“Startling events” are coming in Star Trek: Picard season 2
&nbAfter nearly two decades away from Star Trek, Sir Patrick Stewart recently returned to the role of Jean-Luc Picard in Star Trek: Picard, which aired on CBS All Access. We, for one, were glad to see him back, although things had changed over the years.
“I’d been turning down Star Trek spin-offs almost from the day after we finished filming Nemesis, the last Next Generation film, because I felt that I had said everything I had to say as Jean-Luc Picard,” he told Gold Derby. However, after listening to a pitch from showrunner Alex Kurtzman, Stewart came around. “I would have been a fool to have said no because what they were proposing was so close to the only kind of Star Trek series that I would possibly be interested in. Immediately the script of episode one shows us a very different Jean-Luc Picard.”
The first season of Picard showed the former captain tending his vineyards, missing his friend Data (Brent Spiner), and lamenting the loss of the Romulan homeworld, Romulus. As the season went on, we learned that synthetics like Data had been banned — under false pretenses, it turned out — and Picard makes it his mission to get to the bottom of things. “Fundamental to all of Jean-Luc’s philosophies are those ideas that we all have a right to live and exist and be who and what we are,” Stewart said. “It’s part of the prime directive.”
In the end, Picard succumbed to a life-threatening illness, but was brought back to life in the body of a synthetic. “The writers had been a little bit undercover about that aspect of how series one was going to end,” Stewart recalled. “I learned it from reading the script, and when I saw that Picard collapsed and died when he was on that alien planet, I thought, ‘Oh my lord, I’m being written out of the show?”
He wasn’t written out of the show. Production on season 2 is on hold thanks to the coronavirus, but Stewart teases that there are some “startling events” in store. “We’re not going to be covering the same ground, and it’s going to be extraordinary…I’m looking forward to it very much.”
I have no idea what “startling events” are coming, but I can’t wait to see how it all unfolds.
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