Name: Picard, Jean-Luc
Species: Human
Occupation:Serial number: SP 937-215
Active rank: Captain
Most recent assignment: Commanding officer, USS Enterprise- D, (2364-2371)
Field of study: Archaeology
Bio: Jean-Luc Picard was born in La Barre, France on Earth on July 13, 2305. (TNG: "Conundrum") He and his brother, Robert, spent their childhood tending to their family vineyards with their father, Maurice. Concerned about the preservation of their familial values, Maurice and his wife, Yvette, educated their sons in the ancient traditions, avoiding in particular any superfluous technologies. (TNG: "Family") As a child, Jean-Luc took piano lessons, but eventually gave it up because he dreaded performing in front of an audience. In his later life he would regret it, because his playing used to please his mother. (TNG: "The Perfect Mate")
As a child, Jean-Luc dreamed of adventure and exploration. He was fond of starships, of which he liked to build models. (TNG: "Booby Trap") Moreover, he was captivated by the Phoenix, the first Human warp-capable starship, which he admired several times at the Smithsonian Institution. (Star Trek: First Contact) Like his nephew René, Jean-Luc wrote a ribbon-winning report on starships. (TNG: "Family")
As a young boy, Jean-Luc watched his grandfather "deteriorate from a powerful, intelligent figure to a frail wisp of a man, who could barely make his own way home." (TNG: "Night Terrors")
Jean-Luc caused "quite a stir" by leaving his family's generational vineyard and applying to Starfleet Academy. (TNG: "Family") Although he failed to gain entry on his first attempt, Picard succeeded in his second attempt in 2323. He subsequently became one of the most outstanding cadets in his class. (TNG: "Coming of Age")
Picard's career at the Academy was difficult, at best – years later, Picard credited Academy groundskeeper Boothby with helping him develop a mature attitude. (TNG: "The First Duty") Among Picard's friends at the Academy were Donald Varley, Cortin Zweller, Marta Batanides, and an acquaintance called "A.F.", whom he blamed for his failed semester of Organic Chemistry and whose initials Picard carved into Boothby's prized elm. (TNG: "Contagion", "The Game", "Tapestry")
At the Academy, Picard developed an interest in archaeology. His professor, Richard Galen, encouraged him to continue in this field, but Picard ultimately refused his offer of becoming an archaeologist. (TNG: "The Chase")
Picard also excelled in sports. He won the Starfleet Academy marathon in April 2323 on Danula II, becoming the first freshman to win the race. (TNG: "The Best of Both Worlds, Part II"; Picard family album) During a wrestling match, Picard caught a Ligonian with a reverse body lift and pinned him down in the first fourteen seconds. (TNG: "The First Duty")
During his sophomore year, Picard was assigned to training on Morikin VII where he had his first encounter with Nausicaans, who had an outpost on a nearby asteroid. (TNG: "Tapestry")
On April 20, 2327, Picard accepted an invitation to attend the Academy graduation ceremony in the Yuri Gagarin Hall.
Shortly upon graduation in 2327, Picard's promising career nearly ended abruptly during a layover at Starbase Earhart. During a bar brawl over a rigged game of dom-jot, he was stabbed through the heart by a Nausicaan, and had to undergo emergency surgery to replace his heart. He later related to Wesley Crusher that he laughed after looking down to see the knife protruding through his chest. This event helped him realize how fragile life could be, and thus made him more willing to take risks and make his mark on the universe, which he only realized when Q proposed him to change this event in 2369. (TNG: "Samaritan Snare", "Tapestry")
As a junior officer, Picard was the closest of friends with Walker Keel, and also became friends with Jack Crusher and his fiancée, Beverly Howard. (TNG: "Conspiracy", "Journey's End")
Picard demonstrated command abilities early in his career, in particular when he led an away team on Milika III to save an ambassador. This incident would later be mentioned by Q as one of the crucial events forming Picard's personality. (TNG: "Tapestry")
As a young lieutenant, Picard attended the wedding of Sarek's son where he briefly met Sarek and Spock for the first and only time before the 2360s. (TNG: "Sarek", "Unification I")
Picard was assigned as a flight controller aboard the USS Stargazer. In 2333, as a lieutenant commander, he assumed command of the vessel when the captain was killed on the bridge. Starfleet awarded Picard a promotion to the post of captain, making him one of the youngest Starfleet officers ever to attain the position. (TNG: "Tapestry") Picard remained in command of the Stargazer for twenty-two years.
In 2342, Picard dated a young woman named Jenice at the Café des Artistes in Paris. However, he became afraid of a possible future relationship and posted Jenice, who later married Paul Manheim. (TNG: "We'll Always Have Paris")
During the Cardassian wars, the Stargazer was involved in a truce offering by the Federation. After making contact with a Cardassian warship, Picard lowered the ship's shields as a gesture of good will, but the Cardassian commander ignored the gesture and disabled the Stargazer's weapons and impulse engines. The Stargazer managed to regroup and flee. (TNG: "The Wounded")
In 2354, Picard was on an away mission when he saved the life of one team member at the expense of another; Jack Crusher was lost in the line of duty. Picard met with Crusher's widow, Beverly, on Starbase 32 to present the body; it was one of Wesley Crusher's earliest memories. (TNG: "Encounter at Farpoint", "Coming of Age", "The Bonding", "Violations")
In 2355, the Stargazer was seriously damaged in a battle with an unknown enemy vessel, later discovered to be a Ferengi ship. Picard managed to destroy the enemy vessel using the Stargazer's warp engines in a unique tactical maneuver (later named the "Picard Maneuver"), but was forced to abandon the Stargazer. His actions during the battle were called into question by Starfleet prosecutor Phillipa Louvois, but he was exonerated by the inquiry board and was later awarded with the Grankite Order of Tactics (Class of Excellence) for the development of the Picard Maneuver. The encounter with the Ferengi vessel, later known as the Battle of Maxia, eventually came back to haunt Picard. DaiMon Bok, whose son was killed during the battle, twice tried to exact revenge on Picard. (TNG: "The Battle", "The Measure Of A Man", "Bloodlines"; Picard family album from Star Trek Generations)
In 2364, Picard was assigned command of the newly-commissioned Galaxy-class starship USS Enterprise-D, the most prestigious captaincy in Starfleet. He commanded the ship for seven years, participating in many important missions. Among these were the defeat of the Borg invasions of 2366 and 2369, and his command of the fleet which blockaded the Klingon-Romulan border during the Klingon Civil War.
