Rest in Peace Sir Patrick

It was way back in the 1980’s, long before streaming, when a trip to the local video rental shop brought you all kinds of surprises. Back then when you rented a film the tapes always featured trailers for other videos you might want to rent, as was the case when I discovered that there was going to be a new Star Trek, not a film starring the old crew, but a brand spanking new television series, the first time there had been a new Trek series since the old animated series back in the 1970’s.

The trailer was for the pilot film of ‘Star Trek: The Next Generation’, set some eighty years or so after the films, which were still going strongly at that point. They featured a whole new crew, and I remember sitting there watching this trailer in wonder. They had an android, a blind guy, a lady doctor, and we were now best buddies with the Klingons.

Oh, and new captain of this grand new U.S.S. Enterprise was played by an Englishman, a man from Yorkshire no less.

Needless to say, I eagerly looked for that tape the next time I went to the video shop, and it wasn’t long before I got my first look at the new crew in Encounter at Farpoint. Okay, let’s be really honest here. As seemed to be the case with a great deal of new television shows, the first season was a little shaky, and it certainly didn’t stand out as the best thing to ever come out of Gene Roddenberry’s vision of the future. But what was obvious from the start was that they had a hell of an actor on their hands who was a more-than-worthy successor to James T. Kirk.

Even though I’d already seen him in films like Excalibur, this was my first prolonged exposure to Patrick Stewart, and as the show went on, and as the stories got better, I was treated to some truly remarkable performances from him, and as time went on, I began to believe something that would have shocked countless Trek fans across the world: Captain Picard was a hell of a lot better than Captain Kirk.

We watched Picard grow into this figure of authority, and we watched Patrick Stewart grow as he brought his Shakespearean gravitas to the bridge of this brand new, 24^th century Enterprise, so much so that when news came out that there would be a big screen version of Marvel’s hit franchise X-Men, there only really seemed to be one choice for the role of Charles Xavier.

As you can probably tell from what I’ve written here I haven’t really watched any of his Shakespeare performances. If truth be known the works of Shakespeare have never appealed to me. But what I have seen over the past forty years or so led me to realise that Sir Patrick Stewart was not only one of the finest actors I’ve ever seen, but he was also a fine human being as well, and now that he has sadly passed away the world will be a poorer place without him in it.

So to Sir Patrick, thank you for all that you’ve given me for the vast majority of my life, and I have no doubt that I will revisit the work that you’ve left with us time and time again, and I will be inspired by what you did for years to come.

Set a course for immortality, Captain Picard, and rest in peace.