Paramount+ has dropped a new teaser for Star Trek: Picard season 2, and it features the first footage of returning fan-favorite character Q (John de Lancie).
The minute-long promo video opens with an anxious Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart) yelling Laris’ (Orla Brady) name at the top of his lungs. When his housekeeper doesn’t answer back, Picard takes a pause to figure out what exactly is going on.
“What the hell is happening here?” Picard asks. Though he finally hears a voice, it’s from someone he isn’t really expecting.
“Excellent question, Jean-Luc,” replies Q, who suddenly appears out of nowhere. “Oh dear, you’re a bit older than I imagined.”
As Picard tries to process the fact that Q is right in front of him, the devious jokester expresses how he has missed the former captain of the USS Enterprise. “Mon capitaine, how I’ve missed you,” says Q, before welcoming Picard “to the very end of the road not taken.”
Time has been broken. #StarTrekPicard season two, coming 2022 ? #StarTrek pic.twitter.com/OjqarMnFBr
— Star Trek (@StarTrek) June 16, 2021
As teased by Stewart during the Star Trek: Picard presentation last April, Q’s arrival in the show is, as it often was, “utterly unexpected” but also comes “at a shattering moment.” “Whether it’s directly connected to Q or not, I am still actually not quite sure,” added the actor. “But there is significant trauma. And, in fact, at the moment, I am working on how the trauma of this moment hangs around Picard for quite a substantial part of the episode and then [claps his hands] there he is.”
While the new teaser doesn’t really explain Q’s sudden appearance, co-showrunner Akiva Goldsman previously revealed that Q’s reunion with Picard has something to do with one of the themes in the upcoming season.
“There are a lot of people who think of Q as a trickster god, right? And he is. But he’s also a profoundly significant relationship in Picard’s life,” Goldsman told The Hollywood Reporter last April. “There’s a lot of discussion in Picard season 2 about the nature of connectedness. [So] Q’s kind of a great lightning rod for that because in some ways he’s one of Picard’s deepest — not deep in the same way that [William T. Riker (Jonathan Frakes) is or Beverly Crusher (Gates McFadden) was — but in its own uniquely, profoundly deep relationship.”
The new teaser also confirmed season 2’s time-travel plot, with someone from the characters, declaring that “time has been broken.” At some point in the video, Picard also tells his crew, “We can save the future and I will get us home together.”
The video also teases more trouble from the Borg, with Seven of Nine (Jeri Ryan) awaking to find what seems to be a variation on the Borg emblem in her room. The clip ends with Seven of Nine nervously touching the top of her brow where her implant used to be.
Star Trek: Picard season 2 is set to premiere sometime in 2022.