The lost sons of “Picard”

The very first teaser trailer for 2020’s “Picard” ended with a hint of the iconic Ressikan flute theme from “Star Trek: The Next Generation”(TNG) episode “The Inner Light”. This classic episode featured Captain Picard experiencing an entire lifetime from a long lost civilisation, in which he lived as a man who - unlike Picard - married, and had two children. Patrick Stewart has named “The Inner Light” his favourite episode of TNG, on the basis that he got to work with his real-life son(Daniel Stewart, also an actor) in it. So by referring to this episode musically, the trailer seeded the idea(in a meta way) of sons being lost to another life, long gone.

The trailer released on the 18th of December, 2019, introduced us to this new face:



He’s clearly a Borg drone, and one we’ve never seen before.
Images of him appeared under a voiceover from Picard, the words “I was haunted by my past, but now I have a mission”. Single frames of this new drone alternated with single frames of long-established and beloved TNG character Data.

Now, I’m no media studies buff, but I’m pretty sure that when you have 750 frames(at 25 frames per second) to make a teaser for an upcoming show, you don’t waste any of them giving full-screen close-ups to irrelevancies. And you wouldn’t interleave a major character with an unimportant one at such a speed that they almost blur together; equal screen time gives them equal weight. This teaser gives this new character equal importance to Data, as well as positioning them on opposite sides of the screen so that they appear to be having a quickfire conversation. That’s pretty high billing.
Initially, it looked like he was supposed to be Locutus, the Borg drone Picard became in TNG’s “The Best of Both Worlds”. That was a time in Picard’s life that left him scarred and traumatised; a haunting past. But Locutus looked like this:



Note the different appliances stuck to his head. When you get a proper look at the new drone, one that lasts for longer than .4 of a second, you can see that he isn’t Patrick Stewart. He does bear a bit of a resemblance to him, enough that you might be forgiven for mistaking them as he flashed past; although not as much of a resemblance as he does to Daniel Stewart. He was hitherto unseen, but reminiscent enough to seem familiar, and his inclusion in the trailer implied that he was significant.

( Read more... )