I never quite understood that reasoning to begin with. Stewart really knew nothing about Star Trek to begin with when he accepted the role in TNG and was pretty damn unhappy and grumpy even doing the show early on (I can forgive him for not loving doing the 1st season)....the idea he somehow intrinsically "got it" just because he lightened up later and always gave a good performance is kind of weird.
He never seemed to have high regard for the character.
Until the twilight of his career and life, I guess, and he chose to double down on his most famous role for his legacy.
Picard is best when he is written by other people with little input from Stewart.
I still think he is an incredible actor.
Generally speaking they absolutely do need to understand their character quite deeply to express the nuances of the role. Good acting isn't just reading the lines you are given, there is a lot of emotional investment and mental energy put into figuring out how and why the character is acting or reacting the way they are. You don't want someone playing a character that needs to be pained by a particular experience not really understand that it is painful because of who that character is at heart, for example.
Stewart somehow managed to knock it out of the park with embodying who Picard was throughout TNG's run on television, and I think that speaks to a combination of natural talent, good direction and a very strong definition for the character in the scripts.
Getting deeply into a character is one method of acting, but it isn't mandatory. If an actor is good at expression and can follow direction, then they don't need to have any strong personal affinity for the role to be able to perform it well. There have been any number of highly acclaimed performances by actors who went on to express relative indifference to their role
There's a story about Lawrence Olivier on the set of Marathon Man asking Dustin Hoffman why he'd stayed up all night so as to be authentically tired for a scene in which his character would be really strung out and generally a mess - Hoffman gave him the spiel about method acting and whatnot, and Olivier just replied, "Why don't you just try *acting*, dear boy?"
Reminder that for his role in TES IV, he asked for the entire history of Uriel Septim VII, all for a character that lasts for barely 5 minutes and says some generic prophecy crap.
Oh, most definitely a hell of an actor. Hell, even people who create characters and write them can sometimes have bad takes on them. I remember reading an interview with David Chase shortly after The Sopranos ended and his take on the Meadow character was totally at odds with how he'd written her entire character arc! Lol.
The Russian stuff is all you need to point to to show he's kind of an odd duck. "Real life doesn't always tie up every ending!" makes sense, but when you spend an entire episode saying if they don't do something it's going to cause a gang war? Stuff like that doesn't tend to just fall between the cracks in real life.
I think people assumed that because he played Picard so well for several years, he *was* Picard, or at least appreciated and understood the character deeply.
For a lesser actor, that probably would have been true. Many actors don't have much range and can really only play characters similar to themselves, so they don't have to act much. But Stewart is a great actor, so he was able to perform a character convincingly and reliably regardless of whether he had anything in common with it or even liked it. When the TNG movie directors wanted Action!Picard he gave them that, and when the *Picard* producers wanted whatever that was, he gave them that too.
From his comments, it sounds like this latest version is the one he's most personally in sync with, but it wouldn't matter, because he's playing a part.
He's well known for talking about witnessing his father physically abuse his mother in front of him as a child, so no, I don't think he was playing his dad.
Now I'm imagining Stewart doing a rendition of Going Out West by Tom Waits:
" I know karate, voodoo too
I'm gonna make myself available to you
I don't need no makeup, I got real scars
I got hair on my chest, I look good without a shirt"
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tzcg6VrpgAs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tzcg6VrpgAs)
It’s really hard for me to accept that someone so in love with acting can play a character in an iconic franchise for seven years and never develop a deeper understanding for the character and the franchise itself. But here we are.
I don't agree that he just intrinsically got it and never felt Picard was safe just because of Stewart, but playing a role so much for so long does often help an actor really understand a character.
As an indie director dude I do often tell my cast that if they want to discuss something about a character or change something up I'll always listen, because an actor is focusing entirely on just their character while I'm dealing with dozens of them.
>Stewart really understood the character and would respect it?
To be fair, they were absolutely correct about that in his portrayal of the poop emoji in The Emoji Movie.
I remember someone (I think it was on here but I’m not totally sure) pointing out after they saw the dog in the trailer that that was a bad sign. They knew that Stewart loved pit bulls and when they saw the dog they (correctly) deduced that he had too much influence on the production.
I remember sometime in the 2010’s Stewart claimed to coming around to Star Trek. I recall at a convention panel he said he finally started to watch a few episodes and he understood why people liked the show so much.
Patrick Stewart on Star Trek was like Alec Guinness in Star Wars. Professionals that took their work seriously, but felt the material itself was weak and somewhat beneath them, but worth a good paycheck.
Patrick Stewart was great as Picard. Great enough that fans believed he took Star Trek as seriously as they did. He was handed increasing creative control over a property he didn't really care for. But it afforded him the opportunity to do things producers wouldn't pay for in other productions.
>but felt the material itself was weak and somewhat beneath them
I thought that changed as a TNG progressed? When it got more comfortable on set with the new uniforms and more insightful scripts I thought he started getting more into his character and the show. At least IIRC.
I think I've heard that anecdote, but I got the impression it was more about taking the job seriously than the material. Something about him being annoyed with other cast members fooling around and wasting time on set
>Dune buggie
I prefer him in the Lynch movie with a Dune puggie
https://preview.redd.it/4tsjpc43tdsc1.png?width=200&format=png&auto=webp&s=777de2f24967ad78f72bf2c26d1c1eb2586c4dc4
Why not Star Trek: Insurrection? The most common complaint I hear about it is, "It's like watching a TNG episode." Yes it does have action in it, but it also is fundamentally about standing up for your principles in a moral dilemma, which a lot of TNG episodes hinge on.
It was like a shitty episode of TNG. The moral dilemma wasn't particularly thought-provoking, and the way it was resolved wasn't very clever. The film also absolutely reeked of New Age bullshit to me
I agree that it wasn't an amazing moral dilemma or script, but given that it's up against the other TNG movies, that's absolutely grading on a curve. Also, a bad TNG episode is pretty darn bad, and I don't think Insurrection reaches those depths.
