What Star Trek: Picard Means for the Future of Star Trek

There are at least two audiences for Star Trek: Picard: The audience that already loves Star Trek: The Next Generation, which introduced Patrick Stewart as Jean-Luc Picard more than 30 years ago, is probably pre-sold on the idea of the captain boldly going across the final frontier one last time, and they’ll get at least some of what they want from it.

But I’m more interested in the other audience: Those who are intrigued by Picard but don’t know anything about Next Generation. Picard does its best to be accessible, but modern TV audiences are completists in a way that they weren’t when Next Generation originally aired, and by 2020 standards, Star Trek: The Next Generation is a hard show to get into.

The boom in heavily serialized prestige television—and the way that the streaming era has encouraged binge-watching entire seasons at a time—has also trained viewers to treat every single episode of a series as equally important. But while the entirety of Star Trek: The Next Generation is available on Netflix right now, I can’t think of a worse way to watch it. There are 178 Next Generation episodes; many have aged poorly, many are inessential, and more than a few are awful. And while Next Generation’s episodic format also led to some of the most brilliant stories in the entire Star Trek franchise, it’s pretty archaic by modern standards.

With all that in mind, I guess it’s no surprise that Star Trek: Picard, which is theoretically a sequel to Next Generation, barely even resembles it. The first three episodes feature occasional callbacks to several fan-favorite episodes (most notably Season 2’s "The Measure of a Man," which you should probably watch before you start Picard). But Picard builds the vast majority of its story on the back of an all-new chunk of backstory: A traumatic incident many years after the events of Next Generation, which sparked Picard’s resignation from Starfleet.

Let’s start with what works about Picard. It’s no surprise that Patrick Stewart is terrific, because he’s great in pretty much anything not called The Emoji Movie. The show looks great and has some of the best action scenes in the history of the entire franchise. And Picard has a very cute pit bull named Number One who could literally never overstay his welcome.

As for the rest… well, at best Picard is a very rough work in progress. The downside of a performance as magnetic as Stewart’s is that it makes everything else look slipshod and undercooked by comparison. Apart from a researcher played by Allison Pill, none of the new characters get much to do. The subplots that don’t involve Picard directly—essentially, a bunch of convoluted politicking involving Starfleet and the Romulans—mostly manage to be confusing and boring at the same time.

Given the nostalgia that clearly brought this show into being, the most surprising thing about Picard is how unfamiliar it feels. The series is saddled with a ton of backstory to explain. The consequence is that the end of the third episode feels more like the end of a pilot—and when your whole season is 10 episodes long, that’s a lot of time to spend on an opening chapter.

It’s possible that a course correction is already on the way. That Episode 3 ending does seem to herald a more classically Star Trek direction for the show, and trailers have teased the return of some familiar fan-favorite characters who don’t appear in the first three episodes at all. And Next Generation had been on TV for more than a year, and endured some very public creative rejiggering, before it managed to put its best foot forward. Why can’t Picard do the same?

But even if this new series works for you from the jump, it raises a bigger question: Is this what Star Trek is now? The past decade has seen the Star Trek franchise pass through the hands of a number of creatives, and their visions have rarely congealed—or turned Star Trek into the kind of mainstream, multi-platform franchise Hollywood is hungry to reverse-engineer.

Let’s count off where things stand as Picard premieres. Sister show Star Trek: Discovery, which is set centuries before Picard, isn’t bad—but after two seasons, it’s still mostly playing to the Star Trek faithful who loved the franchise enough to pony up for CBS All Access. Meanwhile, an adult-oriented animated comedy called Star Trek: Lower Decks, by one of the creative minds behind Rick and Morty, is slated to premiere sometime this year. Apart from an animated children’s series that may still be in development at Nickelodeon, Star Trek’s future on television may live entirely behind the paywall at CBS All Access—even as the diversity of those projects makes it clear that a Star Trek series can be pretty much anything.

But at least CBS All Access is giving Star Trek the chance to stretch out and try some new things. There’s also the question of what to do with the rebooted movie series that launched in 2009, which hasn’t seen a new installment since 2016. The relatively weak box-office performance of Star Trek Beyond (and the untimely death of cast member Anton Yelchin) has left the future of that franchise in limbo, and no one can quite commit to where it should go next.

At one point, S.J. Clarkson was slated to become the first female director to helm a Star Trek movie, which would have seen Kirk travel back in time to meet his dad (played, as in 2009’s Star Trek, by Chris Hemsworth). Meanwhile, Quentin Tarantino openly teased the possibility of directing an R-rated Star Trek movie for more than a year before apparently abandoning the project. Now, a new Star Trek movie might be on the way from Fargo and Legion showrunner Noah Hawley—but it’s not even clear if his movie would be a sequel to Star Trek Beyond or a whole new reboot.

The irony of it all is that 2020 feels like a perfect time for a new Star Trek cut from the classic mold. If Star Wars has turned out to be, however unintentionally, a pessimistic parable for an era of perpetual war, Star Trek offers an openly optimistic vision of the future. And if that future seems unattainable in our actual present, which all its political and environmental grim, it also infuses Star Trek with a newly urgent sense of aspirationalism and catharsis. Comments by co-creator Alex Kurtzman, which indicate that the show’s larger arc will find the newly cynical Picard finding his way back to the optimism of the original Star Trek, at least indicate that the creative team has thought hard about the difficulty and the value of Star Trek’s overarching ethos, and what it might mean in 2020.

And maybe Picard will eventually pull that off. In the meantime, it’s kind of fitting that Picard is a bit of an odd duck, situated uneasily between Star Trek’s fondly-remembered past and its uncertain future. In 2020, the entirety of the sprawling Star Trek franchise is burdened with the same question—and it’s just as unclear which course the series will ultimately chart for itself.

Heroes

Whether he’s thundering through Shakespeare, leading the X-Men via telepathy, or escorting us on a tour of his favorite Brooklyn haunts, the knighted British thespian radiates the charisma of a much younger man. Wearing the season’s handsomest new coats, he shows all the world that “dressing your age” can be an ageless art.

Originally Appeared on GQ