STAR TREK: PICARD: Pat is back! Resistance is... well, you know.
Nobody thought Jean-luc Picard would ever return to the captain’s chair — including the man who played him. Patrick Stewart shares the story of his unlikely comeback with pilot tv
IT’S APRIL 2019 AND PATRICK STEWART is muttering to himself on the bridge of a starship — somewhere he swore he’d never be again. He is, against all probability, back in the shoes of a man he’d said his goodbyes to almost two decades earlier. Yes, the presentation has changed — the crisp, tight-fitting uniform now replaced by a more functional shirt and brown overcoat — but even without the insignia on his breast, as Stewart stands on this Santa Clarita soundstage for the first day of filming, he is instantly, indisputably Jean-luc Picard once more. Which was never part of the plan.
“The moment they came and made me the offer, I knew that I would turn it down,” Stewart tells Pilot TV. “Because I felt very strongly that the work we did for seven years and 178 episodes and four feature films was all that I had to say about Jean-luc Picard and Star Trek. Ten years out of a creative life doing basically the same thing every week, every day is not what I became an actor to do, and returning to Jean-luc was not a prospect that appealed to me at all.”
The red and black uniform had beckoned many times over the years, with each offer declined. Different people, different projects, but Stewart’s answer was always the same: when it came to space, starships and the final frontier, his voyage was at its end.
When producer Alex Kurtzman made a similar offer in 2018, Stewart had his standard answer prepared. But, touched by the thoughtful tone of the request, and out of respect, he agreed to take the meeting — not to hear Kurtzman out, but to explain politely but firmly why he, like Picard himself, was out of Starfleet for good.
Kurtzman and co-writers Akiva
Goldsman and Kirsten Beyer met Stewart, and proceeded to pitch their idea for a new show, one that would pick up Picard’s story 20 years after it had left off. Stewart listened patiently, heard them out, and, smiling, gave his polite but firm refusal.
“After the meeting wrapped up, my agent and I were back on the street,” recalls Stewart. “I said, ‘There’s something about the things they were saying that has really caught my attention.’ The notion that it’s a different world from the one we inhabited in The Next Generation. It absolutely intrigued me because it wasn’t the same. A different man, a different environment. Everything had changed.”
STAR TREK: PICARD DIDN’T START out as a series. Rather, it began life as a flight of fancy, a throwaway glimpse of a possible past. Star Trek: Short Treks were conceived as a series of shorts
“What The hell am I doing here?”
that the streaming arm of CBS could serve up to fans during Star Trek: Discovery’s downtime. Telling stories tangential to the main series, these 10 minute shorts gave writers an opportunity to play with trivial, humorous, or whimsical ideas that would amuse the fans and tide them over until the main show returned.
“We came up with the idea of doing a Picard back story short with a younger Picard,” recalls Kurtzman. “But as we started peeling back the onion layers, more and more story kept coming, until it became: ‘Wouldn’t it be great if we could do this as a full series as opposed to just a flashback?’”
After Stewart politely declined, Kurtzman resigned himself to moving on. But, two days later, he received a call requesting a two-page document summarising the pitch. Stewart had been thinking about the idea. He was intrigued. He wanted to know more.
So, with the help of novelist Michael Chabon, who had previously written the Short Trek ‘Calypso’, Kurtzman, Goldsman and Beyer began pouring ideas onto the page. They sketched out a very different Picard: a man changed by time and tragedy, who had stepped back from the affairs of the galaxy he had once helped shape. A galaxy that had since moved on without him.
“It would’ve been really inappropriate to say, ‘Let’s just pick up where we left off 20 years ago,’” says Kurtzman. “To do justice to the character we needed to take what had been set up, the seeds from 20 years ago, and see what they had grown into now. To come up with ways to tell a story that was unexpected, but also entirely familiar.”
They imagined Picard in his dotage, retired from active duty to live out his twilight years on the French vineyard where he grew up. What would he be like? How would he see the world he left behind? What could bring him back?the ideas kept coming and the two-pager grew until, 34 pages later, they had an unexpectedly weighty manifesto ready for Stewart’s approval.
The actor’s only stipulations were that it honour the legacy of The Next Generation
without poking fun, and that it offer something completely different to anything he’d done before. With that established, Stewart was finally in.
