Patrick Stewart was the beating heart of Star Trek. We were lucky to have him

Christine Bohan

WHY IS IT so unexpectedly sad that Patrick Stewart has died?

The man was 86, for heaven’s sake. He had a great innings, with the kind of professional career that actors dream of, marrying commercial success with the theatre work that he loved. His autobiography is basically him spending a few hundred pages talking about how jammy he was at every stage of his life and how happy he was with how everything worked out (somehow it manages to be endearing rather than annoying).

But it’s a bit like when Jack Charlton died: it’s the end of an era.

In the same way that there will always be Ireland football teams, there will always be Star Trek. But there will never be that Ireland football team again – and there will never be Captain Jean-Luc Picard again.

And casting him as Captain Jean-Luc Picard in Star Trek: The Next Generation is one of the best casting decisions ever made in the history of television, partly because it was a hugely successful gamble – but also because it was absolutely stone-cold bonkers.

It is safe to say that the then-40-something from West Yorkshire with the voice of God was not exactly anyone’s idea of a starship captain. Patrick Stewart was an excellent theatre actor, but he had only occasionally dipped his toe into TV at that stage. He did not have breadth, but he had depth: he had been at the Royal Shakespeare Company for almost 20 years, playing every role possible by his beloved Shakespeare, when he decided to give America a bash in the 1980s.

It was a roll of the dice on both sides. The original season of Star Trek had finished up almost 20 years earlier. The horny swashbuckler (Editor’s note: she means Captain) in charge of the USS Enterprise was James T Kirk, with a woman on every planet and a flagrant disregard for the lives of his crew. Star Trek was infused with the 1960s spirit of adventure and possibility and space seeming cool rather than a new frontier for billionaires.

Instead of repeating this recipe, the people behind Star Trek: The Next Generation decided to cast Kirk’s polar opposite. Patrick Stewart’s Picard was a grown-up. He was an explorer, not an adventurer, who loved archaeology, poetry and a good cup of Earl Grey tea, and hated children, frivolity and the Borg. He bore the weight of captaining a starship and the lives of thousands of people on his shoulders, and you felt that in Stewart’s performance. He brought a gravitas to the rag-tag bunch of characters who would have felt flimsy without him to anchor the show. 

“Yes,” you think watching him, “this man seems like he is absolutely the right person to be in charge of a starship in the 24th century. I can see why they trust him with their lives. Good to see standards haven’t slipped in the coming 400 years.”

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And ok, like Captain Kirk he also had women on a lot of planets because this is Star Trek, and the weird undercurrent of horniness is never more than a light year away. But Stewart’s acting chops made him seem like a man wrestling with his decisions, who was seeking out new life and new civilisations but also how to do what’s morally right at all times.

That’s a huge achievement for an adventure-of-the-week show that should not have worked. (At times, it didn’t. In season one, the chief of security is eaten by a sentient big black pile of sludge (embarrassing!). The ship’s doctor has a relationship with a ghost. We won’t even talk about the episode where everyone is dressed up as Robin Hood and his Merry Men). 

But when it was good, it was brilliant, and Patrick Stewart was the beating heart of it for seven seasons. The best episodes are almost entirely driven by him (if you see a Star Trek fan today, shout “THERE ARE FOUR LIGHTS” at them and watch them well up with emotion).

The other actors on the show initially took a more laid-back approach to filming (“We are not here to have fun!” he sternly told them) before pulling their socks up. At the same time, he relaxed a bit more and began to enjoy it – and it shows in his performance. 

Whether it was having to defend humanity in a mock trial (he won!) or be assimilated by the Borg (arguably the single best moment in the entire seven seasons), he took what was essentially a soap opera in space and he made it compelling. More, he made it feel real.

“Jean-Luc was if not his first love, his deepest,” wrote actor Anson Mount, who also played a Star Trek captain, paying tribute to him.

And he was loved by the fans too. Watching it on RTÉ Two – Network Two, as it was then – every week with my sisters in the 1990s, I didn’t know that it was nerdy or schlocky. I just loved the stories and watching Patrick Stewart being a brilliant captain every week.

(When a huge Star Trek exhibition came to Mosney convention centre in 1997, I somehow managed to convince my parents to bring me, my sisters and my best friend to it, all squeezed into a Daihatsu Charade. The main thing I remember is seeing Captain Picard’s uniform. It was in a glass showcase, a few feet off the ground, as if it were a valuable artefact in a museum. To me, it was). 

He made it easy to be a fan of Star Trek. He brought a complexity to the role that bled into the series itself and elevated it beyond the scripts that he had to work with. 

If the Star Trek producers had gone for the easy choice back in 1987 and opted to replicate the James T Kirk-style of captaining from the original series, we would have missed out on one of the defining performances of modern television. 

Instead, we were lucky to have Patrick Stewart for as long as we did, in as many roles as he did.