Star Trek: Picard TV Spot Offers New Look at Data

CBS has released a new Star Trek: Picard television spot that has made its way online. The short commercial consists up of quick cuts between shots from the show. One of those clips appears to be a shot of Data that appeared in the trailer released at San Diego Comic-Con 2019. Data’s appearance is now closer to how he looked in the Star Trek: The Next Generation movies. The most probable explanation for this is that those working on the series have had time to go back and touch up the shot in post-production. That may not have been possible ahead of Comic-Con (if you ever wonder why some Comic-Con trailers and footage don’t make it online, this kind of post-production work is often a big part of it).

This is the latest 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 producer Alex 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.