New Star Trek series will find Jean-Luc Picard having been radically altered

The thought of Patrick Stewart returning to play Jean-Luc Picard in a new Star Trek series, over fifteen years after he last played the role, is quite exciting, especially as it will find the character in a "different time and place" of his life. While speaking with THR, Alex Kurtzman went one step further, saying that the new series will find Picard leading a radically altered life.

Why is that exactly? Well, Kurtzman also dropped a big clue about the premise of the new series, saying that "Picard's life was radically altered by the dissolution of the Romulan Empire." Now, if you're not down on your Star Trek lore, here's a rundown on what that means. In J.J. Abrams' STAR TREK, we learned that a supernova was threatening to destroy Romulus, the Romulan homeworld, which prompted Ambassador Spock (Leonard Nimoy) to attempt to save the world using red matter. Unfortunately, Spock was too late and Romulus was destroyed and both Spock and Nero (Eric Bana) were sent back in time leading to the creation of the Kelvin timeline. The regular Star Trek timeline which we've known for the past fifty years continued on, and it appears that the Picard series will be dealing with the aftermath of that cataclysmic event. 

Alex Kurtzman also said that Patrick Stewart only agreed to return to the role if they were going to do something drastically different. "He threw down an amazing gauntlet and said, 'If we do this, I want it to be so different, I want it to be both what people remember but also not what they're expecting at all, otherwise why do it?'" Kurtzman recalled. Patrick Stewart also asked Kurtzman to put together a three-page document outlining his ideas for the potential series, but it quickly ballooned into thirty-four pages. Thankfully, Stewart liked what he read.

He walked into the room and he had a huge smile on his face and said, 'This is wonderful.' What he understood at that point … was that he was with people who desperately wanted to collaborate with him; that we weren't trying to exploit him. He knew if he was going to go back to Picard, it needed to be for the greatest reason ever.

The Picard-centric Star Trek series is expected to debut in late 2019, and in regards to any other Next Generation cast-members also making an appearance in the series, Kurtzman only teased that "anything could happen."