Star Trek Letting Its Heroes Age Is a Fascinating Thing

There’s a second within the climax of Star Trek: Picard’s season two premiere when Q, the all-powerful bane of Jean-Luc’s life, seems within the latter’s humble French property. He has had, like so many returning figures of traditional popular culture of late, the method of time smoothed out by CG, to provide us a semblance of the Q we as soon as knew all these years in the past. But, he realizes: Jean-Luc Picard has gotten previous. So why shouldn’t he?

“Oh dear, you’re a bit older than I imagined,” Q jokes. “Let me catch up.” In a trademark click on of his fingers, and a brilliant flash of sunshine, the CG-enhanced Q turns into simply common previous up to date John de Lancie. It’s an ideal strategy to deliver Q and Picard collectively once more, a long time after they final crossed paths within the finale of The Next Generation—but it surely’s additionally emblematic of an method up to date Star Trek is taking to its growing old heroes. Instead of being rooted within the second we left these figures trapped in televisual amber generations in the past, for essentially the most half Star Trek has returned to them as they’re within the right here and now: actors and characters alike who’ve grown older and lived lives past the occasions we noticed performed out on display screen.

Q’s temporary de-aging isn’t the primary time Trek has leveraged the know-how—in Picard’s first season, Brent Spiner appeared a number of instances in a mixture of make-up and CG contact ups to painting the “ageless” Commander Data, whereas showing as his regular self as Dr. Altan Soong. But it’s been uncommon for the sequence as its renaissance within the streaming age has plunged into the depths of Star Trek’s previous and its future. The franchise has labored inversely too—in reveals like Discovery and the upcoming Strange New Worlds, set in Trek’s twenty third century “past,” revisiting youthful variations of well-known figures like Spock, Sarek, Uhura or Captain Pike has been managed by recasting new faces, giving the prospect in flip for these actors to place their very own interpretive mark on Star Trek legends. And the place neither method essentially works, there’s at all times animation: Lower Decks supplied methods for us to revisit characters of their Starfleet heydays like Tom Paris, or Commander Riker and Deanna Troi. Prodigy even had it each methods, with Kate Mulgrew reprising her function as each a Voyager-era Captain Janeway (in holographic type) and what can be the up to date Admiral Janeway.

It’s made all of the extra fascinating to see this multi-pronged method in distinction to Trek’s long-time sci-fi “rival,” Star Wars. In some methods there are parallels—new faces stepping in to painting new chapters of traditional determine’s lives, like Alden Ehrenreich because the younger Han Solo, or Rosario Dawson as a post-Return of the Jedi Ahsoka Tano. In sequence like The Bad Batch, Rebels, and Clone Wars, we’ve seen acquainted faces return, whether or not performed by their cinematic counterparts or by soundalikes, permitting them to exist and dwell tales throughout a number of eras of the Star Wars timeline. But in stark distinction to Trek, Star Wars has leaned essentially the most on utilizing know-how to recapture the youth of its legacy figures, to combined levels of success. From Rogue One’s digital replicas of Princess Leia and Grand Moff Tarkin, to the now-seemingly-ongoing deployment of a CG likeness of Mark Hamill to deliver a Return of the Jedi period Luke Skywalker again to life in The Mandalorian and The Book of Boba Fett, Star Wars’ fascination with its previous has seen it draw upon the technological influences that made the franchise a pioneer within the first place, making an attempt to make use of VFX to lock its heroes in that aforementioned amber. Who wants to inform tales a few Luke Skywalker that has grown previous, when you may simply place a younger Mark Hamill’s digital face over a stunt actor, and relive an idealized previous?

Of course, that’s to not say Star Wars didn’t attempt that: the previous Luke we met in The Last Jedi, embittered by disillusion and years of self-imposed exile, provided a daring look at a hero who has grown from the glory days we final encountered him in, traumatized by the future positioned upon his shoulders. The indisputable fact that the response to such an thought was rendered so controversial, nonetheless, that Star Wars has seemingly raced again to this CG-enhanced model of Luke’s previous self in its wake is probably made extra damning, then. What Star Trek has carried out with figures like Q and Picard, Star Wars has develop into too reluctant to attempt. But regardless of the method, on this age of revitalized franchises making an attempt to maneuver and develop past their predecessors, how two of the largest sci-fi hits have taken reverse stances on simply tips on how to greatest revisit their most iconic figures has develop into fascinating to observe unfold—whether or not by way of layers of digital trickery or in any other case.

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