Star Trek: Picard Producers Reveal Nothing From the Original Pitch Made It Into the Show

It was no small task to convince Patrick Stewart to return as Captain Jean-Luc Picard from Star Trek: The Next Generation in Star Trek: Picard. It took several attempts by the show’s producers — Akiva Goldsman and Michael Chabon among them — before Stewart agreed to reprise the role. Speaking to ComicBook.com ahead of the show’s premiere, Goldsman and Chabon revealed that nothing from those pitches made it into the series. Rather than a plan for the season, they were about showing Stewart how serious they were about trying new, exciting, and different kinds of stories with the character of Picard.

“There was a really lengthy pitch that he just said no to,” Goldsman said. “And then, unwilling to have gotten so close and fall so far, we all went back, put our heads together, Michael wrote a 35-page document/love letter/treatise/please come back which was the promise of a show which both convinced him to take a flier on us and one of which exists in any of the material that you’ll have seen.”

“It was a proof-of-concept for us more than a particular season of television,” Chabon adds.

Goldsman continues, “He wanted to see if we meant it when we said, no, we don’t need you to stand on the bridge of the Enterprise-Q, F, Z, M, and say ‘make it so.’ We know that we too were interested in what might happen to a man of his age, a man of his century, that might reflect what was happening in ours.”

Star Trek fans may have noticed that certain dynamics have shifted since we last visited Picard’s era of the Star Trek universe. Starfleet is more suspect, while the Romulans and even the Borg are more sympathetic. Comicbook.com asked about these changes as well.

“The general answer to that question is always going to be in some way or another a reflection of this world that we live in now,” Chabon says, “because that’s what Star Trek does and has done from the very beginning, from TOS forward. Star Trek has always been about the 22nd century, or 24th century and the 20th century, or 21st century now, always, simultaneously. And so the Borg as we will encounter, the Romulans as we will encounter them, Starfleet as we encounter it will all be true to what we’ve heard and what know and what we’ve seen before on Star Trek about those entities and also true to what we are all experiencing in the world that we’re living in.”

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

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