If the kids didn't mutiny, would Picard have been killed when the turbolift fell?
I'm not really clear on why the turbolift would fall in the first place... Is that a gravity plating thing? I guess gravity plating must work without power?
Also Picard knew it was going to fall... are we to infer he'd rather be pancaked than spend another moment with those kids?
I know the writers just think of them as elevators, but why are we generating artificial gravity in a turnolift shaft just so we can overcome it with another generated force?
Kinda related, I've been saying for years we need more "the gravity plating is out" episodes where everything is floating around, bumping into shit, causing problems. We got one scene in enterprise and that's it. :/
I think Picard was willing to sacrifice himself to save the kids. He's an officer who signed up for a risky job - they are not, and also they're kids. I think he thought that going with them would slow things down enough to add unacceptable risk for the kids. And they did end up spending a bunch of time cobbling together an apparatus to move Picard during which the lift could have fallen.
When the kids refused to go maybe that changed Picard's calculation: the advantage of going without him diminishes if they use up time arguing. Or maybe it's TV writing.
But maybe Picard wasn't certain that the lift would fall. Or maybe if he'd stayed he would have managed to pull out a Picard move to save himself at the last second - you know, the kind that's easier to do when there aren't kids watching. Or maybe, as far as he knew someone might rescue him in time. But yeah, he probably would have died, and the kids' mutiny was the only out that let him save himself while also trying to be noble.
The way gravity plating works is not given as far as I know, Perhaps the gravity generators simply alter the number of gravitons in an area of plating. Once that value is set it remains until changed again. A sudden power spike can cause the generators to withdraw the extra gravitons, as a result sometimes certain kinds of emergency can "turn off" gravity in an area of the ship.