Patrick Stewart Tells His Favorite Star Trek Episode And It’s The Best Choice

Considering how many great episodes he starred in, why did Patrick Stewart choose this as his favorite episode? During an interview with Wired, he mentioned how he loved “The Inner Light” “because I become someone other than Jean-Luc Picard over decades of living a different life, and therefore become a different person, a domestic person, not a starship captain.”

He also had a very sweet motivation for selecting this episode: “My son Daniel played my son…that was an extraordinary experience.”

Reading between the lines a bit, it sounds like one of the reasons that this is Patrick Stewart’s favorite episode is that it gave him an opportunity to act against character. Star Trek: The Next Generation may have made Stewart a household name, but its grueling shooting schedule meant playing the same character day in and day out. Even though that role still arguably defines his career (why do you think he came back to make Picard?), “The Inner Light” gave this Shakespearean actor a chance to bring a different character to life.

If you’ve never seen it (we don’t want to oversell it, but it changes you forever), you might be wondering what Patrick Stewart’s favorite Star Trek episode is all about. In short, “The Inner Light” begins with Captain Picard getting hit by a strange alien beam; he wakes up as a completely different man on a relatively primitive planet. He has a wife who helps him overcome his “memory loss,” and he lives an entire lifetime before being revived on the Enterprise, where only 25 minutes have passed.

While TNG wasn’t exactly known for serialized storytelling, another reason that many fans love this particular story so much is that it changes Picard forever. It turns out the space probe that zapped him was the last remnant of an extinct civilization, and they sent that probe into space to ensure that their culture would live on through others. Patrick Stewart’s favorite episode ends with Picard playing a flute found within the probe, utilizing musical skills that he developed from living an entire lifetime as another person.

As the interviewer noted, Picard’s experience in “The Inner Light” shares a surprising similarity with the character’s assimilation by the Borg in “The Best of Both Worlds:” In each case, a character that we thought we knew was irrevocably changed. The assimilation traumatized Picard so much that he became a rage-filled monster in First Contact, practically salivating at the opportunity to give these bionic brutes a taste of their own medicine. The “Inner Light,” however, helps make Picard a more thoughtful person, someone who will forever be processing an entire lifetime of wisdom.

Becoming a better person by engaging with an alien culture on a deep and personal level is basically the perfect embodiment of Star Trek’s focus on diversity and understanding. That makes Patrick Stewart’s favorite episode the perfect representation of the franchise, and there’s no time like the present to watch “The Inner Light” and see this long-running franchise at its best.

Source: Wired