Captain Picard was supposed to be the more 'nerdy', intellectual (as opposed to action-oriented) captain, I thought, as opposed to the popular conception of Captain Kirk as the more impetuous, get-your-shirt-torn-off-at-the-first-opportunity kind of macho leader (no matter how much TOS also portrayed Kirk as a smart, thoughtful, well-educated man in the better episodes).

But then it seemed like the last ST:TNG movie, especially, wanted to throw out most of that intellectualism in favor of having Picard be a hot-rodding action junkie, whooping it up in a souped-up dune buggy, and stuff like that. Riker was supposed to off-set Picard's much greater age and obvious intellectualism by being the younger, 'handsome' (not that I ever found him attractive at all, frankly), and gleefully promiscuous guy who got to lead the more dangerous away missions, but it never quite seemed to work out . . . at least, not for me.

Let's face it: intelligence is darn sexy (see Spock as 'Exhibit A'), especially when combined with emotional intelligence (what McCoy was generally thought to bring to the party) AND an intuitive, well-informed leader who brings out the best in his crew (the best crew in the Fleet). And that's what Kirk represented at his best in TOS, before the parodies of Shatner's 'unique' speech rhythms and other commentaries seemed to overshadow his character in popular culture. *sigh*