Patrick Stewart Teases How The Star Trek Universe Has Changed Since We Last Saw Picard

Despite being inarguably the greatest Star Trek captain of all time (sorry Kirk fans, deep down you know it’s true), Jean-Luc Picard went out with a whimper rather than a bang. I’m talking about the terrible 2002 release Star Trek: Nemesis, which up until the announcement of the new Picard series on CBS All Access was our goodbye to the character and the rest of the Next Generation crew.

But we’ll soon get to catch back up with Stewart’s iconic captain and given that 20 years have passed since we last saw him, things will have changed for Picard – for better or worse. The actor’s being coy about precisely what might be different, but in an interview with Yahoo, he explained the following:

“The story is great…but it references the present day at times. And that’s all I can say. I’m not saying we’re in the present day. We’re not, we’re not. But the world that we find Jean-Luc Picard in is not quite the world that we left him in.”

I have no idea what he’s talking about when he says it references the present day, but I dearly hope that the show stays far, far away from any time traveling antics.

One thing that we do know comes from executive producer Alex Kurtzman, who confirmed that Picard’s life has been “radically altered” by the dissolution of the Romulan Empire. The Romulans were one of the most frequent adversaries of the Enterprise on Star Trek: The Next Generation, and Picard devoted much of his captaincy to diplomatic efforts to secure peace between them and the Federation. In one of the more highly regarded Trek crossovers, Picard and Spock even teamed up in the hope that peace could be brokered between Romulans and Vulcans (sadly, it didn’t happen).

So, what impact would the dissolution of the Romulan Empire have on the character? Well, depending on how it occured (possibly involving the planet Romulus being destroyed), it might’ve sent the remaining extra-planetary legions rogue, ensuring that there’s no central body to negotiate with and making genuine peace all but impossible.

That’s just speculation on our part, but with the Captain Picard Star Trek show set to go in front of cameras pretty soon, we should learn more in the coming months.