This episode begins with the death of captain Jean-Luc Picard, when he is attacked by aliens called the Lenarians while on a diplomatic mission. He finds himself in the afterlife where he meets the infamous Q; a mischievous, if not malevolent being with almost god-like abilities whose path Picard has crossed before, and who always seems to have a hidden agenda.
Q informs Picard that he is dead, explaining that it needn't have been so if he had possessed a natural heart rather than an artificial one which was surgically installed during Picard's younger (and more reckless) days as a Starfleet ensign after he made the unfortunate decision to pick a fight with a group of very bad-tempered and strong aliens known as Nausicaans, only to be impaled by a Nausicaan spear-like weapon for his trouble. Q explains that a normal heart would have survived the energy beam that had hit Picard's chest during his recent fracas with the Lenarians, but the artificial heart was, unfortunately, less resilient.
Picard expresses regret over his misadventure with the Nausicaans, not only because it apparently lead indirectly to his untimely death, but because he feels that he acted in a foolish and headstrong manner and he suggests that he might do things differently if given the chance. On hearing this, Q transports Picard back in time, to two days prior to his tussle with the Nausicaans and challenges him to change the course of events and avoid the fight. If he can do this, he can avoid getting stabbed through the heart which will mean that he has a normal heart when he is later attacked by the Lenarians, which in turn, will mean that he survives that encounter and regains his life. In spite of his mistrust of Q, Picard reluctantly agrees to play along, not only for the chance to avoid death but also for the opportunity to change a part of his past of which he is not proud.
As events unfold for the second time, Picard makes every attempt to avoid confrontation with the Nausicaans but doing so requires him to act in an uncharacteristically reserved, at times seemingly cowardly manner, causing his friends from that time to question his motivations and character and, indeed, alienating them in the process.
He ultimately does manage to avoid the skirmish with the Nausicaans and, true to his word, Q returns him to the present day where he finds himself no longer deceased, but back aboard the Enterprise ... but also no longer her captain. Suddenly he is a lowly assistant astrophysics officer reporting to the Klingon, Lt. Worf. Through ensuing conversations with the Enterprise's senior officers and also Q, he learns that his cautious, risk-averse approach to the Naussican confrontation set in motion a pattern of similar behavior in all things, causing others to see him as competent, but unimpressive and leaving him a dreary functionary with a tedious job and no prospects for self-improvement.
Naturally, this new development is not at all to Picard's liking and (spoiler alert) he persuades Q to allow him to re-live his youth yet a third time and once again fights the Nausicaans, gets impaled, and is returned to his normal timeline and rank ... still alive. It seems that Q simply felt that Picard needed a lesson about being true to himself. The episode title comes from Picard's comment, in the end, that, although he isn't proud of some of the things he has done in his past, he has found that pulling on one of these "loose threads" caused the entire tapestry of his life to unravel.
Canada is, in my opinion, one of the finest countries in the world. Its people are known to be diverse and accepting of other cultures. We enjoy a high standard of living, a government that respects individual rights and freedoms, a high calibre of education, a health care system that ensures access to high-quality care for all and a reputation that makes Canadians respected and welcomed by virtually every other nation.
We also have things in our past that could have been done better and of which we are not proud. We weren't always as accepting of other cultures as we are today, and there was a time when we segregated indigenous children from their families and tried to assimilate them into the British colonial culture. There are some who would eradicate anything that reminds them of those unenlightened times. This ranges from tearing down statues of those who are perceived as the instigators of the segregation to renaming buildings, streets, parks, towns and even entire provinces whose current names seem to glorify the British colonialism that lead our ancestors to act as they did.
In doing this, we may be making the same mistake as Jean-Luc Picard did, failing to understand that our faults and our virtues both make us what we are, and to alter any one aspect of our identity or our history changes our very essence. Edmund Burke famously said "Those who don't know history are condemned to repeat it". If we truly succeed in eradicating all traces of our colonial past, we risk forgetting our past mistakes and, ultimately, repeating them rather than acknowledging them and learning from them.
We must also remember that those whom some would vilify for being the architects of the residential school system which separated indigenous children from their families were not entirely villainous and, indeed, brought about positive changes as well as negative ones. For example, Sir John A. Macdonald, who has become the target of scorn for many as the chief architect of the residential school system, was also known to be a drunkard and was embroiled in a scandal for accepting election funds in exchange for awarding a contract to build the Canadian Pacific railway which forced him to resign as Prime Minister. Yet he was one of the prime architects of Confederation which turned British North America into the nation of Canada. Canada owes its very existence to this man. And the Canadian Pacific railway remains an invaluable part of Canada's infrastructure to this very day.
If we were to go back in time and erase Sir John A. Macdonald from history, we would very likely return to the present to find that all the provinces and territories north of the 49th parallel are suddenly nothing more than America's 51st to 63rd states.
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