Patrick Stewart will be returning to his most iconic role one more time, suiting up as Jean-Luc Picard for the second season of “Star Trek: Picard”.
For fans of “Star Trek: The Next Generation”, the new season delivers an embarrassment of riches, including uber-nemesis the Borg, plus the reappearance of Q (once again played by John de Lancie) and Guinan (Whoopi Goldberg).
Stewart told ET Canada that reuniting with de Lancie and Goldberg “was extraordinary,” but revealed it’s Q who drives the season’s storyline.
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“I knew that everyone, the executive producers, were united in absolute certainty in the belief that Q should be part of this story because we don’t know, but it’s possible the Q can live forever,” Stewart explained. “So if that’s true, while all the rest of us are getting older, that would be a very interesting aspect of the story. But Q may not be living forever. I don’t know. I’m not teasing you with that, but I don’t know. It’s just a possibility.”
As for reuniting with Goldberg, Stewart admitted it’s something he’d been wanting to do for some time. “Well, from the day that she arrived on the set of ‘Next Generation’ and gave me her reasons for wanting to do ‘Star Trek’, she pressured herself on ‘Star Trek’ because she wanted to be part of it. And she was thrilled,” he said.
“I mean, that day on ‘The View’, when I said we wanted her to come back on the show, I hadn’t realized this because we were sitting at opposite ends of the table, that she was weeping. Well, when I made that request, she had tears in her eyes and on her cheeks, and I knew then that I’d done the right thing.”
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Meanwhile, viewers can expect to see Picard in a whole new light. “There are elements of Picard’s childhood that are being exposed by the story and those elements are showing him that his beliefs in what his childhood was like, and how the tragedy that occurred in the family came about, was one thing when in fact it’s proved to be something very different. And it feels so real,” Stewart said.
“The adjustment that he’s had to make to what was really happening in his home when he was a child, the impact has been enormous on him,” he continued. “And he may never fully recover from it, but it has also shown him that by denying closeness from another person in his life, intimacy of the kind that he doesn’t even have with Deanna Troi or Dr. Crusher or Commander Riker, it’s very potent.”
Picard, Stewart added, “is having to face truths which he’s never faced before, and I find that fascinating.”
The new season of “Star Trek: Picard” debuts Thursday, March 3.
