Star Trek: Picard wasted no time establishing a new status quo for the franchise in a few different ways, one of which was giving the titular character a brand new Number One. Since Jean-Luc is no longer the Captain of the Enterprise, and doesn’t have a right-hand man, it only made sense for this new Number One to be someone equally as close to the character….his dog. Speaking with host Wil Wheaton on the new after show The Ready Room, series showrunner and Executive Producer Michael Chabon opened up about the addition of the dog revealing the new Number One was there from the beginning.
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“Pretty early on,” Chabon said when asked when the choice was made to give him that name. “As soon as the first draft was getting written I think it appeared at that point. It’s meant to be…it’s an Easter egg, and it’s cute and charming, but there’s something also kind of poignant about it, to me at least. He doesn’t have a Number 1, those days are behind him. Riker’s long gone in his life and there’s almost something sort of touching that he’s trying to recreate in the form of a dog, which is not a bad thing to try to do. (It’s) So much that he’s lost, so much that he’s left behind.”
As far as the former Number One, William Riker, is concerned, actor Jonathan Frakes will reprise the role for Picard in addition to stepping behind the camera and direct three of the show’s ten episodes.
Like the franchise’s most recent hit, Star Trek: Discovery, Picard will be streaming exclusively on the CBS All Access service here in the United States, a subscription to which has become a must-have for Star Trek fans over the past couple of years. CBS All Access has a free trial for users that have yet to give the service a go. You can stream whatever you want on All Access, including the Picard premiere, for a full week before being charged for it. Simply go to CBS.com and sign up for your free trial, and you’ll have no issue watching the new Star Trek series.
If you don’t want to pay for CBS All Access after your trial, be sure to go into your setting and cancel within that seven day window. If you’re content with what you’re paying for, however, just let the subscription kick in after a week and keep watching.
For those in Canada, new episodes of Star Trek: Picard will first arrive on television every Thursday at 9 pm ET. The episodes will be available on the Crave streaming service the following day. For fans in other countries around the world. new episodes of Picard will be released on Amazon Prime Video every Friday morning.
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