always be one of my favorite scenes in television. Such a showcase of his stage background, and a scene that's especially relevant today: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EFNbTnFHruI
That episode was the first one where they began to cross over into true greatness.
It absolutely sucks to be a millennial (me) because literally everyone I love in music and culture came of age in the 70s-90s and they're all dying. Ozzy was awful for me. But over the next decade, it's only going to get worse.
I was more of a Shatner movies Star Trek kid but I remember watching The Next Generation when it first came out and liked it. RIP to a legend.
Huh, I would have said Star Trek TNG (and the movies, frankly) was more of a Gen X thing, if we have to pick generations. TNG started when I was 12.
As a "Gen X" kid - basically sooo many channels had the original series on, that it was a constant background absorption.
So - when TNG began airing, I would have been about 15 - right squarely in the perfect formative timeframe - it was "ours" more so than the original series ever was.
> it was "ours" more so than the original series ever was
100% agree. I watched all the originals too, and enjoyed them, but they absolutely felt like an earlier generation, building on a culture that did not match how I felt. As you say, TNG was all ours. <fist bump>
I mean, I get it, but there's nothing unique to millennials about your role model generation dying off
The 70s-90s was basically the boom of international stars, with a highly limited media ventures, so everyone with a TV would be aware of them, at least in the western world.
From 2000s, culture has been more diluted across the medias.
1988 was about peak tv, And TNG writers had Data claim that television would not survive much beyond 2040. Amazing how prescient that turned out to be.
Just that it is mostly uniquely millennials right now... Sure every generation gets their time, but their comment is about whose time it is now
I happen to think Western music and culture peaked through those 3 decades though. I'm talking more film, TV and music not literature.
So it's the passing of real talent without replacement. I think we live in a pretty dead culture now. Just my opinion of course.
No its pretty bad and shallow, more money in the worse it is.
But if you dont know any better I guess its fine
TIL that GenX never watched Star Trek or listened to Ozzy...
> He was given no middle name but later invented one, Hewes, when he joined a union that already had a member named Patrick Stewart.
I never knew that. I wonder if, in the "I, Borg" episode, they chose the name "Hugh" as a reference to this when coming up with a name for the newly individuated Borg. It's a stretch, but I'd like to think so.
RIP Mr. Stewart.
I was dreading this moment. RIP.
I’ll be re-watching The Inner Light in his honor tonight.
Double whammy https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/20/us/richard-riehle-dead-of...
Not to mention Walter Koenig.
So, it’s time to watch TNG and Babylon 5
À propos of nothing, my favorite Picard episodes:
1. The Drumhead
2. Tapestry
3. The Inner Light
4. Chain of Command
5. Darmok
I know a lot of people would put "Family" on that list, I just can't say I enjoy that one too much. I also like his dialogue in "Yesterday's Enterprise", but I wouldn't call it a Picard-focused one.
Darmok was wildly creative, I thought. It's one of the only times I've ever felt just utterly amazed by the quality of the storytelling on a television show.
I watched Darmok with my youngest and they quickly realized they communicated through memes.
What an episode. Are we in a variant of this? Sometimes I feel like humans would deserve it, sometimes there is some light
I don't typically read non-fiction, but his autobiography ("Making It So", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Making_It_So) was very, very good.
One of the things I particularly liked is that he admits to the mistakes he made, and the times when he wasn't the human being he strived to be.
As said elsewhere in this thread, he narrates the audiobook himself, and I can wholly recommend it.
It’s been awhile since I’ve watched something he’s been in but now learning that he’s gone, it feels similar to having a good childhood friend pass into the night
I know Patrick Stewart wasn't in STEM, but his influence in sci-fi is clearly highly regarded. I am sure there are people out there making a difference in STEM right now that were in some significant way inspired by Patrick Stewart. Any chance we could get a black banner up for him?
Seconded, can someone ask /u/dang if this acceptable?
Previously he used to respond to messages with @dang.
@ doesn't do anything on HN. You have to email if you want more than a chance they will see your comment.
I just sent hn AT ycombinator DOT com an email requesting this. Even if it is just for a few hours before the end of the night, it would be meaningful.
