James McAvoy has already played a younger version of one Patrick Stewart character, and it turns out he wanted to go for two. The X-Men star recently revealed he pitched Paramount a Star Trek series about a young Jean-Luc Picard, and he says it came really close to happening.
“‘Mutiny on the Stargazer’ was a whole idea that I pitched to the Star Trek people. We nearly did it,” McAvoy said on the Happy Sad Confused podcast.
After several movies as a young Charles Xavier, McAvoy seems to have found his niche. He even joked about it, saying, “All I really want to do in my career is play young versions of Patrick.”
Jokes aside, McAvoy had an actual story in mind. “I’ve got a whole story about an early Picard that I love,” he said.
“I pitched a one-off, standalone season,” he continued. The plan was to follow Picard “when he took over as Captain of the Stargazer, what actually happened, and the secret he’s been holding his entire career.”
The USS Stargazer is a big piece of Picard’s history in The Next Generation, even if the show only ever gave us bits and pieces of it. Picard took command back in 2333 after the ship’s captain was killed in battle, and he managed to save the vessel. That command lasted until 2355 and the Battle of Maxia, where he pulled off the now-legendary “Picard Maneuver” to take out an attacking Ferengi ship. He won the fight, but the Stargazer was so badly damaged that he and his crew had to abandon it.
The ship popped up again in “The Battle,” the ninth episode of TNG’s first season, when a Ferengi named DaiMon Bok hands the recovered Stargazer back to Picard as part of a revenge scheme. Turns out Bok’s son was in command of the ship Picard destroyed at Maxia. The episode is also where we first heard about the Picard Maneuver and learned more about how the Stargazer was lost.
Here’s the interesting part about McAvoy's pitch though. TNG never mentioned any kind of mutiny on the Stargazer, so his idea would’ve dug into a chapter of Picard’s life we know nothing about. He didn’t say who would’ve turned on whom, and he kept the details of Picard’s big secret to himself.
The Next Generation did touch on some other rough moments from that era, however. Picard faced a court-martial over losing the ship, and his close friend Jack Crusher died during an away mission while serving under him. That guilt, plus his feelings for Jack’s widow Beverly, hung over the two of them for years.
Sadly, McAvoy’s passion for the project wasn’t enough to make it happen.
“I just pitched it to them, and they were well in it. But we hit logistical issues, and we couldn’t do it. But I love that story, and I just go to bed and think about it at night,” McAvoy said.
Star Trek’s future is still pretty up in the air right now, so this one goes on the pile of shows we’ll probably never see. There was also talk of a Kirk “Year One” series coming out of Strange New Worlds, and nothing’s come of that so far either.
Personally, I’d rather the franchise look ahead than keep going back to another famous captain’s early days. I get the appeal of spending more time with characters we love. But when every gap in someone’s backstory gets filled in, you can lose a bit of the mystery that made them so great to begin with.
After all, did anyone really need to see how Han Solo got his last name?