Star Trek: Picard Season 2 Will Have More Starfleet

Star Trek: Picard featured little of the Star Trek franchise's signature institution, Starfleet. Though one of Starfleet's most decorated officers of all time, Jean-Luc Picard had left his Starfleet career behind to live out his retirement on Earth (though that wasn't always the plan). Not a single Starfleet vessel appeared in the show until Captain William Riker showed up with a rescue fleet to aid Jean-Luc Picard his standoff wth a Romulan war fleet above the android homeworld of Coppelius. The second season of the CBS All Access is now in development. Producer Akiva Goldsman tells IndieWire that there will be a more significant Starfleet presence in the show's sophomore outing.

"We knew that bringing in that fleet was a little bit of a promise, and so we tried to be thoughtful about it," Goldsman says. "Especially as we go forward, we're going to start making statements about really what the world of Starfleet, at least technologically if not socially and culturally … These are the things that are likely to get a little bit more play than they did [in Season 1] in what was essentially a story about somebody who is outside of Starfleet."

There were plans for Picard's second season to begin shooting this month. Goldsman revealed in a previous interview that the coronavirus had dashed those plans. "We were not shooting," Goldsman said. "We were to start shooting in June, which I guarantee you we will not unless the world opens tomorrow. We had broken the season. We were about halfway through the writing of it. You know, we will start as soon as we can once the world opens, you know? Prep will have to resume, and then we'll start. We know what it is, and it's cool. And we're excited by it, and I feel like we learned a lot from season one. Of the things I have in my life, it is the one that is most imminent when the world opens. It's the one that feels like that's the thing, at least in my life, that's going to come back fastest."

Remaining optimistic, Goldsman sees the delay as a blessing for the show's writers. He said that it "is fundamentally a gift to be able to do all of them [the episodes] if you can. Because unlike previous iterations of television, this serialized ten-hour narrative has setups and payoffs that require a thoughtful view of the object once it is completed. It's very funny, in the first season of Picard, there were all these reviews of the beginning, 'Oh it's so dark, it's so dark, it's so dark.' And I kept saying, 'They're reviewing the first act of a movie.' The first act of a movie is always dark. If you stopped It's a Wonderful Life at the bridge, it's a really dark movie! Because fundamentally in a long-form narrative, it's a redemption story, it's a healing story. It has to be bad at the beginning, so it gets good at the end. Otherwise, there's nothing to fix. So we're in this weird world now where we create one narrative object, but we dole it out bit by bit, which is fascinating. And it can be kind of fun. But what you really want is to be able to refine your setups once you've written your payoffs… if, in fact, you could have the time to write 10 hours first, that would be amazing. And maybe we will."

The first season ofStar Trek: Picard is streaming now on CBS All Access.

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Source: comicbook.com