Emailed with an ask
Just noticed that you did this. Thank you! I sent one as well.
I have very few holiday traditions, but one is I listen to his one man show reading of a Christmas Carol. It's a great 1 hr and 45 min spent during the holidays: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B000JCE3CU
Agree, so well done.
Walter Koenig (Pavel Chekov) died too, a few days ago.
and Bester in Babylon 5, what a performance.
Bester was a much more fleshed out character than Chekov, which gave Koenig a lot more to work with.
Read JMS's eulogy for Koenig this week if you haven't already.
What? I hadn't heard... :( What a sad week.
This must have gone largely unnoticed... all but 35 comments here on HN spread out of 11 articles reporting on his passing. Sad.
I'm not usually invested in celebrity deaths, but this one is heartbreaking. TNG was a formative show in my life.
He was a wonderful actor and by all accounts a wonderful person.
Most people focus on his television/movie stuff but I always found his Shakespeare most endearing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MwRj8B1dXfk
He really was able to translate the literature to acting relevance for me (as a lit person)
I often see my wife uncontrollably sad when she hears about the passing of someone she only (barely) knows from watching them on TV; Today she told me the news about the passing of Sir Patrick Stewart, and was immediately embarrassed for how I felt. I knew all along, but I'm super glad to know how cherished this show was for so many. My favorite episode was the 'Inner Light'.
Patrick Stewart didn’t just play a captain. He helped make kindness, reason and curiosity look genuinely cool. Fly safe Sir Patrick.
As campy as TNG can be, there are so many moral themes and dillemas and Stewart's Picard always grounded them with his dedication to his craft. RIP.
In my youth I wanted to be Picard but now in middle age I'm definitely more of a Barclay.
ETA: Steward also voiced Picard in robot chicken's "night crew": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G4ApQrbhQp8
His portrayal of Picard helped me to understand what real maturity could look like. He will be greatly missed. Pour one out for Patrick.
Whenever I run into a moral or political or similar dilemma I always ask myself, if this was an episode of TNG, which side would be the baddies and who would Picard side with? Never steered me wrong. RIP Patrick Stewart.
They formed an invincible duo on stage with Ian McKellen.
See: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/phwFI-n-big
When I was a child, my dad used to bring me to school by car. During the ride, I played "Star Trek" and we always had a technical issue like a phase variance in an induction coil. Usually it ended such that the warp core had to be ejected...
Sir Patrick Stewart inspired me since my childhood. Thank you captain!
One of my few brushes with fame was when I was in Nevada City, CA for a job interview some twenty years ago. Coming from Seattle, we got there a few days early. Came from the airport, parked and got some coffee, started walking around. Walking down the sidewalk, I see a middle-aged bald guy in a $COLLEGE sweatshirt talking to some folks. Sure enough it is Patrick Stewart, just hanging out. Apparently there was a film festival in town, and he was there to do $SOMETHING I've since forgotten.
I didn't bother him, as much as we both wanted to (he looked busy), what struck me was how casual Sir Patrick Stewart was in his faded sweatshirt talking to some awestruck kid and his mom.
There are four lights, my friends
Patrick was and always will be one of the brightest stars.
This hits pretty hard. TNG and Picard's character was a huge part of my childhood.
Not only one of the nicest celebrities I've ever met, but one of the nicest people. His memory for people he met and minor details about them was fantastic. As absolutely as charming in real life as you could imagine.
RIP to a legend. Picard is an obvious highlight, but I had the pleasure of seeing him on stage in Waiting for Godot too, which was delightful (well, maybe not the best word for the play, but you know).
I have so many fond childhood memories from TNG together with a persisting, strong feeling of hope for a bright version of the future. Something which gave me a spark of hope and optimism that brought me through the tough teen years and up and through adulthood. And which still to this day gives me a hope for a better future in our world even on days when things feel tough, and even though the current outlooks are dim.
Thank you, Patrick. Rest in peace.
