Star Trek: Picard’s season 2 co-showrunner explains why Guinan doesn’t recognize Jean-Luc in 2024. Time travel has been used as a narrative tool by Star Trek ever since Captain Kirk, Spock and the Enterprise crew went on various temporal adventures in The Original Series. So it should have been no surprise when Picard season 2 went to that well with a storyline seeing Jean-Luc and his friends going back in time to change a dark future brought about by the ever-enigmatic Q.
Of course it’s one thing for characters to go back in time to some random point in history for the sake of a fun episodic adventure. In Picard season 2 however, Jean-Luc actually encounters someone he knows during his time travels, namely the ageless El-Aurian Guinan. But this is not exactly the same Guinan Picard and everyone else remembers: in addition to her being younger than usual (she’s played in 2024 by Ito Aghayere instead of Whoopi Goldberg), she also doesn’t remember Jean-Luc. This latter point would not be a problem of course, except that TNG fans all remember the 2-part episode “Time’s Arrow,” when Picard traveled back to the late 1800s and met Guinan (and author Mark Twain). Presumably then, 2024 Guinan should have remembered Picard from this earlier meeting? That this younger-looking Guinan seemed oblivious to Picard’s identity indeed upset some Trek fans, who accused Picard of flat-out forgetting Star Trek canon.
Now Picard season 2 co-showrunner Terry Matalas has emerged to clear up any confusion fans might have about what’s going on with Guinan and Picard in 2024. Speaking to Inverse, Matalas set the record straight on which timeline Picard is actually in, and laid out exactly why Guinan wouldn’t know who he is:
“This Guinan wouldn't remember Picard because in this alternate timeline, the TNG episode "Time's Arrow" never happened. Because there was no Federation, those events did not play out the same. No previous relationship exists. However, she still was likely traveling to Earth and, as we know, she hung around a bit. So this Guinan is different. But she, of course, can sense something is off. She's going through a kind of time-sickness thanks to Q's meddling with the timeline.”
Guinan being sensitive to temporal disturbances is of course something that has been explored in Star Trek before. Memorably, in the TNG episode “Yesterday’s Enterprise,” the wise El-Aurian is the only one to sense that something is amiss after the crew encounters a space anomaly that creates a new timeline in which the Enterprise is a warship and the long-dead Tasha Yar is still alive. Given this previously revealed sensitivity, it makes sense that Picard’s 2024 Guinan would be able to sense a problem without necessarily understanding what exactly is happening.
So ultimately Picard’s dismissal of everything that happened in “Time’s Arrow” is easy enough to explain. It’s also easy enough to explain 2024 Guinan looking younger after an earlier Picard season 2 episode had Goldberg’s version of the character revealing an ability to alter her own aging process to better blend in with humans. What might be more difficult to square for Trek fans though is 2024 Guinan being considerably angrier than the ever-placid character everyone came to know and love on TNG. Guinan’s personality shift is indeed the real way Picard arguably betrays the character. But no doubt Star Trek: Picard season 2’s showrunners and writers have good reasons for making a younger Guinan surprisingly edgy and prone to irritation. Perhaps they think sagely tranquility is just not "dramatic" enough.
Source: Inverse
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