Summary
Just finished rewatching this episode on Netflix.
Basically, my take away is: If you’re average and make sensible decisions, you’re a loser and should hate your life.
Anybody else get that impression as well?
Nope. I always read it as “Starship captains live large life.” Small bites are for plebes, and all that. You can’t make the big leagues if you don’t swing at a few pitches outside the strike zone.
I believe Mr Williams would disagree. 
I took it to mean “Our decisions, even our bad ones, define us: We can’t change something about our past lives without changing everything we are.”
The example they used to show that perhaps implied what the OP took away from it, but I took it as showing that even mistakes can be positive if you learn and grow from them, and trying to avoid mistakes reduces the opportunities for growth.
Tapestry is my favorite episode of TNG
here’s what I learned about
That you can’t have regrets about life and wish you could go back and fix every mistake you ever made
all your past decisions make you who you are
bad decisions are the lessons you learn that lead you to maturity. Picard learned when to fight and when not to fight.
My take is that playing it boring and safe was not what Picard wanted in his life. I actually thought about how I would have been happy with where he was, but Picard clearly was not. He decided he’d rather die than be where he was.
There was also nothing sensible about sleeping with his best friend, so being sensible wasn’t the issue. It was just about “fixing” his past and finding out that you can’t do that.
What’s paradoxical is that the only reason why Picard even thought it was a better idea to not fight the Naussican was his own life experiences. He’d still had a brush with death. He only did the sensible thing because he’d experienced not doing the sensible thing. But when that experience was removed, he became someone who had no knowledge on how to manage risk.
The point of Tapestry is that it is our mistakes that define us, that make us who we are. It never shies away from saying his fight with the Naussican was a mistake. But it was a mistake necessary for Picard to get the life he wanted.
I don’t believe it’s fruitful to plumb fiction for life lessons. But I’d say what PICARD (not the audience) was supposed to learn was that he couldn’t skip steps. His odd combination of wisdom and daring, reserve and badassery, came from the entire tapestry of his life. By trying to omit his most reckless decision, he robbed himself of an essential part of his growth.
Oh, and he totally should have done Tasha Yar.
It explains a several seasons old mystery. In an early ep, when Picard told Wesley that he looked down at the Nausican spear poking thru his chest, he says he laughed. Wesley asked him why he laughed and Picard said he didn’t know. At the end of Tapestry, Picard knows the difference in his life from playing it safe vs being daring. Seeing his body’s injury he knows his life will be amazing, if not safe. Q gave him a gift. He laughs with a mixture of relief and joy. He is Jean-Luc Picard, his life made a difference.
Yes, he can know that right then, and still not be aware of his future events. At that moment, he was old Picard looking thru young Picard’s eyes. It was Q, after all. Wibbly wobby time wimey. We discussed this at length in Phil Farrand’s Nitpicker’s Guild back in the day.
It’s a crime this wasn’t voted best episode of TNG in the official poll. Tapestry is a great episode and sums up everything Star Trek was supposed to be. Even your worst choices are you, and if you don’t do them then you’re someone else.
If you’re average then you are, well, average. And that might work for you, but it’s not a captain of a starship either. Sensible decisions have their place. If all you make are decisions that turn out to have been sensible, then you have played it safe. And you made a bad decision in the long run.
I hated it.
I think it sends the message that if you don’t take the risky choices, you’re just a damn lower decks lab tech. Trouble is, that’s most of us. So the episode puts us all down as losers.
The episode says you can be the hero, or the goat. No other outcomes possible. What if the result of Picard taking the safe route was that he was now first officer. Running out his career as second banana, never quite ready for the big chair. Just like like some other character we know. Now THAT would have been interesting!
In real life, taking the big risk doesn’t always pay off. That’s why they are big risks. For every guy that becomes starship captain, there’s a Ben Finney, or a Gary Mitchell. Or every nameless red shirt who tried to be the hero and got vaporized. This episode would have you think that the only thing that prevents any one us from being Starship captain is gumption. Well, that ain’t so.
I hated it too.
To think that just one decision would set the standard for the rest of your life - I doubt it. People face new challenges everyday.
