The Star Trek: Picard Movie Has Us Very Worried
As a franchise, Star Trek has often had episodes where characters learn the perils of getting exactly what they want. For example, in the classic The Next Generation episode “Tapestry,” Patrick Stewart’s Captain Picard learns that if he had avoided a drunken bar brawl that nearly killed him, as he had always wanted, his career would have been sad and stagnated.
Sadly, Stewart didn’t seem to learn this important lesson from the episode: the veteran actor recently expressed excitement over a Star Trek: Picard movie Paramount is writing, and he doesn’t seem to realize such a film would be as disastrous as most of Picard.
Third Time’s The Charm
If you’re currently remembering how warm and fuzzy Star Trek: Picard made you feel, that’s only because the third and final season brought back the entire ensemble cast of The Next Generation and finally delivered a coherent storyline.
Before that, we had a first season that revealed the Federation to be hypocritical cowards before showing us some robot god thing straight out of Mass Effect.
In season 2, the writers simply threw a dying Q, some boring Borg, and a ton of wasted time travel potential into a blender and delivered a smoothie that tasted like something from waste extraction.
Could Be Even Worse?
You can probably tell where we’re going with this. If Paramount actually delivers a Star Trek: Picard movie, there is no guarantee it will bear much resemblance to the one good season of the show.
In all likelihood, it will be even worse than what came before because there will be fewer classic cast cameos and the show already killed or wrote out most of the original characters it previously introduced.
That means that a Star Trek: Picard movie will mostly focus on the title character (Stewart is the only cast member we know of), and that’s a big part of what has us worried.
Movie Picard Is the Worst Picard
What do you think of when you think about Captain Picard? Most fans imagine the calm and measured captain who tends to save the day with logic, reason, and a perfectly timed speech.
He was deliberately written as the tonal opposite of William Shatner’s cowboy Captain Kirk, but the Star Trek: The Next Generation films gave us a captain who was completely different.
Not An Action Hero
Beginning with Star Trek: First Contact, the franchise tried to turn Picard into an action hero: he shows off his biggest muscles and best action movies when fighting the Borg, and then the next movie turns him into a sexy rebel who tells Starfleet where to stick it.
Oh, and in the film after that, he’s zipping around in a dune buggy and engaging in hand-to-hand combat with his evil clone.
The sad truth is that Patrick Stewart likes pretending Picard is an action hero, so the upcoming movie will likely substitute those classy Picard speeches with embarrassing fight scenes featuring an actor in his eighties.
The Worst Of Both Worlds
Here’s the final kicker: the best thing that could happen in a Star Trek: Picard movie will still piss fans off in a major way.
After the success of Picard’s season three, countless fans began clamoring for a Star Trek: Legacy to continue the adventures of Seven of Nine and Jack Crusher, with potential cameos from characters like Jean-Luc Picard and Beverly Crusher.
The Picard finale even teased this possibility by showing Q visiting Jack Crusher, but it looks like Paramount is about as likely to give us a Legacy show as they are to give us remastered episodes of Deep Space Nine or Voyager.
Prediction Time
So here’s our prediction: just as the intended Section 31 show became a Section 31 movie, we think the Star Trek: Legacy series that Picard showrunner Terry Matalas wanted to make happen will become the Star Trek: Picard movie.
While that might sound better than nothing, turning the would-be series into a movie means we won’t get all the fun potential cameos that a multi-season show would give us (Kate Mulgrew, anyone?).
At the same time, making it explicitly a Picard movie means we’ll get yet another swan song for Patrick Stewart, meaning that potential Legacy lead characters like Seven of Nine and Jack Crusher will take a backseat.
Final Thoughts
Call it the worst of both worlds: such a Star Trek: Picard movie would ruin the entire point of a Legacy series while squandering its potential to give us one more trip to Patrick Stewart’s nostalgia buffet.
At this point, what’s left on that buffet is looking so decrepit and nasty that we’d rather swing by the Klingon restaurant on Deep Space Nine for some gagh.
Unlike the modern Star Trek franchise, we can at least rest assured that the gagh is still alive.
