Star Trek: Picard Teaser Spotlights Romulan Agent Narek

CBS All Access is counting down the weeks to the premiere of Star Trek: Picard with a series of teasers. The latest features the new character Narek, played by Harry Treadaway. Narek is a Romulan agent who joins up with Jean-Luc Picard and his crew to investigate the Romulans’ new interest in Borg drones. You can watch the teaser above. And speaking of Borg drones, last week’s teaser featured Seven of Nine, again played by Star Trek: Voyager‘s Jeri Ryan. You can see that teaser here. While the Borg are a familiar race from Voyager and Star Trek: The Next Generation, Picard is said to be approaching the Borg from a new and different angle.

“Obviously it’s not a secret that the Borg were involved, and [Patrick Stewart’s] first instinct was not to do the Borg,” series creator Alex Kurtzman said in a recent interview. “He was like, ‘I did that story. I don’t want to do that story.’ And we couldn’t just say, ‘Yeah, but we loved you in it so much, we just want to do that again.’ And what ended up emerging was actually as a result of that back and forth, a very unique and very different Borg story. Definitely not one that you could have told in Next Generation. And certainly not what I think anyone’s expecting.”

This is the lastest piece of the publicity push for Star Trek: Picard, which premieres this month. CBS released a new teaser trailer for Picard during NFL football over the weekend. It also released a trailer for “Children of Mars,” the episode of Star Trek: Short Treks that ties into Picard.

Star Trek: Picard continues the story of Jean-Luc Picard from Star Trek: The Next Generation, but Kurtzman has said that this series is a different experience from the series in which Stewart originated the character.

“You know, we feel a tremendous responsibility to the fans who have loved [the Picard character], and Patrick himself, who took a massive leap of faith with us in choosing to come back and play Picard [after] he said he was done forever,” Kurtzman said. “He also said, ‘I want to make sure if I come back, if you loved TNG, you’ll feel we’re honoring it, but this is a very different experience.’ This is really a very different experience. It looks incredibly different, the kind of storytelling is different, but if you’re someone who’s never watched it at all, it’s been built for you to come into it and get to be dropped into this very emotional story about this captain who’s in the late stage of his life and is dealing with the sum total of all his choices.

“It also has an incredible new crew — incredible, to a person, they’re all so wonderful. And we have now started showing it to the studio, and they’re thrilled with it, so that gave us a lot more confidence that we’ve hit the mark. We’ve now watched five episodes with Patrick and he’s thrilled with it too. Because he was so happy with it, it makes us feel like it honored what we promised.”

Star Trek: Picard debuts January 23rd on CBS All Access.