In the second season of “Star Trek: Picard,” the good admiral (Patrick Stewart) is approached by his old rival, the trickster space deity Q (John de Lanice), about a new challenge. Q snaps his fingers and flings Picard into an alternate universe where Earth had become a galaxy-wide tyrannical power, devoted to the extermination of its perceived enemies. Earth had already driven the Romulans and the Klingons to extinction, and is now gearing up to execute the last-known Borg (Annie Werching). It’s pretty grim. Picard, occupying the space of his tyrannical interdimensional counterpart, has to gather his friends (Q conveniently teleports several of them to the evil universe as well), and then travel back in time to the year 2024 to figure out how the evil universe came to be.
At the end of the season, it’s revealed that Q only played his little time-travel game with Picard as a sort of wistful farewell. Q was previously thought to be immortal, but he was actually nearing the end of his life, and his powers were waning. He used some of his last shreds of magic to test Picard, hoping to connect with him. The season ends with Picard and Q giving each other a warm hug goodbye.
This was a relatively restrained conclusion for the character, given how silly he had been in the past. There was an episode of “Star Trek: The Next Generation” wherein Q transformed Picard and his crew into Robin Hood characters, for instance. In another episode, to celebrate a personal milestone, Q appeared on the bridge of the Enterprise with a magically manifested mariachi band. Q, in case you couldn’t tell, usually brought a great deal of levity to “Star Trek.”
When it came to “Picard,” however, de Lanice preferred to be a little less ridiculous. He even made a special request in that regard.
John de Lancie requested that he not be asked to wear tights
Keep in mind that “Star Trek: Picard” served largely as a throwback series, catching up with Jean-Luc Picard about 20 years since 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 the bulk of the cast of “Star Trek: The Next Generation.” Stewart had agreed to return for the whole of the “Picard” series, but de Lancie required some convincing.
De Lancie was concerned that he, now in his mid-70s, would be required to be as buffoonish on “Picard” as he was decades ago in the Robin Hood episode. Luckily, the producers of “Picard” put his mind at ease. As de Lanice explained to Newsweek in 2022:
“I sat down, and I said, ‘Listen, the first thing I want to know is: you’re not going to be putting me in those tights again, are you? Because if that’s the case, the deal’s off!’ They said ‘No, no, no, no, we’re going for a different feel.’ I looked pretty much as I do now. And they said, ‘As a matter of fact, we even want the beard, we want a sense of maturity. Time has passed, and there is something up on your side.’ And I said, ‘So it’s not, like, mariachi band time?’ 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 threatening and sentimental; it featured no mariachi bands, and Q himself wore a tasteful black overcoat. Of course, since Q 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, time will tell if Q appears in the proposed “Star Trek: Legacy.”