6x15 Tapestry

[9.0/10] It’s appropriate that Patrick Stewart would go on to star in multiple adaptations of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol for the stage and screen. “Tapestry” takes its cues from that story. Here is a man at a crossroads, brought back by a spirit to revisit a key moment in his life, and see what his future may hold if he stays on a certain path. Like the Dickens classic, it’s a means of introspection by way of the supernatural, using the high concept premise to dig into the psyche of Captain Picard, his regrets, and the choices that made him who he is.

The irony, of course, is that it’s basically the anti-Christmas Carol. Scrooge’s tale is a parable about what you might have done differently, the changes you should have made sooner, but which it’s not too late to make now and ensure you have a better life to come. “Tapestry” has the opposite message. It’s the foolhardy, brazen, even stupid things you’ve done in your past, things which you may cringe to recall now and wish to erase, that have forged you into the person you became. Erasing them would be erasing yourself, on the episode’s account, and those foolish mistakes can be the things that give us perspective, that put our truest wants and most instructive epiphanies into stark relief.

Of course, the spiritual guide here is better than anything of the voices from beyond Mr. Dickens dreamed up. It is, naturally, Q who takes Picard on this metaphysical journey. After Jean Luc seems to have died on the operating table thanks to a bit of misfortune and his artificial heart, Q gives him the opportunity to undo the events which led to him needing the synthetic organ in the first place. His put-downs, snapbacks, and smart remarks are all as sharp as ever. And as usual, Q’s goals and trustworthiness are questionable, but he’s too much fun in his teasing, and what he offers is too tantalizing to turn down.

Here, that’s the chance for Picard to become a twenty-one-year-old ensign again, on the cusp of his first assignment, and on the verge of getting stabbed through the heart by a surly Naussican in a bar fight. Lamenting the folly of his youth, Picard now has a chance to undo it. It’s a deft choice both for the pragmatic stakes of it, and for the broader point it makes about the captain.

What’s at stake is plain. Jean Luc dies in the present thanks to his artificial heart. Avoiding that bar fight in the past means saving his life in the future. But it’s also a quiet referendum on whether going back and correcting our youthful mistakes would alter the people we grew into in deleterious ways. And it’s a tribute to the way that Picard, for all his stuffiness and staid dignity, is also a risk-taker, with a willingness to stand out and make bold moves that led him into the captain’s chair.

In truth, I don’t entirely know how I feel about that message. Picard stops himself, and his best friend at the academy, from picking a near-lethal fight. It’s a tricky thing, and its jeopardizes his friendship with someone he’d stay pals with long into his adulthood, which takes a certain courage. And his karmic reward for showing such resolve in the face of a buddy barreling headlong into stupidity is...a future where he’s a schnook, a junior officer on the Enterprise, considered too timid and bland to be considered for command.

Look, you have to give “Tapestry” and TNG credit. It’s a great cut. There’s something so jarring about seeing Picard snapped into an unfamiliar uniform taking orders from Worf. (See also: “Conundrum”.) Likewise, it’s a treat to see him go from conversing about the past and the afterlife with Q while bathed in white light, only to jolt him into another scene by showing him slapped by a jilted paramour. Without going too big on impressionism here, the episode does a stellar job selling those transitions and the haltingness of Picard’s jumps across moments and timelines.

But I’m a little troubled by the facileness of its message of “Those dumb things you did as a kid gave you the great life you have now” message. Most charitably, you can read it as a deconstruction of familiar regrets of adults, wishing they could take back their youthful mistakes, redo the great loves unloved, without realizing the unintended consequences that might ripple out from those choices.

My favorite detail in this episode is the way old-young-Picard notices the crush his “just a friend” had on him at the time, realizes he reciprocates her feelings, only to see that acting on them would mess up a longstanding friendship. The easy route for Picard, whose grand “path not taken” has always been never having a family, would be to show Marta as “the one that got away,” who he could have formed that family with. Instead, the show goes someplace bolder, suggesting that the missed connection where the timing was never right could have just as easily ended in disaster as bliss.

