It’s true, and Stewart was a great actor. But he would have sold a vision of a morally compromised captain just as well. The vision is Roddenberry’s.

The original Janeway for Star Trek Voyager only filmed like one episode and her take was very different (French actress I think. And maybe they were aiming for a Picard analog).

> It's clear he brought a gravitas to the role that inspired a team of young/new actors around him

That's a lesson everybody on this site should learn — Every senior is a leader, even if they don't think they are. People (mostly the more junior sorts) look up to you as a role model whether you (or they) know it or not, and that's very real power that you must learn how to wield.

I've given negative reviews to technically excellent candidates in the past because just about everybody in the org would look up to them if they got hired, and they would be a terrible role model.

> But, if you watch the first season of TNG, it feels like there is a turning point where Patrick Stewart starts taking the role seriously (Symbiosis) and understands that he's depicting Starfleet as an institution and the restrictions (the prime directive) that institutions must enforce.

There was an interesting essay about Star Trek's depiction of society over time largely coming to the conclusion that modern writers/audiences don't seem to believe in the idea of duty to an institution.

https://www.thebulwark.com/p/are-we-all-too-cynical-for-star...

At the same time he was making way too many calls in the "Picard" series.

This reminds me of how it's a software developer's ultimate power that he or she gets to bring the vision to life. If you disagree with the implementation of a requirement, you can build it the "right" way, and let them choose to fire or replace you. If your judgement is good, they probably won't.

Similarly, Patrick Stewart assumed a written role, but he was responsible for its ultimate execution, which have him influence over the immediate execution in small ways, and likely, increasingly powerful influence over its future execution.

He deserves a great deal of credit for how Picard ultimately came to be represented.

What do you mean by post-Roddenberry? Most of the TNG era was created without his direct input.

Yes and no. DS9 plays with things at the edges, much like Ian Banks’ novels deal with the behavior that lies at the edge of the Culture and is part of what permits a utopian society to exist at all. It cuts directly to the question of when and if martial force —or other, more subversive mechanisms of power — must be deployed for protection against a force that threatens the existence of an otherwise non-violent society. I think these are criticisms of visions like Roddenberry’s without necessarily undermining them or missing the point entirely. I also think it’s been an ongoing commentary on modern civilization as much as speculative fiction.

Some of the other series and movies miss the point more dramatically for me by just becoming space opera. Star Trek was always political.

Yes it becomes space liberalism rather than space communism.