Picard ends a 35-year mission … maybe

By now, Patrick Stewart knows this “Star Trek” thing is more than a brief blip in his life.
It’s been, he said, “35 years since I first put on the captain’s uniform …. The world has changed and I have changed too.”
Or not. As “Star Trek: Picard” (shown here with Stewart and LeVar Burton) begins what it calls its final season (Thursdays on Paramount+, starting Feb. 16), he’s remained a potent performer of British classics.
On TV, he’s done Shakespeare (“Macbeth,” “Hamlet,” “Richard II” and a Texas variation of “King Lear”), plus “The Lion in Winter,” “Animal Farm” and a fierce “Christmas Carol.” He’s also returned to the stage for “The Tempest,” “Macbeth,” “Othello” and a one-man show with bits of everything.
But to many people, that’s a mere hobby. Since 1987, he’s been Jean-Luc Picard in two TV series (plus an episode of a third), four movies and video games… plus Xavier in “X-Men” movies and games.
Now he’s wrapping up “Picard,” in a season that reassembles his old “Star Trek: Next Generation” colleagues – an idea he once opposed. “I was wrong,” he said.
He had not wanted a mere “reunion, because that would just simply be stepping back,” Stewart, 82, told the Television Critics Association. But the series concocted a reason for Picard to re-link on one more mission; now he’s back with:
— Gates McFadden as Beverly Crusher, who gets some action scenes. “I love kicking (butt),” she said.
— Michael Dorn as Dorf, briefly trying non-violence. He liked the changes, he said, with one exception: “The only thing that wasn’t easy was they said, ‘Okay, he has gray hair.’”
— Other key people – Burton (Geordi), Jonathan Frakes (Riker), Marina Sirtis (Troi) and more.
— And Jeri Ryan as Seven of Nine. Now Terry Matalas, the former production assistant who drove her around in a golf cart, is a key producer, she said. “He has loved, loved ‘Star Trek,’ and followed it religiously …. He is such a huge nerdball and Trekkie forever.”
There are a lot of forever Trekkers … including, by accident, Stewart.
It all started, he recalled, with a “call from my agent, whom I had never met, who said, ‘I’ve got two questions for you, Patrick: What were you doing at UCLA last night? And why should Gene Roddenberry want to see you this morning?’”
What he’d been doing was a literary reading. A producer had seen it and told Roddenberry, who was creating a spin-off of his “Star Trek” series.
Stewart’s reaction? “I had to (phone) my kids and say, ‘Kids, kids. I think you watch “Star Trek.” Tell me about it …. Was it any good at all?’
“And, of course, they raved about it. I remembered coming home after matinees from the Royal Shakespeare theater, just in time to give my kids their supper and read to them and put them to bed before going back to do an evening performance.
“And I would find they were watching this thing on television, with these guys in colored T-shirts.”
Then he became one of them. The “Trek” captains before and after him were also Shakespeareans (William Shatner did summers at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival in his native Canada), but nothing like this – a bald British guy who had done about 60 Royal Shakespeare productions.
Now, 35 years later, this is his final season – probably. As producer Alex Kurtzman put it: “If the show blows the doors off the place … who knows?’”