Patrick Stewart does NOT want a pandemic storyline in Picard season 2

Star Trek: Picard season 1 has come and gone, and while it may take a while for production on season 2 has yet to begin — thanks, coronavirus — it’s coming sooner or later.

Season 1 saw Picard and the crew of the La Sirena fly around the galaxy looking for and rescuing Data’s daughter Soji (Isa Briones), and ended with the former captain of the Enterprise dying from a terminal illness and being brought back to life in the body of an android. Season 2 should feature the continuing adventures of robot-Picard and friends (plus the return of Whoopi Goldberg as Guinan), but what it won’t be about is a pandemic.

“I would not encourage that,” Stewart told CBC Radio. “This is a disturbing and frightening and sad time for many thousands of people. I would feel uncomfortable if we were to make this a theme of the second season of [Star Trek: Picard]. It is too sensitive, too upsetting, too frightening, than some of the other issues that we have dealt with, which are much more of a political nature.”

That said, Stewart does put the pandemic into a political context, saying that if Jean-Luc Picard was in charge, he’d have responded “very much quicker than either the U.S. government or the U.K. government did.”

"There were good examples around the world of how best to handle this dangerous and difficult situation, and it wasn’t taken up. I think that Picard would not have hesitated in finding, if not solutions, at least ways of minimizing the risk and the danger to individuals."

At 79 years of age, Stewart has been smartly staying in his Los Angeles home with his wife, singer/songwriter Sunny Ozell. But that’s not keeping the actor from spreading a little love through social media by reading a sonnet by Shakespeare every day.

“It suddenly occurred to me that there was this little saying that my mother used to chant when I was a child: An apple a day keeps the doctor away,” he mused. “I thought, well, what if I did this thing where I said: ‘a sonnet a day keeps the doctor away?’ It’s silly, and it’s perhaps a little embarrassing … [but] I’ve been enjoying it very much.”

Patrick Stewart is the hero we need in these dark days. Catch up on season one of Star Trek: Picard on CBS All Access, which you can do for free for a few more weeks!

Save us, Jean-Luc!

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h/t TrekMovie