A a lot of new TV shows will premiere in 2020. Many of them have the potential to become legendary and loved by millions of people. However, one of those shows stands out even among the glorious rest – at least if you’re a Star Trek fan (or a Trekkie, if you’d like).
Star Trek: Picard is set to premiere on the 23rd of January. And unless everything goes terribly wrong, it’s bound to be pretty epic. There are a lot of reasons to be excited about the show – five, more specifically. But also five reasons to fear it just the tiniest bit.
Can't Wait: Sir Patrick Stewart (aka Jean-Luc Picard)
As far as Star Trek captains go, only a few of them have been as well-received as Jean-Luc Picard. Intelligent, polite, often charming, but also capable of besting his enemies; these are all the reasons why people love Picard. Plus, he’s the type of man who can truly enjoy his tea (Earl Grey. Hot.). But even the greatest captain would be barely half as great without an amazing actor.
Sir Patrick Stewart is as British as they come, but that never stopped him from playing international characters from all over the world. He’s best known for playing Picard and Charles Xavier, aka Professor X in X-Men, but the truth is he has created many great movies.
Don't Care: CBS All Access
The station and creative force behind Star Trek: Picard is CBS All Access. That would be fine and exciting if CBS All Access also wasn’t responsible for Star Trek: Discovery.
Long-time fans of the Star Trek franchise were mostly disappointed or even appalled by Discovery, which did its best to change some beloved character’s origin (Spock again). So it’s enough to make Trekkies nervous about Star Trek: Picard, which might very easily repeat its predecessor’s mistakes if the station hadn’t learned its lesson by now.
Can't Wait: The cast in general
Besides Sir Patrick Stewart, it’s also important to point out the rest of the cast. The TV show is packed with famous names and talented actors. Santiago Cabrera appeared in fantasy and sci-fi many times. He acted in Transformers: The Last Knight in 2017, and is even better known for his TV work, and shows like the sci-fi series Salvation, the superhero tale Heroes or the fantasy Merlin, where he stole our hearts as Lancelot.
Then there’s Alison Pill from Scott Pilgrim vs. The World or Penny Dreadful. Reading the cast list feels like a Christmas gift and a dream come true.
Don't Care: The ideal viewer
It also remains unclear who, exactly, is the ideal viewer, the focus group of Star Trek: Picard. It might be the original Star Trek: The Next Generation fans who are well in their 40s/50s or older nowadays. It might be the people who saw J. J. Abrams’s Star Trek trilogy and are interested in finding out what happened after the destruction of Romulus. Or it might be an entirely new audience which has never heard about Star Trek before.
The worst-case scenario? The TV show aims to capture the attention of all of these groups and becomes a strange cocktail that doesn’t really know what to focus on in the first place, storytelling wise.
Can't Wait: Linking back to Abrams
It’s quite unclear at the moment what exactly will be the main plot of the show. So far, the trailers and teasers have revealed that the show will revolve around iral Picard, as he’s living his rather peaceful (but not quite) life, twenty or so years after the disappearance of one ambassador Spock (R.I.P., Leonard Nimoy) and the destruction of Romulus.
If you’ve seen the latest Star Trek films directed by J. J. Abrams, the above mentioned will probably sound familiar to you. The destruction of Romulus happened in Star Trek (2009), and it drove the crazy Romulan Nero (Eric Bana) to travel to the past and destroy the planet Vulcan. The show could elegantly tie-in to the events portrayed in Abrams’s films, and show us what happened after them. Fingers crossed!
Don't Care: The long pause
26 years between TV shows with the same main character is a long time, especially in the world of television, where new trends seem to jump up behind every corner. So it might quite possibly be that Star Trek: Picard will arrive a bit too late.
Even the latest Star Trek film with Captain Picard’s crew, Star Trek: Nemesis, premiered in 2002, eighteen years ago. Again, that’s a lot of time, and what once interested viewers may prove to be a bit too obsolete nowadays. The stubborn silence about the show's plot also doesn’t bring a lot of confidence alongside it.
Can't Wait: Coming back home
The positives don’t end there. Not only will Star Trek: Picard be connected to Abrams’s Star Trek film trilogy, but also to the original TV show, Star Trek: The Next Generation (also known simply as TNG), even though it's not a direct sequel. It’s been a while since the show went off the air (almost 26 years, to be exact), so it’s not much of a stretch to say that Star Trek: Picard feels a bit like coming home.
Especially since a lot of the original TNG heroes will also appear in the new show. Jean-Luc Picard is a given since his name is in the title, but the commander and later captain William Riker (Jonathan Fraser) will also appear, plus counselor Deanna Troi (Marina Sirtis), the super-intelligent Data (Brent Spiner) and even the fan-favorite Seven of Nine (Jeri Ryan). The 23rd of January couldn’t possibly arrive sooner.
Don't Care: One is never enough
The beauty of the previous Star Trek shows was in the fact that there was a rich parade of characters, each one different from the rest. And they had to fight the unexpected and discover the face of the unknown at the same time. Pretty difficult to do when you’re in space, and almost everything can kill you.
Question is whether Star Trek: Picard will manage to capture the true spirit of Star Trek and the audience’s attention with its primary focus on the one main character. After all, even though it might seem like a sacrilege to the Trekkies, there are those sci-fi fans who actually don’t know Captain Jean-Luc Picard.
Can't Wait: Less space to ruin it
It’s been said that the show will have fewer seasons or episodes than the oldest Star Trek show Star Trek: The Original Series (or TOS). Just as a reminder, TOS ran for three seasons and got 79 episodes in total. That also means that unless a miracle happens, Star Trek: Picard will most likely be quite a short-lived TV show, at least in comparison to others.
However, this doesn’t necessarily have to be a bad thing. Fans have seen again and again what happens when a TV show runs its due course – and yet it keeps on going. The end result is rarely ever pretty, so it’s probably better to end while you’re on top. That being said, if Star Trek: Picard turns out to be as awesome as it seems to be, it will no doubt be sorely missed once it ends.
Don't Care: Too much of a good thing
In the end, the biggest reason why some of the viewers might not really care about Star Trek: Picard is that the franchise is simply beyond saving, or at least needs a proper rest.
It’s difficult to overlook that by far the most original Star Trek TV show of the last few years isn’t Star Trek: Discovery, but The Orville – which isn’t even a Star Trek series, but parodies it quite successfully. Maybe the world has simply grown weary of Star Trek, which is entirely possible. After all, as the old saying goes – there can even be too much of a good thing.