Tapestry

Tapestry is an episode of season six of Star Trek: The Next Generation. It is a follow-up episode to the Picard-centric events shown in the season two episode "Samaritan Snare".

The episode serves to provide character development of Captain Jean Luc Picard, who is featured in this episode to the general exclusion of the rest of the cast. It is also the penultimate series appearance of Q (John DeLancie). Its primary theme, explored in many other stories (starting with H.G. Wells' The Time Machine), is the effect on the present of changing the past. However, the primary literary theme is the balance of order and chaos within the individual.

Prologue
On a seemingly routine diplomatic mission, Picard and the away team are attacked by a group of radicals. Picard is slightly injured, but the energy blast directed at him damages his artificial heart, putting his life in danger. As such, Picard finds himself in the afterlife, but to his dismay it appears to be the domain of his nemesis Q.

Plot
To prove Picard is dead, Q introduces him to persons Picard is aware have died, including Picard's father, and the voices of all the dead persons for whom Picard is responsible. When Picard accuses Q of causing his death, Q reveals that Picard's artificial heart is the cause of his demise - a genuine heart would not have been damaged in the same way by the energy discharge.

It is "revealed" to Q that Picard lost his own heart in a bar brawl with a Nausicaan - a large hostile race, which resulted in Picard being impaled from the back through his heart. This information was already revealed to Wesley Crusher in a previous episode, but was not generally known to the crew. Picard realizes his regret for his "wild youth" and that it has finally caught up with him. It is revealed that the basis of his current disciplined personality and need for privacy in his personal life is rooted in his regret over his earlier life and a wish to keep it secret.

Realizing Picard's regrets, Q offers to let him go back in time to prevent the injury that resulted in him obtaining an artificial heart. Picard is then whisked back to the day before the injury, meeting up with his friends and academy classmates Corey Zweller and Marta Batanides. To his friends and acquaintances, his "newly changed" personality comes as somewhat an unpleasant surprise, and he quickly alienates everyone around him - the person they knew as fun loving and quick to anger is now staid, slow to anger, and often unintentionally insulting.

Events proceed as they did with Zweller becoming enraged with a group of Nausicaans who cheat him at dom-jot. However, Picard quickly short circuits Zweller's original plan to rig the damjat table, enraging his best friend in the process. After a quick intimate encounter with Ensign Batanides that was not part of the original timeline, the Nausicaans appear and start insulting Picard and his friends. Instead of taking on the Nausicaans as he originally did, Picard instead throws Zweller out of the way of the fight. The Nausicaans call the ensigns cowards and leave. Q appears and tells Picard that he has successfully saved his heart, and sends him back to the present.

However, when he arrives, Picard finds that although Q's promise not to otherwise change the timeline has been kept, Picard finds himself on the Enterprise as a lieutenant (j.g.) in the astrophysics department. After consulting Riker and Troi, he discovers that his entire career is now a list of routine postings and that he has accomplished little or nothing of consequence. He is described as extremely competent by his superiors, but he fails to show initiative.

Picard eventually confronts Q, who tells him that although the bout with the Nausicaan nearly cost him his life, it also gave him a sense of his own mortality. The new Picard never took any risks. Picard realizes that his attempts to suppress and ignore the consequences of his youthful indiscretions has resulted in him losing a part of himself - a part he does not necessarily like, but a vital part of him nonetheless.

Climax
Q gives Picard the chance to go back again, even though Picard realizes that putting the timeline back as it was will result in his death. However, Picard prefers death as the captain of the Enterprise rather than the routine life he has shown. He goes back to the fight, takes on the Nausicaans, and events unfold as they should.

Epilogue
Back on the Enterprise, Picard recovers from his injuries. He wonders if he really did go back into the past or whether it was merely a hallucination or one of Q's tricks. In any event, after Riker hears the story, he expresses some difficulty imagining the man he knows taking on two Nausicaans twice his size. At that point, Picard launches into another story about an encounter with Nausicaans in similar circumstances, and the viewer is left with the hope that Picard will open up about his past to his friends and colleagues.

