Star Trek’s 10 Best Jean-Luc Picard Episodes, Ranked

Every “Star Trek” fan has a favorite Captain, to varying degrees of actual rank. It might be James T. Kirk, it might be Benjamin Sisko. For a lot of us, it’s hard to overcome the legacy of Jean-Luc Picard, formerly of the Enterprise-D. “Star Trek: The Next Generation” star Sir Patrick Stewart introduced himself with chilly efficiency at first, a man seemingly so rigid that having an empath around made sense. But Picard, like the rest of his crew, was flawed and human. Behind the noble French-English veneer was a man with a lifetime of troubled relationships, and a soul scarred deep by the Borg.

Picard brought with him quirks that became fandom legend, like the Picard Maneuver, which seems him snappily tugging at his tunic whenever he gets out of his chair, or the barked words “Tea. Earl Grey. Hot,” at irregular intervals. He also brought us one of the best actors in the franchise, who eagerly went for lusty archaeological adventures with the same vigor as Shakespearean courtroom drama. It’s an era that defined Stewart’s career, but never contained it — he’s as loved as Professor Charles Xavier (and several others!) as he is Picard. These are our ten best picks for Captain Picard’s best voyages on the starship Enterprise, even though they’re all winners in our hearts.

While “The Best of Both Worlds” was an epic two-part event that saw the fandom perched on nails throughout a full season break to discover whether or not Captain Picard would be freed from Locutus of Borg, the actual answer to that was complicated. “Family” picks up in the aftermath of Picard’s recovery from a Borg Cube and the end of a massive, potentially Starfleet-ending conflict at Wolf 359. As it starts, Picard returns to his family vineyards (of infamously dubious quality, as we’d later discover) on Earth to consider what’s next for him.

It’s an uneasy visit; Picard isn’t on the best of terms with his brother, Robert (Jeremy Kemp), and he’s considering leaving Starfleet altogether. But as the brothers regress into their childish, mud-slapping behaviors by way of facing their issues, Picard’s stoic facade finally cracks: he weeps, as any veteran might, for the violations he faced and the horrors he committed while consumed by the Borg. Taken as a whole, the episode can be a little heavy handed. But Stewart’s sudden collapse into a scared child, if briefly, is a reminder that everyone breaks under enough pressure. Even our heroes. Wolf 359 and Locutus would be with Picard for the rest of his life, “Family” is where another part of that journey begins.

Looking back, it’s wild that a slapstick romance tangle-up between Picard, Lwaxana Troi (Majel Barrett-Roddenberry) and a Ferengi (Frank Corsentino as Daimon Tog) happens just two episodes before the Borg grab Jean-Luc. Yet that’s what happens in “Menage a Troi,” when a Betazed shindig gets out of hand and Lwaxana is abducted by her erstwhile suitor. A lot happens in this episode, but the meatiest bit of it is in the finale, when Picard, famously annoyed by Lwaxana’s obsession with him, has to play a jealous lover in order to rescue her from Ferengi paws.

It’s a metaphorical Broadway showstopper at gunpoint for Picard. Stewart, a classically trained Shakespearean actor, busts out multiple sonnets and even a little bit of Tennyson’s elegiac “In Memoriam” in order to profess his willingness to give all for love, barely hiding his inner glee at going full ham even while pretending he hates this. In the end, his Ferengi opponent is cowed, and Lwaxana goes straight for the throne (Picard’s lap) upon arrival, prompting our noble captain to all but blurt “I must go, my planet needs me.” If you can’t get to a hammy park performance of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” this episode will do in a pinch.

Sir Patrick Stewart never made his love of Shakespearean drama into an overbearing facet of his career as Picard. If anything, he made the format more approachable and human. “Tapestry” is not itself inspired by the Bard, but Sir Stewart’s performance as he explores his own lifetime without one near-fatal incident is very much in line with “Hamlet” and its earthy questions about youth and death. It’s even balanced by the right amount of humor as John de Lancie’s Q returns, this time as an ersatz archangel, perfectly gleeful about needling Picard at all the best moments.

Once upon a time, a young Picard was, more openly anyway, a roughhouser not afraid of getting into a few scraps here and there. It resulted in one hell of a life lesson, and Picard’s artificial heart occasionally needs care. But Q offers him a devil’s dream while Picard’s ticker gets tinkered with: what would life had been like if he’d avoided just that one fateful bar fight? The answer lies in a downright philosophical acceptance of mortality, an understanding of the joyful risks of life. Picard laughs as he embraces near-death. It’s a hell of a visual metaphor, and Stewart makes it land with just the right touch of gravitas. Damn good stuff.