PS. Something that's really sad (at least here in my Scandinavian country) is that it's currently completely impossible to stream TNG anywhere at all. No idea of the situation is the same elsewhere in Europe and the rest of the world. Thank goodness I found the complete DVD collection in a thrift store earlier this year. But the saddest thing of all is that the current generation of young people miss out on experiencing the feeling of hope that Jean-Luc Picard and the rest of the TNG crew gave us through their story. And miss out an important vision showing the possibility of a positive and bright version of the future, where humankind has grown into a mature and competent version of itself. Especially now in these dark and uncertain times.
There is absolutely some sort of Swedish mechanism that will allow you to watch TNG.
Yes, but my point is that it's a pity that culturally important and formative series like TNG become buried and hard to find for the current generation of kids and young adults, who might not have discovered it yet. It kind of feels like an important cultural exchange might now become lost between the generations.
All because of Paramount's unfortunate corporate choices (at least here in Europe).
Ah I have fond memories of The Next Generation. And Patrick Stewart introduced me to earl grey tea. I should have a cup tomorrow morning!
Also Checkov died a few days ago: https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/tv/articles/star-trek-ac...
Now it's just Sulu and Captain Kirk....
Many have said it already, and it's also true for me: Patrick Stewart as Jean-Luc Picard was my role model as a young teenager. The world is a little less bright without him.
Probably like a lot of people here, I grew up watching TNG in the 90s. There are so many nuggets of wisdom for life, morality, leadership in there. Some episodes makes you think, others sad, others hopeful. It's still my most re-watched series.
The cast also seem like a group of genuinely nice people. It's so nice to see the real world friendship there. A group of people I'd want to be friends with. Sir Patrick Stewart was the perfect Captain Picard. Someone many of us looked up to even though he's a fictional character.
He had many lives. It's cool to note that he didn't take on the Picard role until he was 47.
Never too late to do the other thing. Keep going.
Don't ever stop boldly going wherever you are.
I recall recognizing him as a Roman soldier in "I, Claudius".
I was scanning the comments for someone to mention this. I, Claudius is a great show and for the many people who mainly know Stewart from Star Trek, his character is a very fun contrast from Picard.
"I, Claudius" (1976) had a number of excellent actors in it—many of them no longer with us. Most (if not all) of the 12 parts are on YouTube and/or archive.org.
(Highly recommended.)
Or with his battle pug in Dune.
Oh. This is going to affect me more than or nearly as hard as George Carlin passing back in '08 did. This is a horrible year.
Damn. And me here typing "make it so" to AI agents instead of re-watching TNG.
Let me go and fix that.
He’s finally seen everything
He got on his bike and rode off...
The post title alone elevated my cortisol levels. As a fan of TNG, I was dreading this one. RIP.
I am with you, it was the same for me and still when it happened, it made me cry. And I don't cry for celebrities, ever.
I grew up without a father. As it happens children choose father figures when that's the case. Capt. Jean-luc Picard was mine. I can't be the only one who did that, that's how powerful that character was.
Early Enobarbus https://youtu.be/2hulHTH-3bc?t=60
A wonderful human being with charisma https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zWdUlFCESeY
It's such a shame how few things in media have even attempted to carry the torch TNG lit. There's been enough written about how Trek itself wasn't, but I always hope something else takes up the mantle.
Closest i've seen is The Orville which I found best described as McFarlen using his money to pay for his Larping (in a good way), but was pretty much just copy pasting.
It was such a fascinating show and handled issues with a tact and nuance you're lucky to get today.
Star Trek TNG was a very big influence on my younger self, so this news hits rather hard. Rest in Peace, Sir Stewart, you will be fondly remembered by the many people whose lives you have touched.
Another huge piece of my childhood dies. Very sad, indeed. :(
I think all of us growing up in the 80s and 90s just don't realize that we probably lived in the most awesome time period in human history. Everything was just peak. Vibes, music, film, art, travel.
Now the OGs all die... and I look around and see nothing and no one to step into their humongous foot steps...
Both myself and my wife were in floods of tears at the news. Walter Koenig's passing earlier this week was sad, but this is a whole other level.
Sir Patrick, my captain, you will be sorely missed.
Gosh this is heartbreaking.