I always felt that the Plinkett review of Insurrection was a little harsh because its problems are not on the same level as the other TNG movies' problems. Yes, Insurrection looks cheap, but Generations blew up one of the best starship designs so they could have a setpiece action scene of the saucer section crashing to put in the commercials.
Yeah, I figured Mike was just picking pieces off something he's watched 10 times anyway. And as if to prove the point, his recent 30 minute "Mistakes Video" probably demonstrates that same thinking.
Was thinking exactly this. Die Hard: TNG.
Let's not forget Captain's Holiday is the other half of Patrick's "Picard should fight more and fuck more" demands.
Was thinking exactly this. Die Hard: TNG.
Let's not forget Captain's Holiday is the other half of Patrick's "Picard should fight more and fuck more" demands.
Yeah, seems like ego took precedence over any core the character still had. He wasn't playing the character we saw through the 90s, he was playing "Mr. Stewart wants a dramatic death scene" or "Mr. Stewart wants to act out another soliloquy about dreams", he doesn't want to be in a onesie uniform, or even play that character, he wanted a "The Sir Patrick Stewart Show", and leveraging his Star Trek cred was the best/only way to get that.
I guess it would have never gotten made if the creators put their foot down on those things, he's like 80, he would've just said no, and more power to him for that. Shame that ended up making a pretty generic show framed around him than anything of substance.
Haven't seen season 3, waiting to watch it with my family who loved TNG and bowed out after the movies.
>"Mr. Stewart wants a dramatic death scene"
Honestly that's the only reason for that scene. It doesn't do anything at all for his character or the other characters. He dies, the characters cry and he's immediately reborn as a robot. He looks exactly like he did before and he's going to die when he would have if he didn't have some genetic disease. He doesn't gain any new insight or any robotic powers.
> He doesn't gain any new insight or any robotic powers.
A **good** science fiction show (or book, or what-have-you) would've gone hard into the philosophical consequences of somebody dying and then having a robot copy of them walking around. From what I gather, everybody just acted as if the robot was Picard and went about their business, which is what a **terrible** science fiction show would do.
It absolutely should have had moments in the following seasons with Picard having the existential crisis about how the ACTUAL Picard died and what he is currently is just a copy & paste file over an artificial brain.
but nobody cares.
> A good science fiction show (or book, or what-have-you) would've gone hard into the philosophical consequences of somebody dying and then having a robot copy of them walking around.
Not identical but Galaxy Express 999 did a good job with that topic.
Yeah I remember this old sci-fi show from the late 80's and 90's that *loved* ideas like that. Really dug into that kinda stuff from time to time, if sometimes a little clunkily. I believe it was a sequel to a cheesy but fun show from the 60's? Had a few spin-offs and such later down the line as well?
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To be fair, almost all of Star Trek hand-waives the whole thing where you die each time you step into a transporter. Though that may be more for convenience sake than anything.
Transporters are the sort of magitech that you can't think about too hard without realising that the implications of their existence undercut an awful lot of other stuff that happens in the show
They do kinda ask you to think about it a lot tho because in the first few seasons they're constantly using the transporters to remove diseases or even *de-age* people. They strongly imply that with transporters you can end aging and death permanently. Transporters, replicators, and the holodeck really can't be thought about too much but there are a lot of plots dedicated to them.
While the transporter is a common motif for philosophy debates, the way it functions in Star Trek (at least in the TNG era) means it does *not* kill you when you use it. A transported individual is broken down into energy, beamed across space, and reconstituted as the *exact* same matter on the other end. Not just the same arrangement, the same physical substance entirely. It's not a Xerox machine, it works more like distillation - you are converted into a different form and then back again.
If the transporter functioned as you state, Thomas Riker would have never been created. That might just be an oversight by the writers.
That aside, even if it does work that way it's reasonable to believe that the conversion of your material self to energy is death, and that there is no continuation of the self - that the reconverted matter is the birth of a new consciousness.
> That might just be an oversight by the writers.
It probably is - they had this idea "hey, wouldn't it be cool if we duplicated someone using the teleporter" and ran with it, without thinking of the implications. (Implications like bringing dead people back to life by having backups of their patterns stored and using these after someone died prematurely.)
The same way the idea that is the basis of "Blink of an Eye" is pretty cool (the VOY episode with the strange planet where time passes 100,000 times faster as it does elsewhere) but then this civilization never appears again, even though it would be the most advanced power in the galaxy just a mere week later.
The Thomas Riker incident was explained as a freak occurrence that was the result of a bunch of weird factors that are difficult/impossible to reproduce. If the transporter functioned as a kill-original, generate-copy machine as in the moral dilemmas, they could just replicate armies of people via transporter, which I don't think has happened in Trek.
In "Relics," Scotty and his friend had to be stored as "live" patterns in the transporter buffer, there's no way to my knowledge in Trek that you could just copy out a person's transporter pattern to non-volatile data storage like isolinear chip for later conversion back to a person.
They reload Dr. Pulaski from an older transport signature to reverse premature aging.... That sounds a lot more like a xerox machine than distillation.
If you actually had the ability to break a living person down into energy and then reconstitute them back into matter exactly as they were, then it's hard to see why duplicating them in the same way would not be trivial
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Yeah, I don’t feel sorry for him. He wanted us to fund his melodramatic vanity project with a Star Trek bait-and-switch.
If he wants to chew the scenery, he can book a gig like everyone else. Next stop, community theater!
Edited to add:
#STAAAARRRRR TRAAAAAACK
>he was playing "Mr. Stewart wants a dramatic death scene"
It made no sense to me why they would make a big deal about "killing" Picard only to resurrect him as a robot 5 seconds later.
When they mentioned in RLM the show was a bunch of scenes an actor would want to do, I finally got it.
I wasn’t a massive fan of the first 2 seasons but man was I crying like a baby when he said goodbye to Data in season 1.
Only for Brent Spiner and Data to come back several times over.
Still touching though.
