How long will Star Trek Picard run? – Patrick Stewart talks about the series plan

Sir. Patrick Stewart attended the premiere of The Kid Who Would Be King in London on February 3rd and stopped to talk a little about the upcoming Star Trek Picard series.

Details on the upcoming Star Trek Picard series have been releasing faster and faster as we approach the start of production this spring, we’ve already learned previously that the series will be highly serialized  and is being viewed by the creative team behind it, which includes a very active Patrick Stewart, as more of a 10-hour movie then a season of the show.

This seems to suggest there won’t be much in the way of standalone episodes, and given the average runtime of the franchise so far we can safely assume we’re looking at a season of ten one-hour episodes.

However during his stop on the red carpet Stewart was asked if there was a possibility of another movie and how many seasons the show was likely to run for. In response Stewart said:

"Oh, Lord, we are set up for possibly three years of this show, so if there is a film, it’s a long way off.– Sir. Patrick Stewart"

So it shall be written…

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Of course being set for three seasons doesn’t mean that thirty one-hour episodes are written and ready to produce, in highly serialized series it’s often practice for the creative minds behind the series to lay a grand plan for a large part of the series and make course adjustments on the fly as the series is fleshed out, written, filmed and released.

For example the writers room for Star Trek Discovery most likely entered production on season one with an outline of what we’re now seeing in season two and what we may see in season three, however as fan reaction as well as the actors and actresses becoming more comfortable in their characters skin begin to sway the creative direction of the series leading us to a more relaxed bridge crew and Klingons with hair.

The Age of Picard

Stewart also spoke about how the new series will handle age, which seems to be pretty much as we had expected in that the show will be set twenty years after Star Trek Nemesis which premiered nearly twenty years ago.

"The one thing that will be different about this version of Star Trek is that we have simply moved the whole narrative twenty years from when I lost wore Jean-Luc’s uniform. So everything has aged. When the series gets released you will see things are very different from what they were.-Sir Patrick Stewart"

No big surprises there, but it will be interesting to see our first true canonical glimpse into the Star Trek universe beyond the return of Voyager to earth as every time we’ve seen it before has been either through the lens of a possible future, an alternate timeline, or an erased timeline.

It will be interesting to see how far the technology and political situations have changed, particularly when we look at how far we’ve come in the past twenty years… You’re not sure how far we’ve come?

Look back beyond the Y2K Problem to the year 1999, the gameboy colour was in it’s first year, The Matrix coming to theatres (not that any of knew what it was), Bill Clinton on trial, Lance Armstrong going for his first Tour De France win, an all new currency called The Euro was created…. And so much more.

Of course we know the former Starfleet Captain will be greatly affected by the dissolution of the Romulan Star Empire but just how much will the rest of the galaxy be changed by their fall?  We’ll find out when the series premieres later this year.

Star Trek Picard is scheduled for production this spring with a tentative release in fall/winter 2019 on CBS All Access.