Kurtzman, Chabon and the team developed a story that summoned old friends, new foes and even echoes of Treks past. Because, while Star Trek has never played in this era before, the canon’s reach spans light years. The destruction of Romulus, which set in motion the plot of JJ Abrams’ 2009 Star Trek, is here a seismic event in Picard’s past and one that weighs heavy on the character.
The new show looks steadfastly towards the future, but Picard is a character who can never escape his past, whether the ghosts of fallen friends, such as Brent Spiner’s Commander Data, or the ever-present shadow of his most affecting ordeal.
”It’s the first thing you think of when you think of Picard,” explains Kurtzman. “I feel like if you took a poll, the two things people would say would be Data and The Borg.”
Introduced in The Next Generation’s
second season and the subject of the series’ most lauded episodes, ‘The Best Of Both Worlds’, and the eighth film, First Contact,
the Borg were the Enterprise’s most formidable foe. A hive-mind of cybernetically-enhanced beings, they were implacable, unstoppable and singular in their objective to either destroy or assimilate all life in the galaxy. Having once subsumed Picard himself into their Collective, they are the enemy with which the character is most intertwined.
“Patrick was adamant at first about not doing a Borg story, because he did not want to repeat what he had done,” says Kurtzman. “So we started without including them at all, until we began to dig deeper and we found a reason to tell the Borg story in a way that had not been told before.”
The series will not only explore how Picard’s time among the Borg has rippled through his life over the past 20 years, but how the Collective itself has evolved during the same time. Jonathan Del Arco’s Hugh — a drone separated from the Borg in the episode ‘I, Borg’ — returns in Picard, as does another, far more familiar face: Jeri Ryan, who played Borg crew member Seven Of Nine on Star Trek: Voyager.
“Hugh was the first to show that there were people underneath the Borg. Species that had been assimilated by them as Picard had been assimilated as well,” says Kurtzman. “And Seven went through the same thing on Voyager. You have all those characters who share a common experience and it’s really interesting to see how that trauma has affected each of them.”
Uniting these three characters nods to a more psychological, inward-looking tackling of the Federation’s classic foe. Beyond their militaristic might, it’s the Borg’s brutish violation of their victims and the mental scarring of survivors that made them such a terrifying threat. These themes, only touched upon previously, are here given room to breathe in a darker, more adult show.
WITHOUT WOLVERINE, THERE would be no Picard. The gruff X-man’s final outing in James Mangold’s Logan (2017), explored what happens when beloved heroes grow old. No matter how invincible the character, nor indomitable their spirit, everyone succumbs to the ravages of time — even a near-indestructible mutant. It was this experience, as much as anything Kurtzman said in his pitch, that primed Stewart to re-examine Jean-luc Picard through the prism of time passed.
“After seven X-men movies, Logan was by far and away my favourite,” says Stewart. “I mean, there was Wolverine driving a shitty, clapped-out limousine. And Professor Xavier living in what seemed to be an upside down oil tank, rambling and confused and angry and sometimes dangerous. I told the
Star Trek people why Logan meant so much to me, and they took all that on board. It turned out to be a very interesting exercise.”
Even in his eightieth year, Picard himself is anything but rambling and confused. That patrician mien is as hard as ever, his stentorian tones still radiant with command. But he’s not the man he was when last we saw him, walking the corridors of the Enterprise ‘E’. Nor even the Admiral he later became in the years prior to his retirement. “He’s angry, frustrated, disappointed and enraged by much of what’s going on around him,” says Stewart. “Those aren’t qualities that describe Captain Picard, but Jean-luc Picard it certainly does.”
More than that, however, after years in retirement with only a bull terrier — wryly named Number One — for company, the former flag officer has been out of the fight too long. Long enough, perhaps, that his edge has become blunted, lost to years of bucolic isolation in pursuit of the perfect Bordeaux.
”These are circumstances which are completely unknown to him,” says Stewart. “He’s in a world where the Federation and Starfleet are not the same organisations that they had been in Next Gen. He is not the kind
of person they want in their organisation; they want him out. Partly because the organisations have changed too. Are they to be trusted? Are they honest? Are they working for everyone’s best interests?”
