Q: The Unlimited Seven
"I add a little excitement, a little spice to your lives and all you do is complain. Where's your adventurous spirit, your imagination?"
--Q in Q Who?
It seems contradictory that the impulsive, frivolous, uninhibited Seven has an intrinsic connection to the repressed, rule-bound One. The two types seem to be a natural opposition; and indeed, movies often bring out this conflict -- usually on the side of the light-hearted, seize-the-day Seven who frees others from prudish, grim Ones.
The Next Generation established a classic Seven-One conflict: The flippant, narcissistic Q versus a continually scolding, ever-righteous Captain Jean-Luc Picard. Picard is constantly trying to impede Q’s notion of a good time -- understandably, since it is nearly always at the expense of the Enterprise crew.
For an unhealthy Seven, the One represents confinement the Seven is trying to avoid -- confinement caused by morality, rules of good behavior, whatever will prevent the Seven from having a fun, new adventure. Given Q’s enormous powers, the best the human Picard can do is lecture Q on his bad behavior, but not truly place any limits on him. But to Q, Picard’s stuffy reaction -- never once willing to go along gladly with Q’s latest scheme -- is confining enough. He seems to want Picard to play along, and never gets his wish. “I add a little excitement, a little spice to your lives and all you do is complain,” he says in Q Who?. “Where’s your adventurous spirit, your imagination?”
His powers make Q in a way the ultimate Seven -- he appears to have no limits. Being immortal, he has all the time in the world to pursue any adventure he can dream up. Seemingly every whim can be satiated.
Picard’s greatest offense, it appears, is being “boring” -- often a Seven’s favorite pejorative. It’s a concept that pops up in Q’s vocabulary when he describes something he doesn’t like: “boring,” “dreary,” “mild-numbingly dull,” and so on. The antidote to boredom, naturally, is that everyone cheerfully go along with whatever games Q wants to play. As Clarence Thomson writes: “Sevens tend to be among the most self-referential of all the types, blithely assuming that if they want to do something, it will be all right with the rest of the world. This is an assumption they frequently don’t check out.”
The confinement that a Seven is trying to escape through these games and adventures relates to an avoidance of pain -- the Seven’s greatest fear. This was brought out clearly in the episode Deja Q, in which Q was punished by the Q Continuum for his misbehavior. His punishment was to become human, and for the first time he experienced real limits: “To think of a future in this shell,” he says. Deanna Troi gets to the heart of the matter -- remember that Seven is in the fear-based trio -- “I am sensing an emotional presence, Captain. I would normally describe it as being terrified.”
Q rolls off a litany of all the limits of being human: wearing clothes, being too hot or too cold, growing feeble with age, losing his hair, having to bathe, suffering from various physical ailments. When Picard throws him in the brig, Q protests, “I would never survive in confinement. I mean, this is cruel and unusual punishment. The universe has been my backyard.” Later, he complains to Picard about the experience: “I’ve been in this dungeon of yours. Alone. Helpless. Bored to tears.” (See the Voyager episode Thirty Days for a similar picture of a Seven being held in the brig!)
Q increasingly despairs of living in the human shell. He calls it “a joke on me, joke of the universe. ... As I learn more and more what it is to be human, I am more and more convinced I would never make a good one. I don’t have what it takes. Without my powers I’m frightened of everything. I’m a coward. And I’m miserable. And I can’t go on this way.”
He redeems himself by sacrificing himself to save the Enterprise. Be even he admits that his action is motivated more by his fear: “Death of a coward then, so be it. But as a human, I would have died of boredom.”
But his selfless act gains him a pardon from the Q Continuum. Returned to his immortal state, his powers restored, he throws a party on the Enterprise bridge -- well he tries to, until Picard tells him to stop it. But it is a moment of the infectious fun Sevens can bring to life: “My good fortune is your good fortune!” he announces, and leaves a particularly happy parting gift to Data.