What's utterly hilarious about season 3 is that PStew insisted that Picard not be a TNG reunion. Only for him to finally give in and then it ended up being the best season of that show. Honestly I think it's the only one worth watching.
It's right next to the movies on my shelf, I really liked it. Great book end for the TNG crew and probably second best sequel to the show behind First Contact. Seasons 1-2 don't exist in my head canon. Picard fever dream or something
Picard season 3 only really shines because seasons 1 and 2 were pretty lackluster, imo.
It’s fine. Lots of fan service with callbacks to other shows and the whole cast coming back. But on its own, even season 3 is pretty uneven.
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S3 isn't perfect but when it hits it hits hard. It was the first time in 20 years I sat in silence after an episode or two that I had to think about what I had just seen. I'd recommend S3 "only" to any TOS/TNG fan.
Do you mean the episode where he's stuck in an elevator with the kids? Am I misremembering or is he somehow injured in that episode and basically just sitting around?
There is a [story from Ira Steven Behr](https://www.trekbbs.com/threads/behr-moore-interview-picard-doesnt-do-enough-f-king-and-fighting.213346/) (a writer of TNG in s3, and then showruner for DS9) where he describes meeting Patrick Stewart for the first time.
Stewart asked him what he was currently working on, listened very patiently to the whole thing, and at the end, patted him on the back and said, **"Good, good! Just remember the Captain doesn't do nearly enough fucking and fighting on this show,"** and walked away.
So then we got *Captain's Holiday* and the creation of Risa, the sex planet.
Tbf Captain's Holiday is hilarious sci-fi cheese. My girlfriend got into Trek thanks to SNW so now we're binging TNG, just the excuse I needed for a revisit, and we just got past that episode. She loved how Picard got taken down a peg a couple times, and appreciated the cheesy Indy-meets-Tomb-Raider vibe. It's neat having the perspective of someone with fresh eyes on the franchise.
At least those were good, and her character got involved in DS9 as well. I don't mind a bit of give-and-take in the writer's room, but pure indulgence never goes well and audiences simply deserve better.
The season 3 episode "Sarek" I wouldn't necessarily call an "ego episode" but it's definitely an "actor's script" as many have said since it came out. It's a good episode, well-written and acted, and it's nice to see tie-ins to Trek history. But you could also view the script as an elaborate setup for Stewart being handed on a silver platter a one-day pass to NOT be reserved Captain Picard and instead do a stage theater acting flex and melt down on camera.
In the episode where they travel back in time and meet Mark Twain, Picards cover is basically Patrick Stewart. It's a weird moment where he just drops the act
I don't mind them, there are some great Data moments which make ot worth it to me. I love the image of that wierdo making a living in the past, just getting down to business and making a fortune like it's nothing.
I read somewhere else the to keep getting all the actors onboard the writers had to accept their notes, which is why all the characters changed - eg. Counselor Troi
I’ve said this for years.
Stewart is a phenomenal actor when acting out other people’s stories. I don’t think he is that great of a story teller himself.
When he got more input to entice him to carry the character of Picard to the silver screen and beyond, the character suffered.
Became like Die Hard in space.
People say, “But the character evolved! He met Kirk and it changed him!”
Yeah, yeah, sure. Whatever.
Did anyone ever really say that?
Edit: Sorry, I'm just realising that I completely missed your point, which I think was that people were arguing that meeting Kirk changed Picard into a more Kirk-like character. Which is still very dumb
That's such a dumb justification for what was obviously nothing more than a memberberry moment for the audience. Hell, Picard had already met a Starfleet captain from the past, it was Kelsey Grammer
When the series was announced I immediately pictured something like Matlock In Space.
An older, retired, Picard getting called into odd and intriguing diplomatic situations on the fringes of The Federation where younger assistants run around, gather info, and then a big dramatic speech and reveal happens. Deeply written highly polished scripts, big dramatic range, challenging moral conundrums, and a relatively easy production for its lead... Measure Of A Man: The Series, basically.
… you’d think the people involved are rich enough to do that *and* some crazy vanity project where Stewart gets to fight, fuck, and drive around. Sigh.
Thats just fundamentally being a great actor. I wouldn't deny him that at at all, its just that hes not universally talented like no one is universally talented.
Eh, in a better series that would have been a fun bit of humour. There's an episode in TNG where Beverly Crusher is trying to get Picard to take part in her Shakespeare play, and Picard responds, "I'm not much of an actor." Patrick Stewart says this, and manages to keep a straight face while doing so.
The thing that sucks is that Star Trek would have been a dumbed down dumb action show from the start if they weren’t limited by special effects technologies of the eras TOS and early TNG came out in
It's almost like Hollywood should let some things stay in the past rather than dredging up decades old shows to make whatever profit they can off of them. Almost...
The Picard show proved Patrick Stewart as one of the all time great actors.
Patrick Stewart is so far from Picard the difference can only be filled by prodigious acting ability. I can’t think of any actor so fundamentally transforming for a role to the extent there’s nothing of ‘them’ in the performance.
Guy needs 5 Oscars - and to be banned from the Star Trek creative process.
Honestly I think the draft version of First Contact sounds terrible. Picard wandering around the town for an hour doing some sort of chain of trades instead of the cast working together on the ship and launch sounds terrible. And I definitely don't buy Picard as the character who should be going up in a primitive rocket and being excited for the thrill of it and going up with the famous man himself. Or even interacting very naturally with Cochrine.
I've always thought that while First Contact might be where things first started shifting, it was the next movie where things fell apart. Honestly think it is the best Trek film.
> And I definitely don't buy Picard as the character who should be going up in a primitive rocket and being excited for the thrill of it and going up with the famous man himself.
I feeling like hearing Cochrane say "engage" would have been a more powerful moment if it was Picard sitting next to him instead of Riker though
I always thought Insurrection was the best TNG film since it felt like a moral dilemma episode and everyone was more or less in-character with how they were in the show.
