As we speak, CBS is developing a new series to add to the Star Trek franchise, and it has many fans quite excited, because for the first time in over fifteen years, Patrick Stewart will be reprising his role as Jean-Luc Picard.
Now, so far, they’ve released very little information on the series beyond this fact. That’s where we come in?
What is your pitch for this new Picard series? What do you want to see from it?
If I were up to me, I’d make it a limited series, eight or ten episodes, and the plot would focus on a Federation research station where scientists think they’ve made the ultimate discovery: the power of the Q Continuum. While the process needs some fine tuning, they’ve developed a way that an ordinary person can theoretically be transformed into the same sort of nigh-omnipotent being as Q.
Meddling with such awesome power is incredibly dangerous, of course. If their calculations are wrong, they could tear open the fabric of reality itself and erase everything around them from existence. To minimize this risk, the research is being conducted on a remote space station far from any inhabited worlds, with the work overseen by Starfleet’s most decorated officer, Jean-Luc Picard.
But even if this experiment goes flawlessly, there are still incredible dangers, and thorny philosophical issues to deal with. Is it right to give ordinary people the power of gods? Can they be trusted with it? And who do you send through the process first? If you raise them to godhood before anyone else, will you be putting the rest of the universe at their mercy? And what will the Continuum think of humans trying to raise themselves to the level of Q?
But while those are all weighty concerns, more immediate ones also arise. It seems word of this experiment has leaked to the other major powers in the Galaxy: the Klingons, the Romulans, the Dominion, even the Borg. All of them immediately send every ship they have to this space station, their first priority being to stop the Federation from gaining the power of Q, and as a very close second priority, take the secret of Q’s power for themselves. This will give us plenty of action and intrigue to go along with the scientific research and philosophical pondering.
On Star Trek: The Next Generation, Picard’s story began and ended with him (and, by extension, humanity) being put on trial by Q, tasked with proving the worthiness of his species, to show they have the potential to continue advancing just as the Q Continuum advanced long ago. It seems fitting that what will most likely be the conclusion to Picard’s story should return to this point, with humanity now at the point of actually becoming Q, and Picard forced to judge whether they deserve to.
Random things I’d like to see in such a series:
- Obviously, you’d want to get John de Lancie to return as Q. When Picard questions why an all powerful being who can take any form appears to have aged, use stock footage/visual effects to make him look young again, then immediately change back and have him explain that, given how old Picard himself is now, he’d be unlikely to respect someone who looked so fresh faced. To which Picard would wonder when he ever respected Q.
- In either the finale or the penultimate episode, have Picard himself go through the process to become a Q, and make the whole episode a trippy exploration of his mind expanding to encompass the universe.
- Have several Data-like androids working at the research facility, with the understanding that such beings are now commonplace in Federation society.
- Have a complication between the reality-altering research and the holodeck briefly cause Dixon Hill to become an actual person and have a conversation with Picard.
- And if you can get Whoopi Goldberg to reappear as Guinan, that’d be a big plus.
Those are just my ideas, though. What would everyone else like to see from the upcoming Picard series?