If Picard is such a “self-righteous do-gooder” in Q’s eyes, why does he keep coming back? Thomas Condon describes the Seven’s attraction to judgmental people: The Seven will try to draw that person out and will enjoy teasing him, dancing away from him, confusing him, punching holes in his doctrine, trying to get him to loosen up. Because of the Seven’s own connection to One, this judgmental person actually represents the Seven’s own sense of inner rules and “shoulds.”
It is as the representative for the Continuum that Q’s own One connection comes out. He can take on the role the Continuum’s enforcer of the rules: In True Q, he is sent to bring a stray Q into the fold -- or else execute her; in Encounter at Farpoint and All Good Things, he presides over the Continuum’s trial of humanity. In All Good Things, it’s more complicated, though: Q is enforcing the rules, but in a Seven-like way, he’s also evading the authority of the Continuum, undercutting its judgmentalism, when he gives Picard a helping hand.
On Voyager, Q’s connection to One became a central thread of his character. In Death Wish, he is again the enforcer: He arrives to recapture a renegade Q (I’ll here refer to him as “Quinn,” the human name he takes on briefly) who wants to end his immortality and commit suicide.
Quinn mourns that Q has by this time fallen in line with what the Continuum expects of him: “Q rebelled against this existence by refusing to behave himself. He was out of control. He used his powers irresponsibly and all for his own amusement and he desperately needed amusement because he could find none here at home.”
Q replies, “And I paid the price for my inappropriate behavior.”
“No, we paid the price by forcing you to stop,” Quinn says. “You surrended to the will of the Continuum like a good little Q, and may I say you’ve become a fine, upstanding member of the Continuum. But I miss the irrepressible Q -- the one who forced me to think.”
Quinn had sensed in Q what can be good about Sevens: Their irreverence and energy can shake people out of complacency. (As Picard had himself realized in Tapestry, when for once Q’s games cracked Picard’s upright smugness, and Picard is forced to acknowledge the energy his own Seven connection had given his life and career.)
By the end of Death Wish, Q resolves to return to being the irreverent Q that Quinn had so admired, but we sense a crucial difference. However much Q may have inspired Quinn, Q’s actions had most often been driven by pleasure-seeking. Now Q begins to see that Quinn’s determination to challenge the Continuum was driven by more: principles.
“He was right when he said the Continuum scared me back in line,” Q says. “I didn’t have his courage or his convictions. He called me irrepressible. This was a man who was truly irrepressible. I only hope I make a worthy student.”
This is the Seven moving to the high side of One: Q resolves to anchor his actions in principled ideals, to direct his energy toward something bigger than his own pleasure. And in The Q and the Grey, we see that he has done that. He is fighting for freedom and individualism in the Continuum.
This is not to say he’s become the perfect Seven. He has hit upon what Condon calls the “Big Idea” -- when the Seven thinks he’s got the solution that will fix everything in one fell swoop. In this case, Q thinks having a child with Captain Janeway is going to create peace in the Continuum -- an “infusion of fresh blood, new leader, new messiah.” He’s quite pleased with himself to have dreamt up such an imaginative solution, but he’s not willing to do the work. He expects to father the kid but leave Janeway to raise it.
“I’m an idea man,” he tells Janeway. “Hard work isn’t my forte.”
But Janeway -- not willing to be the mother in any case -- tells him, “Creating a new kind of Q is a noble idea. But it’ll take more than impregnating someone and walking away. If you want your offspring to embrace your ideals, you’re going to have to teach them yourself.”
Eventually, Q’s idea is put into action: He fathers the child with a fellow Q. She is an Eight, and not likely to let him slip out of his responsibility -- the hard work. Not that he’s going to be the most strict of parents: By the end of The Q and the Grey, he’s already let the tyke wreak a little Q-like havoc on the universe. As I write this, in a few weeks, Q will be back on Voyager and perhaps we’ll get a look at the end result of Q’s Big Idea. I can’t wait. If nothing else, it will at least be fun!
--Teresa Malcolm