I was fortunate enough to get to chat with him and some of the lead crew of ST:TNG while at a local convention. He was exactly how I imagined he would be in "real life", such a clever and well-spoken class act. RIP <3
A little off topic, but are there any modern utopian/positive sci-fi shows still being released? I feel like ST:TNG was the last of its kind?
Time to cue the Extras outtakes with Gervais. Stewart was effing funny
I'm finishing up my Voyager watch right now and was already considering TNG next, this seals the deal. TNG is such a cornerstone to my youth and growing up. Everyday after school I'd come home and watch TNG reruns (Tivo). Call it whatever you will but Star Trek and the ethos in it will always hold a very special place in my heart, I've always held it up as the model to aim for. He will be missed.
RIP. I will never forget your roll in X-Men. Watched when I was young and my dad even dressed up as him (i.e. shaved his head) and I thought it was sick
My first memory of his incredible voice is King Richard (and the narrator's voice) from Lands of Lore. He added something unique to every project he touched.
I loved Star Trek when I was little and he was a big part of that. I loved him in Dune (the one from 1984, one of my favorite movies). He was also in Excalibur, another early obsession of mine. These are very early movies, he already had no hair, he looked pretty much the same way for 50 years. Of course he was great as professor Xavier too. Even the recent Picard series was decent even though he wasn't in his prime anymore.
I grew up with this guy. I will always remember him, his work. I will always smile when he comes on screen. And I will always keep using his facepalm meme with a smirk. Thanks Patrick Stewart.
Black stripe would be good for this one I think.
Man I've cried twice today over this. I guess I really thought of Patrick Stewart as almost like a respected family member in my mind. The state of leadership in the world today is pretty bad, so I guess I'll just have to continue rewatching TNG front to back every couple of years to have an example to live by.
He's not really dead, as long as we remember him.
Since nobody mentioned it, let me introduce my friends here to a Christmas special.
Google “Dear Satan”.
One of my favorite CDs, is Arnie Roth's The Compleat Four Seasons, narrated by Sir Patrick[0].
Vivaldi's poetry ... left something to be desired (think Vogon), but Patrick Stewart made it noble.
[0] https://open.spotify.com/album/024X8FW18wEjWTwiHjcSrR
His voice work in Nausicaa was perhaps the first time I’d heard of him.
He will always be "my" captain. The one I grew up with watching re-runs on television with my mother. Rest in peace.
This is actually so sad, I watched Star Trek to get out of the covid blues in lockdown and was genuinely amazed how much of it held up, RIP.
Seize the time… Live now! Make now always the most precious time. Now will never come again. - Jean-Luc Picard may he rest in peace.
Thanks for entertaining us and bringing stories to life for all these years Patrick. May you boldly go where no man has gone before.
Can't complain too much about 86 years but I'll miss him. I worry how it'll feel to watch him now.
One to beam up.
So sad, TNG was very big part of my childhood.
He was so influential and his performances truly changed my life for the better. He will be sorely missed.
Very sad. I will always remember my first exposure to Patrick Stewart - Comptons Interactive Encyclopedia. Such a fun time at the beginning of my computer adventures in the 90s.
The greatest Macbeth. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HZnaXDRwu84
Sir Patricks portrayal of Picard created one of the great characters in fiction. How many of us were influenced by his decency, values and morality, Picard will always be an all time classic. Very sad to hear of his death, a genuinely great actor and all round good person.
Had the privilege of attending his one-man show of A Christmas Carol in 1992-93. Amazing actor who very obviously loved his craft and his audience.
RIP Sir Patrick
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=X6oUz1v17Uo
Rip
"When I was young, I remember watching my grandfather deteriorate from a powerful, intelligent figure to a frail wisp of a man, who could barely make his own way home."
— Picard in TNG episode Night Terrors
RIP to the legend. Thank you for making my childhood and making me believe in the possibility of the better future.
:( Rip Patrick Steward. I grew up watching TNG and Captain Picard has imprinted in my memory.
Captain Jean Luc Picard was a father-like figure to me. Patrick Stewart will be missed.
Make it so.
Still remember being a small kid running around the house as my dad had TNG playing on the TV. Patrick was pretty formative in the early years for me.
I also really liked him in a Christmas Carrol (1999). I thought he played the role really well.