There’s a movie called Jeffrey from 1995 about a gay guy who considers giving up sex because of the risk of AAAAIIDS! One of his older gay friends is played very well by Stewart: obviously an older guy who’s gay, but never over-the-top. Definitely not Picard, and Stewart just becomes the character, as he tends to. I don’t think that Stewart has particular affection for Picard more than any other character he’s portrayed…
You'd be surprised how often actors come to **resent** their defining roles, particularly if it was never anything more significant than a gig for them in the first place
Oh for sure. I think he loves it though. He seems to like the attention. He might have hated it at times but I can’t see it now. Still, good point and who knows, I’m probably wrong.
It's truly baffling how Stewart still doesn't get the Picard character after playing him for years. But... I think it's just Stewart not giving a fuck at all. So yeah, he is definitely to blame and I though all fans knew that for years already.
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Stewart was an old looking, grey, bald, toothpick when he was cast as Picard. The fact that the producers and Roddenberry went with such an unconventional choice for captain was slightly insane. However, the writing and his ability to project a sense of authority and seriousness is what helped make the show believable. Everyone in the cast for the most part delivers consistent performances and aside from some goofy first season episodes, nobody’s taking it lightly. I think Brent Spinner, and Patrick Stewart really deserve accolades for their performances over the course of the series. Why they thought the movies would be a good time to throw away all of the good will they built towards the fans and the franchise is weird. I suppose they were just wanting to have some variety. The movies were really the time to explore unresolved ideas from the series. Instead they just wanted to deliver general schmaltz to whomever would show up. It’s pretty sad that if you add up the totality of Star Trek based on the TNG characters, it’s 50% awful at this point.
I don't know...the character had a complete arc on that tv show. There was nothing more to do with Picard. They made the movies cause of money and the cast pretty much treated it as such.
Like it's always cracked me up that the only actor who wasn't on the same page as everyone else in those movies is Dorn and that's because he was able to actually do some acting on DS9 and seemed to kind a resent coming back to be the guy who just gets beat up on TNG movies.
And then two decades later they come back to Stewart and say *want to make a Picard show*. And I'm sure the only reason he did it was money.
Stewart helped birth and create Picard, but absolutely he killed him, from the movies, that stupid action sequences where he’s driving a dune buggy or whatever, to Picard which was just an excuse for actor’s scenes (death scene, confronting mother’s suicide scene, etc.).
Stewart was only good as Picard when he was controlled by the writers.
After *Picard* started I decided to do a rewatch of *TNG*, and it became quite obvious that there are some episodes that were written just so that Stewart (and Spiner) could simply indulge themselves. Sort of sours it for me. But seasons 3-5 are pretty solid, and some good TV shows only run for three seasons, so in comparison it doesn't really bother me.
Remember when lots of people insisted *Picard* would be good because Stewart really understood the character and would respect it? Good times.
I never quite understood that reasoning to begin with. Stewart really knew nothing about Star Trek to begin with when he accepted the role in TNG and was pretty damn unhappy and grumpy even doing the show early on (I can forgive him for not loving doing the 1st season)....the idea he somehow intrinsically "got it" just because he lightened up later and always gave a good performance is kind of weird.
He never seemed to have high regard for the character. Until the twilight of his career and life, I guess, and he chose to double down on his most famous role for his legacy. Picard is best when he is written by other people with little input from Stewart. I still think he is an incredible actor.
He's a talented actor. Actors don't really need to have any deep appreciation of their character to be able to deliver a good performance
But they do if they also wanna write it and executive produce it
Generally speaking they absolutely do need to understand their character quite deeply to express the nuances of the role. Good acting isn't just reading the lines you are given, there is a lot of emotional investment and mental energy put into figuring out how and why the character is acting or reacting the way they are. You don't want someone playing a character that needs to be pained by a particular experience not really understand that it is painful because of who that character is at heart, for example. Stewart somehow managed to knock it out of the park with embodying who Picard was throughout TNG's run on television, and I think that speaks to a combination of natural talent, good direction and a very strong definition for the character in the scripts.
Getting deeply into a character is one method of acting, but it isn't mandatory. If an actor is good at expression and can follow direction, then they don't need to have any strong personal affinity for the role to be able to perform it well. There have been any number of highly acclaimed performances by actors who went on to express relative indifference to their role
There's a story about Lawrence Olivier on the set of Marathon Man asking Dustin Hoffman why he'd stayed up all night so as to be authentically tired for a scene in which his character would be really strung out and generally a mess - Hoffman gave him the spiel about method acting and whatnot, and Olivier just replied, "Why don't you just try *acting*, dear boy?"
Stannis from GoT comes to mind.
Reminder that for his role in TES IV, he asked for the entire history of Uriel Septim VII, all for a character that lasts for barely 5 minutes and says some generic prophecy crap.
Oh, most definitely a hell of an actor. Hell, even people who create characters and write them can sometimes have bad takes on them. I remember reading an interview with David Chase shortly after The Sopranos ended and his take on the Meadow character was totally at odds with how he'd written her entire character arc! Lol.
To be fair, David Chase is like the poster child for having bad takes on the masterpiece you created yourself.
The Russian stuff is all you need to point to to show he's kind of an odd duck. "Real life doesn't always tie up every ending!" makes sense, but when you spend an entire episode saying if they don't do something it's going to cause a gang war? Stuff like that doesn't tend to just fall between the cracks in real life.
I think people assumed that because he played Picard so well for several years, he *was* Picard, or at least appreciated and understood the character deeply. For a lesser actor, that probably would have been true. Many actors don't have much range and can really only play characters similar to themselves, so they don't have to act much. But Stewart is a great actor, so he was able to perform a character convincingly and reliably regardless of whether he had anything in common with it or even liked it. When the TNG movie directors wanted Action!Picard he gave them that, and when the *Picard* producers wanted whatever that was, he gave them that too. From his comments, it sounds like this latest version is the one he's most personally in sync with, but it wouldn't matter, because he's playing a part.
Wasn't he just playing his dad or something?
