I’m not ready (yet) to speculate about Picard’s job title and when and why Troi should phone in. We’ll have over a year to do that. All I know is that I have been drifting off to sleep each night this week thinking about what old man Picard is up to these days. He’s sitting in his library at Chateau Picard sipping a glass of wine, looking up from his book every once in a while to watch the stars twinkling over his vineyard. He gives a thought to the stars he has visited, before turning back to whatever he is reading.
For those of us who don’t read the novels, Picard has been stuck in time. For me, not a big fan of the movies, that means my head canon stops at the poker table in All Good Things. There is not much life beyond that in my imagination. So this new series is a rare treat. It brings a beloved character back to life and pushes his story forward.
It’s also a rare opportunity in the history of the franchise: to have a main character depicted in the prime of his life, and then many years later, have the character developed and expanded upon closer to the end of his life. Kirk aged and evolved over the 6 TOS films, but he met his death pretty soon after that. He was past his prime but no old man (parallels to Kirk’s full arc and Picard’s will also need to be discussed, and hopefully the CBS writers will avoid the pitfalls of Kirk’s end). We saw Spock in his later, final years, but mainly in a guest staring role.
So I’ve been thinking about Picard the man, the kind of life he will be looking back on in this new series:
- He will be in his mid to late 90s
- He will have been working in space since he was 22, serving Starfleet for at least 56 years
- He will have been a starship captain since he was 28, serving on one ship, the Stargazer, for 22 years, until he was 50
- He will have captained the two Enterprises for at least 15 years, from age 59 to 74
- 20 years will have passed since we last saw him as captain of the Enterprise… and 28 years since that moment at the poker table.