By season 5, it was clear that Captain Picard was one hell of a hobbyist historian. “Darmok” lets him bring those skills into a most unusual and abrupt diplomatic mission, one where failure will get both him and a fellow captain killed. That captain is a Tamarian named Dathon (Paul Winfield), and he’s put them both in this situation for reasons that aren’t immediately clear.

The Tamarians are instantly fascinating; their language is allegorical, meaning they speak in phrases that, to today’s ears, might sound like Tumblr memes. “Darmok and Jalad, at Tanagra” has a specific meaning to Dathon’s people, and until Picard understands what it is (two men, side by side, eagerly facing danger together), they’re all stuck. The key lies in the Epic of Gilgamesh. Picard’s loving, gusto-laden performance of a simplified version of our ancient hero’s journey doesn’t just pull delight from the now-dying Captain Dathon. It’s a replica of what it had to have been like long ago, when storytellers shared legends around campfires. Picard’s love of history helps him click with a stranger, and as bittersweet as it is, it makes for a terrific episode that would finally get a follow-up in “Lower Decks,” where a Tamarian has successfully joined Starfleet. Allegories and all.

It’s deliberate that one of the best episodes of “Picard” goes out of its way to not evoke the original no-win scenario, the Kobayashi Maru. The Maru, which used to be a Starfleet scenario for learning how to cope with failure, is instead a hammy tribute to always making it out. In “No Win Scenario,” Picard, the reluctant Shaw (Todd Stashwick), and Riker (Jonathan Frakes) go head on in learning to accept the worst and darkest parts of their lives. Surviving the mess they’re in is an afterthought.

It’s a talky episode (with some surprisingly blue language), but it’s never slow. Matched with flashbacks that show a gregarious Picard happy to hold forth about his years in Starfleet to a young crowd hanging off every word, a lonely holodeck bar brings out years of missed opportunities between Picard and his estranged, unknown son, Jack Crusher (Ed Speleers). It’s lost time eventually interrupted by Shaw, who’s been at dagger’s edge with Picard and Riker since they came on board. The reason: Wolf 359, where Shaw was one of the last survivors on his ship against the Borg and their figurehead, Locutus.

Stewart takes a quieter role against both men’s frustrations, reflecting back to them his regrets and nightmares. Just as those seemingly jovial flashbacks reveal that Picard has always had only one family, Starfleet, to his son’s sorrow, it also shows that, without Starfleet, nightmares and all, Picard will be lost. It’s Picard at his most open, laying out the subtext of a character we all knew for cruel but necessary study.

“The Inner Light” is a lovely, bittersweet episode that shows up on every best-of-“Trek” list, perhaps to a new fan’s annoyance. But it’s a go-to selection for good reason, as Picard spends the bulk of the episode living a full life as another person, with his own humanity and personality coming through at every turn. Kamin is the last memory of a dead world, an ambassador to a society that ended over a millennia ago. It’s a small thing, perhaps, to a galaxy that can speed across quadrants and settle new worlds. But to these lost people, it’s everything they have to give.

Picard wakes as Kamin after a probe zaps him on the bridge of the Enterprise. Picard knows damn well who he is as he confronts a wife he doesn’t recognize, but this “Twilight Zone” nightmare settles into a dream as the illusion never wavers. He settles into life as Kamin, gradually aware that their world is doomed, but doing what he can to let his family enjoy their last generations in comfort. But this society closes the circle by bringing Kamin, in his old age, to the launching of a very special rocket.

The moment brings Picard back to himself, realizing what’s actually happened, and why his long-dreamed life matters. When he awakens, only a half hour after the probe zapped him, there’s one gift left to give him: the little flute he’d learned to play. If you don’t choke up when Picard plays it softly, now alone with those memories only he can curate, you’re made of sterner stuff than us. For Patrick Stewart, this is still his biggest moment.

“Star Trek” is often at its very best when it tackles big ideas head on, throwing us at real life issues and forcing us to think about them in new ways. “The Next Generation” had its first grand moment of this with “The Measure of a Man.” Nominally about Lt. Cmdr Data’s (Brent Spiner) threat of departure, it’s actually a hardcore legal drama about the value and identity of the human soul. At either end of the battlefield stands Picard for Data’s defense as a full and legal sentient being, and Riker, unwillingly forced to be the Devil’s Advocate on behalf of Dr. Bruce Maddox (Brian Brophy), who wants Data turned over to his lab as a research subject.

