Star Trek Christmas in July: What fans should watch
By Mike Poteet
Data connects with a spirit of Christmas: “Devil’s Due” (TNG)
The finale of our Star Trek Christmas in July watch list comes from Star Trek: The Next Generation.
In the fourth-season episode “Devil’s Due,” the android Commander Data (Brent Spiner) continues his quest to crack the human equation by playing Ebenezer Scrooge in a holodeck production of A Christmas Carol.
(British-born and Shakespearean-trained actor William Glover, uncredited on-screen, played Marley’s Ghost, making this episode one of his final TV appearances.)
After his performance, Data tells Picard he believes convincingly playing Scrooge’s fear will bring him “one step closer to truly understanding humanity.”
Students of the human condition could do worse than scrutinizing Ebenezer Scrooge. Over the course of A Christmas Carol, he moves from exemplifying humanity’s worst traits to embodying its best.
When Charles Dickens’ classic tale begins, Scrooge is “a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old sinner.”
But after his visitations from the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Future, he becomes a new man, overflowing with mirth, mercy, and love.
The narrator tells us Scrooge “knew how to keep Christmas well if any man alive possessed the knowledge. May that be truly said of us, and all of us!”
In 1999, talking about his own approach to playing Scrooge—as he had done for years in his one-man stage show, and as he did that year in a TV movie—Patrick Stewart told the Christian Science Monitor:
"[T]he lessons that the spirits [teach] Scrooge are as applicable at the end of this millennium as they were in 1842: the personal desirability of each one of us learning how to open our hearts to the world; to love and to receive love, not to be afraid, [and] to learn also that we do have a responsibility for others in our society who are not perhaps as fortunate as we are."
Sounds like Sir Patrick believes A Christmas Carol has lessons those of who want to see a future more like the one we see in Star Trek should take to heart—not just at Christmas in July, but all year, every year.
And so, as Tiny Tim would no doubt have said had he been a Star Trek fan, “May the Great Bird of the Galaxy bless us, everyone!”
A very merry Star Trek Christmas in July to you all!