Star Trek: Picard's Premiere May Have Doomed Another TNG Icon
WARNING: The following contains spoilers for "Remembrance," the series premiere of Star Trek: Picard, streaming now on CBS All Access and Star Trek: Picard—Countdown#1, by Kirsten Beyer, Mike Johnson, Angel Hernandez, Joana Lafuente and Neil Uyetake, on sale now.
After just one episode of Star Trek: Picard, the future is looking pretty bleak for the characters of Star Trek: The Next Generation. The series opens with Jean-Luc Picard living an isolated life on his family vineyard, having resigned from Starfleet in disgust after it refused its promise to help the desperate Romulan Empire.
While Commander Data died in Star Trek: Nemesis, that 2002 film ended with a tease that he could have lived on in the body of another android, B-4. However, Picard’s premiere explicitly states that B-4 wasn’t advanced enough to hold Data’s memories. Even though Picard meets Dahj, a young woman who appears to be Data’s android daughter, she’s apparently maimed and killed by the end of the episode.
Click the button below to start this article in quick view. Start nowWhile those tragic events set Picard on a hopeful mission to find Data’s other daughter, the episode also lays out a series of events that could have led to the death of Lt. Commander Geordi La Forge years earlier.
In Star Trek: Picard—Countdown #1, the Picard comic-book prequel reveals that La Forge was stationed on Mars in 2385. As part of Starfleet’s humanitarian efforts to relocate Romulans who were endangered by their sun going supernova, La Forge was in charge of overseeing a project to quickly build a new fleet of ships at the Utopia Planitia Shipyards above Mars.
While the issue begins with a pleasant conversation between Geordi and his old Enterprise captain, Picard casts that scene in a far more ominous light.
As the Picard premiere and the Short Treks prequel that preceded it establish, the Federation was fundamentally changed when a group of Synthetics attacked Mars at some point in the mid-2380s.
Ultimately, that attack left over 92,000 people dead, started fires that burned for decades and led to the effective ban on androids and almost all forms of artificial life. The attack also resulted in the destruction of the Utopia Planitia Shipyards, where La Forge was stationed around that time.
While it’s not clear if La Forge was at the Shipyards during the attack, there’s a very real chance that the TNG engineer could’ve been killed there. Even if Geordi survived the attack or wasn’t present for it, the destruction of a place that was under his command would almost certainly take a hefty psychological toll on the beloved TNG character.
Even though Geordi’s presence at the Utopia Shipyards was only established in a comic book, there’s still reason to think that it could be addressed on the show. While Star Trek comics and novels are usually just side stories that don’t affect larger Trek lore, Star Trek: Picard—Countdown has been billed as a direct, canonical prequel to Picard, and it’s co-written by Kirsten Beyer, one of the chief creative forces behind the series.
While LeVar Burton has expressed interest in reprising his role as Geordi La Forge, Picardexecutive producer Heather Kadin told TVLine that wouldn’t happen in the show’s first season.
Still, the eventual return of an aged La Forge could give the Starfleet officer a completely new history that supersedes this comic in the larger continuity. But until Picard says otherwise, the final fate of Geordi La Forge is unclear.
Star Trek: Picard stars Patrick Stewart, Alison Pill, Michelle Hurd, Evan Evagora, Isa Briones, Santiago Cabrera and Harry Treadaway. New episodes of the series premiere every Thursday on CBS All Access.
Source: www.cbr.com