For nearly four decades, Jean-Luc Picard of Star Trek has largely been presented as genteel, erudite and at times quite buttoned up. Yes, he loses his temper. Yes, he was reckless as a callow cadet many years ago. Yes, he occasionally gets his hands dirty or falls apart.
But the Enterprise captain-turned-admiral stepped into a different place in last weeks episode of the streaming drama Star Trek: Picard. Now, hes someone who to the shock of some and the delight of others has uttered a profanity that never would have come from his mouth in the 1990s: Ten f-ing grueling hours, Patrick Stewarts character says at one point during an intense conversation in which he expects everyone will die shortly.
The whole thing was in keeping with the more complex, nuanced aesthetic of this decades Star Trek installments. And the online conversation that ensued illustrates the journey undertaken when a fictional character voyages from the strictures of network and syndicated television to high-end streaming TV.
Star Trek was G-rated when it first came out. The Next Generation was clean-cut and optimistic. What were seeing now with Picard is a little bit more of the grit, says Shilpa Davé, a media studies scholar at the University of Virginia and a longtime Trek fan.
Over the weekend, Star Trek Twitter reflected that tension.
Totally out of character, said one post, reflecting many others. Some complained that it cheapened the utopia that Gene Roddenberry envisioned, that humans wouldnt be swearing like that four centuries from now, that someone as polished as Picard wouldnt need such language.
Part of Star Treks appeal is the articulate way characters speak. Resorting to gutter language feels like a step backward since Star Treks characters are meant to be better than this, John Orquiola wrote for the website Screen Rant on Sunday.
The backlash to the backlash followed. Christopher Monfette, the Paramount+ shows co-executive producer, wrote an extensive and persuasive thread about the moment and why he believed it worked.
Its easy to hear that elevated British tone escaping the mouth of a gentlemanly Shakespearean actor and assume some elevated intellectualism, he said, while acknowledging: Criticism of its use is fair even if it just strikes a personal nerve or if youve equated Trek with more broader, family-friendly storytelling. But regardless, cursing in the show is carefully debated & discussed in the room or on set. We dont take it lightly.
The showrunner for Star Trek: Picard this season, Terry Matalas, said the F-word from Picard wasnt scripted but was a choice by Stewart in the moment. The result, Matalas said, was so real.
Everything you do as artists, as writers and actors, even as editors, is authenticity. Thats the thing you want to feel, he told Collider. I was really torn because hearing that word come from your childhood hero, Captain Picard, it throws you. But wow, is it powerful.
Star Trek has a long history of pushing boundaries, linguistic and otherwise.
Lets get the hell out of here, Capt. James T. Kirk said on network TV in 1967, when that word was edgy. Hed just lost someone dear to him in the most trying of circumstances. Dr. McCoy, the ships irascible physician, would often say, Dammit, Jim. And in the larger realm, the original series delicately danced with NBC censors over everything from womens costumes to racial, sexual and war references.
But the crossing of last weeks linguistic frontier is an interesting case. It highlights the turbulence generated when a beloved character born during the family-friendly TV era evolves against the streaming landscape, where constraints are fewer and opportunities for unflinching authenticity greater.
This isnt just a rethinking of a fictional world. This is the same actor and the same character in the same setting that we had before. And all these years, he has been speaking and behaving in a certain way, says Robert Thompson, director of the Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture at Syracuse University.
Sometimes this transition unfolds erratically. Velma, a member of the Gen-X-era Saturday morning cartoon Scooby Doo, recently appeared in a more multicultural cartoon reboot on HBO Max that featured a high-school shower scene and overt sexual references. It has been roundly panned. Several years ago, when Riverdale premiered, the attempts to push Archie, Jughead, Betty and Veronica from the sunny world of comics into the darker realm of teen drama produced uneven, sometimes jarring results.
Star Trek is in a whole different universe, so to speak.
Roddenberry famously framed it as a utopian future where the main characters generally avoided conflict with each other, their society wasnt motivated by greed and humanity was seen as inexorably moving forward. Purists have criticized the recent years of what they call new Trek as a darker, more fragmented universe.
Nonsense, say many others: Both allegory and word usage evolve with the times. After all, it was only seven decades ago that Lucille Ball (and her character) was expecting a baby on I Love Lucy and the word pregnant couldnt be uttered on national television except, oddly, in French.
And for years before and after that, Hollywoods production code prescribed the ways morality and amorality could be depicted in film, with strict regulation of everything from sexual innuendo to whether criminals were portrayed sympathetically to whether the good guys won. Hence the term Hollywood ending, which remains with us today in many parts of life.
All of which raises the question: Could it also be the boundaries themselves that help create memorable film and television, rather than merely the breaking of them?
Star Trek had a certain kind of sincerity almost like the 23rd century will be a family-friendly kind of thing, Thompson says. The question is, what happens when your characters outlive the media industry standards? How do you accommodate the fact that youre no longer limited without completely betraying the world that youve created?
In this case, Stewart has said he returned to the character because he was persuaded there were new stories to tell. Just as he had aged two decades since his last Star Trek appearance, so, too, had Picard with all the evolution that went along with it.
The kind of evolution, perhaps, that might make a man facing his own end choose a word that still carries a lot of power even in todays swearing, streaming world. When Jean-Luc Picard says that word, you can be absolutely sure he means it.