The answer to all of these questions is very likely ‘no’. As you might expect with Kurtzman at the helm, Picard, like Discovery, takes place in a more morally ambiguous
Star Trek universe than Gene Roddenberry’s original utopia. Where the franchise creator saw a future in which Starfleet embodied the best humanity had to offer, the series, much like its characters, has moved on with time. As a mirror of the world we now live in, authority and trust no longer go hand in hand. It’s this as much as anything, that may have forced him from Starfleet to begin with.
“He has not spent his emeritus years living the way he thought he would,” says Kurtzman. “When we meet him, he’s done his best to accept the conditions of that existence. The events of the pilot force him back into action to confront a lot of the things he’s been running from.”
Former shipmates William Riker and Deanna Troi both make an appearance in one episode (Kurtzman’s personal favourite of the first season), but it’s in a new crew that Picard must put his faith when he steps back onto the command deck. The foremost of these is Isa Briones’ Dahj, a mysterious young woman who turns up at the vineyard asking for Jean-luc’s help, setting the series in motion. Her murky past, you might not be surprised to hear, has serious consequences for the Federation and beyond. Joining the pair are Dr. Agnes Jurati (Alison Pill), Romulan agent Narek (Harry Treadaway), pilot and thief Cristobal Rios (Santiago Cabrera), former intelligence officer Raffi Musiker (Michelle Hurd), and a deadly Romulan swordsman named Elnor (Evan Evagora).
“One of the things Patrick said is that he feels like the company of actors has become as unique and specific and tight as the company of actors that he worked with on the
Next Generation,” says Kurtzman. “But they provide a very different perspective than the characters from that show. It’s remarkable to see Patrick, who carries all of that history, interacting with a whole new bridge crew, and forming a whole new family.”
PICARD’S ORIGINAL FAMILY WAS officially broken up in 2002, in the wake of Star Trek: Nemesis. Despite an action-packed plot that killed off Data and introduced a little-known Tom Hardy as Picard’s younger clone, the film made little impact at the box office, ending a run for the Next Generation cast that had begun in 1987. “Sadly, Nemesis was the least good of our films,” Stewart laments. “The studio said, ‘Okay, guys, we’re done.’”
An eleventh film penned by Brent Spiner, which it’s said would have been Star Trek’s Avengers, uniting characters across every era to fight an insurmountable threat, was summarily canned.“it really was a wonderful idea and I was bitterly disappointed for Brent. However, I was done. Done. I went to my agent and said, ‘I don’t care what you find for me. But it must have nothing to do with science fiction, nothing to do with space, and nothing to do with uniforms.’” The Next Generation passed into history and Stewart moved on to other things but, even when Picard was furthest from his mind, the actor never looked back with anything but pride.
“Back in 1987 unless you went to the Royal Shakespeare or to fringe theatres in London, you’d no idea who Patrick Stewart was. Star Trek changed all of that for me. Not a single corner of my life, professional or personal was untouched by Next Generation. I have so much to be grateful for.”
Roddenberry’s vision for Star Trek was to show a humanity that had moved beyond pettiness, materialism and venality. He saw the series as an escape from the world around us but also a template for the road ahead. A possibility for a better future. No single character in all of Star Trek has embodied those qualities that we should all aspire to quite like Jean-luc Picard.
“In incredibly complicated, divisive times where emotions flare so hot and there’s so much ugliness in the world, Picard always responded thoughtfully and thoroughly and took humanity into account first and foremost,” reflects Kurtzman. “A leader who thinks that way, who leads that way… I look around the world right now and I feel that we have so few of them. Picard is the captain that we need now more than ever.”
The return of Star Trek’s greatest captain was something Stewart neither expected nor asked for but when he walked out onto that set, deep down he knew he’d come home. The actor has long maintained that, over the years, the line where Picard ended and Stewart began had blurred more with each passing year. Becoming Picard again, then, wasn’t so much about rediscovering a character, as becoming reacquainted with a long lost friend.
“I always loved Picard’s openness,” says Stewart. “His frankness. His willingness to be a listener. He understood the essence of leadership and always pursued the truth. Those were his qualities.” Qualities that, in 2020, seem in short supply. Jean-luc Picard may not have been part of Patrick Stewart’s plan, but he’s both the captain we need and maybe, just maybe, the leader we deserve. STAR TREK: PICARD IS AVAILABLE ON AMAZON PRIME FROM JANUARY 24