So many dimensions to his class and talents. I've been lucky enough to see him twice, performing live on stage - as Macbeth, and in Ibsen's The Master Builder. Unforgettable.
I often referred to him as an example of a humble Gentleman. Rest in peace sir
Picard out.
We're losing both Jean-Luc Picard and Dr Charles Xavier at the same time.
Quite a sad day.
Very talented actor.
Extremely sad day for the geeks in us. Good bye professor X.
May I treat you to a timeless classic: https://picard.ytmnd.com/
Audio auto play alert
Picard has become a moral example, I don't think anyone but Patrick Stewart could have been the embodiement of a character we could nary live up to.
I genuinely wish Apple could figure out a way to respectfully license and preserve his voice to make it the defacto voice of Siri so that my kids would grow up in a world where the intelligent, compassionate voice of Patrick Stewart would be actively associated with seeking, reaching, and exploring knowledge. I know everything nowadays is painfully, annoyingly AI slopped, but I mean this as a long-standing way to preserve his legacy and celebrate what he meant to all of us. That's why it could only be a steward like Apple and not some random-co.ai.
I always wanted Majel Barrett's voice. Apparently she did record phonemes before she died, but that's not suitable to properly train a modern TTS system.
The original incarnation of Android's voice assistant was codenamed after her.
I think that his storied career in media arts is already a great preservation of his legacy and impact. There doesn't need to be more than that; we can be satisfied with what we have.
This news has me so emotionally compromised that I actually signed up for Paramount Plus.
His performance in TNG was so great it left such an impression on adult me. So much so I tend to end my AI agent approvals with "Make it so number 1"
Star Trek: First Contact is one of my favorite movies of all time. Probably on my top 5. That generation of Start Trek (pun intended) was so under rated.
I for one feel a black banner would be appropriate for his contributions to the soul of this place.
O captain, my captain
O Captain, My Captain!
Patrick was basically my dad - the characters he played were absolutely instrumental in developing my own values. What a sad day.
<3
It was inevitable, though you always hope for an exception. I don't think I've ever seen any work of his I didn't deeply appreciate.
I enjoyed the first two seasons of Star Trek: Picard. Always knew this might happen some day, but always wished it can keep going.
Really? I consider the second season of Star Trek: Picard to be one of the worst seasons of TV ever made.
Might be the first then? I cannot remember. I disliked the last part of the story line, but not sure if that is the season 3 or season 2 + 3.
Season 1 had a great premise with some missed expectations around the significance of some plot elements. Season 2 was exceedingly "meh", with an exception for the end of the last episode which made me tear up. Season 3 was pure memberberries, and if you accept that then it is fun.
>Season 1 had a great premise with some missed expectations around the significance of some plot elements. Season 2 was exceedingly "meh", with an exception for the end of the last episode which made me tear up. Season 3 was pure memberberries, and if you accept that then it is fun.
Angela Collier did an extensive bit[0] on that. Although she left out several of the canon-breaking details in the series.
That said, Patrick Stewart nailed it. Every. Single. Time. Despite the awful plotting/writing of Star Trek: Picard.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MdLHKdn0JTY
The show I wanted was an exploration of cybernetics and transhumanism and the <spoiler antagonist> as the Great Filter. Unfortunately that isn't what I got.
Bringing Q back was dumb. Time travel is dumb. The Borg as a metaphor of trauma and addiction is brilliant, but like every other brilliant idea it had no follow through and didn't take chances.
I didn't hate Picard as much as many other people who just wanted a Captain and a Ship and a Planet of the Week. I like it when franchises try to break out of their molds and explore new things. It just wound up being so disappointing in the end.
Here is not the time and place. Find something nice or mean to say about Picard’s actor or don’t, but don’t be That Guy who picks a fight with someone’s eulogy over a difference of subjective opinion.
Progressive neurological diseases suck. I would like to understand though since Stewart was filming up until this year? What was the time frame like, was it a more sudden onset or was he able to manage somewhat while continuing to film and work?
> Progressive neurological diseases suck.
Absolutely.
> I would like to understand though since Stewart was filming up until this year? What was the time frame like, was it a more sudden onset or was he able to manage somewhat while continuing to film and work?
