There they hoist us,
To cry to th’ sea that roared to us, to sigh
To th’ winds whose pity, sighing back again,
Did us but loving wrong.
The Tempest, Act I, scene ii
Jean-Luc Picard is many things.
He’s a crotchety taskmaster. He’s a Starfleet officer. He’s a beloved captain, a galactic hero. He likes Shakespeare. He’s a vintner, a philosopher, a speechmaker. He is Locutus, Kamin, Dixon Hill. He’s the Klingon Arbiter of Succession, the man who learned how to communicate with the Children of Tama, the man who stood against the worst excesses of his government’s own self-assured ideological conviction. He’s the Hermit of La Barre.
As much as the fandom might like to pretend otherwise he’s not, and has never been, Saint Jean-Luc. As many times as he has succeeded in spite of the odds, he has been bested by them. Gowron turned out to be a short-sighted fool. Captain Dathon died at El-Adred. Data died on the Scimitar. He has been guilty of failures of imagination; the same failures he accused Soji of. He brawled with his brother in the mud like a five year old.
He is self-righteous, he can be petty, he is an arrogant bore. I love him dearly.
Every moment I spending hanging out with him and his friends, whether aboard the Starships Enterprise or La Sirena, bas been a pleasure.
He’s one of my personal heroes, an inspiration, one of my very favourite fictional characters. I have taken to calling the characters on Discovery the saints of imperfection, but it’s a fitting title for Jean-Luc Picard as well. Perfection has never been what heroes are made of—it isn’t their successes which should define them, but the way they seek healing and redemption in the aftermath of their failures.
That’s… well, that’s what living is. At least, that must be what living well is, right? Fail. Fall. Pick yourself back up. Dust yourself off. Try again. Make the world better by being better. Set an example.
“To be alive is a responsibility,” he says. Who knows it better than him?
Jean-Luc Picard is many things but, in the final analysis, what he is most of all is a good man.