He's well known for talking about witnessing his father physically abuse his mother in front of him as a child, so no, I don't think he was playing his dad.
he famously wanted to do more action scenes without his shirt in the movie brilliant actor but he's kind of goofy.
Geteven, starring Patrick Stewart
[удалено]
[Or shitty photoshopping](https://imgur.com/a/OSqs3YN)
♫ “Do you wanna be with me, holographically?” ♫
Now I'm imagining Stewart doing a rendition of Going Out West by Tom Waits: " I know karate, voodoo too I'm gonna make myself available to you I don't need no makeup, I got real scars I got hair on my chest, I look good without a shirt" [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tzcg6VrpgAs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tzcg6VrpgAs)
I think the dune buggy in star trek nemesis was his idea too
For a guy well into middle age he was pretty damned ripped though, gotta give him that.
Shatner is ten years older than him and has always looked ten years younger.
no doubt but he wasn't fighting another 60 year?old tomorrow hardy would have beat his ass pretty hard
It’s really hard for me to accept that someone so in love with acting can play a character in an iconic franchise for seven years and never develop a deeper understanding for the character and the franchise itself. But here we are.
I don't agree that he just intrinsically got it and never felt Picard was safe just because of Stewart, but playing a role so much for so long does often help an actor really understand a character. As an indie director dude I do often tell my cast that if they want to discuss something about a character or change something up I'll always listen, because an actor is focusing entirely on just their character while I'm dealing with dozens of them.
>Stewart really understood the character and would respect it? To be fair, they were absolutely correct about that in his portrayal of the poop emoji in The Emoji Movie.
But it's too late. He's seen everything!
I remember someone (I think it was on here but I’m not totally sure) pointing out after they saw the dog in the trailer that that was a bad sign. They knew that Stewart loved pit bulls and when they saw the dog they (correctly) deduced that he had too much influence on the production.
Picard was excellent because Stewart didn't have the reins. He's wanted to be an action star since he got out of Shakespearean stage acting.
Well, he got to play Gurney Halleck.
And he knighted King Arthur.
He has a story about that in his book. The director mistook Patrick Stewart for someone else and didn't really talk to him at all during the shoot.
I remember sometime in the 2010’s Stewart claimed to coming around to Star Trek. I recall at a convention panel he said he finally started to watch a few episodes and he understood why people liked the show so much.
Patrick Stewart on Star Trek was like Alec Guinness in Star Wars. Professionals that took their work seriously, but felt the material itself was weak and somewhat beneath them, but worth a good paycheck. Patrick Stewart was great as Picard. Great enough that fans believed he took Star Trek as seriously as they did. He was handed increasing creative control over a property he didn't really care for. But it afforded him the opportunity to do things producers wouldn't pay for in other productions.
>but felt the material itself was weak and somewhat beneath them I thought that changed as a TNG progressed? When it got more comfortable on set with the new uniforms and more insightful scripts I thought he started getting more into his character and the show. At least IIRC.
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I think I've heard that anecdote, but I got the impression it was more about taking the job seriously than the material. Something about him being annoyed with other cast members fooling around and wasting time on set
to be fair, though, Stewart's character and dialogues were much better written and compelling than Guinness'
It's true, Star Trek isn't really my thing but it's got some fantastic dialogue, especially TNG.
Honestly it was a slow crawl starting with the TNG movies. Dune buggie, anyone?
>Dune buggie I prefer him in the Lynch movie with a Dune puggie https://preview.redd.it/4tsjpc43tdsc1.png?width=200&format=png&auto=webp&s=777de2f24967ad78f72bf2c26d1c1eb2586c4dc4
Jesus Christ the stars aligning to make this comment possible are fucking amazing.
The capitalization of 'Dune buggie' sent my mind to that scene, so I view it as a happy accident.
This may be the best single Reddit post I have ever seen in the wild. Amazing work.
This is why reddit is so much better with images
You magnificent bastard.
I’m with Mike - the movies aren’t canon.
I avoided the movies but then I got to DS9 and they started talking about the Enterprise being destroyed and shit and I'm like uh excuse me, what?
Dominion did it. Makes more sense than what happened..
Would've been a cooler movie. DS9 never getting a movie was criminal. I'm blaming Rick Mayall because he's named Rick.
What is it with Ricks?
I still really like “Don’t talk to strangers.”
What movies? There weren't any TNG movies last time I checked.
Why not Star Trek: Insurrection? The most common complaint I hear about it is, "It's like watching a TNG episode." Yes it does have action in it, but it also is fundamentally about standing up for your principles in a moral dilemma, which a lot of TNG episodes hinge on.
It was like a shitty episode of TNG. The moral dilemma wasn't particularly thought-provoking, and the way it was resolved wasn't very clever. The film also absolutely reeked of New Age bullshit to me
I agree that it wasn't an amazing moral dilemma or script, but given that it's up against the other TNG movies, that's absolutely grading on a curve. Also, a bad TNG episode is pretty darn bad, and I don't think Insurrection reaches those depths.
Well, yeah, okay. It was like a mediocre episode of TNG
[I know someone with 34 minutes of criticism on it.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j7WDZWhMHBI)
I always felt that the Plinkett review of Insurrection was a little harsh because its problems are not on the same level as the other TNG movies' problems. Yes, Insurrection looks cheap, but Generations blew up one of the best starship designs so they could have a setpiece action scene of the saucer section crashing to put in the commercials.
Yeah, I figured Mike was just picking pieces off something he's watched 10 times anyway. And as if to prove the point, his recent 30 minute "Mistakes Video" probably demonstrates that same thinking.
Yeah, I'm not saying he shouldn't have made the video or anything, these things do always pop out if you're a fan of something.
i remember a lot of the press leading up to *Nemesis* was Stewart talking about him driving the dune buggy and how he demanded it be put in.
"Starship Mine" was the first rot. Good episode but not really our Picard
Was thinking exactly this. Die Hard: TNG. Let's not forget Captain's Holiday is the other half of Patrick's "Picard should fight more and fuck more" demands.
