Star Trek: Picard: Why the Picard Day Banner Is Kept Revealed

The first episode of Star Trek: Picard on CBS All Access offered fans a chance to return to the world of Star Trek: The Next Generation. Though that world has changed, Captain Jean-Luc Picard kept a few mementos from how it used to be. During one scene, Picard visited his archive at the Starfleet Museum. There were many items there from his time in command of the USS Enterprise. One of them was the Captain Picard Day banner that the children aboard the Enterprise presented made for him in the episode “The Pegasus.” This week also saw the debut of Star Trek: Picard aftershow The Ready Room, hosted by Star Trek: The Next Generation alum Wil Wheaton. He asked director Hanelle M. Culpepper and showrunner Michael Chabon why they included that banner in the premiere.

“I feel like it just kind says a lot about his character’s growth and the things he’s come to value,” Culpepper says, “and what’s so great is that only Patrick Stewart could pull off that character who could be so grumpy around kids and so hate this day that the kids are honoring him and pull it off and make us love him even more because of it and so, I don’t know, it felt very poignant to me that it was ultimately special to him that he had to have it and I was like ‘Let’s make sure we get that in.’”

Chabon adds, “It ties in, to me, directly to the finale of TNG in that what that is about, among many other things, that last moment when he says ‘I should have done this a lot sooner’ is missed opportunity, right? He realizes in that moment all these years I could have been doing this and I missed that opportunity. And the same thing, in a much smaller less intimate way with that banner, in hindsight he might look at that banner and think… I should have appreciated it for what it was at the time and it was a missed opportunity.

“As you get older, you tend to look back on a lot of the things you’ve done, even small things like that, and in Picard’s case there are a lot of big things too and think like, ‘You know, I shouldn’t have done it that way,’ or, ‘If I could go back, I would apologize and I didn’t apologize or I would help someone when I said I was too busy.’ That’s a little one, but I think it’s made out of the same materials.”

The first episode of Star Trek: Picard is full of interesting callbacks and reveals. The episode reveals why Picard left Starfleet and offers new information to the backstory of Nero, the villain of 2009’s Star Trek movie. Critics have given the show a warm reception, getting it certified fresh on Rotten Tomatoes. You can read ComicBook.com’s review here.

New episodes of Star Trek: Picard become available to stream Thursdays on CBS All Access.

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