Picard hand-picked most of his senior staff, such as two young officers who impressed him enough upon first meeting. Geordi La Forge once piloted Picard's inspection tour shuttle and stayed up all night to refit an engine part Picard had made a passing comment on, and Picard witnessed Natasha Yar risk her life to save colonists amid a Carnelian minefield. He had also picked William T. Riker as his first officer and promoted him to commander sight unseen, impressed by the young officer's record of independence. (TNG: "The Next Phase", "Legacy", "The Pegasus")
Mere months upon taking command, Picard was offered a promotion to commandant of Starfleet Academy with the rank of admiral by Admiral Gregory Quinn, but turned it down to retain command of the Enterprise. (TNG: "Coming of Age")
Although Picard often heatedly defended a strict interpretation of the Prime Directive, he broke it numerous times when he felt it was warranted. Thus, in 2364, he allowed an Edo woman to confront her "god" from space, and in 2366, Picard brought a Mintakan leader aboard the Enterprise so as to undo the damage done by cultural contamination. (TNG: "Justice", "Who Watches The Watchers") Furthermore, in 2370, the Enterprise, by hand of Dr. Nikolai Rozhenko, transported a primitive group of Boraalans aboard from Boraal II before an atmospheric dissipation rendered it uninhabitable. Although in violation of the Prime Directive, Picard ordered that the Boraalans be resettled. (TNG: "Homeward")
In 2369, when the Enterprise was undergoing a baryon sweep at the Remmler Array, Picard uncovered a plan, by mercenaries, to steal toxic waste from the ship's warp core. He managed to take out all of the intruders by setting traps throughout the various sections of the ship. He even used the Vulcan nerve pinch technique on one of them. (TNG: "Starship Mine")
Picard held diverse intellectual interests and recreational pursuits. He had a lifelong interest in archaeology, inspired by his Academy instructor, Richard Galen, having studied the Iconian culture since his cadet days. Picard even addressed the Federation Archaeology Council as keynote speaker in 2367, on the subject of his oft-studied Tagus III ruins. He also had a deep love of Terran literature, from the works of William Shakespeare to detective stories featuring Dixon Hill, and preferred to read them in their written form rather than on a holo-visual display. Picard had studied semantics, and kept his Latin fresh. Other subjects that enthralled Picard were physics and celestial mechanics. He kept up with the Atlantis Project on Earth through journals. Picard was fascinated to be the first to reveal an ancient Promellian battle cruiser, as visiting such an elegant craft was always a dream of Picard's, a dream he had held on to ever since he was a child when he used to build model ships in bottles. (TNG: "Booby Trap") After his experience with the Kataan probe, Picard began to play the Ressikan flute, and was good enough to perform works by Mozart. He considered the flute to be one of his most prized possessions. It represented, to him, an entire lifetime he lived in only 25 minutes. As of 2379, Picard kept the flute on his desk in his ready room aboard the Enterprise-E. His attempts at painting were less successful. (TNG: "The Chase", "Family", "The Inner Light", "A Matter of Perspective"; Star Trek Nemesis)
Despite Picard being a rather private person, he maintained a good relationship with the members of his senior staff on board the Enterprise, but only joined in their weekly game of poker after seven years. (TNG: "All Good Things...") When enjoying the comforts of home on the Enterprise, Picard drank Earl Grey tea. He delighted in fencing, horseback riding, and his scale models of various Starfleet vessels. His opponents in fencing included Lieutenant Dean and Guinan, whom Picard coached in the sport. She initially lost one of their matches, and said she did not think she liked the sport. Picard replied she liked it well enough two weeks prior, when she scored him two touches. (TNG: "We'll Always Have Paris", "I Borg")
Only rarely did Picard take extended time off to relax. In 2366, several of the members of his crew persuaded him to go on holiday on Risa. While intending to just relax in the suns, reading a book, he ended up going on a treasure hunt for the Tox Uthat, an artifact from the future. (TNG: "Captain's Holiday")
Philosophically, Picard saw life and death as more than two choices of eternal or momentary existence. In fact, he believed there was another concept yet beyond Human understanding due to the marvelous complexity and the clockwork precision of the universe. In 2364, confronted by Q, Picard quoted from Shakespeare: "What a piece of work is man? How noble in reason? How infinite in faculty, in form, in moving, how express and admirable. In action, how like an angel, in apprehension, how like a god..." Upon Q's interruption that surely he did not see his own species like that, Picard answered that he saw Humankind one day becoming so. In Picard's opinion, genetic engineering with its predetermination robbed Humanity of the unknown factor that makes life worth living. (TNG: "Lonely Among Us", "Hide and Q", "The Masterpiece Society")
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