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STARFLEET LIFEFORM FILE: "Q"
Played by: John de Lancie
Assessment Report of Starfleet Command
Portions excerpted from Briefing of 2367
Contributing analysis: Capt. Jean-Luc Picard
"Q" is the Federation designation for an impudent, self-superior and
sometimes malevolent being from the otherwise mysterious Q Continuum.
Beginning in 2364, the alien literally began to pop up in Federation
space to tease, torment, and try Starfleet officers — especially Captain
Jean-Luc Picard of the U.S.S. Enterprise. From the reports and
eyewitness accounts it is not certain that the remainder of his kind
share his outlook. It should always be stressed that Q's apparent
juvenile humor should never be mistaken for the amoral, unconscionable
acts of which he is capable.
As a pursuing hostile, Q achieved Warp 9.9 — although that might have
been designed to tease the humans; he has since showed capability for
instantaneous travel within both space and time within this dimension
and perhaps others. The subject Q claims to have an Intelligence
Quotient of 2,005 and to be ageless.
The Q being, usually taking the form of a human male, is known to have
confronted the El-Aurian native Guinan around 2166, a century before the
Borg scattered her people and over 250 years after she first encountered
Captain Picard and his crew when they were time-traveling in old San
Francisco. Q and Guinan consider each other enemies.
He first appeared to the mainstream Federation when attempting to limit
humanity's ongoing advance in the galaxy, charging humans as being a
"grievously savage race" and putting Picard's crew on trial as all humanity's representative. Later that year, with the Continuum intrigued
by humans, Q tried to tempt Picard's first officer Riker with Q powers so
the Continuum would have a human to study. Losing a bet with Picard that
Riker would accept them, Q had to promise he'd leave humans alone.
Recalled home for that incident and cast out to wander the galaxy, a
bored Q offered to renounce his powers and sign on as a "guide" through
the unknown upon reappearing in 2366. Picard's refusal angered him into
hurling the ship 7,000 light-years beyond explored space into the
initial confrontation with the Borg, where the U.S.S. Enterprise escaped
only with his help. Because of such ongoing meddling, Q was reportedly
stripped of all his powers by the Continuum and banned again circa
Stardate 43539, choosing human form in refuge aboard the U.S.S.
Enterprise to hide out from all his enemies. But after selflessly offering himself to the Calamarain to save the starship, his powers were
restored.
Captain Picard has reported that Q returned a year later, claiming to
still harbor guilt over the unreturned gratitude while arriving
unannounced amid a personal matter involving a romantic affair. To
apparently learn more about this new vulnerability in Picard, he placed
the couple and the ship's senior staff in a Sherwood Forest reality as
the legendary Robin Hood, Maid Marian, and the Merry Men — with himself
as the Sheriff of Nottingham. After its resolution, the woman, the rogue
archeologist Vash, accepted Q's offer for hosted adventures about the
universe.
It was this encounter which prompted Starfleet Command to schedule a
major service-wide briefing on Q in 2367. Despite his departure with Vash and a year's seeming absence, Q turned up again in Picard's life
twice within a few months in 2369, to claim a Q female raised up as a
human and to steer Picard on his deathbed through an alternative view of
his own life. The busy alien also turned up on Deep Space Nine that
year, where he taunted Commander "Benjy" Sisko and his staff.
A year later he sent Picard on a time-slipping trek into three key
timelines to help decipher a poser the Continuum had raised to
illustrate humanity's future.
Q has called 24th century Earth a "dreary place" and "mind-numbingly
dull," preferring it a thousand years earlier with the Crusades, the
Spanish Inquisition and - shrinking his own time lag by 400 years — Watergate. However, it was that same boredom that drove him to mischief
in the first place.