Also someone Picard’s age still being an “ensign”? Wesley is an ensign. Picard looks to be around 40.
Seriously if someone in the US military still hadnt moved beyond the rank of private in say 20 years they would have been drummed out. Wouldn’t Starfleet do the same especially on a ship every person wants to get on?
I loved that episode, but I did get a bit of the OP’s vibe. But keep in mind that we’re seeing most of that episode from Picard’s viewpoint, and he’s not the final word on judging the measure of someone’s life. All he saw was that the man he became after his meddling was someone who had taken a very different and (to him) more boring path. Honestly, I suspect more than a little shenanigans from Q to get Picard to that spot where he could learn his life lesson. If Picard-prime had really been so risk averse and average, he probably would never have even landed a spot on the Enterprise.
As other posters have already mentioned, I see the episode’s thesis more as “we are the sum of our experiences and decisions, even our mistakes” rather than “if you don’t live a big life like Captain Picard then you’re a big fat loser.”
Au contraire, mon capitan!
Nobody should have *ever *done Tasha Yar. Not Data, not some Romulan general, and certainly not Picard!
Tasha Yar – the only character so bad they had to kill her three times!*
*Ok, one of those times was her daughter, but it was the same actress. And I cannot stand Denise Crosby. Was happy to see her offed in The Walking Dead, too.
I think your reaction may say more about you than it does about the episode.
Picard is not denigrating the lower decks type. (I mean seriously, do you really, genuinely believe that the character of Jean-Luc Picard was written to be an elitist snob? This on a show that literally had an episode titled “Lower Decks”? Context does matter.) But that doesn’t mean he wanted to be one of them himself. When Picard rails at Q near the end of the episode, he isn’t upset because he ended up a “goat.” He is upset because he, Jean-Luc Picard, aspired to be a leader of men, a captain of a starship. And, in fact, he knows he can be - in fact, he was. And that knowledge is incredibly frustrating.
The young Jean-Luc Picard we meet, through the eyes of his friends, is a brash, ambitious young officer who wants his own command someday. He’s not a hand-on engineering type, and clearly does not want to be one. But when his future self takes over, seeing only the errors he made as a youth, he diverts from himself the exact characteristics that made him (after some seasoning) an effective commander. Doesn’t mean that if a similar young officer had made the same choice to side with the Nausicaan against his friend that this officer wouldn’t have been perfectly happy with a life spent in Engineering, or that this hypothetical officer would have been a bad person. Just that the hypothetical officer would not have been Jean-Luc Picard.
As others have mentioned, the episode is about how our mistakes define us, just like our triumphs. It’s not making some sort of bizarre political statement about the value of different vocations. To take away from this episode that one can either be a captain or a goat is to fundamentally misread the text.
This story is quintessential “Roddenberry” Star Trek.
His concept of a Starship captain was someone who would take risks and even disobey orders to do the “right thing.” In his mind, if you can’t go “all in,” you are not captain material.
Examples:
Kirk’s solution to the Kobiashi Maru scenario.
The Enterprise Incident.
The Defector.
Amok Time
Speaking of Roddenberry, I found this interesting. Don’t know if there is any truth in it. But, it is a nice read.
Wikipedia says the basic facts are true.
“To be a warrior a man has to be, first of all, and rightfully so, keenly aware of his own death. But to be concerned with death would force any one of us to focus on the self and that would be debilitating. So the next thing one needs to be a warrior is detachment. The idea of imminent death, instead of becoming an obsession, becomes an indifference.
― Carlos Castaneda, A Separate Reality
Q: The Jean-Luc Picard you wanted to be, the one who did not fight the Nausicaan, had quite a different career from the one you remember. That Picard never had a brush with death, never came face to face with his own mortality, never realized how fragile life is or how important each moment must be. So his life never came into focus.
I don’t think the show is trying to put down people who play it safe, just saying they would not make good military leaders.
Exactly. The Alternate history Picard is a science officer on a Starship. Its hardly flipping burgers. Many good and successful men would aspire to that. The problem was that it was a bad outcome, not inherently, but because Picard did not want and aspire to such an outcome.