I hope this doesn't Shaka when the walls fell...

Never thought I'd hear myself say this,
but maybe that's enough Star Trek?

CBS's streaming service, as I have previously indicated, is dumb and I hate it. But it's the only way to see new Star Trek. You have to pay extra for it and it's not in fancy 4KHD (like it is everywhere else in the world), but still, new Star Trek so they're getting my money. And in an effort to make sure trekkies don't unsubscribe during Discovery's hiatus, they're making even more new Star Trek shows. Like, five of them, which even I, a fairly hard-core fan, admit is kind of a lot.

One of those shows is the unimaginatively named Star Trek: Picard. A teaser trailer was released today that-huh? Yeah, this whole post is going to be about Star Trek, so if that's not your cuppa tea, now's the time to bail. 

What kind of tea? I don't know,
Irish Breakfast. What do you think?

"Fuck the Prime Directive Mr. Worf!"

-Captain Picard,

actual line

Still with me? Super. So the Picard show will see Sir Patrick Stewart-yeah, he's a knight. The show will see Sir Patrick Stewart return to the role after seventeen years. Well, twenty-one years if you, like me, would just rather pretend Star Trek: Nemesis never happened. Remember? The one where Picard goes off-roading on a pre-warp planet? Anyway, since the announcement there's been very little information about what the show will be like other than executive producer Alex Kurtzman describing it as a more grounded and contemplative show than say Discovery. Which, what does that mean exactly? 

I love Discovery but sometimes I feel like it was written by actual cocaine. Which isn't a criticism I just-ok, it is a criticism, but again it's a great Trek show, I'm just not always sure about what's happening.

Spoiler alert, but in this scene from the season 2 finale, the Enterprise and Discovery
are fighting secret agent not-Borgs who want to become sentient so time travel happens.
And then everyone agreed never to talk about it again. No, really. That was season 2.

You wouldn't think wine-making would
be all that lucrative in a future with both
replicators and a money-less economy but...

So cool, grounded and more contemplative than Disco. Ok. I'm in. But how grounded? Like I mentioned earlier, a teaser trailer came out today and a lot of it was old man hands tending grape vines, which seems a little weird for a Star Trek thing if you don't know that in addition to being a space captain, Picard is also a brand of wine in the future. According to the narration, there was apparently some rescue mission that Picard led, something happened, and then he left Starfleet and went back to France to make wine and I don't know, play his flute. 

"Explain Star Trek? Don't mind if I do!"

-any Star Trek fan at any time 

This all lines up with some of the scant plot details we've been given so far, specifically that the series would deal with the repercussions of the planet Romulus' destruction in the 2009 Star Trek sorta-reboot. How? I'm glad I pretended you asked. One of the running story arcs of the Next Generation was Picard trying to make peace between the Romulans and the Federation. In fact, the two-parter where Mr. Spock returned was all about the Romulan storyline. It's was a big part of the series.

But unfortunately, it never got resolved and then J. J. Abrams esploded planet Romulus out of dubious plot necessity, so it looked like it never would. 

In The Force Awakens, Abrams
blew up five planets. Because stakes. 

Well, no, those are still problems,
but at least TV's pretty great.

But now we live in a world where Full House is back on tv so I guess anything is possible. Even picking up a thirty-year old plot line from Star Trek. See? The future isn't all climate collapse and twitter-based rage. Anyway, using my encyclopedic knowledge of Star Trek, I predict that the aforementioned rescue mission referred has to do with Picard saving Romulans from their scientifically implausible doom and that that mission's consequences set up the show's arc.

Ok, cool, so Romulans, old Picard, wine-making. That's what we've got so far. Will it be any good? I hope so. I mean, I hope it's not too grounded. Contemplative is great. I'm all for contemplative, but I also need Picard to get up to some Star Trek-y stuff. Like, come out of retirement, get the crew back together and maybe remark about how he's too old for this merde. Could it be that they're just saving it for the full trailer? I mean, the whole show can't just be Picard tending grapes and aging, can it? 

Somehow after the Borg and Q, drought and
grape mites don't feel like satisfying adversaries.