The gritty details about law under Starfleet are minor asides; the meat of the matter is whether or not Data can legally be considered a person, or is he property? Not only does Picard get some of the finest courtroom monologues in any series, but we also feel his necessary discomfort when he goes to speak to Guinan (Whoopi Goldberg), who points out the elephant in the room: the questions about Data’s personhood drift unpleasantly close to America’s history of slavery, and to make him into property may well create a new slave class under Starfleet. Now even more aware of the stakes, Picard pushes towards triumph on Data’s behalf, all while leaving the biggest question open for us all to ponder: what do we truly consider a soul, if we can’t even delineate consciousness? Stewart navigates it all thoughtfully, and his righteousness as captain and friend makes this episode an all time banger.

The Borg’s abduction wouldn’t be the only time Captain Jean-Luc Picard would find himself stripped down to bone and soul. The Cardassians were introduced in season 4 of “The Next Generation” to create a more relatable and interactive threat to the Federation, gradually revealing themselves as imperialistic fascists, happy to subjugate planets. By season 6, Picard began to face their threats head on, eventually finding himself captured and placed in the hands of torturer Gul Madred (David Warner).

“Chain of Command” doesn’t hold back on its intense and accurate depictions of both psychological and physical torment, and we spend these two episodes watching Picard being broken down, piece by piece, by one of the coldest characters in the franchise to date. It’s a stunning episode that ends in triumph of the bleakest sort, as Picard admits how close he was to giving in. 

Stewart’s performance brings forth agony of the most raw kind, and Warner, who once shared a stage with Stewart back in the ’60s, is more than up for the challenge of reflecting that agony back at him with the exact chill needed to horrify us. Is it a fun storyline? God, no. But it’s a magnificent showcase for both actors, and an unmissable part of the “Next Generation” era.

Gene Roddenberry wanted “The Next Generation” to be weighed down by the original series as little as possible, somewhat to the sorrow of long-time fans eager to know what the Vulcans had been up to since the ’60s. On the whole, it wasn’t a bad directive; it pushed the series to create new and interesting worlds to explore. But when the door to the past did finally open, it used one of the finest episodes of “Trek” to date to do so. “Sarek” brings back the father of Leonard Nimoy’s Spock, Sarek (Mark Lenard), with a somber, painful exploration of aging and loss.

Straightforward with its central conflict — Sarek is afflicted with a kind of Vulcan emotional dementia, and it’s bleeding off on the crew — the real story is about a man committed to serving his legacy to the near exclusion of all else. Do we mean Sarek, or Picard? The answer is moot, as these two statesmen grow equal to one another. And in one of the greatest sacrifices and kindnesses a human could offer a Vulcan, Picard ensures Sarek can complete his work by carrying all of his emotional weight. It’s vulnerability at its hardest.

As Sarek is free, for a time, to finish his diplomatic mission, we see through Picard the sheer weight of all that Sarek has carried. Weeping, screaming, angered, and full of decades of loss and pain, from his estranged relationship to his son, to his inability to tell the human women he’s loved just how much they’ve meant to him. It’s terrible but beautiful stuff, and Stewart’s performance makes it authentic, never hammy.

“All Good Things…” helps bring “The Next Generation” to a spectacular conclusion; bringing Q back in another chapter of his ongoing trial of humanity is a perfect bookend to the series pilot, “Encounter at Farpoint.” His latest trial scenario (but not a final one, as “Picard” would go to show) demands that Picard demonstrate a value of humanity poorly understood by even ourselves: intuition. His life is split into multiple timelines, all of which show some aspect we might have wondered about post-series, but in all of them there’s a deadly riddle to be solved. A temporal anomaly unlike anything Starfleet’s ever encountered, capable of ending human life. Even if it is just another of Q’s little tricks.

It’s a trial that, when we look closely at it, reveals subtle clues about Q’s fondness for his best friend — even if Picard would call Q his best fiend. Sure, Picard shows off how important our human quirks are, but more importantly, it’s all about being human. Mortal. Flawed. Capable of change. Q’s never had any of that and yet, he’s learning about it via his trials and tricks. From Picard. And only now, at the end, does Picard, a little bit like Stewart at his first convention, learn how much he means to everyone else. It’s that understanding that brings him home to his friends, to join that friendly game of cards for the first time.

It’s richly human stuff, and Sir Stewart makes shrugging off the old ego to simply join his friends into something like taking off a coat and getting cozy at last. “Picard” would go on to underline what we already learned here: Jean-Luc Picard has always had a family of his own, and he would do anything for them. Forever.