By Chris Snellgrove
| Published
As a lifelong fan of Star Trek: The Next Generation, the weirdest thing about Picard was its insistence that the former Enterprise captain and his android subordinate, Data, were just the best of friends. In TNG, Data’s best friend was Geordi LaForge; Picard was somebody he played with on the holodeck when nobody else wanted to watch him play VR Shakespeare. Nonetheless, Picard presented its titular character as best buddies with his former synthetic homie. Maybe Jean-Luc just had dementia; after all, this is the same show where he’s suddenly cool with Starfleet using android slaves, something he helped make illegal decades earlier.
While Picard and Data got a bit closer in the TNG movies (close to a devil’s threesome with a bionic babe, even), they were never in danger of being best friends. Why am I so confident about this? Simple: The Next Generation presents Picard as a man of many hobbies, including literature, archeology, music, and more. Did you know that he tried his hand at art, too? No, you probably didn’t know that, and there’s a specific reason for that. Namely, the one time Picard tried to paint something, Data dunked on it so hard that the captain never picked up a paintbrush again!
Picard The Artist
This story begins with “A Matter of Perspective,” a Season 3 episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. Inspired by Akira Kurosawa’s classic Rashomon, we get the same story from multiple perspectives. Basically, Riker is accused of some serious crimes, including assaulting a man’s wife before murdering the man. The Enterprise uses the holodeck to recreate very different scenarios as told by very different people. By the end, Riker is exonerated, and it’s revealed that the man he is accused of murdering actually tried to kill Riker, ultimately dying by his own hands due to a freak accident.
Once the episode gets down to business, there isn’t much time for Picard to engage in any of his hobbies. But in the cold open for “A Matter of Perspective,” the captain is doing something deliciously out of character: creating a painting of a woman who is posing nude for all of the artists in the room. Data arrives to deliver a report to Picard; afterward, he offers his artistic opinion on the work done by Lieutenant Wright, whom he claims “has effectively fused the incongruities of the surrealists with the irrationality of Dadaism.” When he looks at Picard’s own painting, his initial comment is just one word: “interesting.”
Who Arted?
Picard then asks his subordinate the obvious question: “In what way?” With this cue, the android absolutely tears into his superior officer. “While suggesting the free treatment of form usually attributed to Fauvism, this quite inappropriately attempts to juxtapose the disparate cubistic styles of Picasso and Leger,” he said. “In addition, the use of color suggests a haphazard mélange of clashing styles. Furthermore, the unsettling overtones of proto-Vulcan influences–” Picard sarcastically thanks Data, and when the little art critic asks if he can offer any more help, the captain dismisses him.
In the context of “A Matter of Perspective,” this cold open is meant to offer some light humor before we settle into a rather dark and serious episode. But here’s the thing: after Data’s criticism, Picard literally never paints again. Why is that, you think? No need to guess: in a deleted scene, the captain throws red paint at his creation in shame over Data’s criticism. This is a guy who sustained his interest in literature, music, and even archeology for decades, but he gave up his new painting hobby immediately because he never wanted to hear that know-it-all android be rude about his art, ever again.
Data Makes Motel Art
You know the real gutpunch of a punchline? In Picard, one plot point revolves around a painting created by Data, and guess what: as a piece of artwork, it absolutely sucks. There’s no real tension, the symbolism is obvious, and the bland, boring sky takes up over half the image just to serve us warmed-over symbolism. This android destroyed a lifetime of artistic aspirations for Captain Picard only to use his advanced positronic brain to create a badly-lit painting featuring a woman practically floating off the canvas. Maybe I’m being a little too harsh about Data’s creative abilities, though, and I should really acknowledge his limitations.
After all, what were any of us really expecting from AI art?
