In July 2022, the Yorkshire Post asked Patrick Stewart if, like his character Jean-Luc Picard, he actually drank Earl Grey tea. No, he said. He preferred Yorkshire Gold. I immediately ordered a large box, and, truth be told, it is delicious. So last night, in remembrance of his life, I poured a cup of Yorkshire Gold, hot, read Shakespeare’s Sonnet 71, and recalled the words of Enterprise captain Picard in Star Trek: Generations:
“Time is a companion who goes with us on the journey and reminds us to cherish every moment, because they’ll never come again. What we leave behind is not as important as how we lived.”
The best part of my sophomore year of college at the University of Wisconsin–Madison occurred every weeknight at midnight, when my closest friends arrived at my dorm room for a sacred ritual: watching Picard captain the starship USS Enterprise (NCC-1701-D) in the latest rerun of Star Trek: The Next Generation (TNG), a show still on the air in 1991. We sat in ecstatic silence, candles lit, while Stewart presided on the bridge, his arm pointed toward the future, leading us through the universe and building bridges with other worlds. He imparted more than a lifetime of wisdom and listened intently to his crew’s needs and his own heart. It was the closest thing to a religious experience I’ve ever had.
So I was devastated to learn that Stewart passed on Wednesday. According to his spokesperson, Kelly Bush Novak, he’d died of Alzheimer’s disease and Lewy body dementia. He was 86. Thankfully, Stewart had a “brief and poignant journey” with these terrible diseases, both of which afflicted my father for too many years. Stewart did not publicly reveal his diagnosis in life, so his loss feels sudden and poignant for those of us restless to see him reprise the role of X-Men’s Professor Charles Xavier in Avengers: Doomsday, in theaters December 18.
The enormity of his talent and range was stunning. He captured the screen in roles both serious and lighthearted (The Sheep Detectives, Robin Hood: Men in Tights, L.A. Story), commanded the stage (Antony and Cleopatra and Macbeth in the West End, Waiting for Godot with his dear friend Ian McKellen on Broadway), won three Olivier Awards and a Grammy for Prokofiev: Peter and the Wolf, and even cut it up with a raunchy stand-up routine at age 75.
But his deep humanity, relationship with the written word, and good-humored spontaneity touched my heart most. For five months during the pandemic, he entered our homes to recite a daily Shakespeare sonnet, opening our shuttered worlds to a renewed desire, a deep ache, and a celebratory beauty. His hopeful spirit and endlessly engaging, hilarious presence brought so many people, and aliens in the far reaches of the universe, to Shakespeare over the years, connecting us all to a shared humanity.
Members of the Improvised Shakespeare Company at iO Theater in Chicago, including creator Blaine Swen, often speak in hushed reverence about the first of many times Stewart joined them onstage for an unforgettable surprise performance. In American Theatre, Stewart recalled, “. . . When I first saw Improvised Shakespeare Company . . . in Chicago in January 2013, I was astonished and full of wonder. How can this be improvisation? I thought. How can it be for the first time?”
I had a similar surprise when I attended the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s performance of Igor Stravinsky’s opera-oratorio Oedipus Rex in February 2010, only to discover Sir Patrick Stewart himself was narrating, in person!
Given who he was, his deep commitment to social justice was no surprise. Stewart championed arts education in schools, as well as organizations that advocate for survivors of domestic violence, such as Refuge. As a boy, he had watched his father, a veteran, return traumatized from World War II and abuse his mother while he looked on helplessly. “Violence against women is learned,” he said. “Each of us must examine—and change—the ways in which our own behavior might contribute to, enable, ignore or excuse all such forms of violence.” Stewart also stood with the queer community. After Ian McKellen came out as gay in 1988, Stewart became a longstanding public patron of PFLAG.
But his greatest contribution to the world, in my opinion, is Picard in TNG (and later Star Trek: Picard). Through Gene Roddenberry’s vision, Stewart immortalized phrases that will perhaps be repeated into the 2360s: “Make it so!” “Engage!” “Earl Grey, hot,” and the greatest meme of all time, “Wesley!”
Entire doctoral theses could be written (and probably have been) about Picard’s impact. Yet at the end of the day, he was just damn sexy. Suddenly on our TV screens came this fascinating, bald, British man into our homes, reciting poetry, drinking tea, playing music, and wooing women of all species in the great legacy of James T. Kirk, and he did it with little bravado. Just a thoughtful mix of humility and confidence, inquisitiveness, and stubbornness in a burgundy Starfleet jumpsuit. And that Earl Grey is indeed hot.
Standing on the bridge of the USS Enterprise as the egalitarian captain of a multicultural and interspecies crew, the character of Picard was groundbreaking because he built bridges, figuratively and emotionally. From its first episode in 1987, near the end of the Reagan era, to its final episode in 1994, early in the Clinton era, TNG bridged a conservative, materialistic America with the idealism and hope for a more liberal, compassionate country. Boldly going where few TV shows had gone before, TNG was progressive and approached issues way before the culture could catch up, tackling gender (like the episode “The Outcast,” where Jonathan Frakes’s character of Riker has a relationship with Soren, a member of an androgynous race; addressing conversion therapy to a muddle of praise and critique from the LGBTQ+ community), xenophobia, feminism, race, artificial intelligence, conflict resolution, and, of course, the Prime Directive, which involves the morality of interfering with prewarp civilizations not yet able to travel the stars.
I took a fantastic folklore class at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where the teacher required us to watch TNG season 5, episode 2, “Darmok,” an episode that perfectly espouses Stewart’s oeuvre and includes a phrase any Trekkie would know: “Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra.”
In this episode, Picard encounters an alien starship captain, Dathon of the Tamarians, who communicates only in metaphors and allegories from their culture’s history and mythology. To help Picard understand the Tamarian language, Dathon brings Picard to the hostile planet of El-Adrel IV to fight an invisible monster. After great frustration and confusion, the determined Picard discovers that “Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra” refers to a Tamarian fable in which two enemies work together to conquer a common foe. It clicks when Picard connects the tale to a story from his human culture, The Epic of Gilgamesh, which he recites. By the end of this episode, Picard enters Tamarian legend (“Picard and Dathon at El-Adrel”), but I suggest you watch it for yourself.
Such selfless cooperation is often alien to our contemporary human culture, but TNG, and this episode in particular, imagines a future far beyond borders without being naively utopian. Many of Earth’s problems have been solved, and many new galactic problems have emerged, yet the show offers hope that all people—or beings as they may be—may continue to transcend their differences and find ways to come together under the stars.
But today, we mourn the loss of Captain Picard.
“Shaka, when the walls fell.”
This story was originally published by our sister paper, Chicago Reader.