Character development
'Tapestry' provides an important part of Picard's backstory. At the beginning of the series, Picard is a Starfleet legend, new captain of the flagship, and famous in his own right. Throughout the series, the captain's past exploits are highlighted in a number of episodes, including the invention of the Picard Maneuver.

However, when Picard is in more private situations, we learn that he is far less confident of his belief in his own discipline. To most of his crew and many of his acquaintances, he has no personal life to speak of. The only person who knows better is his old friend Beverly Crusher, and she usually refuses to discuss Picard's prior life, knowing that he would see it as an invasion of his privacy. When Picard's life outside Starfleet is discussed openly, it is often about his other accomplishments, such as his interest in archaeology.

Ironically, Picard's crew (particularly Dr. Crusher from a personal point of view, and Troi from a professional point of view) wish he would have more of a personal life. Picard has few friends he has made recently, with most of his friends being of long association and in distant places. Although he has several romantic liaisons through the series, he is usually embarrassed about them. When his crew discovers such relationships, they are usually surprised, then delighted.

This episode lays all of Picard's secrets bare. Although Picard shows himself as the disciplined intellectual he has become, his academy days were far different. Unlike Captain Kirk, who was a well known 'stiff' at the academy, Picard seems to have been fun loving, promiscuous, and indifferent to his studies except when he was fully engaged with the subject. We did hear hints of this in previous episodes - his reunion with Boothby alluded to an incident that may have resulted in Picard's expulsion.

An interesting twist on canon established in Samaritan Snare is given. In that episode, Picard tells Wesley of the incident, saying that as he looked down at the knife emerging from his chest he laughed. At the end of this episode, Picard looks down, sees the knife, and he laughs, knowing that everything will happen as it is meant to.

Time travel
The episode clearly follows Star Trek's standard time travel rules: it is possible to change the future by changing events in the past, but it is also possible to "undo" the change and put the "timeline" back to its previous state. Although there are several Star Trek episodes and movies where one or more persons tries to change the past, in Tapestry, like all other time travel episodes in Star Trek, the correct timeline is always restored - a plot device that is often derogatively referred to as the "reset button technique". However, it can be argued that despite the timeline being put back into place, Picard's personality is permanently changed by the experience.

The episode also demonstrates Q's ability to travel freely in time as well as space, and to take others along with him. This ability is more aptly demonstrated in All Good Things....

The exact nature of time travel used in this episode is intentionally left ambiguous in light of the full spectrum of Q's powers and the incident that brought about the chain of events in the first place. As observed by Picard himself, Q's powers and ability to create isolated realms of existence introduce the possibility that time travel is precluded entirely, or the whole experience could merely be a hallucination precluding Picard from actually having even met Q at all in the episode. The lattermost theory is somewhat supported by the title itself; "Tapestry" is the only episode of Next Generation since the pilot Encounter at Farpoint and aside from the finale All Good Things... to feature Q without having the letter "Q" in the title, which could be seen as a suggestion that the appearance of Q is "not really there."

Order and chaos
Unlike prior science fiction heroes, who tended to be stereotypical good guys, the primary characters in Star Trek are often shown with flaws. From the beginning of the series, we start to see Picard is an impressive figure, but not perfect. In "Encounter at Farpoint", we learn right away that Picard is uncomfortable with children (a flaw he finally overcomes in "Disaster").

One consistent message in Star Trek from the very beginning is the need for the good to deal with the evil inside them. In the original series, the episode "The Enemy Within" literally splits Kirk in two to show that his good side can't function without his bad side. Several Star Trek characters share this duality, most notably Worf, Quark, and Kira Nerys.

This is a theme that has been explored many times in literature (e.g. A Clockwork Orange), and science fiction (being the main theme in Babylon 5 and a major theme in The Matrix).

DVD

 * This episode is featured on the Star Trek: The Next Generation - Jean-Luc Picard Collection DVD set for Region 1 only. It is the last of seven episodes featured, on disc 2 of the two-disc set.
 * This episode is featured on the Star Trek: Fan Collective - Q DVD set. It is the ninth of 14 episodes featured, on disc 3 of the four-disc set.