For most of the first season of Star Trek: Picard, retired Admiral Jean-Luc Picard (Sir Patrick Stewart) searches for a girl named Soji (Isa Briones) so that he can protect her from the Romulan secret police. As it turns out, Soji is the twin-sister of Dahj, and the sole-remaining daughter of his old friend Data (Brent Spiner).
In order to find Soji, Picard must first find a new ship — since he is no longer the captain of the USS Enterprise — and that means getting a whole new crew. A new crew means a new cast, and a new cast means a new group of people to get to know when the cameras aren’t rolling. And that can be tough.
“There was no socializing for the first five months — we were shooting,” Stewart recently told The Los Angeles Times. “When we came to the end of the , we had promotional activities to engage with and we were traveling together on airplanes and got to know one another so much better.”
"This is going to be a new element in Season 2, that there is a lot of mutual respect everywhere. If you know you can take risks, and there is a network around you that if you crash land, they will catch you, it’s a wonderful feeling. That’s how I feel now. I feel safe."
We’ve heard a lot about how Stewart turned down the opportunity to return as Picard several times before finally giving in. What ultimately changed his mind was a script by novelist Michael Chabon, who writes for the show. Although as it ends up, that script found Picard in a pretty different place. “The only thing I remember was that it started with Picard having long since retired, and was now a jack of all trades,” Chabon said. “When the story opened up he was working as a road manager for a traveling theater company, and we were doing a performance of Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape.”
The actual show opens with Picard in easy retirement on his family vineyard, so that changed somewhere along the line. Show of hands: Who would rather have seen Picard be a wandering minstrel?
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)
Fun fact: Stewart and his costar from the X-Men movies, Ian McKellen (Magneto), once appeared together in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting For Godot. So maybe the choice of a Beckett play was intentional. Store that idea for season 2, will you, Chabon?
And speaking of X-Men, it sounds like the producers of Picard wanted to do for Stewart’s Star Trek character what Logan did for Professor Charles Xavier. “In that film, Charles Xavier was no longer the wise, thoughtful, modest, humorous gentle man ; he was a crazy, dangerous fellow … screaming out children’s nursery rhymes,” remembered Stewart. “I just love that. I introduced this idea to say, ‘I do not want you to rewrite Logan. But the reason I made Logan was to expose aspects of Charles Xavier that had never been seen before.’ And this is exactly what Michael and the team have been doing with Jean-Luc.”
So far, Star Trek: Picard is a different kind of beast compared to most Trek shows. It’s heavily serialized and very personal, and clearly Chabon has ambitions of shaking the franchise up. “The rap on Star Trek is it’s utopian, optimistic,” he said. “Over the years, a lot of these things have been tossed out by writers, like, ‘Yes, we don’t have money’ and “Yes, we don’t have war” and all these admirable things, but we aspired to say, ‘What does that actually mean?’ What does it mean that Jean-Luc Picard owns a winery? This is a 50-plus-year-old machine where people haven’t dug around inside too much.”
The new approach also resulted in storylines that explored things like the aftereffects of Picard getting absorbed into the hive-mind Borg. “There was no real residue from it,” Stewart said. “But there has to have been. What has it been like for the past 25 years, having gone through that incredibly traumatic experience and never having had the chance to talk about it or reckon with it or purge it?”
Production on Star Trek: Picard season 2 was put on the backburner at the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, but hopefully it’ll pick back up later this year.
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