By Chris Snellgrove
| Published
One of the biggest architects of the golden age of Star Trek was Ronald Moore, a young writer who came onboard The Next Generation in its third season and helped shape the franchise for a decade. These days, he is best known as the showrunner for the excellent Battlestar Galactica reboot series, but when his script for “The Bonding” brought him to TNG, he was just a young and inexperienced writer. And when he visited the set during shooting, Patrick Stewart offered some shocking advice to Ronald Moore: that Captain Picard needed to get in more fights and get laid more often in future scripts.
Patrick Stewart & Ronald Moore
Of course, part of what makes Patrick Stewart’s advice to Ronald Moore so funny is that fans tend to think of the older man as dignified, formal…basically, the embodiment of Picard himself, right down to his formal way of speaking. However, Moore discovered just how informal the sci-fi icon could be when he heard Stewart’s hilarious X-rated advice for future scripts: “‘Just remember one thing… the Captain doesn’t do enough screwing or shooting in this series.”
To make things even funnier, this was actually the first time that Patrick Stewart and Ronald Moore had ever met. The young writer recalled the actor being “very gracious and friendly when he learned that I had written [“The Bonding”],” and Stewart wanted to know if Moore was writing another episode. When Moore began describing his next script (“Defector”), Stewart seemed interested in the plot but soon reminded the writer that Picard needed to get laid more often and get into more fights.
Patrick Stewart then turned around and walked away from Ronald Moore after dropping this amusing advice, and we like to think he was fully aware of how shocking those words were coming from Captain Picard’s mouth. However, despite the actor’s best efforts, the young writer he was talking to was far from shocked. Recalling the story, Moore reached a conclusion that many fans would agree with: “Now, THAT is the Captain of the Enterprise, if you ask me.”
Now, we know what you’re asking: did Patrick Stewart get his wish, and did Ronald Moore make sure that Picard got more action scenes, both in and out of the bedroom? Surprisingly enough, yes: Moore wrote “Tapestry,” the famous flashback episode to Picard’s Starfleet Academy days. While this isn’t the sexiest episode in Trek history, we do get to see the future captain flirt with multiple women and (thanks to Q’s reality-warping powers) finally seal the deal with Marta, a former classmate for whom he always harbored secret feelings.
And Patrick Stewart received plenty of additional onscreen action scenes for Picard thanks to Ronald Moore: the writer penned both “Gambit” (in which Picard had to outwit and overcome a group of ruthless mercenaries) and “Chain of Command” (in which Picard survives prolonged torture after getting captured on a top-secret spy mission). Moore also wrote most of TNG’s Klingon episodes (which proved that the Captain wasn’t intimidated by threats from warriors with half his years and twice his strength) and co-wrote “All Good Things” (the series finale in which a time-jumping Picard must save the entire universe).
At first glance, Patrick Stewart’s advice to Ronald Moore seems a bit juvenile, and some fans think it laid the groundwork for the “action star” version of Picard we see in the TNG films. However, while looking at the list of Moore scripts that accommodated the actor’s request, we can’t help but note that these are some of the best episodes in the entire series. And maybe Stewart knew something about his character early on that none of us would have guessed: Picard really is at his best when he gets to channel his inner James T. Kirk.
