First plot details for Patrick Stewart’s new “Picard” Star Trek series revealed

While it appears that Star Trek on the big screen is just about dead for now, there’s a ton of small-screen related content for the long-running sci-fi franchise on the way. While Star Trek: Discovery is the most immediate with its second season debuting next week, there’s another offering much further away that has fans the most excited though.

As revealed last year, Sir Patrick Stewart will be looking to reprise his much beloved role of Captain Jean-Luc Picard from Star Trek: The Next Generations for a brand new series. As it’s been a very long time since we’ve seen Picard on-screen (the rather poor Star Trek: Nemesis movie), this new show is a bit of a mystery. We don’t even know what it will be called. However, we now at least know when it will be taking place and a little bit of what it will actually be about. This info comes via producer Alex Kurtzman, who has been tapped to oversee the development of the entire Star Trek franchise, who spoke to THR about what this next chapter in Picard’s life will entail.

The biggest detail is that the series will be taking place after the events of JJ Abrams’s 2009 movie reboot (which Kurtzman co-scripted). In that movie, Leonard Nimoy’s Spock tries and fails to stop a supernova that destroys the Romulan homeworld. His actions result in him and another Romulan ship being flung 129 years into their past, inadvertently creating the new “Kelvin” timeline in which the new movies take place. The new show will take place in the original Prime timeline but we’ll see that “Picard’s life was radically altered by the dissolution of the Romulan Empire”. The Enterprise captain had “a long and complicated relationship with the Romulans”, an offshoot of Spock’s Vulcan race, and the two men struggled long to broker peace between the Romulan Empire and the Federation they served. Picard’s final on-screen appearance in Star Trek: Nemesis was actually to combat a clone of himself (played by a very young pre-fame Tom Hardy) created by the Romulans. So yes, long and complicated.

What was also potentially going to be long and complicated was actually getting Stewart to return to his iconic role. The 78-year old actor had long said he was uninterested in resurrecting Picard, but Kurtzman was desperate to have him onboard and called for a meeting to discuss the pitch which had “turned into a 34-page document — with no way to shorten it.”

We were going on all in and he was going to read it or not read it, love it or hate it. It was our best attempt at trying to get him to say yes.

What we tried to convey in that meeting was how desperately we loved him and the character and how much we wanted to see what happened to Picard

Luckily, Stewart did, in fact, love it and said yes, as Kurtzman explained.

He walked into the room and he had a huge smile on his face and said, ‘This is wonderful.’ What he understood at that point … was that he was with people who desperately wanted to collaborate with him, that we weren’t trying to exploit him. He knew if he was going to go back to Picard, it needed to be for the greatest reason ever.

He threw down an amazing gauntlet and said, ‘If we do this, I want it to be so different, I want it to be both what people remember but also not what they’re expecting at all, otherwise why do it?’

The untitled Picard series is yet to actually start production, so we have no idea when we’ll get to see it, but I’m excited for it. Especially as Kurtzman hints that “Anything could happen” in terms of other older cast members showing up as well. We need to see Riker climb over the back of a chair to sit down at least one more time.

Last Updated: January 10, 2019