Making It So

written on October 31, 2026, read November 2023

The news caught me at a bad moment last week. On 24 October I had to let Henry go, and I was pretty off the rails all week. I still am.

Then, on 28 October, Patrick Stewart died. Yet another piece of bad news in a time already full of bad news. Of course I didn’t know the actor personally. And of course the loss of Henry affects me personally. It hits me incomparably more directly, infinitely harder. But Patrick Stewart’s Jean-Luc Picard was a very essential part of my growing up. I have spent many hours of my life watching worlds that Patrick Stewart, among others, breathed life into and left his mark on.

It doesn’t really matter that much whether someone is a real person or a fictional character, as long as that person raises the right questions for your own life. That’s what gives them meaning.

Of course I’m fully aware that Picard is not Stewart. Picard is an amalgam of the actor, the writers and the directors – of all the people who shaped this character. But Stewart simply is the face. And when that face goes, a piece of your own youth goes with it. While you share in the grief over the death of Stewart the man, perhaps what you mourn most is what he meant for your own growing up. You’re mourning a piece of yourself, and that gives the death of someone who, realistically speaking, was a stranger a personal dimension after all.

In the third season of “Picard”, Liam Shaw talks at the end about the great book that Seven of Nine will write in her life. What he means is that, unlike himself, she isn’t “by the book”, and will instead write a great one of her own.

I like that image. I believe we all write our books, and many of them are simply great if we allow them to be. Of course, most of these books will never be put on paper and placed on a shelf. They are the stories you remember when you think of a person. And sometimes you meet people of whom you know: even if you only know them briefly and will never read the whole book, it would be a book you couldn’t put down.

Patrick Stewart is one of those people whose lives have touched so many others that their story has made it into the bookshops. With “Making It So”, he published his memoir in autumn 2023. The book of his life, in his own words. I bought it as soon as it came out.

I think the biggest news I took away from Patrick Stewart’s memoir was hair. When I first noticed him as an actor in “Star Trek”, every trace of a full head of hair had already deserted him. He was 46 when he got the role, but apparently he had only rudimentary hair even as a young adult. Later¹ I saw the in many places rather strange 1984 film adaptation of “Dune”.² But there, too, he had already lost all his hair. Somehow a mental image had stuck that amounted to him having suffered from a blatant lack of hair even as a child. But this book actually contains pictures of Patrick Stewart with hair.

When I watch “Picard” today, I wonder whether the seasons didn’t also contain ideas from Stewart: season 3 was clearly a thank-you to us fans for his life having been what it was. He gave us what many of us had longed for. I admit it: I got goosebumps when the Enterprise-D flew out of the hangar one last time to face danger. Those goosebumps were a wonderful gift to us.

With the book in my hand and watching the second season, I wonder whether it wasn’t partly also about Stewart coming to terms with his own past. I’ll quote right from the beginning of the book, page 18: “However, the truth is that all I want is to revisit the past. Perhaps I could have made things happier.” And that is exactly one of the essential anchors of the plot of the second season: the skeleton key in the wall.

I know that many people don’t like “Picard”. That many only consider the third season acceptable says more about the viewers than about the series: they weren’t interested in new stories, but in bringing back the past. As unchanged as possible. But that is exactly what Stewart didn’t want. Considering that many people watched “The Next Generation” in their youth, there may be the same wish behind it to travel into the past – not to make anything better, but to remember a time when many things seemed simpler.

So season 3 as Stewart’s gift to us, season 2 as a look into his soul, season 1 as bargaining with one’s own mortality and the loss of friends.

I may be in a minority of one here, but I enjoyed watching all three seasons of “Picard”. Even the first.

I have the impression that you have to read “Picard” and Stewart’s memoir in parallel, at least in parts. “Star Trek: Picard” is, to a large extent, also “Star Trek: Stewart”. And “Making It So” is, at least partly, a key to “Picard”: a story about life, about the paths you’ve taken in it along with their consequences, about growing old and loss, but also about friendships that last a lifetime – no matter what happens, no matter where you are.

The book Stewart wrote – both the book of his life and the printed one – is far more than Picard. In it he is also an accomplished stage actor, he is also Professor X, he is also a little boy from humble beginnings whose father was violent. A little boy with hair.