I'm Not A Star Trek Fan – Here's What I Learned After Watching Patrick Stewart's Best Tng Episodes

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I love my job and promise I'm qualified to do it, but sometimes, I have to admit that I, as the kids or Taylor Swift might say, don't "know ball." After admitting that I'd never seen "Jurassic Park" or ever sat down and watched "The Mummy," I wrote about the experience of watching these gems for the first time right here at /Film, and across the board, I'm always excited to learn about some new corner of the pop culture world for the first time.

Then my editor asked me to watch "Star Trek."

I need to be exceedingly clear: I don't have any actual beef with the Star Trek universe, but I am a spiteful and deeply stubborn person who has been asked — begged, at times — to watch this show by some of its more passionate fans who have flitted in and out of my life. There came a point where I felt like proving some sort of inane point by not watching this show, even though my refusal to do so affects nobody and nothing anywhere in the world. Then, Sir Patrick Stewart died, and my lead editor asked if he could give me a list of five particularly fun Picard episodes of "Star Trek: The Next Generation" and I could write about them. I said yes, because despite my well-documented spite, I'd like to pay my respects to Stewart's legacy. (A note! "Best of Both Worlds," "Family," and "Chain of Command" were only excluded from this list because they're multi-part episodes.)

Some important context! I've never watched this show before. I don't really know who most of the characters are, nor do I know what's going on at most given moments. So what do I think of these handpicked Picard episodes of "Star Trek: TNG?" Let's see.

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I started with "The Measure of a Man," a relatively somber Season 2 episode of "Star Trek: The Next Generation" that involves a legal, ethical, and moral dispute over whether the ship's android guy Data (Brent Spiner) is a sentient being or the property of Starfleet, to be dismantled and studied. The whole thing progresses into a miniature legal drama where Captain Philippa Louvois (Amanda McBroom) has to oversee Data's case and make a declaration one way or another. (Also, I love that this show goes out of its way to remind us, regularly, that Patrick Stewart's Captain Jean-Luc Picard is way hot. Louvois is practically panting at him during most of their scenes.)

"The Measure of a Man" is a relatively somber treatise on what it means to possess a soul, artificial intelligence, and what can and should be sacrificed in the quest for more knowledge, but I really can't stress this enough: it's also the first Star Trek anything I've ever watched. With that in mind, I admittedly didn't follow every single plot beat but instead paid close attention to Stewart's performance, which is, obviously, outstanding. The way he approaches a world where the guy next to him is in full body paint as if it's a Shakespearean drama is incredibly rad, but it also lends some gravity to the entire situation. (Get it? "Gravity." The show's about space! Nevermind.) 

As news spread of Stewart's passing, it became quite clear to me that he was a massively important actor for so many people thanks to the Star Trek franchise, and this episode was a perfect first introduction that helped me understand why. How could you not side with the guy arguing to save his friend?

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"The Drumhead," the second Patrick Stewart episode of "Star Trek: The Next Generation" that I turned on, is a tiny courtroom drama focused on an explosion on the Starship Enterprise that may or may not have been outright sabotage. After the arrival of retired rear admiral Norah Satie (Jean Simmons), the crew tries to officially get to the bottom of it, as Worf (Michael Dorn), a Klingon dude that I referred to as "the guy in a Chewbacca mask" to tick off one of my Trekkie coworkers for fun, reveals that his hilariously named fellow Klingon J'Dan (Henry Woronicz), is betraying them; it turns out he is, but he didn't cause the explosion.

Satie turns on Picard, angry that he's vehemently defending his own crew — even though the explosion wasn't sabotage at all, as it turns out. The reason that "The Drumhead" ended up on this list is, indisputably, because of Picard's masterful monologue defending himself; Stewart, of course, performs it beautifully and with the solemnity of a soliloquy delivered by Hamlet or Macbeth. (The scene with him and the Klingon whose name is definitely Worf and not Not-Chewbacca is also quite nice.) Again, there's a steadiness to Stewart's performance that's obviously what drew in "Star Trek" fans for decades. Even as you know that Picard is falsely accused, Stewart's real concern and frustration in the moment is palpable, and his moral center remains clear even as he deals with political scapegoating and fear-mongering. That's not just a prescient message for our current times; it's a message that has remained relevant in the decades since Stewart turned in this performance in "The Drumhead," and it's easy to see why Picard is so important to so many.

