The new trailer for Star Trek: Picard features a crew of familiar faces

By Georgina Torbet July 20, 2019

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If you’re not excited for the return of Patrick Stewart as Jean-Luc Picard yet, you will be once you watch the new trailer for Star Trek: Picard.

It shows an older, more pensive Picard who, despite his efforts, has never found his place living the comfortable life of a retiree on his chateau. That changes when he meets a mysterious young woman, played by Isa Briones, who goes to him in need of aid and who is implied to be a character who is significant to the franchise.

We see the makings of a new crew too, with a group of humans, Vulcans, and others joining Picard.

Fans will be delighted by the return of beloved actress Jeri Ryan as Seven of Nine, last seen on Star Trek: Voyager, and Brent Spiner, who will be playing the one and only Data. Although things aren’t looking so hot for Data right now as he’s still in pieces after sacrificing himself to save the crew of the Enterprise in Star Trek: Nemesis. Spiner said he “couldn’t say no” to doing the show when he heard Stewart was involved.

And there’s one more exciting and unexpected returning actor: Jonathan Del Arco, who will be reprising his role as a Borg named Hugh who broke free from the Collective.

Stewart said filming the show with old friends has been immensely fun so far, and they still have three more episodes yet to film. The show will have a different tone from other Trek shows though, and particularly from The Next Generation. Executive Producer Alex Kurtzman said that Picard will reflect the more complex politics of our current era, and that Picard will be forced to wrestle with some of the decisions he made during his career in Starfleet.

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Georgina Torbet

Space Writer

Georgina is the Digital Trends space writer, covering human space exploration, planetary science, and cosmology. She…

Entertainment

The 10 best Star Trek: The Original Series episodes, ranked

Captain Kirk, upset, buried waist-deep in Tribbles.

It’s hard to imagine today, but back in the late 1960s, the original Star Trek was not considered a hit. The ambitious science fiction series was constantly on the brink of cancellation and was cut short only three years into its planned five-season run.
However, it’s important to put Trek’s apparent failure into historical context as, given that most markets in the U.S. had only three television channels to choose from, even a low-rated show like Star Trek was being watched by about 20% of everyone watching television on a Thursday night, or roughly 10 million households. This year’s season of HBO’s Succession was viewed by roughly 8 million households a week, which makes it a hit by today's standards. Star Trek’s audience only grew once it went into reruns in the early 1970s, and by the time Star Trek: The Motion Picture hit theaters in 1979, it was a genuine cultural phenomenon. Today, the Star Trek franchise is considered one of the crown jewels of the Paramount library.
Though arguably outshined by its most prosperous spinoff, Star Trek: The Next Generation, Star Trek: The Original Series holds up remarkably well for a vision of our future imagined nearly 60 years in our past. It’s a space adventure series that tackles social or political issues from what was, at the time, a daring and progressive perspective informed by the contemporary civil rights movement, sexual revolution, and backlash against the Vietnam War. Conveying these values through fanciful science fiction didn’t only allow its writers to get away with a lot of subversive messages, it also delivered them in a way that remains fun to watch decades later — fun enough that fans are willing to forgive when its ideas, or its special effects, crumble under modern scrutiny.
These 10 episodes, however, unquestionably stand the test of time, and thanks to the continuity-light nature of mid-20th century television, any one of them could be your first Star Trek episode. (Be aware, however, that the order in which classic Trek episodes are listed varies depending on the source. For our purposes, we’re using the numbering from streaming service Paramount+.)

10. Mirror, Mirror (season 2, episode 4)

Entertainment

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For decades, Deep Space Nine was “that other Star Trek show.” It debuted in 1992, during the run of Star Trek: The Next Generation, the first Trek series to achieve mainstream popularity. DS9 overlapped in first-run syndication with TNG until 1994, and then with Voyager — which ran on primetime network television — from 1995 to 2001. Throughout its seven-year run, Deep Space Nine was never a top priority for studio Paramount or franchise executive producer Rick Berman. While this was a source of frustration for the cast and crew, the studio’s neglect also allowed them to take greater creative risks.
Under showrunner Ira Steven Behr, DS9 gleefully subverted the Star Trek formula, pulling open the cracks in the franchise’s futuristic utopia and refusing to be bound by the episodic nature of weekly television. DS9’s serialized stories and long character arcs may have made it harder to keep up with when it first aired, but it’s perfect for the modern binge-streaming model, which has introduced it to a whole new generation of fans. Thirty years after its debut, Deep Space Nine is finally receiving the respect it always deserved.
Selecting just ten episodes of DS9 to showcase is a challenge, as many of its most compelling stories are spread out across multiple episodes. Some of the episodes below are totally standalone stories, some are standout chapters in multi-part arcs that can be appreciated on their own, and some are two-parters that we simply couldn’t separate and had to list as a single entry. We hope you don’t mind us bending the rules just a bit — after all, that’s part of what made DS9 great to begin with.

10. In Purgatory’s Shadow/By Inferno’s Light (season 5, episodes 14 and 15)

Entertainment

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Anson Mount Star Trek: Strange New Worlds' musical episode.

How do you celebrate Star Trek at Comic-Con when all of the actors stayed home? The actors and writers strike has greatly diminished the star power of San Diego Comic-Con, but Paramount+ had a novel solution. The streamer put its cards on the table early by promoting the remaining episodes of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds season 2, including a video preview for the upcoming musical episode.

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds | "Subspace Rhapsody" Trailer (SDCC 2023) | Paramount+