10 Most Uplifting Star Trek Moments
3. Picard Chooses His Own Life - Tapestry
There are many excellent episodes of the Next Generation. However, one of the top moments from the show is this exchange between Picard and Q.
Picard is offered a second chance. He goes back, knowing the outcome and he changes things. Then brought back, he drifts, unable to focus, unwilling to take chances. Never has the colour blue been so damning. So, what is that episode doing on this list of uplifting moments in Star Trek?
Tapestry is an examination of the choices we make in our lives and how we feel about them later. Who hasn't done something in their youth they'd like to change? Who hasn't said the words 'if only I could do things differently?'. Even James Kirk himself speaks these words in the Nexus. But here, in a bottle episode in the middle of a season.
We are offered Trek's defining answer to this - there is no such thing as destiny and our path is what we make it. Go back along the path and change something, a new one emerges. The very act of going back sets Picard on a new path, robbing him of the life he lived but with the knowledge of what he could have been.
And so he returns to the moment of death, telling Q 'I would rather die as the man I was'. He asks us to stop, to look and to know that we may not know the end but it doesn't mean we're on the wrong path.