Dembadon said:
Do you have a source for this? I can't find anything mentioning "arrogance" or "being too assured of himself."
Well, I did a Google search and a lot of profile pages list him as 'some-what arrogant', but no links to the original character description which admittedly is no-where to be found.
http://www.google.com/searchq=jean+luc+picard+character+description+arrogant
First of all, one is not given choices when dealing with Q. Q does as he pleases; you should know that.
And Janeway handled Q with a lot more caution.
I mean, an
omnipotent and omniscient being comes to you saying 'You're not yet ready to explore the galaxy.' and he says back 'I think we are.' how bloody arrogant is that? You're talking to a being that can do all, and has seen all.
Encounter at Farpoint was a really bad episode, because Q had all the arguments, he had all the quotations from human history, Q was simply right and the crew of the Enterprise were savages that got aggressive because they couldn't handle being confronted with themselves, they had
no argument back except some dogmatic gibberish saying 'you're wrong'.
But then again, Gene himself was pretty narcissistic about human capabilities, he gave technological progress and human morality a lot more credit than it deserved. After his death Star Trek became less anthropocentric and more realistic in showing that humanity isn't the perpetual good guy and the practice of the Federation is different than its idealized theory.
TNG was an extension of human narcissism. It tells people what they want to hear about themselves, that humanity will be the centre and focal point of some vast moral police of the galaxy that cannot fail. Later series were less flattening and consequently less popular.
The crew faces life-threatening situations due to the nature of their missions, which are commonly received from Starfleet Headquarters or distress signals while in an area. Picard's decisions within those missions are consistently selfless. I think your correlation is misguided.
So was Janeway's or Kirk's? They're larger than life characters. We're not debating if they're selfish or not, we're debating if Picard was arrogant or not, a little bit too in love with himself, a little bit too overconfident.
And there were a lot of episodes and a film which dealt with this theme, Picard's pride and arrogance.
Using your logic, I could just as easily claim that your judgment is misted by your dislike for him. This is where we'll just have to agree to disagree, because the "You're just not perceiving him correctly" stance isn't very stable, for either of us.
Oh, I'm perfectly willing to admit that Janeway wasn't arrogant even though I don't like her as a character. I love Dukat as a character and I can say without a trace of irony that he's arrogant as ****. I also love Bashir both as a character and as a person, but he's arrogant, come on, a central theme around Bashir was learning to cope with the fact that he could fail. The Quickening was one of my favourite episode, a central theme to it was Bashir's failing.
A lot of things simply went wrong, or almost went wrong, and wouldn't have gone wrong if Picard hadn't overestimate his or the Federation's capabilities, it's not really a thing you can say about ever-cautious Janeway or even worse, Garak.
Galteeth said:
Odo wasn't really a "guy" at all. Picard was no way as irritatingly overconfident as Janeway. But Voyager was just terrible all together.
Name me one example where **** went wrong because Janeway underestimated the situation or overestimated her of the Federation's capabilities?
The point is that Janeway was so flawless it got annoying, Picard still made some obvious mistakes, but Janeway didn't, she outwitted the Borg multiple times for ****s sake, it just wasn't believable any more. But yeah, purely in-universe, she was flawless, her command decisions were impeccable, she always took due praecautions, she was cautious, made flawless decisions and always had an ace up her sleeve, always another card when it turned out she was betrayed she was 'HAH, you think you had me, but this is Kathryn Janeway you're dealing with, I never take my chances so I had a backup plan!'
She was just too infallible for it to be realistic, she never made a single error in judgement.