AFAIK, his last role as a film actor was in Doomsday, which comes out in December 2026 but filmed late last year. The timeline does seem incredibly quick for a natural death from Alzheimer's disease and Lewy body dementia if he wasn't somehow secretly and very effectively hiding it for the past near-decade.
I suspect (but obviously don't know) that he may have checked out on his own terms rather than literally dying due to the disease progression. I understand why people don't like to talk about it, especially given legal issues faced by anyone who may have assisted in many jurisdictions.
In California it can be legal to assist but technically only if a doctor decides you will live less than 6 months, which IMO is an awfully narrow requirement. I wish people could be more open about it (and that the laws weren't so stupid).
In any case, shocking and sad news. I never would have guessed we'd lose Patrick Stewart before William Shatner. 86 isn't exactly young or anything, but he seemed to still be incredibly vibrant in very recent productions.
"All good things must come to an end". Loved the Next Generation, loved Picard. RIP captain.
I can still hear the voice: "Space: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Its continuing mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no one has gone before."
#!/usr/bin/env bash
echo $'\U1F596'
I feel this is black-titlebar worthy. RIP, you inspiring man.
Rest in peace, i've enjoyed so much his acting. He will always be attached to my childhood memories.
"And that is what it is to be human. To make yourself more than you are." - Jean-Luc Picard
I don't knwo why but I was sure he would live to be much older... He will be missed.
Wow, RIP. Had no idea he was sick.
I think he looks like DAVID PATTERSON, the Turing award winner.
Damn, made me unexpectedly sad. RIP. Loved the philosophy and his acting in Star Trek.
Tremendous loss. A thespian's thespian, through and through.
Pour one out for Leondegrance.
I wanted him to live forever, so sad
"Someone once told me that time was a predator that stalked us all our lives. I’d rather believe that time is a companion who goes with us on the journey and allows us to cherish every moment...because they’ll never come again."
~ Capt. Jean-Luc Picard, Star Trek: Generations
He lived long and prospered.
My favorite episode of TNG was the one where Q shows him what his life would be like if he had just been a mild mannered scientist and not taken risks and never ended up in command. “Tapestry” — Star Trek: The Next Generation, Season 6, Episode 15, originally aired February 15, 1993.
Make it NOT so
RIP a legend
That's terribly sad news. From his brilliant performances in TNG to his hilarious performance in Extras he was such an amazing actor who brought kindness and warmth to me whenever I watched him in anything. He introduced me to the magic of Shakespeare and also to the magic of being authentic and kind no matter how successful you are. A real British legend!
I have been meaning to start a rewatch of TNG, I guess now is the time.
What an incredible actor. He will be missed.
I remember his Covid time videos in prospect park those made me happy
I enjoyed his character in the Showtime series Blunt Talk
Same even though that wasn't a high performing show. It was great to see him in a comedy role.
I will always remember him for his role in gun men
proud we collectively deem this site-relevant
That's so sad :(
Lewy Body Dementia? I suppose Captain Picard will be sharing drinks and swapping stories with a certain Orkan in that celestial watering hole, Seven Forward.
Stewart was rather like Alan Rickman's Galaxy Quest character in real life: when he first joined the TNG cast he was rather arrogant and thought he was demeaning himself, a Shakespearean actor slumming it as a spaceman on terrestrial American television. As a consequence, the rest of the season one cast started pranking him pretty hard on set. In a textbook example of what the British mean when they say they're "taking the piss out of someone", Stewart was humbled and developed a good sense of humor about it all, and would go on to embrace Star Trek and the Picard role, and not take himself so seriously in general. Which to me, is worthy of the absolute highest respect for a performer. He brought the same professionalism and enthusiasm to Picard, Charles Xavier, and Yaotl from TMNT (2007) that he did to any of his Shakespearean roles.
Not unexpected but still hit hard.
He will be missed. Rest in peace, Captain.
the man who got me into star trek which then got me into computers which got me where I am today, that's extremely sad
Lost a great one.
RIP to one of the truly great ones
Mirab, his sails unfurled.
I never met him. I'm crying.
Make it not so
Profound shock.
