Tapestry (Star Trek: The Next Generation)
"Tapestry" is an episode of season six of Star Trek: The Next Generation. It is a follow-up episode to the Picard-centric events shown in the season two episode "Samaritan Snare".
The episode serves to provide character development of Captain Jean-Luc Picard, who is featured in this episode to the general exclusion of the rest of the cast. It is also the penultimate series appearance of Q (John DeLancie). Its primary theme, explored in many other stories (starting with H.G. Wells' The Time Machine), is the effect on the present of changing the past. However, the primary literary theme is the balance of order and chaos within the individual.
Story
To prove Picard is dead, Q introduces him to persons Picard is aware have died, including Picard's father, and the voices of all persons for whose deaths Picard is responsible. When Picard accuses Q of causing his death, Q reveals that Picard's artificial heart is the cause of his demise - a genuine heart would not have been damaged in the same way by the energy discharge.
It is "revealed" to Q that Picard lost his own heart in a bar brawl with Nausicaans - members of a quick-tempered, bullish race, which resulted in Picard being impaled from the back through his heart. This information was already revealed to Wesley Crusher in a previous episode, but was not generally known to the crew. Picard realizes his regret for his "wild youth" and that it has finally caught up with him. It is revealed that the basis of his current disciplined personality and need for privacy in his personal life is rooted in his regret over his earlier life and a wish to keep it secret.
Realizing Picard's regrets, Q offers to let him go back in time to prevent the injury that resulted in him obtaining an artificial heart. Picard is then whisked back to the day before the injury, meeting up with his friends and academy classmates Corey Zweller and Marta Batanides. To his friends and acquaintances, his "newly changed" personality comes as somewhat an unpleasant surprise, and he quickly alienates everyone around him - the person they knew as fun loving and quick to anger is now staid, slow to anger, and often unintentionally insulting.
Events proceed as they did with Zweller becoming enraged with a group of Nausicaans who cheat him at dom-jot. However, Picard quickly short circuits Zweller's original plan to rig the dom-jot table, enraging his best friend in the process. After a quick intimate encounter with Ensign Batanides that was not part of the original timeline, the Nausicaans appear and start insulting Picard and his friends. Instead of taking on the Nausicaans as he originally did, Picard instead throws Zweller out of the way of the fight. The Nausicaans call the ensigns cowards and leave - as do Zweller and Batanides, since Picard has just completely destroyed his long friendship with them by refusing to stand up for Zweller. Q appears and tells Picard that he has successfully saved his heart, and sends him back to the present.
However, when he arrives, Picard finds that although Q's promise not to otherwise change the timeline has been kept, Picard finds himself on the Enterprise as a Lieutenant junior grade in the astrophysics department. After consulting Riker and Troi, he discovers that his entire career is now a list of routine postings and that he has accomplished little or nothing of consequence. He is described as extremely competent by his superiors, but he fails to show initiative and has never been willing to take the necessary risks in order to have a successful, well rounded career in Starfleet.
Picard eventually confronts Q, who tells him that although the bout with the Nausicaan nearly cost him his life, it also gave him a sense of his own mortality. Q says:
That Picard never had a brush with death, never came face to face with his own mortality, never realized how fragile life is or how important each moment must be, so his life never came into focus. He drifted through much of his career, with no plan or agenda, going from one assignment to the next, never seizing the opportunities that presented themselves. He never led the away team on Milika III to save the ambassador, or took charge of the Stargazer's bridge when its captain was killed. And no one ever offered him a command. He learned to play it safe. And he never, ever got noticed by anyone.
Picard realizes that his attempts to suppress and ignore the consequences of his youthful indiscretions has resulted in him losing a part of himself - a part he does not necessarily like, but a vital part of him nonetheless.
Q gives Picard the chance to go back again, even though Picard realizes that putting the time line back as it was will result in his death. However, Picard prefers death as the captain of the Enterprise rather than the routine life he has been shown. He goes back to the fight, takes on the Nausicaans, and events unfold as they should.
Back on the Enterprise, Picard recovers from his injuries. He wonders if he really did go back into the past or whether it was merely a hallucination or one of Q's tricks. In either case, he observes that he learned an important lesson, stating, "There are many parts of my youth that I'm not proud of. There were loose threads - untidy parts of me that I would like to remove. But when I pulled on one of those threads, it unraveled the tapestry of my life." After Riker hears the story, he expresses some difficulty imagining the man he knows taking on two Nausicaans twice his size. At that point, Picard launches into another story about an encounter with Nausicaans in similar circumstances, and the viewer is left with the hope that Picard will open up about his past to his friends and colleagues.
Character development
'Tapestry' provides an important part of Picard's backstory. At the beginning of the series, Picard is a Starfleet legend, new captain of the flagship, and famous in his own right. Throughout the series, the captain's past exploits are highlighted in a number of episodes, including the invention of the Picard Maneuver.
This episode lays all of Picard's secrets bare. Although Picard shows himself as the disciplined intellectual he has become, his academy days were far different. Unlike Captain Kirk, who was a well known 'stiff' at the academy, Picard seems to have been fun loving, promiscuous, and indifferent to his studies except when he was fully engaged with the subject. We did hear hints of this in previous episodes - his reunion with Boothby alluded to an incident that may have resulted in Picard's expulsion.
An interesting twist on canon established in Samaritan Snare is given. In that episode, Picard tells Wesley of the incident, saying that as he looked down at the knife emerging from his chest he laughed; he doesn't say what caused him to laugh.
DVD
- This episode is featured on the Star Trek: The Next Generation - Jean-Luc Picard Collection DVD set for Region 1 only. It is the last of seven episodes featured, on disc 2 of the two-disc set.
- This episode is featured on the Star Trek: Fan Collective - Q DVD set. It is the ninth of 14 episodes featured, on disc 3 of the four-disc set.
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