Engage, One Last Time New post The bridge is empty

Some actors play a role; Patrick Stewart became Jean-Luc Picard. On Wednesday he died at his home in Los Angeles, aged 86, at the end of what his family called a brief and poignant journey with Alzheimer’s and Lewy body dementia.

Two days earlier, Walter Koenig – Ensign Chekov, 90 – had died in North Hollywood. Kirk’s navigator and Picard himself, two days apart; I’d like to file a formal complaint with the Q Continuum. William Shatner called it a heartbreaking week, and for once in his life, Shatner understated something.

The captain who didn’t unpack

In 1986, producer Robert Justman wandered into a Shakespeare reading at UCLA, watched a balding veteran of the Royal Shakespeare Company do his thing, and called him in to audition – against the wishes of Gene Roddenberry, who didn’t want a bald Brit as the face of his new series. Stewart got the part anyway, and then he panicked: it came with a six-year contract, and his Shakespeare calendar was full. Everyone he asked around Los Angeles told him to relax, because reviving an icon like the original series was madness and he’d be lucky to survive the first year. So he signed – and for the first six weeks of shooting he lived out of his suitcase, because why unpack for a show that’s about to get canceled?

At the very first press conference, a reporter asked why the captain had no hair; surely by the 24th century somebody would have cured male pattern baldness? Roddenberry’s answer, as Stewart retold it on Parkinson: by the 24th century, nobody will care.

When Star Trek: The Next Generation premiered on September 28, 1987, Stewart was 47 and, outside British theater, close to anonymous. A bald Yorkshireman with a Shakespearean baritone playing a Frenchman – it looked like a casting accident, and it became one of the luckiest ones in television history. There’s a quieter irony underneath, too: the boy from Mirfield who grew up with an abusive father spent his career playing the kind, steady father figure a whole generation of nerds never had (hi).

I met him in the mid-90s, before I’d even started school: afternoons in front of an old, clunky TV with my sister, both of us so dazzled by the futuristic, exotic look of the thing that we were sometimes convinced we were watching a documentary (okay, we’d believed the same about the original series, but through kids’ eyes everything looked like magic – and a bald man calmly ordering tea from a wall was, frankly, magic).

Theater on the bridge

Stewart brought the stage to the bridge. His Picard was no Kirk – no flying kicks, no torn shirts, no green-skinned romance per away mission. He was a diplomat, an amateur archaeologist, a humanist who’d rather talk for three hours than fire once, and who believed understanding hits harder than any phaser; Klingons, Romulans, Cardassians, the occasional omnipotent pest – he negotiated with all of them. He turned Tea. Earl Grey. Hot into a personality and Engage into a promise of discovery, never conquest. And Make it so – I, um, still say it to my AI agents, and they still don’t get the reference. Some found him stiff, but to his crew, and to everyone watching, he was the rock you hold onto while the warp core is about to breach.

But Stewart could do so much more than steady. As the assimilated Locutus in “The Best of Both Worlds”, he scared the shit out of me as a kid – the calmest voice on the show, suddenly speaking for the Borg. In “Darmok”, Picard is stranded on a planet with Captain Dathon (Paul Winfield), whose people speak only in metaphor, and the two strangers can only survive the beast by fighting it together. Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra has been flying around my head ever since: cooperation as the only exit.

And then there’s “The Inner Light”: an alien probe knocks Picard out, and in under half an hour of ship time he lives decades as Kamin, an iron weaver on a dying planet – a wife, children, grandchildren, a flute. Back on the Enterprise, Riker hands him a box; the flute is inside, and Picard plays the melody alone in his quarters. Stewart does it so quietly that the scene has never left me. The episode won the 1993 Hugo. (Fun fact: the notes you hear aren’t his – musician Bryce Martin played them on a tin whistle; doesn’t matter, the face was all Stewart).

“The Inner Light” – the sound of a lifetime lost

“Darmok” in under eight minutes, abridged by Rikerish

He never really left after that. Rewatches, the movies, Professor X in the X-Men films – and my PC, again and again: Star Trek games, of course, but also The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion, where he voices Emperor Uriel Septim VII, who hands you the Amulet of Kings in the opening dungeon right before the assassins get him. Nobody else sounds like that, and every time I stumbled across that voice somewhere, I was happy, like bumping into an old friend in a foreign city.

Captain Picard is here

When Stewart told his old friend Ian McKellen about the casting in 1987, McKellen told him to turn it down: a serious stage actor doesn’t throw his career away for TV. He admitted later that he’d been wrong – and he’s also the one who said the most beautiful thing about Stewart I know. Stewart, McKellen told Variety, looks reliable, the guy you want next to you when things go wrong: Captain Picard is here, don’t you worry.

That’s exactly who he was to generations of viewers, and to Jayden and me: the promise that reason, decency, and humanity can still win in the end – and in a year like this one, I’ll take that promise over almost anything.

I barely feel sad when someone famous dies; that’s just the way life works. This one hits me from an angle I didn’t see coming. It feels like I lost a part of my own life – a captain I know deeply, one I went through happy and difficult times with, one I explored the wonders and secrets of the universe with, one I’d trust with my secrets, my stories, and my life, the way Kirk trusts Spock. Which is a very… fascinating feeling.

We finished a full rewatch of The Next Generation and all three seasons of Picard at the start of this year, which now feels less like a binge and more like saying goodbye without knowing it.

The bridge is empty now. Still, Jayden and I stand up (on the floor, not on the desks – the furniture in Phú Mỹ Hưng isn’t rated for it) and shout what the boys in Dead Poets Society shouted for their teacher, a line Walt Whitman originally wrote for another dead captain.

O Captain! My Captain! 🖖