Star Trek: Picard Producer Says Coronavirus Hasn't Been Written Into Scripts Yet

Star Trek: Picard season 2 is adding some new blood to its creative team, including new supervising producer Marc Bernardin. Bernardin is best known as an entertainment journalist (THR, EW), and TV writer (Castle Rock, Treadstone, Carnival Row) - and of course, as the co-host of Kevin Smith's FatMan Beyond podcast. It was on that latter show where Smith and Bernardin got into the timely discussion of how Hollywood films and TV shows will treat the Coronavirus Pandemic as a piece of world history - including how Bernardin and the creative team over at Star Trek will address it.

So has Star Trek: Picard started to incorporate the Coronavirus Pandemic (or any sci-fi adaptation of it) into the season 2 scripts? Here's what Marc Bernardin had to say: '

"Thus far no. But I think we talked about it last time - the trying to figure out how our lives will be impacted on a long-term basis. And not specifically people who like lost somebody during the pandemic - in the same way not specifically people who lost someone during 9/11 - but how the culture changes. You know I was talking to somebody online the other day, and I was like, 'Do you actually think that professional sports come back... do you think people are going to show up and fill those arenas anymore? Like, that's 60,000 people sitting on each other's laps, all the time. How quickly do you think people are going to get to a point where they're cool with that?'"

No doubt, future TV and move projects will try to turn the Coronavirus Pandemic (or a generic pandemic) into the subject matter of their story. However, there's the larger question that Bernardin raises as to how the aftermath of the COVID-19 outbreak changes society forever. Those social changes will be the new reality baseline that defines all genre storytelling - much like the normalization of cell phones as story devices, or the darker themes of terror and fear that permeates virtually all creative work in the post-9/11 era of the 2000s. Anxiety about infection, overcrowding, isolation, societal collapse, even new considerations about extinction - these are all themes shared by people all around the world right now, which will require the cathartic process of fictional storytelling to help sort out.

Luckily, the sci-fi genre is greatly equipped for this kind of storytelling. Series like Star Trek (or even more modern ones like Westworld) all hint at humanity having dipped into some deep and/or nearly fatal peril, before entering the cleaner, more advanced civilizations we know. So, retrofitting plague into humanity's troubled history won't be too hard for Star Trek - the greater challange will be coming with new episodes that make good metaphor of the Coronavirus Pandemic.

Star Trek: Picard Season 1 is now streaming on CBS All Access. Star Trek: Discovery season 3 is slated to air in 2020.