Star Trek: Picard showrunner, Akiva Goldsman is next up in our series of roundtable interviews. For the uninitiated, Goldsman is no stranger to film and television. He’s worked as a writer, producer, and director for more than 20 years in notable films and shows like Practical Magic, A Beautiful Mind, Fringe, Titans, and so many more. He’s also worked on Star Trek: Discovery and will serve as a producer, writer, and director for the upcoming series, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. Needless to say, Goldsman has a ton of expertise to bring to Star Trek: Picard. Here are a few of his thoughts on the upcoming season.
Bringing Back the Old Guard
When asked about integrating seminal Trek characters like Q and The Borg into the series, Goldsman commented on much further than just this integration. He also elaborated on overarching themes and how Q, The Borg, and Guinan play into those themes.
“…If season 1 is about resurrection, season 2 is about redemption, so we wanted to look backward and talk about connection, or lack of connection, and it’s really about relationships. …What we’re exploring are the relationships people have with intimacy and connection, and that’s useful for us for storytelling. It’s a place where we haven’t delved too hard into Picard’s heart and it’s deeply rooted in this one life. It then hollers out for some other hosts to the story.
Guinan and Q are the most notable because them being the most intimate and they are characters within the Star Trek universe to help us render visually a world that represented some of the future of the themes we’re talking about. …One is almost magical and one has tremendous wisdom and cross-temporal awareness. The Borg Queen serves a different function here. She’s sort of the replacement for Spock. …The Borg Queen is in a way, not to sound reductive, but her relationship to connectivity is binary. She’s either connected to all things or totally disconnected. So when we’re talking about intimacy and relationship, she’s unique in that way. And the closest partner she has is Alice Jurati because she is isolated. And what you’ll see as the season emerges are…pairs of people, and how those kinds of relationships form.”
Tone and Form
Shifting from relationships and themes, Goldsman then spoke about how the characters of Q and Picard have evolved. Taking into consideration the serialized storytelling approach today versus the episodic approach from the 80s and 90s, Goldsman commented on how that affects the way we perceive these characters.
“The really interesting thing is to look at Patrick in “The Encounter at Far Point.” I think that there’s this funny thing about entertainment grammar–we tell stories differently. We have a capacity for complexity in stories. It’s different. The nature of serialized television suggests that we can do things in Star Trek that ever really tried until late seasons of Deep Space Nine. They were prototypes in a funny way, I think. And Q is a complicated character because he has that thing that breaks the story. Which is that he can do anything…the genie with all the wishes in the world. The trick is all…you have to create guardrails, otherwise there’s no story. You can kinda get away with it in an hour, but don’t try it for ten.”
The Importance of Addressing the Issues
Historically speaking, Star Trek has always been the most diverse, the most inclusive, and the most progressive of any show on television. And while there’s always room for improvement, the heart behind Trek has always been about showing the world as it should be and empowering its audience to aim to make that a reality. When asked if this jump to the past in Picard would include commentary on race, Goldsman had this to say.
“100%. I think one of the things Star Trek does well …is that [it] really speaks to inclusion and diversity. And we are not value-neutral about that. Star Trek has never been value-neutral about the future. Star Trek states loudly that those of us who make it [Star Trek] are proponents of a wildly diverse, a wildly inclusive galaxy, which is really a way of saying a wildly inclusive and a wildly diverse present. And you can be sure that we would not bring our folks back here today, without acknowledging what goes on here today.”
Hailing Frequencies Are Open
Thanks very much to the folks at Paramount+ for inviting Fangirlish to participate in these roundtables. A big thank you as well to Akiva Goldsman for his time and thoughtful responses. Be sure to stay tuned for more interview recaps with the cast and crew of Star Trek: Picard and set your hailing frequencies to our #StarTrek tag for every bit of Star Trek coverage here on the site.
Season Two of Star Trek: Picard will air on March 3, 2022, on Paramount+.