The Inner Light

I'm not much of a Star Trek guy, if I'm honest. George Lucas got to me deeper, and ironically, it was J.J. Abrams' Star Wars audition reel of the 2009 reboot that backed me into Trek lore. But I know good work when I see it, and one episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation — a masterclass for Patrick Stewart, who died Wednesday after "a brief but poignant battle with Alzheimer's disease and Lewy body dementia" — stands above the rest.

"The Inner Light" (season 5, episode 25, stardate 45944.1, Earth date 6/1/1992) finds a mysterious deep space probe locked onto the starship Enterprise. It sends a beam at Captain Jean-Luc Picard; he is not hurt, but medical staff is unable to break the probe's hold on him. While at bay, he awakes as Kamin, an iron weaver on the planet Kataan. Although he remembers his life in Starfleet, he gradually adapts to his new life, cared for by his wife and admired by his best friend. As the years pass, he starts a family and comes to realize that the ongoing drought in his village, brought on by increasing solar radiation, does not seem like it will dissipate.

As he ages, mourning the fate of his grandchildren on the doomed planet, he comes to discover the launching of a primitive rocket. Inside are memories of Kataan and its people, ready to beam into the right mind through a probe. Kamin/Picard realizes he is that mind, selected to remember this long-gone society, and awakes with the heavy memories of a full life lived in under half an hour of his own time. The episode closes with Picard in his quarters, clutching the Ressikan flute he mastered in his memories, playing a somber, elegiac melody for himself.

Only once have I wept at Star Wars, during the closing moments of the terrific series Andor. "The Inner Light" is one of several tearjerking moments in my Trek history, alongside the demise of Spock in The Wrath of Khan and the sacrifice of Captain James T. Kirk's father that launches the Kelvin timeline of the Abrams Trek series. Stewart sells the gravity of his situation like no other, and it feels ever more resonant.

Among the brilliant lessons of The Next Generation — "it is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose," or the warnings of "the first link" — "The Inner Light" reminds us of the joy and pain of memory, of building a humble life filled with love and duty and working against the fear that it may be forgotten. I think those anxieties have fueled my career in the archival arts, to offer assurance that these disparate relics of the past once meant something, and still do. It's certainly not an easy profession to find stability in — then again, what is these days? — but right now I might not have it any other way, and in a strange roundabout way, I thank Sir Patrick for that lesson I carry with me.

Of course, Picard himself once cautioned against this practice, telling his stalwart friend William Riker (Jonathan Frakes) that "what we leave behind is not important as how we lived." Even there, Stewart the man, not the actor, had us covered. Much has been made of his appearance at Comicpalooza in 2013, discussing his commitment to campaigns against domestic violence. While the last decade has been culturally defined by GamerGate, manias about female Ghostbusters and Jedi, or the heinous acts of our rapist president, here stood Stewart boldly sharing the stories of his father — a man so shaken by his service in World War II that he turned to drinking and striking his wife — and boldly attacking the patriarchal beliefs that such violence is provoked, in the hope of destroying the cycles of violence that shackle us so.

I rewatch this speech often, and think of how it came in my life at a time when it was needed — when I wanted to fix my own emotional turmoil and be the kind of person, friend, partner, or eventual parent I wanted to be. I'm still on that journey, of course, but as we remember this man who could be uproarious as often as he could be profound, I think that's another facet I want to remember him by.

As I put my daughters to bed tonight, I played them Jay Chattaway's immortal Ressikan flute song from "The Inner Light" — a soothing balm for all the times we took turns fraying our nerves today.

"What's that song?" my eldest daughter asked as I changed her diaper.

"It's called 'The Inner Light,'" I told her. "It's kind of like a lullaby."

"Like 'Rock-a-Bye Baby'?" she responded.

"Like 'Rock-a-Bye Baby,'" I replied, smiling.

"You sing a song that's 'Rock-a-Bye Baby'?" she asked, referring to our current bedtime ritual of my scooping each of my girls up and improvising a song for them to that tune.

"Of course, my love," I answered. Taking her and her sister up on each knee, looking into their blue eyes, I thought of "The Inner Light" and how, even in the darkest moments, we look for, find, and amplify beauty in the hope that it will connect with someone like a deep space probe. I thought of friends, no doubt inspired by the examples of Picard and Stewart alike, sending their thoughts to us like a probe in the Parvenium system, and how their words touch us. At last, the masks of sadness and weariness placed on the shelf for a quick moment, I said to them, "Do you know what a gift it is to see you — to know you — to watch you grow up?"

"Yes," came the answer, and then the sudden need to change a diaper yet again because one of them had been crapped in. The cosmic ballet goes on.