Everything I hear about CBS’ Star Trek show that brings back Patrick Stewart’s iconic Jean-Luc Picard makes me more hyped up. After all, chronologically, the last time we saw the character was in the dreadful Star Trek: Nemesis, which was no way for the greatest Trek Captain of all-time to bow out.
Now, in an interview with Yahoo, Stewart has explained how the writers are treating the show, and according to him, it’s going to feel like a “10-hour movie.” That’s great to hear, and not entirely unexpected. After all, this kind of format is very much in vogue at the moment in prestige television.
For the last decade or so, we’ve seen a shift away from serialized TV with theoretically endless plots towards stories written around cinematic arcs and generally featuring one prime motivation. My theory’s that the advent of online streaming in which every episode’s released at once gives people a little more leeway to tell a consistent story without having to deal with the historic problem of audiences missing the first couple of episodes and being lost from then on.
And, I genuinely can’t think of a better way to bring back Picard than to devote ten hours to showing us what he’s been doing in the twenty years since we last saw him. Right now, we only have a handful of hints as to what he might’ve been up to, with writer and producer Alex Kurtzman explaining that Picard’s life would’ve been hugely affected by the destruction of Romulus, and Jonathan Frakes explaining that by the time we meet him here, Picard will no longer be a Star Trek captain.
My hope is that we find him happily relaxing on the Picard family estate in France, hopefully turning out some nice bottles of wine. I have no idea what kind of drama will send him off to the stars again, but whatever he does (and whichever of his Star Trek: The Next Generation co-stars appear in the show), you can bet I’ll be tuning in.
