I'll get this out of the way quick, we all know this is a thoughtful episode, but it relies on you not knowing where it's going, and not thinking very deeply about it as it's going there to make any sense. The great final point is totally mixed up and doesn't actually make any sense whatsoever.
Picard wants to not be the sort of reckless youth who gets stabbed through the heart in a fight over a game of a pool. An event which one presumes helped lead him to become his on-show persona, a responsible man who is somber, sober, and wise. His youthful self was brash, reckless, and stupid, and he's grown to be the polar opposite of that.
Except now, according to Q, if he doesn't get stabbed through the heart he becomes too somber and not reckless enough? Are we supposed to believe that getting stabbed through the heart made him realize to never change? Picard repeatedly states in this episode and others that he's changed a lot since he was young. But he didn't change? And if he doesn't get stabbed through the heart he doesn't realize how precious life is, and realizing that is what causes him to do risky stuff in the line of duty? But if he never almost died and has no brush with death, he doesn't appreciate the fragility of life so he doesn't do reckless things? And by suffering no consequences for being hot-headed and irresponsible he over-learns the lesson to not be hot-headed and irresponsible?
Of course, I can easily see where the writer tripped over their own two feet on this. Picard regrets that as a young man he was a bit of an idiot and user of other people. And therein could be a lesson that, "Hey, who you were, even if you weren't perfect, is what helped make you become the much better person you are now." What a great literary theme for an episode. Except none of it makes any sense as written, as Picard learned a lesson getting stabbed, that lesson was to get serious. Because being serious and thoughtful is how he's shown as succeeding in life. So he can't now go back and time and be serious, and therefore become a failure because he never learned to be reckless and take risks. He was already reckless and took risks, he learned to temper that with foresight and reason.
If Picard avoids getting nearly stabbed to death what that should teach him is there are no consequences to being an immature jerk. So instead of being a milquetoast nobody thirty years later, he'd be an irresponsible, people user thirty years later, just like he was at 21. But the writer missed that, because they were thinking they wanted to show how taking risks and being daring is what made Picard a success. But Picard doesn't regret being a responsible 30-something who is willing to take charge in the moment, he regrets being a dumb 20-something who almost died in a bar fight. And there's just no way to make getting stabbed in a bar fight and then using the incredibly flimsy excuse of a near-death experience to paper over this moral idiot plot work. It just doesn't work if you're paying attention.
Also the morning-after scene with his female friend, who had been gazing at him in desperation up until that point, just really stuck out like a sore thumb. The "we ruined our friendship because we had sex," really feels dated nearly 30 years on, it's painfully clunky. Nobody would write a line like that nowadays, you can tell that's a writer raised in the 1950s, in a time with very different ideas about sex and sexuality. And of course, these are supposed to be 21 year-olds living centuries from now, for them to sound like they had to be born during the Eisenhower years really sounds goofy.
It's still a good episode because everything else in it works well, the acting, Q, the fun of Picard going back in time, but the point of the story really has lost it's luster watching this now as a more discerning adult.
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