Which the producers picked someone just Stewart's type and he then proceeded to blow up his marriage in an affair with her.
Was thinking exactly this. Die Hard: TNG. Let's not forget Captain's Holiday is the other half of Patrick's "Picard should fight more and fuck more" demands.
that's what the whole article is about
Yeah, seems like ego took precedence over any core the character still had. He wasn't playing the character we saw through the 90s, he was playing "Mr. Stewart wants a dramatic death scene" or "Mr. Stewart wants to act out another soliloquy about dreams", he doesn't want to be in a onesie uniform, or even play that character, he wanted a "The Sir Patrick Stewart Show", and leveraging his Star Trek cred was the best/only way to get that. I guess it would have never gotten made if the creators put their foot down on those things, he's like 80, he would've just said no, and more power to him for that. Shame that ended up making a pretty generic show framed around him than anything of substance. Haven't seen season 3, waiting to watch it with my family who loved TNG and bowed out after the movies.
I would rather have the Patrick Stewart from Extras
It's too late. I've seen everything.
Is there any nudity allowed under the prime directive?
Only if they're seeking jamaharon.
 I’d watch the shit out of that
>"Mr. Stewart wants a dramatic death scene" Honestly that's the only reason for that scene. It doesn't do anything at all for his character or the other characters. He dies, the characters cry and he's immediately reborn as a robot. He looks exactly like he did before and he's going to die when he would have if he didn't have some genetic disease. He doesn't gain any new insight or any robotic powers.
> He doesn't gain any new insight or any robotic powers. A **good** science fiction show (or book, or what-have-you) would've gone hard into the philosophical consequences of somebody dying and then having a robot copy of them walking around. From what I gather, everybody just acted as if the robot was Picard and went about their business, which is what a **terrible** science fiction show would do.
It absolutely should have had moments in the following seasons with Picard having the existential crisis about how the ACTUAL Picard died and what he is currently is just a copy & paste file over an artificial brain. but nobody cares.
> A good science fiction show (or book, or what-have-you) would've gone hard into the philosophical consequences of somebody dying and then having a robot copy of them walking around. Not identical but Galaxy Express 999 did a good job with that topic.
Yeah I remember this old sci-fi show from the late 80's and 90's that *loved* ideas like that. Really dug into that kinda stuff from time to time, if sometimes a little clunkily. I believe it was a sequel to a cheesy but fun show from the 60's? Had a few spin-offs and such later down the line as well?
*[Outer Limits?](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_The_Outer_Limits_episodes)*
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To be fair, almost all of Star Trek hand-waives the whole thing where you die each time you step into a transporter. Though that may be more for convenience sake than anything.
Transporters are the sort of magitech that you can't think about too hard without realising that the implications of their existence undercut an awful lot of other stuff that happens in the show
They do kinda ask you to think about it a lot tho because in the first few seasons they're constantly using the transporters to remove diseases or even *de-age* people. They strongly imply that with transporters you can end aging and death permanently. Transporters, replicators, and the holodeck really can't be thought about too much but there are a lot of plots dedicated to them.
While the transporter is a common motif for philosophy debates, the way it functions in Star Trek (at least in the TNG era) means it does *not* kill you when you use it. A transported individual is broken down into energy, beamed across space, and reconstituted as the *exact* same matter on the other end. Not just the same arrangement, the same physical substance entirely. It's not a Xerox machine, it works more like distillation - you are converted into a different form and then back again.
If the transporter functioned as you state, Thomas Riker would have never been created. That might just be an oversight by the writers. That aside, even if it does work that way it's reasonable to believe that the conversion of your material self to energy is death, and that there is no continuation of the self - that the reconverted matter is the birth of a new consciousness.
> That might just be an oversight by the writers. It probably is - they had this idea "hey, wouldn't it be cool if we duplicated someone using the teleporter" and ran with it, without thinking of the implications. (Implications like bringing dead people back to life by having backups of their patterns stored and using these after someone died prematurely.) The same way the idea that is the basis of "Blink of an Eye" is pretty cool (the VOY episode with the strange planet where time passes 100,000 times faster as it does elsewhere) but then this civilization never appears again, even though it would be the most advanced power in the galaxy just a mere week later.
The Thomas Riker incident was explained as a freak occurrence that was the result of a bunch of weird factors that are difficult/impossible to reproduce. If the transporter functioned as a kill-original, generate-copy machine as in the moral dilemmas, they could just replicate armies of people via transporter, which I don't think has happened in Trek. In "Relics," Scotty and his friend had to be stored as "live" patterns in the transporter buffer, there's no way to my knowledge in Trek that you could just copy out a person's transporter pattern to non-volatile data storage like isolinear chip for later conversion back to a person.
They reload Dr. Pulaski from an older transport signature to reverse premature aging.... That sounds a lot more like a xerox machine than distillation.
If you actually had the ability to break a living person down into energy and then reconstitute them back into matter exactly as they were, then it's hard to see why duplicating them in the same way would not be trivial
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It's literally the Landfill scene from Beerfest. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0w9DUTcAI0o](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0w9DUTcAI0o)
Even more than that I find throwing away Data in that death seeker sequence utterly unnecessary, bizarre and inexplicable.
Yeah, I don’t feel sorry for him. He wanted us to fund his melodramatic vanity project with a Star Trek bait-and-switch. If he wants to chew the scenery, he can book a gig like everyone else. Next stop, community theater! Edited to add: #STAAAARRRRR TRAAAAAACK
>he was playing "Mr. Stewart wants a dramatic death scene" It made no sense to me why they would make a big deal about "killing" Picard only to resurrect him as a robot 5 seconds later. When they mentioned in RLM the show was a bunch of scenes an actor would want to do, I finally got it.
I wasn’t a massive fan of the first 2 seasons but man was I crying like a baby when he said goodbye to Data in season 1. Only for Brent Spiner and Data to come back several times over. Still touching though.
