First Contact, Picard & the Trojans

On First Contact Day, today forty-two years before humans meet Vulcans, in Star Trek cannon, let’s take a look at an often overlooked aspect of the film from where we gleam this information, First Contact.

I’m kind of embarrassed to admit this, but I only recently tracked down the Berlioz piece from the scene where Riker walks in on Picard listening to classical music at full blast. But as it turns out, the piece has significant insight into the film and Picard himself, so it’s worth discussing, regardless of my shame.

First of all, the piece comes from an opera, which for whatever reason I’d never really considered, possibly because I’ve never pursued opera. I was always on the lookout for Berlioz appearances in classical music compilations, hoping I’d randomly come across it, which obviously never happened.

Instead, I finally just googled it, and discovered that the piece came from Les Troyens (The Trojans), specifically the beginning of Act V (the final act of the opera)

The opera is based on Virgil’s The Aeneid, which serves as both a myth for the founding of Rome and a sequel to The Iliad, very similar in structure to the other sequel, The Odyssey, although history sometimes is kinder overall to it, as The Aeneid can be placed firmly in the records, as well as Virgil himself, whereas Homer and his epics can’t.

Anyway, to make a long story short, if you know anything about the Trojan War, you know that the Trojans came out on the losing side of it, and so Berlioz composed his opera about the bad end and the subsequent efforts by Aeneas to bounce back as he flees for his life.

Act V doesn’t begin with him at all, though, but rather a young sailor named Hylas who is equally homesick and hoping for his fortunes to change.

Do you begin to see the parallels?

When Riker enters Picard’s quarters, they’ve recently been sidelined from the response to the latest Borg attack, because Starfleet doesn’t trust Picard’s ability to keep a level head. Naturally he would much prefer to be a part of the action, for any number of reasons (as the film dramatizes in various scenes, including his primary motivation, having once been assimilated into the Collective).

So Picard is listening to the opera, and the scene features this particular song, as a direct parallel.

There’s more! The composition of the opera itself was problematic, which I’m sure the clever writers of the film (Braga & Moore!) were well-aware of, as well as the fact that Berlioz was in fact French, just like Picard. Seldom was Picard’s national origin relevant to his character (at random points in the first season of The Next Generation and again the first season of Picard), but I would wager those clever writers (Braga & Moore!) had exactly that in mind when they chose Berlioz.

The opera itself, again, had complicated origins. A full recital didn’t happen for years. There was a popular revival following WWII. Someone immersed in history, and you would expect Picard to be (given any number of examples), would be aware of all this, adding another layer to his choice of music in the scene.

The Trojan War itself would be a parallel, given the last Borg incursion, and even a preview of developments yet to come in the film. The famous Trojan Horse is featured in the opera, and of course the Borg end up using the Enterprise itself as one.

So there you have it! Sometimes fans complain about First Contact because it also features references to Moby Dick, as had Wrath of Khan (one of the most sacred elements of franchise lore, a movie endlessly defended by fans) before it.

As it turns out, there was a deeply resonant cultural reference all its own there all along.