He'll be returning as Jean-Luc Picard and he is heading back to deal with an old enemy.
We reported a few months back that Patrick Stewart would be returning to the iconic role for an upcoming Star Trek series, and to say that people were overjoyed by this news was a bit of an understatement.
The new show is set to be executive produced by Alex Kurtzman, a man who has some previous experience with the franchise (he also exec-produced Star Trek: Discovery), and also has some other good experience with sci-fi (Fringe, Lost) and some bad (he directed the Tom Cruise starring The Mummy).
Stewart has had a fantastic farewell to
one of his other iconic characters recently, but Kurtzman revealed that it wasn't easy getting Picard back to the final frontier:
"We heard he was very reticent, for a million understandable reasons, to do it. I think he just felt, ‘I don’t know what else there is to do?’ We proposed it to him, he sat there and listening very thoughtfully as he does, said, ‘Thank you, let me think about it.’
"We thought we failed. But on Monday his agent called and said, ‘He’s interested and he’d like to know more and can you write down what you had.'"
"What he understood at that point was that he was with people who desperately wanted to collaborate with him, that we weren’t trying to exploit him. He knew if he was going to go back to Picard, it needed to be for the greatest reason ever."
Speaking to
Variety, Kurtzman had the following to say about the setting for the new show, and it does sound like a great way to get both the star and his fans back:
"The Picard series will be the first onscreen Trek story set in the aftermath of [the dissolution of the Romulan Empire], which would have altered the balance of power in the galaxy.
"The destruction of Romulus would also have extra resonance for Picard, who has a long and complicated relationship with the Romulans, the alien race that split from Vulcan society thousands of years ago and founded a separate civilization.
"The Romulans went on to control a portion of the galaxy, and the empire was in opposition to the Federation for all of Picard’s career."
As
we reported recently, this series is just one of the many Star Trek projects currently in production (one of which probably isn't going to be a new Star Trek movie), so it does appear to be an absolutely fantastic time to be a Trekkie!
