As part of a recent interview with Heat Vision, “Star Trek: Picard” co-showrunner Akiva Goldsman spoke about the upcoming second season and the backlash the first season received along with fan issues with “Star Trek: Discovery”.
First up, he confirms the former Enterprise-D captain’s ‘new body’ won’t impact the new season at all, saying they addressed that at the end of the first season and “he’s not Super Picard,” he’s just the same Picard without the congenital problem he lived with since the final season of “Star Trek: The Next Generation”.
Asked about fan complaints that “Picard” was ‘overly complicated’, Goldsman says he doesn’t think that was the problem:
“I think where our storytelling is complicated, if it is frustratingly so, it’s just our own fault for not doing it well enough. The great thing about plot complication and character excellence is they shouldn’t be mutually exclusive.
Even a really complicated plot should ultimately become invisible, that’s sort of the job of it. Chinatown being the example that we all endlessly lean on in our imaginations. [It’s] really complex and complicated, yet at the end of the day you just remember it’s about water. There’s this elegant disappearing act so the characters can shine”
Part of that is also acknowledging one key lesson from the first season that ties to arguably the biggest issue even the supporters of the series had with the show – those last few episodes:
“Figure out the end earlier. If you’re going to do a serialized show, you have the whole story before you start shooting. It’s more like a movie in that way – you better know the end of your third act before you start filming your first scene.”
He goes on to say that the return of John de Lancie’s Q will see that character having evolved like Picard himself has:
“[We] don’t pretend that the interstitial years didn’t happen. No, obviously, chronological time is less relevant to Q… We’re now talking about the issues that come up in the last [stage] of your life. We wanted a Q that could play in that arena with Picard.
There are a lot of people who think of Q as a trickster god, right? And he is. But he’s also a profoundly significant relationship in Picard’s life. There’s a lot of discussion in Picard season two about the nature of connectedness. Q’s kind of a great lightning rod for that because in some ways he’s one of Picard’s deepest – not deep in the same way that Riker is or Beverly Crusher was – but in its own uniquely, profoundly deep relationship.”
Asked if the “Section 31” spin-off was still happening, Goldsman says: “I don’t know. I believe so. Alex has a plan” which sounds essentially like no further progress than where we were a year ago.
Filming on the new run of “Picard” kicked off in February in California with the ten-episode run confirmed to be premiering on the Paramount+ service in 2022.
