Jean-Luc Picard - Reception

Reception

Captain Kirk was the man of action right down to the very end. They had him off punching out the bad guy...and meantime they had Captain Picard as the intellectual trying to dismantle the missile by doing it through the computer screen...That was Kirk versus Picard, right there in a nutshell.

The character's acclaim among fans of the Next Generation version of the show is near universal, and he is usually considered one of the top two characters to have been Captain on a Starfleet vessel in the series. There are often lengthy and serious debates over who was the "best" Starfleet captain – Picard, or James Tiberius Kirk. A 1991 TV Guide cover story was titled "It's Kirk vs. Picard: Experts and fans debate who's best." In a more lighthearted take on the debate, the cover of a 1994 MAD Magazine Star Trek special features both Kirk and Picard wrestling childishly to fit into the Enterprise's captain's chair, while Scotty & Worf watch their respective commanders with looks of astonishment. Picard is deemed the ultimate delegator of authority, knowing "how to gather and use data better than any other Star Trek captain." His leadership style "is best suited to a large, process-centric, either geographically identical or diverse team". Kirk and Picard are considered to be attentive to the needs of their respective crews. When Stewart and William Shatner were asked in 1991 how their characters would have dealt with Saddam Hussein, however, Shatner stated that Kirk would "have told him to drop dead" while Stewart joked that Picard "would still be talking."

UGO Networks listed Picard as one of their best heroes in entertainment, saying, "He doesn't have Kirk's sense of panache, but he did have a tendency to take everything really, really seriously for years".