A MAN FOR ALL SEASONS

ALEX KURTZMAN HAS DONE A GREAT MANY THINGS SINCE BECOMING EXECUTIVE PRODUCER OF THE STAR TREK UNIVERSE IN 2009 – BUT ACHIEVING THE IMPOSSIBLE IN BRINGING JEAN-LUC PICARD BACK MAY BE HIS BIGGEST MOMENT YET…

- DARREN SCOTT

HAD THINGS NOT GONE THE WAY THAT Star Trek producer Alex Kurtzman intended, the world would have one less Star Trek show right now – not to mention the fact you’d be holding a very different copy of SFX in your hands.

When he and colleagues met Patrick Stewart in 2017 to discuss a potential return for Jean-Luc Picard, there was no plan B – no other series in mind. No Star Trek: Sisko, no Star Trek: Janeway.

“No, we knew that if we ever got him to come back, it was going to be a Picard-specific series,” Kurtzman, who has been executive producer on all things Star Trek since 2009, says. “There was nothing where he came onto somebody else’s show. In fact, he has acknowledged that he said he would never come back to play this part at all.”

Fortunately, he and his team were able to convince Stewart there was a story to be told (see page 40), and to seal the deal they turned around a series proposal document within days. The notes from their initial meeting became a pitch of over 30 pages. It appears their original vision took a new turn with the input of Stewart.

“Quite a lot of it changed from a plot point of view,” he considers. “I guess the spirit of the document is very much alive in the show. There were a lot of things thematically that are still there. But in terms of literal plot, very little.”

With the series already recommissioned before an episode had been aired, it transpires that a longer arc was always on the cards.

“We’ve always imagined it as probably three seasons,” Kurtzman reveals. “That’s our hope, anyway. We’ve been thinking about it in the long term as soon as we started. We mapped out a story that would probably take up three seasons. But obviously we’re not counting our chickens yet.”