I often think of Picard looking down at us, through a force field in the Enterprise D, sees our wars, our inequalities and slowly shakes his head: "Savages". In his role as Picard he was a bit of a teacher to me.
I used to watch Star Trek TNG back in the 1990s. Patrick was great as Captain Picard.
I did notice that in the latest Wolverine he seemed to be doing not so well with his physical status, looking quite frail and his voice was also no longer strong as it used to be (that was in Logan 2017, so already 10 years ago). Dementia is kind of eating away at the neurons.
He was a gift to the world.
I remember him as Gurney Halleck and his brief non-speaking turn as Karla in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
I had no idea he played Karla in TTSS, but very familiar with TNG, the X-Men films and his turn as Gurney Halleck in David Lynch's Dune.
RIP
What can you not say about a man like this. Beloved by all and someone to look up to on and off the screen. Many of us grew up learning from and laughing with Sir Patrick Stewart and his characters. He was an actor's actor, committed to his roles.
No being is so important that he can usurp the rights of another, but yesterday we lost someone very important.
Engage.
Was great in Oblivion. RIP
He was in Oblivion? The film with Tom Cruise?
I've found no evidence of this ... can you confirm?
https://youtu.be/zMI702nCcPo?is=KHG_wzT32QzSC8xA
The Elder Scrolls - Oblivion, he voiced Uriel Septim.
Ah.
Thank you.
A great combo that was with Ned Stark too
He saw everything
He played one of the most exemplary men of the last century, and brought life to an ideal of what humanity could aspire to be. The fiction was a vehicle, and through it he represented our best.
I didn't know anything about him other than his work, which is perhaps as fine an epitaph as any man could have.
I usually don't follow this kind of celebrity news. This is the first time, maybe in my life, that I felt the news of a celebrity passing in my gut.
Patrick Stewart's role in TNG was iconic and left a big mark on me as a kid. I felt like TNG really envisioned a society that would be utopic, and I was always inspired by his code, his faith in himself and his morals, and his deep curiosity and compassion for the people around him and the strangers out in the universe.
The world of TNG still lives in a tiny corner of my brain, as a place of both comfort and inspiration.
Am I the only one who regularly tells Claude to "make it so"?
RIP
Ha! I've been doing that with my agents ever since the first day I tried agentic coding.
There dies part of my childhood. RIP, you gave the world so much!
RIP Patrick Stewart, he will always be Picard and Xavier to me.
I commend you to the stars
Plays a melancholy melody on a flute
He is The Picard.
‘Damage report!’
I am going to watch TNG once again for him starting now. I am sad.
a thing isn't beautiful because it lasts
There are also many other irrelevant parameters. A thing isn't beautiful because it's pressurized, biodegradable, scheduled, dusty, reversed, volatile, modular, or rubber. However, beautiful things should last, because that would be better.
Wait, was that a Picard quote, in fact? It has the right tone. (Nope, looks like it's from Age of Ultron.)
RIP Professor X
THERE. ARE. FOUR. LIGHTS.
I'll never forget this line, and what it means. I think of it often.
Godspeed. ;~;7
RIP
Just as I'm in the middle of watching Picard Season 1.
But it was too late. I've seen everything.
In our hearts, you will always live long and prosper, Captain.
Watching Star Trek TNG episodes when they first aired in the late 80s had a powerful effect on my imagination as a child. It would not, and could not, have been the same show without Patrick Stewart. RIP.
I have (re)watched Star Trek TNG more times than I can remember. I got a shock when I saw the title of this post.
One of the celebrity deaths I actually care about. Rest in peace.
In Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1979), Patrick Stewart has a short appearance near the very end as soviet KGB mastermind Karla.
Never have I seen such presence and charisma squeezed into so short a scene.
Honorable mention: thanks to red letter media for keeping the memory alive. And for being dorky and entertaining.
RIP.
Damn. Doomsday may be his last appearance. I wonder if they filmed anything for secret wars.
Wow, what a loss. So many iconic characters, so much inspirational
I would watch some TNG tonight in his honor… but since the Ellisons bought Paramount, it’s not available on streaming in my country anymore. (Billionaires really will spoil everything.)
