The lost sons of “Picard”

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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.

When the show aired, the full musical theme for the series took its melody from “The Inner Light” - but not the “Skye Boat Song”-inspired tune of the main title. It is built around a melody played by Batai, the son played by Daniel Stewart. The entire orchestral theme for the whole “Picard” series points back to the son Picard had in another life, when he was someone other than himself. It’s not just one instrument, one penny whistle dressed up as a Ressikan flute; it’s a whole orchestra playing the same tune, because Batai was not the only lost son.

Almost every major character(and some prominent supporting roles) in “Picard” had a lost or broken parent/son relationship as part of their tragic backstory.

Elnor(dubbed Romulegolas by tumblr the moment we saw him) was a child refugee, orphaned by the destruction of Romulus.




He was raised by a sect of warrior nuns, with no father figure; except, for a while, Admiral Picard. Picard, whose protestations that he didn’t like children never really bore out, bonded with him. He read him “The Three Musketeers”. He taught him to fence. When he was suddenly called away by the destruction of the shipyards of Mars, he promised to return.

He didn’t. Not for another 18 years. To Elnor, not only were his biological parents dead, but his surrogate father had abandoned him.

Seven of Nine lost her adopted son, Icheb.




Icheb had come aboard Voyager many years before, the oldest of four prematurely activated Borg drones who, once rescued, were put into Seven’s care. She helped to deassimilate them, and rehabilitate them from mindless drones to independent individual children. Three of the four were dropped off on a planet in the Delta Quadrant with the family one of them had originally come from; but Icheb remained aboard all the way back to Earth.

Icheb was murdered, broken down for his residual Borg implants piece by piece by a black market parts dealer; but worse than that, Seven had to perform the coup de grace herself, after he begged for death in her arms. She was just too late to save him.

Raffi Muziker lost her relationship with her son, Gabriel.




She had fallen deep into conspiracy theories and substance abuse, so determined to prove her conviction that there was a Romulan conspiracy at play surrounding the Martian sabotage that she neglected her family until, eventually, they gave up on her.

When she tracked down her son, and his pregnant wife Pel, he refused to reconcile with her. They remain estranged as of the end of the first season.

Cristóbal Rios lost a father figure, Captain Vandermeer of the Ibn Majid.




Rios consciously thought of his captain as his father, going so far as to nickname him “Pops” in his head. Vandermeer was ordered by Starfleet to kill two passengers on his ship. He carried out this order, but then couldn’t live with the guilt and turned his phaser on himself.

Rios had to clean up and cover up the whole affair, and was then discharged from Starfleet.

Deanna Troi lost two sons.




The first, decades prior to “Picard”, was an alien consciousness who wanted to learn about the people on board the Enterprise by being born, living, and dying as one. While he only had her DNA(which raises some interesting implications about her own biology, but never mind that right now), and was definitely conceived without her consent, Ian Andrew Troi II was her son and she had every intention of keeping and raising him as such. Unfortunately, this was back in the days of syndication, so he died at the end of the episode.

The second was Thaddeus, conceived the more traditional way with husband Will Riker. He got sick with a degenerative disease which might, perhaps, have been treatable had there not been a ban on synthetic lifeforms and the [technobabble] they could provide. The Troi-Riker family moved to the planet Nepenthe which, like the planet of the Ba’ku, had regenerative/healing properties. This was not enough to save his life.

Picard also lost Data.




At the end of “Nemesis”, Data slapped a prototype site-to-site transport beacon onto Picard’s chest and activated it, before blowing up the ship he was on to destroy it and its crew, eliminating the threat of the Remans and Picard’s rapidly disintegrating clone Shinzon.

Picard later described Data as being like a son to him. This came as something of a surprise to some TNG viewers who thought that maybe this should have been mentioned at some point in the last 33 years, but it was explicitly stated in “Picard”, so now we know.

Picard also probably gets half a point for the death of his nephew, René Picard, in “Generations”, and for the “son” who showed up in TNG wanting to connect with him but turned out to be an unwitting fraud.

So, quick question:

What’s up with this guy?




We have a thread of lost or damaged parent/son relationships running through almost every notable character in “Picard”. We have the musical reminiscence to the son Picard had in a different life he once lived, which still sometimes haunts him. We have a new Borg drone who looks uncannily like that real son, who could have been created from DNA the Borg still had from his days as Locutus, whose fate is unknown because after that(scenery-chompingly melodramatic) entrance above, in which Picard’s arrival on the Artifact seemed to trigger him to activate, we never saw him again.

Why was he not the resolution of the lost sons arc?

I suspect that at one time, he was. I suspect that, on the cutting room floor, there is a story about the Borg. A story in which, perhaps, a new Locutus was cloned and matured by the Borg, but the cube he was on got Admonished and he ended up in stasis for years. Several background actors were paid extra to look confused and say “Locutus?” when they saw Picard - that could have been indicative of the fact that as far as the deassimilated, former Borg drones they were playing were concerned, Locutus was supposed to be in suspended animation several dozen decks below them. It would have been cheaper and as effective for the final product to have them just stare at him, or double-take, and have the actor who was already being paid to speak explain “They still see Locutus”, so why spend the money?

Maybe because all of that investment in the Borg cube, that impressive CGI and extensive physical set, was originally for something more specific than the place where ingenue Soji just happened to start her story. Maybe the son of Locutus was supposed to wake up and start assimilating people, building up a micro-collective, and have to be stopped. Maybe interfacing with the cube and overruling him was the only way it could be done without killing him, and Seven of Nine, Tertiary Adjunct of Unimatrix Zero One, ended up being the only one who could do it. Maybe a certain character death, too pointless to be called tragic in the version we saw, would have happened for a good reason; or at least, have had an impact on the plot.

Perhaps, in this lost story, all the victims of lost or broken parent/son relationships discovered this drone, this Locutus 2.0, and came to a decision: not this one. This son will not die, will not be abandoned. This prodigal son will be brought back into the fold.

That’s my theory about the meaning and intention of the lost sons of “Picard”. They were pointing towards the lost son of Picard.