Security Assessment: Starfleet Intelligence
It should be noted that in all of these latter encounters Q took on a
darker, more establishment tone. In his early appearances Q had tried to
intimidate the Starfleet crews he met with rapid changes in costume,
mostly from Earth history: appearing variously as an Elizabethan-era
naval captain, a United States World War II Marine general, a
post-nuclear Holocaust drug soldier and judge, an Aldebaran serpent, a
Starfleet admiral in dress uniform, a Napoleonic French marshal, a
Starfleet commander, a monk, an angle, and a deaf elderly man;
eventually he came to prefer a simple contemporary Starfleet captain's
tunic.
Though supposedly bereft of human failings such as emotion, Q has shown
an occasional romantic inclination — especially with Vash, whom he toured around the Gamma Quadrant in 2367 until she grew tired of him and
escaped until they crossed paths again at Deep Space Nine two years
later.
His emotional outbursts have included jealousy and petty tantrums, even
smaller in scope than the forced Borg encounter: freezing Tasha Yar and
later isolating her in a "penalty box," converting an angry Dr. Crusher
into a barking Irish setter, sending potential rival Julian Bashir into
a deep sleep before his date with Vash, and in anger caused her to age
and lose her hair as per an alien insect's bite.
File update:
Q Entity: Logged by Capt. Kathryn Janeway, U.S.S. Voyager, Delta
Quadrant
SD 49301.2:
As part of our ongoing intent to update existing Starfleet and UFP
database files where possible, I make the following notation regarding
the entity described as Q and hope that it survives us.
The alien described in Picard's reports appeared on our vessel to
contest our unintentional freeing of a fellow Q from his isolated
imprisonment, where he had been put for expressing a desire for suicide.
As a compromise I was allowed to decide his fate in an inquiry which
included a human-personified representation of the Q Continuum and the
appearance of Isaac Newton, a 20th century human involved in popular
music culture named Maury Ginsberg, and Cmdr. Wil Riker, late of
Picard's crew. I only pray that Riker could have somehow been returned
to his home with a message revealing our crew's whereabouts. My
impression of the Q home is one of bored omnipotence, which leads me to wonder why more natives are not of a meddling mind as the Q known to us.
Throughout our dealings I found Q to be reasonable, though fostering
what I would call a flirtatious attraction to me personally, and he kept
his word — even when I ruled against him. The incident aboard Voyager
seems to have shaken up his reportedly increasingly staid demeanor,
especially when the other Q cited his one-time hijinks as an
inspiration.
Supplemental, SD 50394:
As I had feared, Q has reappeared with disturbing news on many fronts.
He was indeed inspired to take up his late comrade's banner of
individualism within the Q Continuum, which apparently sparked an
all-out internal struggle between the two factions which appeared in our dimension as constant supernovas, far above the statistical norm. I
have no idea, of course, whether this was galaxy-wide or localized to
our Delta Quadrant region. For our perception Q depicted the events as a
scenario from Earth's American Civil War — where he took the side,
interestingly enough, of the Union forces. The guise was thorough enough
that interceding Voyager officers eventually used Continuum "weaponry"
in this form with enough ability to halt the fighting.
I was also correct about his perverse fascination for me personally: on
this visit he professed an annoyingly insistence to bear his child in
order to pump "new blood" into what he perceived as a staid species.
While I rarely felt myself in any danger of being coerced against my
will — and problems of interspecies physiology aside — it eventually
turned out this was his plan to end the "civil war" just mentioned.
Should these logs survive us, this visit may have added to our
perception of the Continuum in that it turns out representations of
"male" and "female" Q do mate for life. Q's mate, who turned up in a
spate of jealousy over his attentions to me, described herself as five
billion years in age, and their relationship a billion years less than
that.
Even more amazing is that fact that I may have witnessed the first-ever
"procreation" between two Q — which to these mortal human eyes appeared
to be more than touching the index fingers together, an original method
these two created on the spot.
In any event the new infant apparently ended the internal dispute, and I
now have the dubious distinction of being godmother to what may be the
first Q infant in several millennia, if ever.
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