One of the few good ideas in Star Trek: Picard could work in Starfleet Academy

A new Star Trek show is in the works. It's called Star Trek: Starfleet Academy and it takes place about 900 years after the events of Star Trek's The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, Voyager, Prodigy, Lower Decks, and Picard. It's a spinoff show of sorts to Star Trek: Discovery, with both shows taking place in the same time period.

With such a huge time jump, you'd think the only returning characters would be from the recent seasons of Discovery after the ship jumped into the future permanently. That's not true, however. Despite the advancement in the timeline, the show will in fact bring back one character from the previous era of Star Trek.

After featuring in a starring role in Voyager and later Prodigy, Robert Picardo is set to return to Star Trek once again. He returned to the franchise after nearly 25 years with Prodigy, reprising his role from Voyager. His return as "The Doctor" was a huge boost to the show, but some fans felt that the animated stylings didn't give Picardo the same ability to emote that we were so used to in Voyager.

Well, he's returning to live-action once again as The Doctor, this time with Starfleet Academy. It's a role that will see him play a character 900 years in the future but also look some-25 years older than he did on Voyager. As he's a hologram, you can't really explain why he looks older. He shouldn't, he's a computer program but there may be a workaround to this idea.

While Star Trek: Picard may have been an up-and-down experience, to say the least, they did have one good idea. In season two, the show brought back the popular Star Trek side-character Q. A god-like, alien race that never ages. Of course, the man who played Q, John de Lancie, aged quite a bit in the nearly 30 years between the end of the Next Generation and Picard.

So how to work around that? Well, Q, in the show, decided to "age himself" to around Jean-Luc Picard's age, so that Picard wouldn't be put off by the fact Q never aged.

The Doctor could do something similar, where he "ages" himself to look older, thus being easier to talk to. He could also just "age" naturally, though very slowly. Attributing his advanced look to a program in his file that exists.

Either way, the Doctor should have a pretty plausible explanation for why he looks a bit older.