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In this episode, which my editor insists is a must-watch because it shows off Captain Jean-Luc Picard's sillier side — and Patrick Stewart's by extension — Picard is bullied into going on vacation by his colleagues because he won't stop working and just go already. (As a freelance writer, I find this sadly and disturbingly relatable.) Picard finally agrees to go to a planet called Risa when he finds out that Deanna's (Marina Sirtis) mother is coming to visit — I asked around, and apparently, she's a real pain in the butt — and when he gets there, a woman he ultimately learns is named Vash (Jennifer Hetrick) kisses him to try to get away from an enemy. (They do it later, probably crazy style. I don't know what the sexual norms are in the Star Trek universe and am only sort of afraid to ask.)

After that, Vash and Picard have a whole subplot involving some sort of MacGuffin called the Tox Uthat — and a brief borderline kidnapping by that aforementioned Ferengi character Sovak (Max Grodénchik) — and by the end of the episode, Picard goes ahead and destroys the Uthat with the Enterprise's help because I guess it's very dangerous or whatever. I don't know about all that. What I do know is that "Captain's Holiday" is an episode of "TNG" that reminds you that Picard is a hot captain who f***s. In that sense, it's incredibly effective, and I am sorry for how much I objectified Sir Stewart throughout this episode. (No, I'm not.) In all seriousness, though, Stewart took the challenge of this silly, relatively fluffy episode and performed it with the utmost sincerity and wit. 

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I was given next to no information about "The Inner Light" and the assigned episode that follows (more on that in a second, obviously), and that definitely improved my viewing experience ... because not only do these feel like relatively standalone episodes, they're also both incredible showcases for Patrick Stewart as a performer. After getting hit by some sort of energy beam in a probe on the Enterprise, Jean-Luc Picard wakes up in another universe as a guy named Kamin, who lives with his wife Eline (Margot Rose) on a planet called Kataan. Picard then spends several decades there hanging out with his wife and his friends, raising children, and noticing, all the while, that the sun's radiation will eventually cause widespread drought, something he hopes to prevent despite the government repeatedly telling him that they don't have the technology to prevent it.

Spoilers for this pretty old episode, but when I learned that the whole thing was a series of memories implanted in a probe to show others what life on Kataan was like before it was lost to time, I was pretty shaken! (Also, the fact that 40-odd years only take 25 minutes for Picard is nuts.) All in all, this was the most emotionally resonant episode of "Star Trek: The Next Generation" I watched in this bunch. As I watched Stewart's Kamin try, over the course of years, to save the planet he calls home and protect his loved ones in the process — despite that mission ultimately being doomed — I ended up weirdly hoping that Picard wouldn't return to the ship, only because Kamin seemed so happy and comfortable with his loved ones. Picard was a cultural father figure, and this episode explains why pretty perfectly.

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A sort of "Sliding Doors," "A Christmas Carol" episode completed by journey into the Star Trek universe — and yes, I'm talking about "Tapestry." (No, I did not know who John de Lancie's Q was going into this, and I still don't! Sorry!) After Jean-Luc Picard is wounded on a mission — an understatement, considering it's a large sucking chest wound — he's taken something that may or may not be the afterlife where he meets up with Q and is able to revisit a crucial moment in his life, seeing what would happen if he didn't get wounded in a bar fight and receive an artificial heart in the aftermath.

After changing his past and sleeping with his fellow cadet Marta Batanides (J. C. Brandy) — I love that all of these episodes drive the point home that Picard is super popular with the ladies — Picard decides to not fight the alien who stabs him in the heart, only to learn that, without taking that massive risk and nearly dying, he doesn't become the captain of the Enterprise ... but becomes a loser junior officer that nobody really respects. I genuinely did not see the "Picard goes back and gets stabbed" conclusion coming here, but it ends up making a weird amount of sense that he needs to push himself to end up on the correct life path. Once again, Stewart delivers a deeply considered and serious performance as a man grappling with a fork in the road that he actually has the power to change (or not), but this is probably the most complicated look at Picard in this bunch, and Stewart sells that conflict in him throughout every single second. Stewart was one of our finest actors, bar none. Episodes like "Tapestry" prove that handily.

"Star Trek: The Next Generation" is streaming on Paramount+.