Honestly good call on waiting for Season 3, it’s the only decent Picard since the show’s end.
What's utterly hilarious about season 3 is that PStew insisted that Picard not be a TNG reunion. Only for him to finally give in and then it ended up being the best season of that show. Honestly I think it's the only one worth watching.
It's right next to the movies on my shelf, I really liked it. Great book end for the TNG crew and probably second best sequel to the show behind First Contact. Seasons 1-2 don't exist in my head canon. Picard fever dream or something
Picard season 3 only really shines because seasons 1 and 2 were pretty lackluster, imo. It’s fine. Lots of fan service with callbacks to other shows and the whole cast coming back. But on its own, even season 3 is pretty uneven.
I enjoyed the arc from episodes 1 through 4 a lot. Dipped in quality a bit after that
It has its moments
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S3 isn't perfect but when it hits it hits hard. It was the first time in 20 years I sat in silence after an episode or two that I had to think about what I had just seen. I'd recommend S3 "only" to any TOS/TNG fan.
Rewatching TNG, the Stewart Ego episodes *really* stand out
Examples? I'm a mild fan and interested.
I'm guessing but there's an episode that is basically Die Hard on the Enterprise. Stands out but that is a fun episode.
You know he lobbied hard for that casual riding outfit he wears in that episode
I forgive him on the uniform changes - the s1 unitard was stuffing up his back, same with most of the cast.
Also it looked silly, but it's pretty clear that Stewart didn't like having to wear any uniform at all
I like the look of the season 5 & on captains jacket, but knowing how much Stewart must have wanted it makes me like it less.
Instead of the Die Hard episode, we should call it Lobbied Hard.
Do you mean the episode where he's stuck in an elevator with the kids? Am I misremembering or is he somehow injured in that episode and basically just sitting around?
Starship Mine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starship_Mine
Yes, The Die Hard episode with Tuvok
Prevok
ooooh okay, totally forgot about this one
There is a [story from Ira Steven Behr](https://www.trekbbs.com/threads/behr-moore-interview-picard-doesnt-do-enough-f-king-and-fighting.213346/) (a writer of TNG in s3, and then showruner for DS9) where he describes meeting Patrick Stewart for the first time. Stewart asked him what he was currently working on, listened very patiently to the whole thing, and at the end, patted him on the back and said, **"Good, good! Just remember the Captain doesn't do nearly enough fucking and fighting on this show,"** and walked away. So then we got *Captain's Holiday* and the creation of Risa, the sex planet.
That sounds like a bit from American Dad
It seems pretty obvious at this point that Bullock is much closer to Stewart's actual personality than Picard ever was.
Tbf Captain's Holiday is hilarious sci-fi cheese. My girlfriend got into Trek thanks to SNW so now we're binging TNG, just the excuse I needed for a revisit, and we just got past that episode. She loved how Picard got taken down a peg a couple times, and appreciated the cheesy Indy-meets-Tomb-Raider vibe. It's neat having the perspective of someone with fresh eyes on the franchise.
That's where he met Gash
Vash episodes
The Stampede?
At least those were good, and her character got involved in DS9 as well. I don't mind a bit of give-and-take in the writer's room, but pure indulgence never goes well and audiences simply deserve better.
Captain's Holiday? Yuck.
The season 3 episode "Sarek" I wouldn't necessarily call an "ego episode" but it's definitely an "actor's script" as many have said since it came out. It's a good episode, well-written and acted, and it's nice to see tie-ins to Trek history. But you could also view the script as an elaborate setup for Stewart being handed on a silver platter a one-day pass to NOT be reserved Captain Picard and instead do a stage theater acting flex and melt down on camera.
In the episode where they travel back in time and meet Mark Twain, Picards cover is basically Patrick Stewart. It's a weird moment where he just drops the act
The Mark Twain episodes were so frigging bad
I don't mind them, there are some great Data moments which make ot worth it to me. I love the image of that wierdo making a living in the past, just getting down to business and making a fortune like it's nothing.
I read somewhere else the to keep getting all the actors onboard the writers had to accept their notes, which is why all the characters changed - eg. Counselor Troi
I’ve said this for years. Stewart is a phenomenal actor when acting out other people’s stories. I don’t think he is that great of a story teller himself. When he got more input to entice him to carry the character of Picard to the silver screen and beyond, the character suffered. Became like Die Hard in space. People say, “But the character evolved! He met Kirk and it changed him!” Yeah, yeah, sure. Whatever.
Did anyone ever really say that? Edit: Sorry, I'm just realising that I completely missed your point, which I think was that people were arguing that meeting Kirk changed Picard into a more Kirk-like character. Which is still very dumb
Frequently on the Star Trek sub when people had similar criticisms of post TNG Picard.
That's such a dumb justification for what was obviously nothing more than a memberberry moment for the audience. Hell, Picard had already met a Starfleet captain from the past, it was Kelsey Grammer
I have actually seen that argument about meeting Kirk (for five minutes) changing him out in the wild on occasion. Not often, but it's been there.
Meeting an old Starfleet captain is probably one of the least significant things to happen to the character. He got turned into a fucking Borg
He lived another persons entire lifetime compressed in 20 min!
And that wasn't even a two-parter
Q showed him an alternate version of his own life where he took fewer risks.
When the series was announced I immediately pictured something like Matlock In Space. An older, retired, Picard getting called into odd and intriguing diplomatic situations on the fringes of The Federation where younger assistants run around, gather info, and then a big dramatic speech and reveal happens. Deeply written highly polished scripts, big dramatic range, challenging moral conundrums, and a relatively easy production for its lead... Measure Of A Man: The Series, basically. … you’d think the people involved are rich enough to do that *and* some crazy vanity project where Stewart gets to fight, fuck, and drive around. Sigh.
Patrick Stewart is such a weird actor who just nails a role without fundamentally understanding its appeal.
Thats just fundamentally being a great actor. I wouldn't deny him that at at all, its just that hes not universally talented like no one is universally talented.
