Star Trek: Picard season 2 trailer shows major time travel plot

The trailer for Star Trek: Picard season two was released.

The second season of Star Trek: Picard finally has a trailer, while revealing its plot. Fans already knew that most of the cast from season one was returning and that appears to be the case for the most part. Fans also knew that John de Lancie would be returning to Trek as Q, but no one was sure what his character’s involvement would be with the series.

Now fans have their answer.

In the season two trailer, Jean-Luc Picard discovers that Q has altered the past for some reason, creating a present where Starfleet is an authoritarian power, Seven of Nine was never part of the Borg and things overall are very different.

This causes Picard and company to go back in time to the 21st century to reset what Q changed and return the present to its normal existence.

Star Trek: Picard’s second season takes some big risks

Like it or not, Picard and Discovery are among the least popular Star Trek properties ever. A large part of it has to do with the darker tone, the more adult-focused content, and the attempts to presumably change what Trek was to a more “modern” take on the franchise.

More from Star Trek: Picard

• The Borg Queen was spoiled early on Star Trek: Picard
• Todd Stashwick calls Captain Shaw’s death “beautiful poetry”
• Could a Raffi and Worf spinoff work as well as Legacy?
• Why Star Trek ret-conning is both great and terrible storytelling
• Seven of Nine’s story after Voyager is coming from Simon and Schuster

Some like this approach, some don’t. Picard will continue to steer into the skid, so to speak, as Picard’s second season is seemingly darker, grittier, full of more adult-focused content, and even takes the crew out of their present entirely and throws them in ours.

Granted, time travel is an approach that has worked for many shows and films in Star Trek. The fourth film A Voyage Home used a similar idea to great effect, as did Deep Space Nine and Voyager. Traveling back to the era in which the show/film is filmed is a Trek staple.

Personally, I’ve never been a big fan of Star Trek stories where the crew miraculously ends up in the exact year the show is being filmed and aired, but everyone will feel differently about Picard seemingly taking place in 2021, or a vaguely similar year.

It’s entirely possible that the show is actually hopping from time-period to time-period and not spending that much time in the 21st century. We’ll have to wait and see.