The first 'Star Trek: Picard' trailer teases Patrick Stewart's return to the final frontier

Ethan Alter
·Senior Writer, Yahoo Entertainment

Ever feel like you need a little more Jean-Luc Picard in your life? CBS All Access has made it so. Twenty-five years to the day after the last episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation aired on May 23, 1994, fans are getting their first look at the highly anticipated sequel series Star Trek: Picard. But this time, Picard (played, once again, by the legendary Patrick Stewart) isn’t at the helm of a starship. And based on the just-released teaser trailer, it sounds like the life he’s seeking out is ... his own. (Watch the trailer above.)

Beyond bringing back one of the franchise’s most popular captains, Picard is the first Star Trek TV series in decades to move the timeline of Trek’s Prime Universe forward instead of backward. (The show’s channelmate, Star Trek: Discovery, takes place prior to the events of the original ’60s series, although the events of the Season 2 finale promise some radical changes.) As we learn via voiceover narration, the show picks up 15 years after Picard’s final day in a Starfleet uniform — an admiral’s uniform, no less — when he commanded “the greatest rescue armada in history” to come to the aid of a civilization desperately in need. It’s quite possible that rescue mission involved the destruction of Romulus due to the Supernova of 2387 — the event that also sent Spock hurtling into the Kelvin timeline where the most recent Trek feature films have taken place.

(Photo: James Dimmock/CBS Interactive, Inc.)
(Photo: James Dimmock/CBS Interactive, Inc.)

Picard apparently succeeded in his mission, but at great personal cost ... great enough that he’s since retired to his family’s stately vineyard in France. (For the record, that’s also the future we saw for him in the Next Generation finale, “All Good Things.”) But now his quiet life is about to be disturbed by visitors eager to get the story behind his decision to leave the stars behind for terra firma. “What did that cost you?” muses the voice. “Your faith? Your faith in us? Your faith in yourself? Tell us, why did you leave Starfleet, admiral.”

Speaking with Yahoo Entertainment earlier this year, Stewart called Picard a “10-hour movie” that could run for multiple seasons. That’s quite a commitment for an actor who had purposefully avoided Star Trek since the last Next Generation film, Nemesis, opened in theaters 17 years ago. Stewart confesses that he was lured out of retirement by the “unusual” nature of the story the writers had in mind. “What I was afraid of was ... this was going to be jokey, and I didn’t want to do that. I asked a lot of questions and the answers were all very satisfying.”

It’s safe to say that Twitter is satisfied by their first look at Stewart’s return.

Star Trek: Picard will stream on CBS All Access later this year

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