The Star Trek news keeps rolling today, as franchise leader Alex Kurtzman gives us the biggest hint yet as to where we’ll find Jean-Luc Picard as Patrick Stewart returns to the fold later this year.
“Picard’s life was radically altered by the dissolution of the Romulan Empire,” Kurtzman revealed to The Hollywood Reporter this afternoon. The explosion of the Hobus star — which created a supernova that destroyed the Romulan homeworld (and sent Spock back in time to the Kelvin universe) in the 2009 Star Trek film — sets the stage for where we’ll find our captain when the Picard series debuts this fall.
The 2009 film was of course co-written by Kurtzman and then-partner Roberto Orci, and the flashback moments of that film, showing Spock’s failure to stop the Hobus supernova from taking out Romulus, is the farthest into the prime Star Trek timeline the franchise has ventured with our familiar characters.
This answers one of the biggest questions fans have had since the Picard series — which still has not been titled — was first announced back in the summer: will the CBS All Access series be able to tap into the big-screen Trek adventures? With the two halves of the franchise being separated between CBS (which controls television production) and Paramount Pictures (which manages the film properties), it’s been a bit of a murky subject.
This tie-in to the end of the Romulan Empire may also tie into Picard’s adventures on the pointy-eared adversary’s home planet in “Unification,” where he met with Spock during the fifth season of Star Trek: The Next Generation, as well as his encounter with clone Shinzon (Tom Hardy) in the last TNG film, Star Trek: Nemesis.
Kurtzman also shared more details on how the production team lured Stewart back to Trek:
Kurtzman says Stewart agreed to return only if he could defy what people are used to seeing with Trek. “He threw down an amazing gauntlet and said, ‘If we do this, I want it to be so different, I want it to be both what people remember but also not what they’re expecting at all, otherwise why do it?’ ” Kurtzman recalls of their initial discussions for what would become the highly anticipated CBS All Access series.
Kurtzman, along with then-Star Trek: Discovery producer Akiva Goldsman and writer Kirsten Beyer met with the Stewart to pitch their vision.
“What we tried to convey in that meeting was how desperately we loved him and the character and how much we wanted to see what happened to Picard,” says Kurtzman.
Stewart asked them to prepare a three-page document outlining their ideas. By this point, novelist and screenwriter Michael Chabon had joined the team to pitch a Picard-centric show, and they soon realized they could not fit their ideas into just three pages.
“It turned into a 34-page document — with no way to shorten it,” says Kurtzman. “We were going on all in and he was going to read it or not read it, love it or hate it. It was our best attempt at trying to get him to say yes.”
Fortunately, Stewart liked what he read. Kurtzman got the call that Stewart would be in Los Angeles during Oscars weekend and wanted to meet.
“He walked into the room and he had a huge smile on his face and said, ‘This is wonderful,’ ” recalls Kurtzman of that March 2018 meeting. 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.”
And on the often-asked question about other Next Generation characters popping up in the new series along side Captain Picard? “Anything can happen,” said Kurtzman.
We’ll continue to bring you all the latest news on the Picard project as it breaks — in the meantime, what do you think of these latest Romulan-themed development? Sound off in the comments below!