With Star Trek: Picard season 2, producer and director Akiva Goldsman is planning to answer questions about Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart) that haven’t been answered in Star Trek: The Next Generation. With the return of Q (John de Lancie) and Guinan (Whoopi Goldberg), Star Trek: Picard season 2 launches Jean-Luc on a time travel adventure that depicts “the road not taken” by the legendary Starfleet Admiral.
Screen Rant spoke to Academy Award-winner Akiva Goldsman on how he and showrunner Terry Matalas plotted Picard’s new journey in season 2, which of Star Trek: Picard‘s new characters he enjoys writing for, and whether Picard season 3 is the definitive end of the series.
Screen Rant: Coming into Picard season 2, you’ve got a lot of TNG greatest hits: Q, Guinan, time travel, the Borg Queen (Annie Wersching). How did you approach putting season 2 together?
Avika Goldsman: Season 2 ultimately turns into ‘Picard looking into Picard.’ And so, in order to set those stakes, we needed some things that were unique. We needed Picard’s two deepest surviving relationships, which are Q and Guinan. So they gave us both emotional context and a couple of things that we really needed for storytelling.
Q can create a palate for us that can externalize [Picard’s] internal journey because he’s magic. Guinan can be someone that triggers a journey. Someone who knows Picard’s struggles and has cross-temporal awareness, which is required as we started to shift timelines. So the story kind of called out for them and we went for ’em.
Besides Picard and the legacy characters, who among the new characters did you really take to and enjoy writing for?
Akiva Goldsman: Honestly, I really dug all of them. It’s hard not to get a kick out of writing a speech for Alison Pill when she plays [Dr. Agnes] Jurati. That speech in [Picard] episode 2 where she’s sort of trying to talk her way out of having to call Seven [Jeri Ryan] ‘Seven.’ She just does this rant. They’re really fun to write because Alison can just say as many words as you can put on a page.
How did Q need to be different this time around?
Akiva Goldsman: We try always to have the characters show up not the way we last saw them. We want there to be the weight of history. Although Q’s life is not temporally linear, we still managed to create this idea that things have happened in his development that weren’t true when last we saw him. For us, that gives a kind of story weight.
Picard season 3 is nearly done shooting, I believe?
Akiva Goldsman: Yes.
Is that the definitive end?
Akiva Goldsman: It is today.
With someone like Picard, we know who he is and what he stands for. How do you approach such a defined character and what new facets are there still to discover about this man?
Akiva Goldsman: I think part of the joy of the show is finding exactly what those are? That’s what we tried to do in season 2. We looked at Picard’s life and said, “There seems to be an interesting absence of durable romantic connections.” What’s that about? Where does that come from? Ha ha, we said. Let’s figure it out.
Star Trek: Picard Season 2 premieres Thursday, March 3, on Paramount+.
