If Star Trek: Picard follows through on its plan to end after 3 seasons, it shouldn’t come as a shock to Star Trek fans. After production was delayed due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Star Trek: Picard season 2 finally premieres on Paramount+ on March 3, 2022. Judging from the trailers, the second season of the Patrick Stewart-led show will be worth the wait. Along with nearly all of Star Trek: Picard season 1’s characters returning, including Seven of Nine (Jeri Ryan), Star Trek: Picard season 2 brings back Guinan (Whoopi Goldberg) and the Borg Queen (Annie Wersching) in a time travel/alternate reality story instigated by Q (John de Lance), who will show Jean-Luc “the road not taken.”

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The fact that Patrick Stewart returned to play Jean-Luc Picard once more is almost a miracle in itself. When Stewart was initially approached by executive producer Alex Kurtzman and his team to bring back Picard in 2018, the then-77-year-old actor intended to turn them down. However, Stewart was intrigued by their proposal and story ideas because it was “so different” from other Star Trek stories. Star Trek: Picard season 1 debuted on CBS All-Access, which has since rebranded into Paramount+, in January 2020, and it set a new record for an original series on the streaming service. Star Trek: Picard season 2 was greenlit and slated to begin production in June 2020, but the pandemic shut down production in Los Angeles for months. Filming on Star Trek: Picard season 2 finally commenced in February 2021 with the plan being to shoot Picard seasons 2 and 3 back-to-back. As of January 2022, production on Star Trek: Picard season 3 is weeks away from completion.

In a new interview with SFX, Patrick Stewart, Star Trek: Picard executive producer Akiva Goldsman, and season 2’s showrunner, Terry Matalas, indicated that Picard season 3 will be the last of the series. This came as a surprise to many Trekkers. However, as Goldsman repeated to SFX, the plan was always for 3 seasons of Star Trek: Picard. In May 2020, Goldsman told Collider, “we have discussed [Picard] as both a 3 season show, a 5 season show, a “let’s just keep going forever” show… But… Star Trek: Picard in my view will go as long as Patrick Stewart wants to do it.” Goldsman later confirmed the three-season plan in September 2021 when he told TrekMovie.com, “the hope was to do three [seasons]… [if the Star Trek: Picard season 1 didn’t flop] So the plan was always three. The hope was always three… the plan remains three.”

There are some logical reasons why Star Trek: Picard plans to end after season 3. First and foremost is Patrick Stewart is now 81 and it’s reasonable that he doesn’t want to commit to Star Trek: Picard to “keep going forever.” The nature of Star Trek: Picard was also purposely conceived to be different from TNG, where the Enterprise can conceivably explore strange new worlds for an infinite amount of time. According to Goldsman, who has been the show’s executive producer from the beginning, Star Trek: Picard was overall planned as a three-act story similar to a feature film. Although Goldsman told TrekMovie.com that he sees seasons “two and three as separate stories…” he also sees the three seasons of Star Trek: Picard as “all separate stories of a piece… I think that three [seasons] is the story as imagined.”

The success of Star Trek: The Next Generation, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, and Star Trek: Voyager in the 1990s planted the idea in some Star Trek fans minds that fewer than 7-seasons means the show somehow “failed.” This was the perception of Star Trek: Enterprise when it only lasted 4 seasons, never mind that Star Trek: The Original Series ran for just 3 seasons when it was canceled in 1969. In today’s very different TV landscape, Star Trek: Picard working from a 3-season plan and actually completing all 3 seasons on its own terms deems it as a success, at least from a production standpoint. And while Patrick Stewart may be satisfied to finally close the book on Jean-Luc Picard when Star Trek: Picard season 3 ends, the producers have indicated that the show could still conceivably continue if Stewart wants to make more.

Star Trek: Picard Season 2 premieres Thursday, March 3, 2022, on Paramount+.

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John Orquiola
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John Orquiola is a Features staff writer and interviewer who has been with Screen Rant for five years. He began as a director’s assistant on various independent films. As a lover of film and film theory, John wrote humorous movie reviews on his blog, Back of the Head, which got him noticed by Screen Rant. John happily became the Star Trek guy at Screen Rant and he leads Feature coverage of the various Star Trek series, but he also writes about a wide range of subjects from the Marvel Cinematic Universe to Cobra Kai. His other great nerdy love is British TV series like The Crown, Downton Abbey, and Killing Eve. John can be found on Twitter @BackoftheHead if you want to see photos of the food he eats.

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