Today my wife Anne and I were saddened to hear of the passing of Sir Patrick Stewart yesterday at age 86 from a cosmically unfair tag team of Alzheimer’s Disease and Lewy Body Dementia. Stewart needs no introduction — he’s played spacefaring authority Jean-Luc Picard, telepathic civil rights leader Professor Charles Xavier, Captain Ahab, more than one King Richard, Ebenezer Scrooge, the same Dune warrior that Josh Brolin later played, Green Room‘s head neo-Nazi, Conspiracy Theory‘s evil CIA psychiatrist, an elderly ram in this year’s wonderful The Sheep Detectives, and even himself more than once, especially that one Family Guy episode. And those are just the roles I’ve seen and remember. Obviously I wish I could’ve added some stage work to my list, but London’s a bit too far of a drive for us.

When the news traveled at Warp 5 through all the online communities, Star Trek fans hadn’t even regained their composure after the passing of Walter Koenig, TV’s Chekov himself from the original Trek cast, earlier the same week. I don’t post an entry every single time an actor that we’ve met at a convention dies, but now I feel bad that I didn’t brake for him. (I pretty much covered our two Koenig encounters the last time we met him in 2022. R.I.P.) But losing two Trek legends mere days apart is too much.

We were lucky to have seen him in person a few times — in the same room at the same time and everything. Anne even got to talk to him once. Her first Stewart experience was over thirty years ago. As she shared with friends earlier this evening:

I’m stunned and bummed beyond words. Two STAR TREK legends in one week during the 60th anniversary year.

I saw Patrick Stewart at a convention in Indianapolis in March of 1993. I remember how someone asked if there would be a new “Enterprise”. He wondered why and someone yelled out to fix the holodeck. Stewart replied that changing the ship just because of holodeck problems was like replacing your car because the ash tray was too full. He also pointed out that fixing the holodeck would eliminate a bunch of episodes.

Someone asked him, “Would you marry my mom?” Stewart: “Normally, I don’t answer questions like that but I’m going to this time. First, I want to know if your mom is the woman sitting next to you with her face buried in her hands. Because, if she is, I think you’re going to be in a lot of trouble when you get home.”

Years later after Anne and I began hanging out and eventually married, then she had the singular opportunity to speak with him:

I met him at Wizard World Chicago in August of 2011. I got his autograph then. I remember mentioning how he’d promoted the Indianapolis Repertory Theater during that earlier appearance in Indy. He mentioned that he didn’t know he’d been to Indianapolis. I reminded him that it had been in ’93 and he joked, “Oh, I don’t remember what I ate for breakfast this morning much less where I was 18 years ago.”

I asked to shake his hand but he kindly told me that he had arthritis and couldn’t shake people’s hands because some people grip too hard (but added that he knew I wouldn’t do that).

Randy calls that the time I almost made Patrick Stewart cry twice. Admittedly, reminding someone how old they are within two minutes flat is not my finest hour. But I also remember him coming over to greet Ray Park who was at the same convention and had appeared with him in the “X-Men” movie.

In our early comic-conning days, we’d sometimes split up and each head toward different celebs and exhibit-hall areas. We regret that tactic in hindsight because it means I never got to chat with him or blurt out, “I LOVED YOU IN STUFF!” or “MAKE IT SO!” Our pics back then weren’t so hot, either, which is why I shared very few when I looked back on it.

…and yes, in our house that anecdote is titled “That Time Anne Made Patrick Stewart Cry”.

Longtime MCC readers may recall the time we saw Stewart live in 2023, when his nationwide tour for his memoir Making It So came to Cincinnati, an easy two-hour jaunt for us from Indy. Beyond the photos and extensive recollections I shared in that entry, one or more of us may have tried to sneak a pic despite the firm “no photos” rule. Thankfully they didn’t have snipers at the ready to take out anyone who’d clandestinely done so, given the very limited circumstances and discouragingly dimmed house lights.

He brought the rigorous discipline and utmost seriousness of the UK theater world into our li’l pop culture worlds, treating many a dramatic role as if it were plucked from the Shakespearean firmament, even if they sucked — like, say, X-Men: The Last Stand or the most tin-eared Next Generation episodes such as season 7’s “Homeward”. (I just finished bingeing the show a few weeks ago — yes, after a decades-long pause, long story — so that one’s fresh in mind for being so rotten in execution.) Obviously we’d prefer to remember his best works, most of us leaning into the good ol’ days. Exhibit A: I saw Star Trek: First Contact four times in theaters, a feat I’ve repeated for no film within the past twenty years. I’ll never forget its best scene, the argument between Captain Picard and Alfre Woodard’s Lily over his increasingly maddened state, which ratchets up his tension levels beyond their maximum until he finally snaps. (Rewatching it tonight, I couldn’t help tearing up.)

In recent years it seems he’d been preparing us for his departure in advance, increasingly focused on saying goodbye to the characters we know best. Three seasons of Star Trek: Picard were a mixed bag in this regard, though at the Cincinnati event Stewart had expressed his hope of perhaps performing Picard for one last movie as a true farewell. Sadly, that wish wasn’t granted in time. (The good captain wasn’t the only character given an ostensible last hurrah in Picard: in one of her rare guest posts here, Anne wrote at length about the season-2 episode that devastated her.)

Thankfully he’d already given Professor X a heartbreaking sendoff in Logan, IMHO the best of the X-Men series, despite Hugh Jackman eventually undoing his own grand X-it through the sometimes cheapening magic of Marvel’s multiverse. That same device will, for better or worse, be used one last time to bring us Professor X’s extra-finally-final farewell in the upcoming Avengers: Doomsday. I’m skeptical about that hyper-expensive blockbuster’s odds of serving as an adequate eulogy for either the talented man or the character he plays, and worried he’ll barely be any more visible among its 600 costars than he was in our grainy old Wizard World Chicago photos. Either way, we’ll have our memories and our souvenirs.

We never took advantage of a photo op at a convention and I’ve kicked myself for years for not doing it or the ST:TNG cast photo op.

Anyway. RIP, Sir Patrick. You will definitely be missed.