A holodeck character, a San Francisco police lieutenant and friend of the fictional detective Dixon Hill, who in The Big Goodbye asks Picard whether his world will go on existing.
Lieutenant Dan McNary is a character in the Dixon Hill holodeck programme, a police detective in the San Francisco of 1941. He appears in the first-season episode The Big Goodbye, set in 2364, when Picard plays Hill for the first time.
McNary treats Hill as an old friend, pulling him in for questioning over a client's murder and then letting him go. After a probe damages the holodeck and the gangster Cyrus Redblock takes Picard's party hostage, McNary is drawn into the standoff.
He watches Redblock and Felix Leech walk out of the holodeck and vanish. As Picard prepares to leave, McNary, now aware that he may not be real, asks whether his wife and children will still be there when the programme ends. Picard has to tell him honestly that he does not know.