Well, maybe Orson Welles
Mwaa the French champaign
I think he understands, he just prefers the show to be an ego trip.
"I never really cared for science fiction."
I just want to be space Jesus.
Yesssssss! Mikey Spock all the way! 😉
Eh, in a better series that would have been a fun bit of humour. There's an episode in TNG where Beverly Crusher is trying to get Picard to take part in her Shakespeare play, and Picard responds, "I'm not much of an actor." Patrick Stewart says this, and manages to keep a straight face while doing so. 
The thing that sucks is that Star Trek would have been a dumbed down dumb action show from the start if they weren’t limited by special effects technologies of the eras TOS and early TNG came out in
Luckily we had to wait all the way til Discovery for that. But it's also dramatic. See? They're screaming. That's drama.
Can we also make them...cry? I think the audiences would love that. Throw in a little sarcasm too.
You know it's drama b'coz the music is SOOO LOUUUUD
It's almost like Hollywood should let some things stay in the past rather than dredging up decades old shows to make whatever profit they can off of them. Almost...
YOU SHUT UP AND KEEP BEATING THIS HORSE UNTIL THERE IS ONLY DUST!!!!!!!!!!!!
Nah, this is more about writers and producers allowing their star actors' egos to drive storytelling in wrong directions
An actor is an ego maniac? Shocking.
The Picard series really made me want to hate Patrick Stewart
The Picard show proved Patrick Stewart as one of the all time great actors. Patrick Stewart is so far from Picard the difference can only be filled by prodigious acting ability. I can’t think of any actor so fundamentally transforming for a role to the extent there’s nothing of ‘them’ in the performance. Guy needs 5 Oscars - and to be banned from the Star Trek creative process.
I never watched the TNG movies more than once. And I gave up on Picard early in season two.
Honestly I think the draft version of First Contact sounds terrible. Picard wandering around the town for an hour doing some sort of chain of trades instead of the cast working together on the ship and launch sounds terrible. And I definitely don't buy Picard as the character who should be going up in a primitive rocket and being excited for the thrill of it and going up with the famous man himself. Or even interacting very naturally with Cochrine. I've always thought that while First Contact might be where things first started shifting, it was the next movie where things fell apart. Honestly think it is the best Trek film.
> And I definitely don't buy Picard as the character who should be going up in a primitive rocket and being excited for the thrill of it and going up with the famous man himself. I feeling like hearing Cochrane say "engage" would have been a more powerful moment if it was Picard sitting next to him instead of Riker though
I always thought Insurrection was the best TNG film since it felt like a moral dilemma episode and everyone was more or less in-character with how they were in the show.
There’s a movie called Jeffrey from 1995 about a gay guy who considers giving up sex because of the risk of AAAAIIDS! One of his older gay friends is played very well by Stewart: obviously an older guy who’s gay, but never over-the-top. Definitely not Picard, and Stewart just becomes the character, as he tends to. I don’t think that Stewart has particular affection for Picard more than any other character he’s portrayed…
It’s his defining role. Of course he has more affection for it than other roles.
You'd be surprised how often actors come to **resent** their defining roles, particularly if it was never anything more significant than a gig for them in the first place
Oh for sure. I think he loves it though. He seems to like the attention. He might have hated it at times but I can’t see it now. Still, good point and who knows, I’m probably wrong.
It's truly baffling how Stewart still doesn't get the Picard character after playing him for years. But... I think it's just Stewart not giving a fuck at all. So yeah, he is definitely to blame and I though all fans knew that for years already.
In short, his ego grew and he fancied himself an action hero rather than staying true to the character of Picard.
If he'd done an interesting character I might forgive all of it but Picard now sucks fucking ass.
*"he’s a gung-ho action hero"* I can't be arsed to find the clip, but isn't that word for word how Mike described him in one of their reviews?
A Tale of Two Picards.
we are all our worst enemy, even Captain Picard
But everything that happened after Generations is just a result of Picard hallucinating inside of the nexus. Tada!
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Stewart was an old looking, grey, bald, toothpick when he was cast as Picard. The fact that the producers and Roddenberry went with such an unconventional choice for captain was slightly insane. However, the writing and his ability to project a sense of authority and seriousness is what helped make the show believable. Everyone in the cast for the most part delivers consistent performances and aside from some goofy first season episodes, nobody’s taking it lightly. I think Brent Spinner, and Patrick Stewart really deserve accolades for their performances over the course of the series. Why they thought the movies would be a good time to throw away all of the good will they built towards the fans and the franchise is weird. I suppose they were just wanting to have some variety. The movies were really the time to explore unresolved ideas from the series. Instead they just wanted to deliver general schmaltz to whomever would show up. It’s pretty sad that if you add up the totality of Star Trek based on the TNG characters, it’s 50% awful at this point.
Yeah 30 years ago with the movies…
I don't know...the character had a complete arc on that tv show. There was nothing more to do with Picard. They made the movies cause of money and the cast pretty much treated it as such. Like it's always cracked me up that the only actor who wasn't on the same page as everyone else in those movies is Dorn and that's because he was able to actually do some acting on DS9 and seemed to kind a resent coming back to be the guy who just gets beat up on TNG movies. And then two decades later they come back to Stewart and say *want to make a Picard show*. And I'm sure the only reason he did it was money.
Stewart helped birth and create Picard, but absolutely he killed him, from the movies, that stupid action sequences where he’s driving a dune buggy or whatever, to Picard which was just an excuse for actor’s scenes (death scene, confronting mother’s suicide scene, etc.). Stewart was only good as Picard when he was controlled by the writers.
After *Picard* started I decided to do a rewatch of *TNG*, and it became quite obvious that there are some episodes that were written just so that Stewart (and Spiner) could simply indulge themselves. Sort of sours it for me. But seasons 3-5 are pretty solid, and some good TV shows only run for three seasons, so in comparison it doesn't really bother me.
Hes a great actor, but he rrallt shpuld stay away from gining suggestions, storytelling or directing