Captain Picard has simply got to be my fav Star Trek character of all time.
Picard has had a single-minded drive since his early childhood for a career in Starfleet. Much like other Starfleet Captains, Picard has never been a “family man”. It was because of this that Picard was long uncomfortable with the Galaxy class starship's civilian families, although his discomfiture with children has dissipated since being stranded with three youths during a shipboard quantum filament crisis. His initial reaction to family is also reflected in the friction he felt as a young boy with his father and, later in life, his older brother. This had been a long standing source of tension in the Picard family, over his leaving the family business, a winery, to enroll in Starfleet.
When asked about having children of his own, Picard once replied that “wishing for a thing does not make it so.” The issue of family lineage and his lack of offspring caused a brief period of depression after the accidental deaths in 2371 of his brother Robert and his nephew Rene, his only family members. His outlook on family was also affected by the chance to experience the nature of having a family of his own through an encounter in the Nexus in 2371. Also, as Picard recounted later, after having relived 40 years of a Kataanan native's life three years earlier; in the latter case the decades of experience compressed into 30 minutes from a Kataanan archival probe was overwhelming to him. This was probably my favorite episode and the music playing on this page is the song he learned during that time.
