29 Days of Star Trek Meme: Day 2
Feb. 7th, 2012 05:01 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
4thofeleven2 - Who is your favourite character?
You know, I thought this would be a really hard one to answer, but thinking about it, there’s only one real choice: Captain Picard. Sure, there’s plenty of characters I like in the various series, but none of them can really compete with mon capitan.
Picard, I think, was really the only character the Next Generation writers had worked out right from the start. Which is a little odd in hindsight; he’s not exactly an archetype you’d expect to see in an American action-adventure show; the rather reserved, intellectual, and, for that matter, European character as the leader is rather unusual. But it worked, and to me at least, a big part of the Next Generation’s appeal is that it doesn’t have an action hero at its core. (Something that the later movies managed to miss entirely…)
One thing I always find interesting about Picard is that the Enterprise isn’t his first command, that at the start of the Next Generation he’d already spent years commanding the Stargazer. It’s something that separates Picard from the other captains, he’s a much more mature and experienced figure with no need to prove his ability to command. (And that’s what makes episodes like “Tapestry” so fascinating, seeing Picard before he’d developed that experience and self-confidence.)
I’m not embarrassed to say that a lot of my personal morality and sense of justice is at least partially influenced by Picard; a lot of the credit must go to Patrick Stewart, who managed to give Picard’s speeches a sense of genuine sincerity when many of them could have come across as merely lecturing the audience. I think in many ways almost all of the modern Star Trek series are dependent on the character of Captain Picard and Patrick Stewart, for creating a convincing example of the sort of person who might inhabit the enlightened utopia the Federation is supposed to be.
You know, I thought this would be a really hard one to answer, but thinking about it, there’s only one real choice: Captain Picard. Sure, there’s plenty of characters I like in the various series, but none of them can really compete with mon capitan.
Picard, I think, was really the only character the Next Generation writers had worked out right from the start. Which is a little odd in hindsight; he’s not exactly an archetype you’d expect to see in an American action-adventure show; the rather reserved, intellectual, and, for that matter, European character as the leader is rather unusual. But it worked, and to me at least, a big part of the Next Generation’s appeal is that it doesn’t have an action hero at its core. (Something that the later movies managed to miss entirely…)
One thing I always find interesting about Picard is that the Enterprise isn’t his first command, that at the start of the Next Generation he’d already spent years commanding the Stargazer. It’s something that separates Picard from the other captains, he’s a much more mature and experienced figure with no need to prove his ability to command. (And that’s what makes episodes like “Tapestry” so fascinating, seeing Picard before he’d developed that experience and self-confidence.)
I’m not embarrassed to say that a lot of my personal morality and sense of justice is at least partially influenced by Picard; a lot of the credit must go to Patrick Stewart, who managed to give Picard’s speeches a sense of genuine sincerity when many of them could have come across as merely lecturing the audience. I think in many ways almost all of the modern Star Trek series are dependent on the character of Captain Picard and Patrick Stewart, for creating a convincing example of the sort of person who might inhabit the enlightened utopia the Federation is supposed to be.