In the second season of Star Trek: Picard, the good Admiral (Patrick Stewart) is approached by his old rival, the trickster space god Q (John de Lanice), about a new challenge. Q snaps his fingers and hurls Picard into an alternate universe where Earth has become a galaxy-wide tyrannical force dedicated to exterminating its perceived enemies. Earth has already driven the Romulans and Klingons to extinction and is now preparing to execute the last known Borg (Annie Werching). It’s pretty dark. Picard, occupying the space of his tyrannical interdimensional counterpart, must gather his friends (Q conveniently teleports several of them to the evil universe as well) and then travel back in time to 2024 to discover how the evil universe came to be.
At the end of the season, it turns out that Q only played his little time travel game with Picard as a kind of wistful farewell. Q was once thought to be immortal, but in reality he was nearing the end of his life and his powers were waning. He used some of his last magical powers to test Picard in hopes of establishing a connection with him. The season ends with Picard and Q sharing a warm goodbye hug.
This was a relatively low-key conclusion for the character, considering how silly he had been in the past. There was an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation where Q turned Picard and his crew into Robin Hood charactersfor example. In another episode, Q appeared on the Enterprise’s bridge with a magically manifested mariachi band to celebrate a personal milestone. Q, in case you couldn’t tell, Star Trek usually gave a lot of levity.
When it came to “Picard,” however, de Lanice preferred to be a little less ridiculous. He even expressed a special wish in this regard.
John de Lancie demanded that he should not be asked to wear tights
Keep in mind that Star Trek: Picard served largely as a flashback series, picking up Jean-Luc Picard some 20 years after his last appearance (in the 2002 feature film Star Trek: Nemesis). Many episodes of Picard brought back familiar faces from Picard’s world, including Q, Guinan (Whoopi Goldberg), and most of the cast of Star Trek: The Next Generation. Stewart had agreed to return for the entire Picard series, but de Lancie still needed convincing.
De Lancie feared that, now in his mid-70s, he would have to be as goofy on “Picard” as he had been in the Robin Hood episode decades ago. Luckily, the producers of “Picard” calmed him down. As de Lanice explained Newsweek in 2022:
“I sat down and said, ‘Listen, the first thing I want to know is: You’re not going to put me in those tights again, are you? Because if that’s the case, the deal is broken!’ They said, “No, no, no, no, we want a different feeling.” I looked about the same as I do now. And they said, “In fact, we even want the beard, we want a sense of maturity.” Time has passed and there is something on your side. And I said, ‘So it’s not the time for mariachi bands?’ And they said, ‘No.'”
Q “died” at the end of the second season of “Picard,” happy to have given his old friend one final challenge. His appearance was both menacing and sentimental; There were no mariachi bands and Q himself wore a tasteful black coat. Since Q of course doesn’t experience time linearly, he also returned at the end of the third season of “Picard” to confront Picard’s adult son Jack (Ed Speleers). Although it seems highly unlikely, only time will tell if Q shows up the proposed “Star Trek: Legacy.”
