Jonathan Frakes Couldn't Stop Saying Patrick Stewart's Most Meme-Worthy Star Trek Line
At one point in the 1996 "Star Trek: The Next Generation" film "Star Trek: First Contact," USS Enterprise-E Captain Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart) yells at Lily Sloane (Alfre Woodard) in an argument about a plan floated by Worf (Michael Dorn) to self-destruct the Enterprise. Picard emphasizes his unwillingness to give up his ship and implicitly cede ground to the Borg by shouting, "The line must be drawn here!" The way Stewart pronounces "here" — more like "hee-yah" — is so distinct, Stewart himself would still reference the line in interviews years later.
In his memoir, "Making It So," Stewart shared that the film's director and William T. Riker actor Jonathan Frakes was the first one to draw attention to his iconic delivery. "It was Jonathan who recognized instantly that my eccentric pronunciation was bound to achieve traction. He started saying, 'The line must be drawn h'yah!' in my voice, in all sorts of situations. Sure enough, it became a pop culture trope, oft-quoted and parodied. I am all too pleased about it," Stewart wrote.
While the popularity of the "line must be drawn here" quote endures thanks to the "Star Trek" fanbase, Frakes was apparently the very first person to effectively meme-ify Stewart's memorable line reading.
Captain Picard's 'the line must be drawn here' became a sort of proto-meme
Presumably, Jonathan Frakes' obsession with Patrick Stewart's delivery of "the line must be drawn here" originated on the set of "Star Trek: First Contact" at some point before its premiere in 1996. The way Stewart's memoir recounts how Frakes found new ways to incorporate the line into everyday situations makes it sound like, for Frakes, it functioned like a meme at a time before anyone really knew to use that word for such a phenomenon.
In fact, "the line must be drawn here" made a splash on the internet in the days just before "meme" entered into the popular lexicon. A looping recording of the line, notably, underscored a post on You're the Man Now Dog — a website that contributed significantly to what would become the internet meme phenomenon. One of that site's most popular posts, in fact, consists of a photo of Picard underscored by a brief clip of a song using his name and station as lyrics in a catchy tune. Meanwhile, the "line must be drawn" line accompanies a popular post in which Picard is depicted teaching an art class, re-contextualizing its meaning.
Frakes catching onto the quote's memetic potential was prescient, then, since it would indeed become a key part of an early internet meme.