Through Captain Jean-Luc Picard, Patrick Stewart taught us the measure of a man

agentultra

Archive link: https://archive.is/HuNjT

francisofascii

I enjoyed the episode reference in the title.

Lerc

I find it fairly amazing that they could say this without mentioning the episode "The measure of a man" in which Picard literally makes the case. Perhaps it is uncomfortable for people to think about now.

ChrisArchitect

Related: Patrick Stewart has died https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50294702

bottlepalm

So many posts and comments are saying the same thing. I guess it's one of the things we remember most about Patrick Stewart and his portrayal of a starship captain. The quintessential captain. Honorable, wise, but humble, diplomatic, reasonable, with high morals, and fortitude under pressure.

shevy-java

> Stewart, of course, was far more than Picard. He anchored the X-Men film franchise and was for decades a dynamo on stage. Actually, Patrick's biggest impact, IMO, was via theatre. It's where his skills originated from. You can notice it in his performance - in Star Trek TNG, he had a stronger presence on the screen, without necessarily overacting. Jonathan Frakes was also an excellent actor, but Patrick was IMO better. His roles had a much stronger screen-presence. In the wolverine franchise, he could not do as much as he did in Star Trek, and in Logan I noticed his health was getting worse, e. g. he looked increasingly frail. That was about ten years ago. I think his health was worse than he conveyed, with his somewhat surprising recent death really. You typically don't die as quickly from Alzheimer, so I guess there may have been some additional neurological issue. Overall I think his role in Star Trek was the most impactful though. He and the others kind of resurrected Roddenberry's idea to some extent. (Roddenberry was more impacted from the cold war, so his views became a bit more outdated compared to the 1990s and beyond. But watch what Nichelle Nichols had to say here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pSq_UIuxba8 )

kstenerud

I think the most memorable of the Picard-focused TNG stories for me was "Tapestry". It really hammered home how much of one's potential is lost when one never takes risks.

DivingForGold

https://wallhop.io/https://www.bostonglobe.com/2026/10/29/me... just click the "x" on the nag screen ...

ionwake

It’s almost hard to imagine perhaps or maybe I’m biased but my grand father was very similar in manner to him. Otherwise I may have assumed such men did not exist.

add-sub-mul-div

A few years ago I saw a post somewhere captioned, "I think we know who the better captain is now". And I don't remember the details but it showed a picture of Patrick Stewart and a statement he'd made that was incredibly compassionate. Next to it was a picture of William Shatner and an old man "get off my lawn" type quote of his from some antiwoke rant.

Der_Einzige

For anyone somehow in this comment thread who didn’t watch Star Trek ds9, if you liked next gen you will probably like ds9 for all the same reasons (and many new ones)!

vr46

Poor writers, they never get any credit

layer8

https://youtu.be/cKcH-ZR7Fao

Balgair

Stewart was, to me, an archetypal man's man.in Picard. Embodying a real man to me in so many ways. The author is right in this eulogy of a great actor and a great role. That out of the way, Brooks' Sisco is the much better captain, man, father, and role model and Brooks' acting in Ben, I feel, does a much better job. I will sorely miss Stewart, as we all should. All the captains' actors and writers who made them should be too. What a great franchise and body of effort and work.

axionbraid

What made Picard endure as a cultural touchstone is rarer than it's being given credit for here. His authority never came from action or decisiveness. It came from deliberation -- from taking moral questions seriously, visibly struggling with them, and arriving somewhere thoughtful. He could be shown uncertain, conflicted, or wrong without it undermining his standing. Most fictional leaders derive authority from what they do. Picard's came from how he reasoned. That's an unusual model to put in front of a generation. The image of a powerful person treating an ethical dilemma as something worth the full weight of their attention is not common, in fiction or outside it. A lot of people who grew up watching him internalized something they might not have had a name for at the time: that authority and genuine moral seriousness can be the same thing, not opposites.