Small Details You Missed In The Star Trek: Picard Season 2 Teaser
For at least one former Starfleet commander, space is no longer the final frontier.
Season 1 of the Paramount+ series Star Trek: Picard took a slower and more character-driven approach to one of television's greatest protagonists. Created by Oscar-winning screenwriter Akiva Goldsman, Kirsten Beyer, Alex Kurtzman, and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Michael Chabon, the series follows Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart) as he embarks on a new mission after a young woman with a startling connection to his past comes to him for help. On April 5, 2021, fans got a preview of what the future holds for our eponymous hero thanks to a teaser video for season 2 of the series.
The short trailer includes a voiceover from Picard waxing poetic on the concept of time, which he refers to as "the true final frontier." While he speaks, the camera pans slowly across a study at Château Picard. Little is revealed about specific plot and character developments for season 2, however, the teaser is rich with symbolic imagery and clues as to what — and who — we will be seeing when the second season premieres on Paramount+.
Here are all the small details you missed in the new teaser for Star Trek: Picard season 2.
Picard keeps a painting of the Enterprise
It makes every bit of sense that Jean-Luc Picard would have a painting of his old ship, the Enterprise-D, hanging up in his chateau. It's the ship where fans of TNG spent the most time, from the first episode of the series to its unceremonious end in the third act of Star Trek: Generations. From its oblong angles to its Amtrak interiors, it became the imaginary second home to a generation of nerds.
The cool detail here is that the painting on display isn't a new addition. It's the same one that Picard had hanging in the ready room of the Enterprise during the TV years, complete with its late-eighties semi-velvet aesthetic. There are definitely some questions left hanging in the air by its inclusion in Picard – how it survived the crash when the ship's disc hit the ground, for example, and which of the salvage guys thought "I should grab this framed print on the way out." Will these questions be answered?
No, probably not, but nice to see a familiar artifact from the old days anyway.
Picard's taste in literature is very intriguing
20 seconds into the teaser, there's a subtle reminder that books still exist in the 24th century. The meat of the shot belongs to a copy of Paradise Lost, but if you let your eyes wander to the right side of the screen, you'll notice that Picard may have been using his collection of classic literature to cover up the fact that he never outgrew noir dime novels.
Underneath the works of Milton, the good captain has a copy of Dixon Hill in The Long Dark Tunnel, one of the depression-era mysteries that Picard used to love escaping into via the holodeck, the Enterprise's answer to the question "what if your Super Nintendo tried to kill you one out of five times you turned it on?" Dixon Hill episodes were a highlight of Star Trek: The Next Generation, with Picard letting his — for lack of a better word — hair down and getting into a fantasy world where he played the eponymous private detective, Dixon Hill. Details being everything, the cover seen in the teaser trailer even features the name of the author, Tracy Tormé, itself a reference to the longtime Star Trek writer of the same name.
Hey, that's not the Enterprise...
Right around the 25 second mark of Picard's season 2 teaser, you'll notice a gilded model ship. Pedestrian nerds will recognize it as "not the Enterprise." Old hands, though, know it as the Stargazer.
See, back in the days before Picard landed the flagship of the Federation, he was stationed aboard a rinky-dink vessel: NCC-2893, a Constellation class ship with a chip on its shoulder. Jean-Luc was still relatively small potatoes at the time, serving as a helmsman, but fate threw him a bone in the form of his captain's sudden death. Picard took command, saving the day and making a name for himself to the point where Starfleet promoted him, making him the captain of the Stargazer. He served as the ship's captain for over two decades.
The Stargazer's story could fit nicely with the narrative being set up in the teaser trailer, which seems focused on old regrets resurfacing as time presses on. Picard eventually lost the ship during a battle with the Ferengi and wound up court marshalled for it. Whatever the case, he's always kept that first command close to his heart, displaying models of the Stargazer onboard each iteration of the Enterprise. We even saw one in his section of the Starfleet Archive Museum during season 1 of Picard.
The hourglass on Picard's desk may have more than one meaning
The clearest overarching theme of the teaser is the concept of time and one of the most literal allusions to that concept comes in the form of an hourglass on Picard's desk. As the camera pans up the device, the sands inside move backward, sliding up into the top of the glass instead of down toward the bottom. This obviously suggests the turning back or reversing of time, something that Picard's narration speaks to. But it also might have a much more specific meaning for Picard himself.
Fans of Star Trek: The Next Generation may remember that the series finale, "All Good Things," saw Picard being transported through three different time periods — one in his past, his present, and one in his future — as he tries to get to the bottom of a spatial anomaly that poses a potential threat to humanity. As if that wasn't enough, the mischievous omniscient being Q (John de Lancie) appears to the commander regularly to toy with him and complicate his mission.
It's the last time that Picard and Q formerly squared off. Although the hourglass has some general symbolic meaning, it may also be directly referencing that specific mission, which saw Picard going backward in time like the sand in the hourglass. That feels even more likely when you consider that the next image in the teaser is a clear and direct reference to Q.
Yes, Q is back to haunt Picard
Out of all the TNG characters that fans were hoping to see in season 1 of Picard, one stood out like a mariachi band on the bridge of the Enterprise-D — and that's Q. This strange cosmic figure was intertwined with the plot of Star Trek: The Next Generation from its very first episode. Debuting in "Encounter at Farpoint," Q is a member of a race of omnipotent space gods, also called Q. It's ... qomplicated?
Throughout the series, Q would appear, generally with the unspoken goal of turning any episode into an original series adventure. He turned the Enterprise's command crew into characters from Robin Hood and stole Picard's old girlfriend, presumably taking her on a series of Doctor Who adventures across the Gamma quadrant. All of this, he claimed, was part of a great trial to see if the human race was worthy of existence. Whether he's back to his old tricks remains to be seen, but like he pointed out in the series finale — and once again, now, in Picard's season 2 teaser — the trial never ends.