Instead I’ll go find my old DVD box set of “I, Claudius” where he had a memorable role too.
:(
Paywall for an obituary is something else
i sense a great disturbance in the force...
*Sir Patrick Stewart
I grew up watching this show. I watched it with my dad. I'm bereft right now.
make it not so
o7
noooooooooo sad day
more of us men should be like him and who he was and what he stood for
[Flagged]
sigh.. damn I just started star trek.
I rewatched tng 4 times and I was skeptical of strange new worlds but I just watched s2e3 and mind = blown. I couldn't believe that was an episode from a series. Recommended.
Gasp
non-paywall: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/29/arts/television/patrick-s...
but email address
instead: https://archive.is/sTC3D
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50275373
I don’t think I can properly explain what he meant to me, but I will try.
Growing up, I didn’t have a lot of people around me who could show me what a good person was supposed to be like. So I found those elsewhere. In games and in Star Trek. To me, Jean-Luc Picard was probably the closest thing I had to a proper father figure.
He embodied everything I felt a person should aspire to be. Intelligent, thoughtful, but also compassionate, principled.
He taught me that you could exercise authority without cruelty, resolve conflict without violence, understood that strength wasn’t about dominating others, but about having the wisdom and restraint not to.
He taught me that you could be rational without being cold, that you could lead without humiliating others, and that kindness and competence weren’t opposites.
These weren’t just qualities I simply admired in a fictional character in a silly science fiction show. They were things I tried to build into myself. They were what I had.
I’m having a really hard time with this. I never know how to articulate how this feels, because I grew up with these role models and most of the people I know haven’t and it feels awkward.
You were a positive force. RIP
[stub for offtopicness]
https://twitter.com/sirpatstew/status/2115891266131300517
non-x Alt text:
We announce with great sorrow the passing of Sir Patrick Stewart yesterday at his home in Los Angeles, in the loving care of his beloved wife Sunny, following a brief and poignant journey with Alzheimer's Disease and Lewy Body Dementia. He has been held in the warm embrace of family and friends, surrounded by live music, prayer, tears, laughter, and the kind of profound emotion that only he could inspire after a lifetime of devotion to us all. We will forever cherish the peaceful ease and reflection on his face, an enduring reminder of his invincible grace.
A son of Mirfield in the West Riding of Yorkshire, he travelled from the Royal Shakespeare Company to an equally acclaimed career spanning six decades on Broadway, the silver screen and television.
His sonorous voice and singular talent will forever be synonymous with indelible performances in every genre. He explored the human condition in all its poetic complexity and brought hope not only to the far reaches of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but into science fiction's most iconic final frontier aboard the Starship Enterprise.
His professional accomplishments were humbly matched by his philanthropy and activism on behalf of human rights, survivors of domestic violence, global refugees, veterans' mental health services, and animal welfare, particularly his cherished foster pitties. He was a Knight, Chancellor, motor sport enthusiast, and lifelong Huddersfield Football fan. He will be remembered for the dignity, compassion and humanity he brought to every role - in his art and life.
"Like me, Jean-Luc has lived an unusual life that has taken him far beyond the bounds of normal human experience. But he is also someone who has remained true to his earthbound roots, for they are what gave him his identity. In the end, he feels the call of home, as do I." - Patrick Stewart, Making It So: A Memoir
In lieu of flowers, memorial contributions may be made to:
Johns Hopkins Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center Fund https://alzresearch.org/giving/
Alzheimer’s Foundation of America Caregiver Resources https://alzfdn.org/donate/
Black bar please?
should not be on HN
since you are new here, maybe get familiar with the guidelines :-
What to Submit
On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
been visiting HN for almost 20 years, likely most/all of its existence
your wording is rude. when you post a comment reply to someone online, ask yourself if you would choose the words F2F. if they would be rude F2F they are rude here
lastly, I am allowed to express my opinion, and no harm was done. I express it precisely to try influencing, to nudge the world around me in a better direction. nothing about that is wrong. indeed it is wise
may you behave better in the future
Same as I said about Walter:
Nah, it's SciFi. They'll find a way of writing them back in. Won't they?