Synopsis: Captain Picard, while lying unconscious in sickbay, where Dr. Crusher is tending his wounds, is visited by Q who gives him the chance to see what his life might have been like if he had made different decisions and taken different actions.
This episode is all about the depth psychological idea of the union of opposites, and the acceptance of the opposite parts of our psyche, the conscious and the unconscious.
In “Tapestry” when Q first appears to Captain Jean-Luc Picard he is bathed in white light and given the appearance of a god. In fact, Q tells Picard that he is God. Picard doesn’t believe him, and in truth Q does not appear as being the one true god of monotheistic religions, but more as Hermes/Mercury who in the ancient Greek and Roman myths was the psychopomp, the one god allowed to travel to Hades and back to Olympus at will. The archetypal energy of Hermes/Mercury is also that of the trickster, a propelling energy that causes change. This is the perspective of the nature that viewers must often see this character in the Star Trek multiverse, but here Q combines both these aspects of the mythological entity.
In this episode Q seeks to understand and utilize any regrets that Picard may have about his actions in the past, and to do so shows Picard what he was like when he was first injured in a fight with three Nausicaans. Picard regretted how arrogant and unwise he was then, and Q put him in the position to go back in time to change his actions. Picard did, and when Q showed him how his seemingly wiser actions had affected him, Picard saw that in this version of his life he was passionless and without imagination. Picard tells Q that he was a better man even with his younger mistakes.
The traits in ourselves that either we or society in general chooses to suppress is what Carl (C. G.) Jung called the shadow. By accepting that our shadow aspects make us who we are, we become more three-dimensional, and our psyche becomes more whole. When Picard wakes up in sickbay, he does not know if what transpired was a dream or just one of Q’s tricks. But his rational ego has been made aware of the necessity of acknowledging and incorporating some of the unconscious bits contained within his psyche. If Picard, or we, can do that, we will all be stronger for it.
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