The Star Trek TNG Episode That Gave Picard An Iconic Element
Captain Picard is such a pop culture icon that even those who have never seen a Star Trek: The Next Generation episode know plenty of details about him. For example, everybody knows what Picard’s favorite drink is—in fact, you’re probably hearing Patrick Stewart’s bossy baritone in your head right now as he intones “tea, Earl Grey, hot.” However, one thing that even the show’s biggest fans may not realize is that Picard first tried to order this drink in the TNG episode “Contagion,” but he received a potted plant instead of his piping hot tea.
No Tea?
Normally, you might think the captain getting served up something as nonsensical as a potted plant would be something of a punchline—the TNG equivalent of Captain Kirk finding tribbles in his food. However, “Contagion” actually treats what could have been a bit of broad comedy as a dark omen instead.
You see, Picard getting a potted plant after he ordered “tea, Earl Grey, hot” for the first time is a sign that the Enterprise is on its way to exploding and killing everyone onboard.
The Yamamato
Earlier in the episode, the Enterprise-D meets up with the Yamato, a fellow Galaxy-class ship that suddenly and horrifically explodes. Picard understandably tries to figure out what happened by reviewing the ship’s logs, and he discovers that the Yamato was scanned by a mysterious planet and then stranded in the Neutral Zone after experiencing a string of computer failures.
Picard receiving a potted plant instead of his desired “tea, Earl Grey, hot” is a sign that the Enterprise is experiencing similar computer failures, forcing the crew into a race against time to unravel this mystery before their own ship explodes.
The Tea Stuck
After this episode, Picard’s drink preference and way of ordering it became a fixture of the franchise, both in TNG and beyond. In addition to constantly ordering “tea, Earl Grey, hot” for himself, the captain occasionally served this tea to visitors in an effort to make them feel welcome on the Enterprise.
For example, when the contentious Admiral Nechayev visited, Picard welcomed her with some Earl Grey, Bularian canapés, and watercress sandwiches (she liked those canapés so much that she was a little disappointed in a later episode that Picard didn’t serve them again).
Even His Enemies Knew It
Amusingly enough, Picard’s tendency to order “tea, Earl Grey, hot” became so well-known in the Star Trek universe that even his enemies would serve it to him as a kind of peace offering. In “Redemption,” the traitorous Klingons Lursa and B’Etor served Picard some of his favorite tea because they wanted to influence his decision regarding the Arbiter of Succession.
Meanwhile, the Picard clone Shinzon unironically enjoyed some of this hot tea onboard the Scimitar in the film Nemesis, broaching the fascinating question of whether Picard’s love for Earl Grey is somehow genetic.
The Switch To Decaf
Incidentally, while our favorite captain never stopped ordering “tea, Earl Grey, hot,” he had switched to decaf by the end of the Picard series thanks to an ad-libbed line from Patrick Stewart. It’s possible Stewart was deliberately honoring his character’s narrative legacy, as the one-time Picard love interest Nella Daren had warned that his late-night tea sessions were giving him insomnia.
Of course, not everyone’s a fan of this iconic drink: in Deep Space Nine, the Cardassian Garak once griped, “I’d like to get my hands on that fellow Earl Grey and tell him a thing or two about tea leaves.”
That man somehow hates root beer, though, so we can safely ignore his thoughts on human beverages.
