Patrick Stewart Returns as Jean-Luc Picard for a New Star Trek Series

He sounds old though.

One of the benefits of early male pattern baldness. :)

The TechCrunch redirect behaviour is so insane that I had to try it a few times to really believe that it was happening. I am flabbergasted that anyone actually thought that was a good idea.

There are details. Look at this:

https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&q=star%20treck%20tng%...:

compared to this:

https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&q=star%20treck%20tng%...:

> My god, Patrick Stewart looks like he hasn't aged in 30 years.

To be fair, he looked a bit older than his actual late 40s when TNG started.

You should look him up from about ten years prior to TNG. He was in several episodes of I, Claudius back in 1976, thereabouts, and aside from the hair, he STILL didn't look much different.

It's widely assumed that Stewart made some kind of deal with Satan, sometime around the filming of Dune, whereby he traded his youth for immortality. He thus looked about ten or twenty years older than he was at the time, but promptly stopped aging altogether.

I've actually enjoyed Discovery quite a lot. I think it's easy to see the old series through rose tinted glasses and forget the extremely subpar episodes, focusing only on the best. In my opinion Discovery has been inconsistent, but far less so than, say, the first season of TNG. That said, I'm still irate they set it in the past. There's no reason for it - even the tech that forms a major plot point feels generations beyond Voyager!

I hope this new Picard show is something entirely different. Given that it'll air alongside Discovery I see no reason for it to be another "explore the galaxy" setup.

Rewatching tng from end to end I found myself disappointed that the cast didn't know what they were doing in seasons 1&2 and seemed like they were phoning it in in season 7...

There are some truly good episodes in TNG... One of my favorites is "the first duty" which apparently was at some point required viewing at the United States air Force academy.

Overall though I like ds9 better because it's a more "honest" look at humanity... But darkness aside there's kind of an optimistic broad character arc/thesis where the good guys each in their own way is on a journey overcoming impostor syndrome (sisko, Kira, odo, Bashir, ezri, Jake, quark, rom, garak, and nog all fit this model to some degree, and even damar when he becomes a good guy basically fits this model), and the bad guys all are brought down by their classical toxic leadership attributes (dukat, Winn, weyoun, FC, but also minors like admiral leyton).

Different times. He stated that he’s only now excited about returning to the role, and hadn’t previously been the last 20 years, because he sees how bleak many people’s outlook is about the world right now. He himself has uncharacteristically begun watching the TNG episodes for a dose of hope. So I think we will find the federation in a state of dis-unification (earth exiting the union? immigration problems?) and perhaps even Picard struggling to find and build hope.

Nah. It may or may not hit the mark, but it's always better to see great artists strike out for new territory and new things than just serving over rehashes of earlier creative exploration.

(I grew up watching TNG and love it, btw, fwiw, etc. etc.)

Audiences want something good. TNG added up to 130 hours of TV. Any team of writers and actors would become burned out after telling such an enormous quantity of stories. Die-hard fans might always clamour for more, but they're the first to complain when a franchise is milked dry.

There's a reason why "jumping the shark" is a trope. No matter how popular and compelling something might be, there's always a point of diminishing returns. Once you've trashed a franchise, it's very difficult to rebuild; If you end on a high note, you leave the audience wanting more.

Rick Berman and Brandon Tartikoff saw what was being attempted with Babylon 5 and recognised the future of television - deep, complex story arcs that span across seasons. They realised that while TNG still had some mileage left in it, they had an opportunity to use familiar elements in a new and exciting way. The results were, in my humble opinion, the absolute pinnacle of the Star Trek canon.

This fan reaction always surprises me. It strikes me as both "looking through rose glasses" and "get off my lawn". A story needs to grow. Enterprise and Discovery both kept the cute almost naive idealism of The Next Generation, but added in exciting new ways. Both of them had campy bad episodes, but that is also true of The Next Generation.

You may not see him at all if the project is "TNG take 2". He probably doesn't want to do it. I'd much rather see an extension to the story with a different angle than nothing at all.

I enjoyed Enterprise, I am enjoying Discovery.

Different people want different things.

There are plenty of folks who will read every book in endless genre series and complain when some favorite TV program gets canceled after 10 years.

Others like me are pretty much ready to move in from a series after 5 years or so no matter how good it is. I just lose interest.

Yes, though I’m enjoying ST:Discovery, WestWorld, and The Expanse, I really miss optimistic sci-fi.

Is there anything like that out there now that I’m missing?

If someone succeeds in making a workable screenplay then the Culture novels from the late Iain M Banks are perfect.

Isn't that what cable was? Only this one you can buy for a month, binge, and cancel. It isn't all that bad.

He is not joining Discovery it is going to be a new series.

The JJ Abrams movies have never been in the same timeline as the TV shows so the new show will be in the same timeline as TNG