Picard's Questionable Mental Health & Competence

[CoveTom]

Many of us have just chalked it up to futuristic healthcare being overall better enough than ours to make that possible, & some of us find that rationale underwhelming. So let me break down the chief tragedies that have happened to this poor guy & see if we can't better justify what the outcome was.

Honestly, I never attempted, headcanon wise, to chalk it up to anything. I think it's just one of those things that you have to chalk up to working within the confines of episodic television and move on. I mean, we could go through similar analyses of Kirk, Sisko, Janeway, et. al. Heck, Uhura literally had her memory wiped and and was apparently re-educated and back at her post in a week.

I understand that trying to find explanations for things is what we Trek fans do, but this scenario is so outside the realm of realism that I always have to fall back on the Mystery Science Theater 3000 approach: repeat to yourself it's just a show, I should really just relax.

 

[Airmandan]

This lends credence to the idea that the only reason Starfleet kept Riker on the Enterprise post Wolf 359 was as a backup in case Picard became an issue.

 

[carcinoGeneticist]

It would have been because it's an episodic TV show. It never discloses the amount of time between episodes, so maybe he had a bit to recover after some of these incidents. As a matter of fact, we do even see one of these recovery periods in the episode called Family.
In another thread which was about Picard's recovery after BoBW, someone mentioned that you would need to have a strong resolve in order to be a Starfleet captain. I believe this explanation could also be cited, as well as the aforementioned better healthcare in the future.

 

[carcinoGeneticist]

Ditto for O’Brien, who basically had the same experience as Picard in ‘The Inner Light’ only it was worse because he spent all that time in pretend prison rather than raising a pretend family.

Now that you mention O'brien being in pretend prison, that reminds me, what about Riker in Frame of Mind? If we're asking about Picard and now O'brien as well, RIker's whole thing probably would have left him with some issues too.

 

[CoveTom]

This lends credence to the idea that the only reason Starfleet kept Riker on the Enterprise post Wolf 359 was as a backup in case Picard became an issue.

Except that it was Riker who made the choice to stay on board the Enterprise at the end of BoBW. He had been offered his own command at the beginning of the story and even had been given a field promotion and put in command of the Enterprise during the crisis. Although the Melbourne was destroyed, there's no reason to think Starfleet would have rescinded their offer to make him captain of another ship.

I always thought of it a different way. Riker was a hot young officer on his way up the ranks when TNG started. We know he turned down his own command to do a tour on the Enterprise and then we saw the subject of him getting his own ship come up multiple times in the first three seasons. But after BoBW, it never really came up again all the way until Nemesis. I just assumed that Riker shot them down so many times, that he effectively torpedoed his own career advancement, but that's what he wanted because he didn't want to be anywhere but the Enterprise.

 

[Farscape One]

And the Pegasus incident probably held him back from another offer until NEMESIS.