STARFLEET LIFEFORM FILE: "Q"

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.

John de Lancie, whose portrayal of the mercurial character Q in Star Trek: The Next Generation has made him internationally (if not intergalactically) famous, was not always an omnipotent being descended from the Q Continuum. In fact, he comes from Philadelphia.

Born in the City of Brotherly Love to Andrea and John de Lancie, young John distinguished himself while in his pre-teen years by flunking the fifth grade after racking up the most detentions ever given a child his age. They thought he was "a little slow", only later to discover that he was simply dyslexic. At 14 de Lancie played the part of Henry the Fifth in the school play; to everyone's astonishment (including his own) he was good. This fact was not lost on his father (First Oboist for the Philadelphia Orchestra and Director of the Curtis Institute of Music) who, thinking "any port in a storm", suggested to his son that he become an actor. The die was cast. John de Lancie then went on the Kent State University where he immersed himself in the drama program and, yes, he was there during the "Troubles." After Kent came the Juilliard Drama School, and after Juilliard de Lancie joined the American Shakespeare Festival at Stratford. At the close of the season he was offered a contract with Universal Studios in California. For two years he worked at Universal on over 35 shows including the acclaimed miniseries "Black Beauty", "Little Women', "The Thornbirds" and "The Captains and Kings". In 1980 John went back to the theater as a member of the Seattle Repertory Company. A year later he returned to Los Angeles and created the very successful character of Eugene Bedford for the daytime series "Days of Our Lives". What ensued can only be described as a three-year "romp" that broke the mold of daytime TV and garnered de Lancie two People's Choice awards as well as a reputation for creative eccentricity. John's television acceptance speech has become a classic and it is still aired on highlight reels fifteen years later as he thanks, "in order of importance", those elements instrumental to his success: "props, cue cards and the lunch truck."

John de Lancie's unique twist on nearly all the characters he's played continued into his next major role as the omnipotent "Q" on "Star Trek: The Next Generation". While only appearing nine times in ten years, the cult popularity of this character is so widespread that Mr. de Lancie's likeness has appeared in countless merchandising and promotional products. He has been the subject of hundreds of articles in newspapers and magazines and has won, time after time, the popular votes for "Best Villain", "Best Recurring", and "Best Loved" character in this vastly popular show. Independent television stations throughout North America, Australia and England have hosted "John de Lancie 'Q' Week" airing all his episodes together. Among Mr. de lancie's feature film roles are "The Hand that Rocks the Cradle", "The Fisher King", "Bad Influence", "The Onion Field", "Taking Care of Business", "Arcade", "Deep Red", "Fearless", "Evolver", and "Multiplicity". Mr. de Lancie has appeared in over one hundred television shows including "Star Trek", "Legend", "LA Law", "Picket Fences", "Civil Wars", "Thornebirds", "The Practice", and "Touched by an Angel".

Mr. de Lancie's most memorable recent stage roles are Jack Tanner in "Man and Superman", and Humphrey in "The Common Pursuit". He has performed with Kurt Masur and the New York Philharmonic; Esa Peka Salonen Orchestra and Montreal Symphony; Charles Dutoit with the Philadelphia Orchestra and Montreal Symphony; Andreas Delps and the Milwaukee Symphony; and David Zinman and Lawrence Foster and the Aspen Music Festival Orchestra. He has also performed at the Kennedy Center. His repertoire includes "Peer Gynt", "King David", "The Bourgeois Gentleman", "The Lincoln Portrait", "St. Joan", "Midsummer Night's Dream," "Young People's Guide to the Orchestra" and, of course, "Peter and the Wolf." This season Mr. de Lancie performed at the Hollywood Bowl and will be the 1998/99 resident narrator for the L.A. Philharmonic Young Peoples Concerts. He is also a member of the Aspen Music Festival.

Mr. de Lancie held the position of Associate Artistic Director of L.A. Theater Works, the producing arm of KCRW-FM and National Public Radio, where the series, "The Plays the Thing", originates. He has directed such plays as "Fallen Angel" with Annette Bening, Judith Ivey and Joe Mantegna; "The Waldorf Conference" with Edward Asner, Ron Rifkin, Shelley Berman and John Randolph; and the nationwide Halloween National Public Radio broadcast of "Invasion from Mars" with Leonard Nimoy. Mr. de Lancie has performed in many radio shows the most memorable being Cassius on the BBC Radio Production of "Julius Caesar", co-starring Stacy Keach and Richard Dreyfuss.

Mr. de Lancie is co-owner, with Leonard Nimoy, of Alien Voices; a production company devoted to the dramatization of classic science fiction. Alien Voices has produced for Simon and Schuster Audio two hour dramatizations of: "The Time Machine", "Journey to the Center of the Earth", "The Lost World", "The Invisible Man", and "First Men in the Moon", Alien Voices has also produced for the Sci Fi Channel three one hour live specials: "The First Men in the Moon," "The Lost World" and a Halloween tribute to Poe, Wilde, and Kipling.

John de Lancie is married to actress-singer Marnie Mosiman, and they have two sons. His favorite pastime is sailing and dreaming about far-off islands.