Star Trek: New Captain Picard Series Deals With Destruction of Romulan Empire

Executive producer Alex Kurtzman is overseeing a new Captain Picard series for CBS All-Access, which is also home to Star Trek: Discovery, and he’s been talking about where we’ll find Captain Picard in the Star Trek timeline when we rejoin his story later this year.

What you’re about to read may be a little confusing if you haven’t been keeping up with the newer Star Trek movies, but we’ll try to break it down as best we can.

read more: Why Star Trek: Picard Won’t Be Like The Last Jedi

In the 2009 Star Trek film, starring Chris Pine, we were taken forward in time to the year 2387 during old Spock’s mind meld with the younger Kirk. Spock showed the rebellious future Captain a plan that he’d concocted to use red matter to create a black hole that would avert a forthcoming disaster – a star that was going supernova was set to destroy Romulus. Unfortunately, Spock didn’t manage to carry out his plan in time, and Romulus was destroyed. Kurtzman co-wrote this story, so it kinda makes sense that he’s taken this event and merged it with the new Picard series, using it to catch up with the timeline 12 years after the destruction of Romulus.

“Picard’s life was radically altered by the dissolution of the Romulan Empire,” Kurztman told THR, and the Romulan connection, featured in many stories that followed Picard through The Next Generation and into Nemesis, appears to be the hook that tempted Patrick Stewart back to the role. “What we tried to convey in [a first meeting with Stewart] was how desperately we loved him and the character and how much we wanted to see what happened to Picard. It turned into a 34-page document — with no way to shorten it. 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.”

Stewart indeed went for it, to Kurtzman’s delight and relief.

“He walked into the room and he had a huge smile on his face and said, ‘This is wonderful’. 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.”

We expect the still untitled Captain Picard series to arrive in late 2019.