Star Trek: Picard fans got a preview of what the future holds in the final
frontier thanks to a teaser video for the series' second season on Paramount+. Here
are all the small details you missed in the new teaser for Star Trek: Picard season 2.
It makes every bit of sense that Jean-Luc Picard would have a painting of his old ship,
the Enterprise-D, hanging up in his chateau. It's the ship where fans of TNG spent the most time,
from the first episode of the series to its unceremonious end in the third
act of Star Trek: Generations. From its oblong angles to its Amtrak interiors,
it became the imaginary second home to a generation of nerds.
The cool detail here is that the painting on display isn't a new addition. It's the
same one that Picard had hanging in the ready room of the Enterprise during the TV years,
complete with its late-eighties semi-velvet aesthetic. There are definitely some questions
left hanging in the air by its inclusion in Picard – how it survived the crash when the
ship's disc hit the ground, for example, and which of the salvage guys thought "I
should grab this framed print on the way out." Will these questions be answered?
No, probably not, but nice to see a familiar artifact from the old days anyway.
20 seconds into the teaser, there's a subtle reminder that books still exist in the 24th
century. The meat of the shot belongs to a copy of Paradise Lost, but if you let your
eyes wander to the right side of the screen, you'll notice that Picard may have been using
his collection of classic literature to cover up the fact that he never outgrew noir dime novels.
Underneath the works of Milton, the good captain has a copy of Dixon Hill in The Long Dark Tunnel,
one of the Depression-era mysteries that Picard used to love escaping into via the holodeck,
the Enterprise's answer to the question
"what if your Super Nintendo tried to kill you one out of five times you turned it on?"
Dixon Hill episodes were a highlight of Star Trek:
The Next Generation, with Picard letting his hair down (for lack of a better word)
and getting into a fantasy world where he played the private detective, Dixon Hill.
Details being everything, the cover seen in the teaser trailer even features the name of
the author, Tracy Tormé, itself a reference to the longtime Star Trek writer of the same name.
Right around the 25 second mark of Picard's season 2 teaser,
you'll notice a gilded model ship. Pedestrian nerds will recognize it as "not the Enterprise."
Old heads, though, know it as the Stargazer.
See, back in the days before Picard landed the flagship of the Federation,
he was stationed aboard a rinky-dink vessel:
NCC-2893, a Constellation class ship with a chip on its shoulder.
"It was an overworked, underpowered vessel, always on the verge of flying apart at the seams."
Jean-Luc was still relatively small potatoes at the time, serving as a helmsman,
but fate threw him a bone in the form of his captain's sudden death. Picard took command,
saving the day and making a name for himself to the point where Starfleet promoted him,
making him the captain of the Stargazer. He served as the ship's captain for over two decades.
The Stargazer's story could fit nicely with the narrative being set up in the teaser trailer,
which seems focused on old regrets resurfacing as time presses on.
Picard eventually lost the ship during a battle with the Ferengi and wound up court marshalled for
it. Whatever the case, he's always kept that first command close to his heart. We even saw a model
of the ship in his section of the Starfleet Archive Museum during season 1 of Picard.
The clearest overarching theme of the teaser is the concept of time, and the most literal allusion
to that concept comes in the form of an hourglass on Picard's desk. As the camera pans up the
device, the sands inside move backward, sliding up into the top of the glass instead of down toward
the bottom. This obviously suggests the turning back or reversing of time, something that Picard's
narration speaks to. But it also might have a much more specific meaning for Picard himself.
Fans of Star Trek: The Next Generation may remember that the series finale,
"All Good Things," saw Picard being transported through three different time periods — his past,
his present, and his future — as he tries to get to the bottom of
a spatial anomaly that poses a potential threat to humanity.
As if that wasn't enough, the mischievous omniscient being
Q appears to him, apparently to toy with him, but ultimately guiding his mission.
It's the last time that Picard and Q met, as far as we know. Although the hourglass
has some general symbolic meaning, it may also be directly referencing that specific mission,
which saw Picard going back and forth through time like the sand in the hourglass.
That feels even more likely when you consider that
the next image in the teaser is a clear and direct reference to Q.
Out of all the TNG characters that fans were hoping to see in season 1 of Picard,
one stood out like a mariachi band on the bridge of the Enterprise-D — and that's Q.
"Au contraire, mon capitaine! He's back!"
This strange cosmic figure was intertwined with the plot of Star Trek: The Next Generation from
its very first episode. Debuting in "Encounter at Farpoint," Q is
a member of a race of omnipotent space gods, also called Q. It's complicated.
Throughout the series, Q would appear to antagonize Picard and crew, on whom he
developed a curious fixation. Episodes in which he appeared were always memorable,
from the time he turned the Enterprise's command crew into characters from Robin Hood, to the much
more serious encounter in which he warned the Enterprise about the looming threat of the Borg.
All of this, he claimed, was part of a great trial to see if the human race was worthy of existence.
"The trial never ended, Captain.We never reached a verdict. But now we have. You're guilty."
Whether he's back to his old tricks remains to be seen, but like he pointed out in the series
finale — and once again, now, in Picard's season 2 teaser — the trial never ends.
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