Q is right there when we need it, but you don't notice it right away, but we can always count on it.
Moritz Neise, Medi GmbH, Germany
[Played by John de Lancie]
STARFLEET LIFEFORM FILE: "Q"
Full Name: Q
Date of birth: [ageless]
Place of birth: Unknown
Parents: Unknown
Education: Unknown
Marital status: Unknown
Children: one son, Q2
Assessment Report of Starfleet CommandPortions 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 Quadrantin 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 rivalJulian 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 ofIsaac 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.