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Throughout seven seasons, Captain Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart) chose to boldly go where no one had gone before in “Star Trek: The Next Generation.”<\/a> The series always thrived when it examined its characters and their dreams, and that character study became a condition for “Star Trek: Picard” co-creator Alex Kurtzman. Speaking about the follow-up series, which shows us what the titular character’s life looks like 14 years after his retirement from Starfleet, Kurtzman told the Los Angeles Times<\/a>: “The mandate was to make it a more psychological show, a character study about this man in his emeritus years. There are so few shows that allow a significantly older protagonist to be the driver.”<\/p>\n What’s interesting is that Stewart also had some strict conditions if he was going to reprise his famous role in a new series, something he had no intention of doing when he was first approached about it. The first condition was that it would not function as a “Star Trek: The Next Generation” reunion show. “This was not at all a mark of disrespect for my beloved fellow actors,” he wrote in his autobiography “Making It So” (via Time<\/a>). “Rather, I simply felt it was essential to place Picard in entirely new settings with entirely new characters.” The other conditions were that the series would run for no more than three seasons and that his character would be retired \u2014 he was adamant that Picard should shed his\u00a0colorful Starfleet uniform<\/a>.<\/p>\n