Star Trek: Picard showrunner talks season 2, dealing with fan blowback

If you’ve had the enjoyment of watching the inaugural season of Star Trek: Picard, then you probably noticed just how much Evan Evagora’s sword-wielding Romulan warrior Elnor resembles a certain sharp-shooting Elf from Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit movies: Orlando Bloom’s Legolas.

“That’s what I’ve been hearing,” Evagora told The Hollywood Reporter. “We, or at least I, had some thoughts like — is [my character] maybe a little too close to what some fans have seen in other things — in other franchises like Lord of the Rings.”

"But in talking it out with [showrunners] Michael [Chabon], and with Alex [Kurtzman] and the other great writers — and with Patrick [Stewart] — I quickly realized we are giving audiences something similar but different, this almost moody teenager. Something that feels new to Star Trek, for sure."

Elnor was involved in several key battles throughout the season, and Evagora says that each fight scene was carried by the superb writing in. “We’re lucky we have very, very good writers. When they’re written, it’s the dialogue and character that come first, so the choreography and the fighting has to work around the scene and it has to follow the story. It’s not ‘action first.'”

The New Zealand-based actor also heaped praise on the show’s stunt team, naturally. “They’re really great actors, too. It’s not just getting hit or falling down. They make sure there’s some depth to their characters.”

And of course, he had nothing but great things to say about co-star Patrick Stewart, even if his first meeting with the legendary actor was nerve-wracking. “I was kinda terrified, obviously,” Evagora recalled. “It was, like, the worst first meeting ever. On my first day of filming, I felt so very nervous. And Patrick, he just — he took me aside because he could tell. But it’s not like he told me a story about being nervous or anything like that. He just helped me feel at ease and more comfortable, just by talking to me.”

“He really loves being in the ensemble — and not just the cast, but the entire crew. He — we’re all equals and he sets that tone every day,” Evagora continued. “My favorite story of working with him was — there was a day when I was sitting across from Alison Pill [Dr. Agnes Jurati] and Patrick filming a scene, and those two together — I was watching them and forgetting I was even being filmed. I just sat there, like I was an audience member, watching them. Just enjoying it.”

Elnor’s introduction came in Episode 4, “Absolute Candor.” Through flashbacks, we see how Picard was able to save a young Elnor — along with many, many other Romulans — but ultimately wasn’t able to save everyone before the planet Romulus exploded. Because of that, Jean-Luc retired to his vineyard and shunned society.

Star Trek: The Next Generation fans weren’t used to this version of Picard, and Elnor helped bridge that gap. “It felt disingenuous to us, and to Sir Patrick, to show a Picard that has gone through such an experience — one that compromises him, one that challenges and strips his worldview of all he’s known from Starfleet — that walks away from that emotionally unscathed,” said Picard showrunner Michael Chabon.

HOLLYWOOD, CALIFORNIA – JANUARY 13: Michael Chabon attends the premiere of CBS All Access’ “Star Trek: Picard” at ArcLight Cinerama Dome on January 13, 2020 in Hollywood, California. (Photo by Rich Fury/Getty Images)

Speaking with Yahoo Entertainment, Chabon talked about the different ways the Trek fanbase has responded to Picard, as well as how divisive the show has been among the fans. “I actually went back and looked on Google Groups, which acquired Usenet, so you can look through the old Usenet groups and watch what people said about Deep Space Nine and then about Voyager,” he said. “They f—ing hated it. They lacerated it.”

"I mean, plenty of people liked it and loved it. But the criticisms that are being leveled against Deep Space Nine, and then against Janeway, female Captain, black Vulcan [Tim Russ’s Tuvok] — all of the things that were problematic for certain contingent of so called Star Trek fans back then, the way that they attack each other and the way they attack the show — it’s identical to now. They could just turn them into 140 characters or whatever it is now on Twitter and you could make tweets out of them and it would still work just as well for Discovery or Picard."

Thanks to the instant access of social media platforms like Twitter, Chabon knew how he wanted to test the boundaries of the Star Trek fanbase. “To the extent that I was aware of the kind of toxic fandom, the anti-SJW, you know, sad little corner of fandom — you just disregard that. Sometimes you’re motivated to have things simply because it’s possibly going to piss off or provoke people who seem to have missed the memo about just what exactly Star Trek is and always has been all about.”

As someone who is deeply connected to the Star Wars fanbase, I can see where Chabon is coming from. Director Rian Johnson delivered what is arguably the best Star Wars film of the Disney era in The Last Jedi, but because female characters like Admiral Holdo and Rose Tico had larger roles than expected, a subset of fans pitched a fit and shined a light on how ugly certain corners of fandoms can get.

“It’s made it easier for me to accept when fans express their displeasure,” Chabon continued. “But it’s human nature to focus on that stuff, and to kind of ignore the fact that the vast majority of fan response seems to be really positive. And, you know, I’ve also been gratified to see a lot of people who do like the show taking other people to task so that I don’t have to.”

With all the fan-feedback — both negative and positive — has Chabon allowed himself to be influenced on the direction of the storyline of Picard season 2? “No, not at all. We’re true to what my dear friend and collaborator and partner Akiva Goldsman calls the object,” he said. “The object is Star Trek: Picard.”

"It is a show with a nearly 80-year-old actor playing a 94-year-old man who is if not in the final stages of his career, in the latter stages of his career, who has a period of great dismay and disillusionment in his immediate rear view, who has allowed himself to let ties that were formerly very important to him slip or fade away, and who has now re-engaged with the greatly changed world in which he finds himself. That is the story we’re telling. And we’re telling that story because it feels both interesting and true, but also because it reflects the nature of our star and both his desires and his capabilities. It was not ever going to be The Next Generation Part Two in any way. It was never going to have a regular cast made up of LeVar Burton and Jonathan Frakes and Gates McFadden and Michael Dorn. It was never going to be set on the bridge of a starship in Starfleet. It was never going to be episodic in format. It was never going to be any of the things that TNG was. Not only couldn’t it be those things if it tried, but it wasn’t going to try. Because that’s not what we have to do."

And what does season 2 look like, now that the season 1 finale has just aired? “It’s going to be different in some ways,” said Chabon. “It’s definitely going to go in directions that we didn’t see in Season 1. I think we’ve been emboldened in many ways by the popularity of the show. I’ve only done this once, but I would imagine it’s probably true for a lot of television shows especially in this era: Season 1 was in many respects about learning how to make Star Trek: Picard. Both in a production sense, but also in terms of storytelling and who our cast is, how these characters end up forming surprising links and attachments to each other.”

"It’s in a way that I think was probably true back with TNG and what I was talking about — everyone agrees, once Riker grew the beard, the show got better. It was because they learned what they had. Going forward, we’re only going to be doing more of what we did, with greater confidence and with a greater sense of what this show feels like when it’s firing on all engines."

You can watch the entire first season of Picard for free until April 23!

As for season 2, we’ll be looking forward to it.

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