Published Jan 23, 2023
On Star Trek: Picard, Family is Everything
Producers Alex Kurtzman and Heather Kadin share how the series is a bold new take on Star Trek with familiar themes.
StarTrek.com
Star Trek: Picard first premiered on January 23, 2020 with "Remembrance," and to celebrate the anniversary, we're looking at how the series came to fruition.
Alex Kurtzman and Heather Kadin are two of the minds behind the current evolution of the Star Trek universe, leading it into a bold new future. They sat down with StarTrek.com and several reporters to talk about Star Trek: Picard, and they touched on the core theme of family that is central to the characters of Star Trek: Picard and the franchise as a whole.
Star Trek: Picard "Remembrance"
“Star Trek has always been sort of about a Bridge crew family," Kurtzman told reporters. “Families have watched Star Trek for over 50 years for exactly the reason that you're asking the question, which is that it's baked into the DNA of the identity of Star Trek."
"Dahj very quickly comes to question her roots in a lot of ways, and we come to understand there's a lot more to Dahj's story than Dahj," continued Kurtzman. "You're talking about somebody who comes to understand that everything they thought was home and family isn't and wasn't.”
StarTrek.com
The same themes extend to the rest of the characters viewers will meet, new and old. “Picard, Raffi, Elnor, Rios, Jurati... they're all very disenfranchised from their families in different ways. They're very alone when we meet them,” he added. “And what happens over the course of the season is that these people who are alone end up coming together and become a Bridge crew family, just not in a way that you always expect... by the end of Season 1, you'll see how much of a family they've actually become.”
The show breaks from Star Trek tradition in that it does not center on a particular starship and crew, but Kadin assured the room that the show would still feel like the best of Star Trek.
“I also think so much of what people love about Star Trek is that they're on a ship and they go on a mission, but it's always about the people,” she said. “It's always the message. It's hope, it's quality, it's mirroring what's happening in our world today, and all of that still stands. They're just not on a Federation starship. I don't think anyone's going to question that at its core it's definitely Trek.”
This article was originally published on January 31, 2020.