But there’s a line between encouraging viewers, by dint of the perspective character here, not to linger too long on regrets or the paths not taken, because those missteps helped teach them the important things that forged their personalities in the here and now. More than that, there’s a fair point to be made about a willingness to take some big swings in life in order to go after the things you want, being willing to stand out and make a splash or risk being comfortable yet unfulfilled.

Lieutenant Junior Grade Picard doesn’t have a bad life. He’s still serving on Starfleet’s flagship and seems respected if not admired. But he’s fallen far short of his potential. Reminding him that the qualities he hates in himself from his youth, qualities he hinted at to Wesley Crusher in the shuttle ride on the way to his last heart transplant, were the same ones that motivated him to be his best self in the present, and linger with him now when the tough decisions have to be made to save the day.

And yet, it’s easy to make the “every mistake led you to the right path” argument when you’re the decorated captain of the premiere vessel in the fleet. It’s the nature of these sorts of stories on television that whatever the chance to change the past, we’ll nevertheless end up at the status quo, because otherwise you’d have to rewrite scads of scripts and build new sets and recast roles and god knows what else. There’s a certain entropy to episodic television, and I don’t mind its practical limitations.

But I also think it’s easy to be too sanguine about the life we know versus the possible lives we’ll never know. For every Jean Luc Picard, whose near death experience put his goals into focus, how many potentially great captains were lost because they veered too far at the wrong time, only to crash and burn? How many of them might have risen through the ranks had they avoided a blot on their record and been able to show the wisdom and discipline Picard wished he’d had in his younger days? (Nicholas Locarno comes to mind.) More to the point, how might you feel about your youthful recklessness if you’re a nobody who washed out of the Academy and is now piloting freighters in the middle of nowhere rather than a legendary starship captain? (Or, for that matter, some schmuck who spends his Sunday afternoons writing about thirty-year-old episodes of television?)

There’s a valid idea here, that tugging at one thread, one regrettable youthful indiscretion, could unravel the tapestry of your life. And the push to take chances in life, to realizes what’s important and go after it rather than drift, is a good one. Reassuring folks that the things they regret from childhood likely served a purpose in the present, and may very well have gone differently than they’d think, is a good thing.

But the mode that takes here still gives me pause. Maybe it’s just the current climate, but encouraging people to take more stupid risks, in the hopes that it’ll lead them to greatness, feels like anathema to me now. As “The First Duty” examined, we don’t always have a system that allows for second chances for young people who make mistakes. Doing what young Picard does here could just as easily ruin your life rather than lead you to the captaincy. And the implicit notion that anything other than the current timeline is bad could easily slip into the “Best of All Possible Worlds” fallacy. If you start to unravel “Tapestry” yourself, look what’s underneath its tangles, the sight isn’t always a pretty one.

Still, maybe it works for Picard. If you don’t try to generalize the episode as a life lesson for all, and simply read it as a fable for one man, it’s easier to buy. Picard is a leader known for his self-discipline, his judgment, his calm dignity and diplomacy in a crisis. Of course he would loathe his impulsive, womanizing, rock-fisted younger self, who represents everything he tried to mature beyond. Reminding the captain of how and why he matured from that state, helping him reconcile with whom he used to be, is a worthy project, and an even better story.

And that’s what puts “Tapestry” over the top in the end. Quibble with its messages all you like. (And I did.) Take issue with its character cosmology. But it’s one hell of a ride. And more than that, it’s one hell of a look into the main character of Star Trek: The Next Generation, spurred on by his best foil. Watching Q toy with Picard with his usual spritely vigor, watching Picard try to remake a past he regrets, and seeing him rediscover the man who’d laugh in the face of a dagger through the heart, is grand storytelling and entertainment.

The high concept premise of “Tapestry” alone would have made it stand out. The chance to watch our hero lock horns (or bedsheets) with Q once more is a treat as always. But the way TNG tells this story of Picard as the anti-Scrooge, a man who witnesses the man he was and the life he might have had, in a way that affirms the person he became and the life he made for himself, makes it one of the series all-time best. However he got there, in the end, Picard came to know the value of his life, his friends, and even the mysterious forces that spurred his chuckling epiphanies. May that be truly said of us, and all of us.