With Star Trek: Picard, CBS All Access Delivers a Wonderfully Mysterious, Darker Future
Thank god it's not a prequel.
Photo Courtesy of CBS All Access
The most important thing to know about Star Trek: Picard is that while bringing back one of the franchise’s most iconic characters might seem like a deliberate retreat to the past, the first three episodes of the CBS All Access series are much more about the new: New characters, new mysteries, and a whole new era of the Trek universe to explore.
That last element is particularly key—one of the first exciting things about the show is that in the recorded annals of Trek, we’re further into the future than ever before (with the exception of some one-off instances of time travel), and that future is darker than one might expect. In a culture obsessed with prequels, this fact alone makes Picard a gift.
Set in the year 2399, almost 30 years after the end of Next Generation, much of Picard’s three-episode premiere is centered around the aftermath of the destruction of Romulus. (That was the event which, in the 2009 J.J. Abrams film, sent Spock back into the past and created the Kelvin timeline, in which Abrams’ subsequent films take place, but to be clear, Picard takes place in the Prime timeline, in which Captain Kirk looks like William Shatner, not Chris Pine. If you’re finding this a bit confusing, that’s understandable, but really all you need to know is that a planet blew up and that’s where the Romulans used to live.)
The loss of Romulus didn’t happen in isolation, but instead triggered a number of additional tragedies that, as handled by Starfleet, eventually drove Jean-Luc Picard to lose faith in the organization to which he had devoted his life. So the show begins with him in retirement/retreat at the Chateau Picard vineyard in France, spending his days puttering around the vines with his trusty pitbull Number One, and his nights dreaming of lost friends and better times.
However, the arrival of Dahj (Isa Briones), a terrified young woman who seems to know him without knowing why, pulls him out of his self-imposed exile. To go into further detail about what happens would be to spoil the premiere’s biggest twists. But Next Generation fans who haven’t been watching Star Trek: Discovery might be taken aback by the approach here: This is not an adventure-of-the-week story, but instead a mystery that only gets more complex episode by episode. And while that mystery is deeply grounded in the show’s history, it is fresh and new enough to make Trek newcomers feel somewhat welcome. (That said, there’s no coddling for newbies, and some big reveals may not make an impact as a result.)
The first minutes of Picard include more than one familiar face, and thanks to casting announcements going back months, we know that other Trek veterans will be making appearances down the line. But Picard puts in the effort to create a whole new ensemble with complicated histories of their own, from nervous synthetics expert Agnes Jurati (Alison Pill) to rogue ship captain Chris Rios (Santiago Cabrera) to Picard’s former (and very bitter) second-in-command Raffi Musiker (Michelle Hurd). Hurd stands out for her raw bitterness at the hand dealt to her by life, while elsewhere, Harry Treadaway makes a big impression as the untrustworthy (but still hot) Narek.