Tapestry (Star Trek: The Next Generation)
In this episode, Q (John de Lancie) allows a supposedly deceased Captain Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart) to re-visit a pivotal event in his youth that he since regrets.
When Picard reflects that he would do things differently if he could relive that moment, Q sends him back in time to the day before the bar brawl, where he meets with fellow cadets Corey Zweller and Marta Batanides.
Picard confronts Q, who tells him that although the fight with the Nausicaan was nearly fatal, it also gave him a sense of mortality and taught him that life was too precious to squander by playing it safe.
Q sends him back to the bar fight and events unfold as they did originally, with Picard stabbed through the heart and laughing as he collapses to the floor.
This was the first time that Ronald D. Moore wrote a Q-based episode, and he was excited by the idea of giving Picard a near-death experience and Q appearing to the Captain as if he were God.
[1] Moore discussed the idea with other members of the writing staff; they focused on the incident which caused Picard to require an artificial heart.
"[2] Moore also said that it was in some ways his own personal story, in that what he thought were big mistakes were what allowed him to end up working on Star Trek.
[4] The writers could not remember the source of the "white room" idea, and it was only after the episode aired that James Mooring contacted the staff.
[6] He had already appeared twice during the 1992/93 television series as the character, both earlier in the season in "True Q" as well as the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode "Q-Less".
[8] There were concerns when she first arrived on set for costume fitting as she looked quite young, and Stewart was worried about the age difference on screen.
[5] There were problems with the audio recordings of some scenes with Stewart and Brandy, as the camera dolly was noisy which required them to re-record their lines later so that they could be dubbed over the originals.
[8] The scenes with Q and Picard together on a white background were compared to those in the Warren Beatty and Buck Henry 1978 film Heaven Can Wait by producer Merri Howard and director of photography Jonathan West.
These particular scenes caused some problems as there were concerns by the director of photography that Q's white robes would not show up on camera well against the all-white background.
This included a one-page monologue by Batanides which would have taken place the morning after her liaison with Picard,[8] a scene where Picard was to report to La Forge in engineering, audio mention of Dr. Selar and a mention of Scobee Hall – a reference to Dick Scobee, the commander of the Space Shuttle Challenger at the time of the destruction of the vessel.
[10] In Atara Stein's The Byronic Hero in Film, Fiction, and Television, the author describes "Tapestry" as showing a change in Q from his usual satanic stance and instead taking on the role of Picard's guardian angel.
Stein also references the alien's increasing influence on the personal lives of the Enterprise crew, a path which Q began in the episode "Hide and Q".
[13] While the majority of the staff were pleased with "Tapestry", Piller felt that the premise was tired and was concerned that it was simply a take on the 1946 film It's a Wonderful Life.
Club, compared "Tapestry" to the television series Quantum Leap with the older Picard jumping into the younger man's body.
[7] In their book The Unauthorized Trek: The Complete Next Generation, James Van Hise and Hal Schuster described the scene where Picard was stabbed through the chest as "particularly violent",[18] and overall said that "Tapestry" was a good story.
They also described the view of Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry towards religion, saying that in his world the Q Continuum aren't gods but are instead an "evolutionary niche higher than mere mortals".
[18] Mark Clark, in his book Star Trek FAQ 2.0, called Stewart's performance "richly nuanced" and "soul searching".
[31] In 2017, SyFy rated the Nausicaans featured in this episode one of the top eleven most bizarre aliens of Star Trek: The Next Generation.
[39] The first home media release of "Tapestry" in the United States was on a VHS box set entitled Star Trek – The Next Generation: The Q Continuum on June 18, 1996.
[41] Paramount deliberately delayed the individual release of Star Trek episodes on VHS within the United States in order to allow for the syndicated series to be shown once more in full.
[42] The episode was released as part of the Star Trek: The Next Generation season six DVD box set in the United States on December 3, 2002.
[48][49] The most recent release was the first on Blu-ray disc, which took place on June 24, 2014;[50][51] this also added an audio commentary track for the episode for the first time.
