For me Star Trek: The Next Generation jumped the shark somewhere in its Fifth Season. Nothing wrong with that! After all, it happens to the best of them. There were though still a couple of later episodes that I continue to think of fondly, such as 'The Inner Light' and 'Rascals'.The latter was a story about how Captain Picard, Commander O'Brien's wife Keiko, Guinan and Ensign Ro are (temporarily, of course) turned into children when the Enterprise's transporter malfunctions. The little girls who played the female characters were all completely forgettable, but the young actor who played the boy-version of Picard was one David Tristan Birkin, who had previously played Picard's nephew in the surprisingly good "non-space" Star Trek episode 'Family'.
Incidentally, Birkin also played a wonderfully funny child-version of Louis XIV in The Return of the Musketeers (Richard Lester's second sequel to his classic 1970s version of Musketeers, which isn't quite as good but is still enjoyable and bound to be better the latest Logan Lerman version). And for some reason I still can't entirely fathom both Picard's brother and said nephew were killed of (unceremoniously and indeed off screen) in the not-terribly-good Star Trek: Generations - the first of the Next Generation Star Trek movies. (They did improve afterwards, but only slightly.)
David Tristan Birkin was born a member of a family of Nottingham baronets in 1977. According to his Wikipedia entry, Birkin and I actually overlapped at Oxford by a couple of years, but since we weren't contemporaries and we hadn't been at the same school (nor, indeed, were we reading the same subject) our paths didn't cross. In any case, I somehow doubt he would have responded well to questions about what it had been like to play Captain Picard. Nowadays he lives and works as an artist in London. Despite the promptings of the Google search bar, he is not gay. (Two years ago he married the performance artist Eloise Fornieles - in a disused slate mine in North Wales, but then they are artists.)
Birkin's father is the writer and film director Andrew Birkin, who in 1975 conceived and wrote a 3-part mini-series for the BBC called The Lost Boys about J. M. Barrie, the creator of Peter Pan. It won him writing awards from the Writers Guild of Great Britain and The Royal Television Society. The critic Sean Day-Lewis wrote in The Daily Telegraph, 'I doubt if biography has ever been better televised than in this sensitive and beautifully crafted masterpiece, and I am quite sure such excellence is beyond any other television service in the world.' The BBC's Director-General Sir Ian Trethowan called it 'a landmark in television drama'. Andrew Birkin has also written a biographical account of Barrie's relationship with the Llewelyn Davies family, J. M. Barrie and the Lost Boys (1979; 2nd edition 2003), described by The Oxford Companion to Children's Literature as 'the most candid and perceptive biography to have been written of Barrie'. He also hosts Barrie's official website on behalf of the Great Ormond Street Hospital, to whom he donated his Barrie/Llewelyn Davies/Peter Pan archive in 2004.
In 1980, Andrew Birkin won a BAFTA award and an Academy Award nomination for his short film Sredni Vashtar, based on the short story by Saki, which he wrote, produced and directed for 20th Century Fox. In 1984 he wrote the shooting script for The Name of the Rose (in which he also had a small acting role). In 1998 he collaborated with Luc Besson on the script of The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc.
At the time of writing, 'Rascals' can still just about be watched on line here. Young Birkin is so deadpan as Picard it's hilarious. In fact it's doubly funny after all the Trekkie hoo-ha over cute "Mary Sue" kiddie characters in Trek such as the infamous Wesley Crusher.
