Patrick Stewart dies at 86, and Picard was the captain Starfleet measured itself by

Sir Patrick Stewart died on October 28th at his home in Los Angeles. He was 86. I came into Star Trek through The Next Generation, which means Picard was my first captain. He's the one who brought me in, and I'm grateful for that.

Jean-Luc Picard became the officer every Starfleet captain after him gets compared to. He was a diplomat first. He treated the Prime Directive almost like scripture, and he never bent his morals, which showed us Starfleet at its best and, every so often, at its worst. This is a walk through the man and the captain side by side.

Patrick Stewart grew up poor in Mirfield, West Yorkshire

Patrick Stewart was born on July 13th, 1940, in Mirfield, West Yorkshire, and he grew up poor. His father was a sergeant major with the paratroopers in the Second World War, and he came home carrying what we now call PTSD.

Fans have joked for almost 40 years that Picard is French, raised on the family vineyard in La Barre, and sounds about as French as a cup of Earl Grey. Stewart didn't start out sounding like that either. He grew up with a broad Yorkshire accent, and when he was 13, his drama teacher told him he'd have to be able to lose it. So for a couple of years, he spoke proper English with her on weekends and broad Yorkshire at school during the week. Every so often he mixed the two up in front of his friends, which went about as well as you'd think.

That voice took him to the stage. In 1987, after Robert Justman, one of the producers of Star Trek: The Next Generation, saw him at a reading at UCLA, he was cast as the captain of the Enterprise. He was so sure the show would be canceled that he lived out of a suitcase for the whole first season.

Picard's Enterprise was a ship of diplomats, not a warship

Think about what Picard's ship was. The Enterprise D was the flagship, and it carried families, kids and a school, and many of its missions were first contact and diplomacy. Picard spends more of the show as an ambassador than a warship captain. In the very first episode, Q puts all of humanity on trial, and Picard's answer is an argument.

Hold on to that, because he didn't start out that way. Before the Enterprise, Picard commanded the Stargazer for more than 20 years, and the Picard Maneuver from the Battle of Maxia is a combat tactic with his name on it. Go back further and he's a young ensign who picked a fight with three Nausicaans and took a blade through the heart, which is why he's had an artificial one ever since.

Picard started as a fighter and chose to be something else. Stewart grew up in a soldier's house and chose the theater. He gave the Royal Shakespeare Company 16 years, and the show found a way to use them. In The Defector, Picard coaches Data through Henry V on the holodeck. Look closely at the soldier Data is talking to. That's Stewart again under the makeup, playing Williams, the only other part he ever played on The Next Generation.

Picard fought his own side in The Measure of a Man and The Drumhead

When Picard digs in, it's usually against his own side. In The Measure of a Man, Starfleet wants to take Data apart to learn how to build more of him, and a hearing decides whether Data is a person or Starfleet property. Picard argues for Data: "Your honor, Starfleet was founded to seek out new life. Well, there it sits."

Offscreen, Stewart was a patron of Refuge, the UK charity for women escaping domestic abuse.

Two seasons later, in The Drumhead, a celebrated admiral turns a sabotage investigation into a witch hunt, and Picard answers her with her own father's words: "With the first link, the chain is forged."

Pen Pals and Symbiosis show what Picard's backbone cost

That same backbone had a cost, and the show didn't hide it. In Pen Pals, Data has been secretly talking to a little girl named Sarjenka on a planet that's tearing itself apart. The senior staff debates whether saving her world breaks the Prime Directive, and Picard orders Data to cut contact. He changes his mind after he hears her voice asking for help.

Look at the order of events. Her planet was dying the whole time, and nothing about the rule changed when she spoke. Picard did.

Then there's Symbiosis, where Picard gives his speech on the Prime Directive: "It is a philosophy and a very correct one. History has proved again and again that whenever mankind interferes with a less developed civilization, the results are invariably disastrous." Crusher has just worked out that the medicine one planet has been buying for generations is an addictive drug, and Picard won't let her tell them. He uses the same rule to refuse the parts for their aging freighters, so once those ships wear out, the trade dies with them. You can read that as the Prime Directive working exactly as written, or as a captain hiding behind it.

Journey's End is the Picard story that stings

Journey's End is the one that stings. A new treaty hands the planet Dorvan V to the Cardassians, and Admiral Nechayev orders Picard to move the Native American colony living there. He tells her plainly that he objects, and then he carries out the order. Wesley sides with the colonists and quits Starfleet Academy over it.

Then one of the colony's elders, Anthwara, tells Picard about an ancestor he'd never heard of, Javier Maribona-Picard, who helped the Spanish retake New Mexico after the Pueblo Revolt of 1680, in a campaign that killed hundreds of native people.

The principles that won Data his rights are the same principles that moved that colony. And Picard never pretended otherwise.

Locutus, Wolf 359 and the four lights

Then the Borg took him. In The Best of Both Worlds, Starfleet's most trusted captain comes back as Locutus and leads the Borg straight through the fleet at Wolf 359. One of the people lost there was Benjamin Sisko's wife. So when Sisko meets Picard in the first episode of Deep Space Nine and Picard says they've met before, Sisko tells him exactly where: "We met in battle. I was on the Saratoga at Wolf 359."

The very next episode of The Next Generation doesn't have a single battle in it. Picard goes home to the vineyard, ends up wrestling his brother Robert in the mud, and finally falls apart. "They took everything I was. They used me to kill and to destroy, and I couldn't stop them."

In Chain of Command, a Cardassian named Gul Madred captures and tortures Picard, and the whole game is getting him to say he sees five lights when there are actually four. What most people forget is the last scene, where he admits to Troi that by the end he did see five. To get ready for those episodes, Stewart got material from Amnesty International so he'd understand what torture survivors go through. He also backed Combat Stress, the British charity for veterans' mental health, because of what the war did to his own dad.

Patrick Stewart beyond Star Trek

Outside Star Trek, he played Charles Xavier from X-Men in 2000 through Logan in 2017, came back for Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, and he's in Avengers: Doomsday. At least probably; I'm not sure whether they filmed his part or not. He also received multiple awards for his stage work, a Grammy for Peter and the Wolf, and a knighthood in 2010.

Star Trek: Picard and the return to the poker table

In 2018, Stewart announced he was coming back to Star Trek for the first time since Nemesis, and he promised a fresh story. Star Trek: Picard opens with him retired on the vineyard. He'd resigned from Starfleet after it abandoned the Romulan evacuation, and when a reporter pushes him on why, he doesn't soften it: "Because it was no longer Starfleet."

Think about that from his side. The officer the rest of Starfleet gets compared to looked at Starfleet and decided it had stopped living up to its own ideals.

For seven seasons, the crew played poker without him. In the last scene of All Good Things, he finally pulls up a chair: "Five card stud. Nothing wild." Twenty nine years later, the final episode of Picard ends at the same table with the same crew.

Offscreen, one of his closest friendships was with Ian McKellen. They did Waiting for Godot together, and McKellen officiated when Stewart married Sunny Ozell. That Picard finale is also where Walter Koenig's voice turns up as President Chekov, so one episode now holds two of the men we've said goodbye to this year.

Picard held Starfleet to its own standard

Picard spent his whole career holding Starfleet to the standard it wrote for itself, even when that cost him, and sometimes when it cost someone else. I've said it before and I'll say it again: Jean-Luc Picard was the proto Starfleet officer. Thank you, Sir Patrick.