Profile
Guinan is a bit of a mystery. All that is known of her is that she is
hundreds of years old (a younger Guinan is encountered in the late 19th century
by Data and the crew in "Time's�Arrow", and has senses and abilities
beyond human understanding (and possibly beyond our comprehension as well).
In the "Next Generation" Writers' Guide, it is stated that Guinan is a
member of a species whose people, by telepathy, empathy, or some other
means, encourage others to speak the truth to them. Picard's first meeting
with Guinan (which, incidentally, was not the first time Guinan met Picard)
occurred during his 22 year mission aboard the Stargazer, at which time he
was intrigued by her and her people. (This, however, contradicts Guinan's
telling Wesley�Crusher, in "The Child", that she never met Picard until she
boarded the Enterprise. She may simply have been trying to forestall awkward
questions, though it seems unusual that Guinan would lie to any of the crew,
particularly the impressionable young Wesley.) Picard obviously had some
means of keeping in touch with her, because sometime after "The�Neutral�
Zone" and before "The�Child", when the new Ten-Forward lounge facility was
installed on the Enterprise, he used his pull at Starfleet Command to bring
Guinan aboard (not as a member of Stafleet, however) to oversee Ten-Forward.
Guinan's first meeting with Picard, on the other hand, took place in 19th
century San Francisco, where she was masquerading as a philanthropic socialite
in order to observe humans, which fascinated her. Picard, Riker,
Dr.�Crusher, Geordi, and Data had traveled back to the 1890s to recover
Data, who had also been dragged into the past through a time warp. She first
met them at this point, and asked Data, on their first meeting, if he had
been sent by her father to watch or retrieve her. In addition to her father,
Guinan has mentioned an uncle of hers, Turcum, whom her mother considered
dangerously weird. As it happens, Turcum happened to be the only member of
Guinan's family to possess any sense of humor whatsoever. In "Evolution"
Guinan states that she has had many husbands (and the implication seems to
be there that she's had multiple husbands at the same time), along with many
children. There seems to be an implication, in "Rascals", the Guinan's
father is still alive, since she says he is 700 years old - not speaking in
the past tense, as she usually does when she talks about others of her
species.
Other facts known about Guinan: she has a long history with two of the
Enterprise crew's most dreaded adversaries, Q and the Borg. Apparently, she
knows Q on a personal basis, but the relationship is not friendly. Q
insists, every time he encounters Guinan, that she is a troublemaker who is
concealing her true identity, though Picard seems to pay little attention to
such charges because the same description seems to fit Q. On one occasion,
in "Q�Who"," Q offered to dispose of Guinan, who then raised her hands in a
curious gesture, as if to ward off Q's powers, and the two seemed deadlocked
for that moment. What Guinan was actually doing is not known, but it is
notable that she is apparently the only person on the Enterprise who could
oppose Q in any way, or, for that matter, be considered a threat by him.
Guinan's past concerning the Borg is tragic; the cyber-augmented aliens
swarmed over her home world, assimilating or destroying most of her people
and forcing the survivors to escape to wherever they could, wandering
nomadically. No other members of Guinan's endangered race have ever been
encountered.
Another fascinating trait of Guinan's is her ability to instinctively know
the flow of time itself. During the alternate timeline in "Yesterday's�
Enteprise", Guinan, though she had been changed along with everybody else
when the Enterprise-C emerged from a time distortion and changed history,
could somehow tell that the events occurring at that time were not correct,
or at least did not match up with history as she had known it. She insisted
that the war with the Klingons should have ended long ago, and she also
dropped many hints that Tasha�Yar wasn't meant to be alive at that point in
history. Picard, even in the alternate timeline, heeded Guinan's advice and
sent the Enterprise-C back into its rightful place in history with Tasha�Yar
on board, restoring the universe to its original state. None of the crew
remembered these events until "Redemption II", when Tasha's half-Romulan
daughter Sela surprised Picard by ordering him not to interfere with events
at the Romulan-Klingon border. Guinan was again able to tell that Sela was a
product of the version of history in which the Enterprise-C had returned to
fight Romulans over two decades before with Tasha�Yar on board . Another
interesting note about "Yesterday's�Enterprise" �is the fact that, when she
first saw the temporal rift from which the Enterprise-C emerged, she seemed
to at least recognize the nature of the phenomenon.
Guinan is on good terms with just about anyone who walks into Ten Forward
(with the possible exception of Q), and sometimes seems to do more counseling
than Troi �(in fact, when Troi�lost her empathy in "The�Loss", Guinan
hinted that she was putting herself up for Troi's job). Members of the crew
will often turn to Guinan when they need advice but don't necessarily want
to go "on the record" by seeking Troi's professional help. Guinan is older
and probably much wiser than any of her shipmates will ever be, but she is
never condescending to them - sometimes a welcome change for the crew of the
Enterprise when dealing with beings with great abilities.
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