Star Trek Picard: What happened to Jean-Luc as the Star Trek: Picard trailer drops

The first trailer for the Sir Patrick Stewart-fronted show Star Trek: Picard has landed.

Acclaimed actor of the stage and screen Sir Patrick Stewart is returning to play the retired Admiral, and we got our first look at him in the role this week.

Back in August, Star Trek fans all over the world got the good news that one of the most beloved actors in the world was returning to play one of the most beloved Star Trek officers of all time – Jean-Luc Picard.

At the Las Vegas Star Trek convention, Stewart told the crowd: ‘I have never ever grown tired of hearing from people … who say to me “Your show changed my life. Without Star Trek: Next Generation, I might not be here”.

‘And that lies at the very centre of what I have to tell you now.

‘Jean-Luc Picard back.’

While this news was happy, the trailer, which dropped on 23 May, seems to offer something of a grimmer tone, with Picard evidently having retired from Starfleet after the ‘unimaginable’ happened, and an as-yet unknown female character asking him: ‘What did that cost you?’ and ‘Why did you leave Starfleet, Admiral?’

With Picard also seen staring into the camera with a pretty unhappy look on his face, it’s left plenty of room to wonder about what exactly happened to Jean-Luc Picard…

What happened to Star Trek’s Jean-Luc Picard?

Not much is known yet about the nature of the new Star Trek series, other than that it’s going to focus on Jean-Luc roughly 20 years after the events that occurred in the movie Star Trek: Nemesis.

As to what happened to cause Picard to quit Starfleet, Alex Kurtzman – who’s an Executive Producer on Star Trek: Picard who and co-wrote both Star Trek (2009) and Star Trek: Into Darkness (2013) – told The Hollywood Reporter: ‘Picard’s life was radically altered by the dissolution of the Romulan Empire.’

Signs therefore point to the destruction of the planet Romulus as being a highly possible root cause of Picard’s retirement.

In the 2009 Star Trek film, we saw Romulus get destroyed by a supernova, despite Spock’s efforts to save the planet and the people on it – this was the catalyst for the events in the film and now, it seems like Jean-Luc was somehow involved as well.

Since the as-yet-unnamed character in the trailer tells Picard that he ‘commanded the greatest rescue armada in history’ before ‘the unimaginable’ happened, it seems highly likely that the loss of the Romulan planet is what’s haunting Picard.

As to the specifics of what happened, it looks like we’ll just have to wait and see…

Star Trek: Picard is expected to arrive later this year.

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Source: metro.co.uk