NEW PICARD SERIES HAS THE POTENTIAL TO BE ... FASCINATING
So many possible plotlines teased in trailer could chart new territory
For a franchise set in the future, Star Trek spends an unhealthy amount of time in its own past.
To start with, the last two television series — Enterprise and Discovery — are official prequels, apparently leading up to the prime era of NCC-1701’S Capt. James T. Kirk.
The recent cinematic Star Trek trilogy, meanwhile, saw the original series semi-rebooted as Leonard Nimoy’s Spock went back in time and changed history, sortakinda sidestepping everything that had gone on before (it’s rather complicated).
As undeniably fun as those films were, they were in essence simply mining operations banking on nostalgia and familiarity, which in itself worked — yet somehow all three stories delivered essentially the same villain: a madman out of time bent on destroying everything beautiful around them.
Which is actually not a bad description of a bunch of junior executives bankrolling a bunch of no-brainer content, not because they had bold and thoughtful new stories they were burning to tell, but because above all, they knew they could make money.
And yet the fourth new-era Trek film — surprise surprise, a time-travel tale — is currently trapped in the belly of a whale: development hell.
J.J. Abrams’ so-called Kelvin timeline seems to have run out of dilithium.
Now, I’m a big fan of Discovery — which exists in an updated and diverse new reality that seems almost impossible to lead into a decade where women in miniskirts pour Kirk his morning coffee and Klingons look like brown-face Italian extras in Sergio Leone westerns.
Having said that, what the series did with Capt. Christopher Pike and Spock actually added something magnificent to these characters, and we’ll be seeing more of them — and Number One — in three upcoming shorts on CBS All Access.
But, again, the loop: we know where it was all going, namely that 122 years later (I actually did the math), old man Spock is going to hop into that freaky little octopus shuttle and erase it all.
But enter Picard, the new series coming our way in early 2020, also on CBS.
First things first: the new series firmly confirms the Prime Timeline of most of Star Trek as we knew it is not just alive and well, but getting new stories, happily set in the original continuity. Huge relief.
To reiterate: for the first time since 2002, these are Prime Timeline stories set in an ongoing, developing future.
(Without deep spoilers, Star Trek Discovery may be playing with this as well in Season 3, but given how terribly quickly things change on that show, I give them four episodes at most where and when Season 2 ended. Plus, is it really Prime?)
But when the full trailer for Picard arrived it felt as if for the first time since Enterprise Star Trek’s creators were unquestionably adding new bricks to a continuous narrative wall first mortared in 1966 — a single baton passed without interruption from The Cage’s away team to the OG crew to the Next Generation to Jean-luc Picard’s new adventures as an unsatisfied hermit making wine amid floating robots and the ghosts of his dead family.
Which brings us via that terribly long introduction to what’s really exciting coming our way next year, starting with the backdrop.
Picard the series — the ninth if you count the Animated Series — is set some 20 years after Data died in an explosion.
It’s also about 12 since Ambassador Spock failed to stop the capital planet of the Romulan Empire from being consumed by a sudden supernova.
This will put the Romulans in at least some state of fragility and crisis, perhaps involving refugees, militancy, and/or total desperation — but no matter what a far cry from the unification between the Vulcans and Romulans Spock believed possible 30 years earlier.
Now throw into this mix a probably defensive and — if Star Trek lives up to its tradition of commenting on the present from the future — xenophobic, perhaps even racist, United Federation of Planets.
And so suddenly, without stepping on any continuity toes, we have a lot of potential for a complicated new world that would have Gene Roddenberry, who envisioned his future without major interpersonal conflict, spinning in his grave — already technically true as his ashes were shot up into Earth’s orbit.
And, with all due respect, that’s a good thing — because the world is more complicated than “the good guys should all fundamentally get along.”
And never mind the Romulans. Throw into the mix the fact of Dahj, who I will say with full confidence is a Borg, and that the threat of and presumed threat of Borg technology — think of your cellphone now — is going to be central to the first season’s 10 episodes.
Imagine it: Picard fighting for a race that arguably hurt him the most (remember him crying in his brother’s arms at the vineyard).
I don’t want to speculate much more here, besides that I think Data in the trailer is a sad holographic simulation (Picard did always spend too much time in the ever-fritzing Holodeck), and that the story updates on Seven of Nine, Riker and Troi are all exciting territory … not to mention Hugh, the little Borg who could.
But there’s one thing I’ve said about this franchise for decades, and it can play out here in a very fundamental way as well: Star Trek at its core is ultimately Spock’s story, and the last time we saw the ambassador in this universe he was risking his life trying to save the very soul of the Romulans.
Now, can you think of anyone French with a British accent who not only had a long and engaging mind meld with Spock, but also his father — another broker of galactic peace at almost any cost?
To quote the resurrected half-human with the raised eyebrow: “Fascinating.”