The complicated Star Trek timeline and canon will be a huge part of the upcoming TV series Star Trek: Picard, but, the real reason why we’re all excited is that we just freaking love the character of Jean-Luc Picard. Enduring franchises are not a series of Easter eggs, it’s all about great characters. Which is why, if you’re remotely familiar with the writing of Michael Chabon, the fact that he’s the showrunner of Picard is a huge deal. This is a writer who helped humanize Doc Ock in Spider-Man 2, to say nothing of his award-winning genre-defying 2001 novel, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. In other words, I’m excited for Picard not only because it’s a low-key Next Generation sequel, but because the head writer is literally one of the greatest novelists of the past twenty years.

And in a twist of overlapping fate, it turns out that if it weren’t for another novelist-and-Star-Trek-writer, Michael Chabon may not have become a writer himself. Recently, Chabon revealed to me that a Star Trek-adjacent Sherlock Holmes book inspired him to pursue his own writing career, which by extension, led to the existence of Star Trek: Picard.

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When Star Trek: Discovery debuted in 2017, it was billed as a show that followed “the adventures of Starfleet.” The show wasn’t just about the voyages of the starship Discovery, but also the USS Shenzhou and, eventually, the USS Enterprise. But now, in season 3, it looks like Discovery is all that is left of Starfleet, and the Federation is down to just a handful of member planets. At New York Comic Con, a new trailer gave us the first glimpse of the wilder, grittier Discovery. Now that the crew has landed 930 years in the future (they jumped from 2257 to 3187 in the blink of an eye) the landscape of Star Trek is suddenly very different.

Based on the short trailer, here are the six biggest questions about Star Trek: Discovery season 3, and what the answers to those questions might mean for the future of the franchise.

Trailer spoilers ahead!

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The new Star Trek: Picard trailer is perfectly suited for any viewer new to Trek, but it also contains a lot of layered mythology and timeline questions for decades-long fans of the various shows.

If it’s been a while since you engaged with The Next Generation, Voyager, or the Star Trek movies released nearly 20 years ago, some of the references in the trailer might seem a little confusing, or at the very least, very quickly glossed-over. Where was Data the last time we saw him? What is the history of the Borg up to this point? What’s the deal with Seven of Nine again? Is Picard living on a farm? (No, it’s a wine vineyard.) Okay, but why?

So that it’s all in one place: here’s a selected chronological timeline of important stuff featured in the show: from Hugh, to Data, and Seven of Nine; to Picard’s family, to Troi, and a certain supernova.

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