Patrick Stewart's Best Star Trek Role Isn't Captain Picard
Inspired by a deep-cut Beatles song, "The Inner Light" remains a classic for a reason.
When the best Captain Picard quotes are compiled, fans often cite one specific quote as their favorite and most inspirational from the character: “Seize the time, Meribor — live now! Make now always the most precious time. Now will never come again." But who is Meribor? And is this Jean-Luc Picard actually speaking?
In a sense, this wonderful, affecting, and beautiful Picard quote isn’t spoken by Picard, exactly. Instead, it’s spoken by a character named Kamin. And that’s because, although the character of Jean-Luc Picard is one of the best TV characters of all time, one of his best-loved stories presents Stewart’s hero as a character who, technically, isn’t Jean-Luc Picard. Thirty-four years after it aired in 1992, The Next Generation episode “The Inner Light” — written by Morgan Gendel — remains one of the most praised, heartfelt, and thought-provoking episodes of Star Trek ever. Here at Inverse, we ranked it fifth on our list of the 60 most important Star Trek stories of all time. In light of his passing, what makes this great performance from Patrick Stewart so interesting, at least among his other great performances throughout Star Trek, is that for most of the episode, Stewart is Kamin, not Picard.
Kamin, not Picard, as played by Patrick Stewart in “The Inner Light.”
“The Inner Light” is a great example of what made The Next Generation special in a variety of ways. Unlike most TV shows before or since, in Season 3, Michael Piller instituted a policy whereby non-staff writers could submit scripts to TNG. This famously resulted in Ronald D. Moore’s spec script, “The Bonding,” getting picked up, which launched his impressive writing career. But it also meant that established writers, like Morgan Gendel, who weren’t on staff, were able to sell scripts and stories to Trek. “The Inner Light” is one of four Star Trek scripts written (or co-written) by Gendel for the Trek franchise of that era; he also penned “Starship Mine” for TNG, and “The Passenger” and “Armageddon Game” for Deep Space Nine. But “The Inner Light” remains Gendel’s most famous Star Trek script, and revisiting it following Stewart’s passing can easily make you see why this story, and this performance, are so special.
Named for the George Harrison Beatles song, “The Inner Light,” Gendel’s script takes the themes Harrison was playing with, including the notion that one could “arrive without traveling,” and turns those ideas into great science fiction. Instead of boldly going, Picard’s mind exists in another life, in another time, as a man named Kamin, living on the dying world of Kataan. At first, Picard resists the idea that he exists in this world and not on the Enterprise. But then, time passes, and we see Kamin, not Picard, grow older, have children, and even grandchildren. (Meribor, played by Jennifer Nash, is Kamin’s granddaughter.)
The final twist — that Picard was living in a kind of mini-Matrix (this was before The Matrix, by the way) isn’t really even the best part of the episode. The episode works, not because we don’t see the twist coming, but because Stewart’s performance suggests that we may never return to the Enterprise at all. It’s a magic trick of acting that feels impossible to imagine with other performers, and even other Trek episodes that played with similar themes are (by now, fault of their own) less convincing.
The key thing that makes Gendel’s concept work so well is that Stewart does become a different character. Kamin is a lot like Picard; he’s determined, he’s a community leader, and he will stand up for the truth no matter what. But Kamin is also a softer and, oddly, more well-rounded version of Picard. It’s one thing to have a bird's-eye view from the bridge of a Galaxy-class starship, but to be a husband and a father, on a dying world, trying to think about future generations creates entirely different kinds of perceptions and wisdom.
Picard wakes up from his “dream,” forever changed.
“The Inner Light” reveals to us the man Picard could be if he did give up the adventures of Star Trek. Stewart’s son, Daniel Stewart, plays Kamin’s adult son in the episode, which reflects the real and authentic themes in the episode. Future episodes of TNG, and really, all four films, and much of Picard, owe a great deal to Stewart’s performance in “The Inner Light.” In episodic sci-fi TV, that was, in theory, supposed to be a series of action-adventure stories, Stewart pulled off something that is extremely difficult, even in thoughtful shows like Star Trek: The Next Generation. He took the amazing sci-fi concept, and he made it a part of Picard’s inner life going forward.
Picard’s assimilation by the Borg in “The Best of Both Worlds” may have broken him, but with “The Inner Light,” Stewart showed us how Picard, or maybe Kamin, could become whole again. And, in doing so, The Next Generation gave us all a perfect metaphor for why we loved the series so much: Maybe all of us, in our ordinary lives, are like Kamin, getting through our days on a flawed world, remembering a dream of a time when we were in a different, wonderful future.
