WARNING: The following contains spoilers for Season 1, Episode 8 of Star Trek: Picard, “Broken Pieces,” now streaming on CBS All Access.
Star Trek: Picard has continued to explore aspects of the famed Starfleet captain established during Star Trek: The Next Generation. Among them is Jean-Luc's notorious discomfort in dealing with children and families. He's always been a reserved man who has difficulty expressing his emotions. His relationship with Soji is meant to represent Picard's attempt to rectify his past mistakes, giving him one last shot to have a family of his own. But he's had that opportunity before in the critically acclaimed Next Generation episode, "The Inner Light."
During the events of "The Inner Light," the Enterprise encounters an alien probe in space. Before the crew can properly react, the probe quickly scans the ship and fires some kind of energy beam, striking Picard. Jean-Luc wakes up in a quaint home on the non-Federation planet of Kataan, where he is greeted by a woman named Eline, who claims to be his wife. Picard is told his name is, in fact, Kamin and is an ironworker who was recovering from a severe fever.
When Jean-Luc relays his actual memories -- his accounts of his time on the Enterprise and his life with Starfleet -- his wife and a close friend, Batai, convince him these were merely vivid dreams, so intense he thought they were real. Eventually, they are able to coax Picard to embrace his identity as Kamin and settle into life in the village of Ressik.
As the years pass for Picard, he starts a family with Eline, studies nature, and learns to take up playing the flute. Decades roll on and Jean-Luc becomes comfortable and content with his life, fully embracing his new identity as Kamin. But he notices something amiss on Kataan. Droughts grow with increasing frequency, caused by their sun emitting growing levels of radiation and endangering all life in this simple world. Picard pleads with the planet's leaders to take notice, but his words fall on deaf ears.
He outlives his wife Eline and close friend Batai, mourning those losses. But he bonds with his daughter, Meribor, as they continue to study the drought. To their dismay, they ascertain Kataan is facing an extinction-level event. Kamin once again confronts a government official, who frankly explains they were already aware. Their civilization was just developing rockets and satellites, and their spacefaring technology was woefully insufficient to evacuate the planet. Kamin is told this is all being kept from the populace to avoid undue panic.
As an old man, Picard is playing with his grandson when his adult children ask him to come along with them. There seemed to be an important rocket launch that all of Ressik was gathering to watch, but Kamin hadn't been aware of it at all. He is ushered outside where he is greeted by Eline and Batai, in the prime of their youth.
They explain to him he's already seen the rocket before. The people of Kataan knew they were doomed. He is told the rocket contained the collected culture and history of Kataan. The identity of Kamin was created to give whoever found the rocket a way to experience and understand their people. Picard realizes he was chosen, and he was the person meant to receive these visions and it was his responsibility to preserve their memory.
He then wakes up on the bridge of the Enterprise and is informed that, although he lived a lifetime within the vision, only 25 minutes passed. The crew brings the probe on board to study and find a small box inside, containing Kamin's flute. Picard takes the flute and plays a tune he learned in his life as Kamin, implying his alternate life had a lasting impact on him. For the remainder of the series, Jean-Luc was shown to periodically play the flute.
Flashing forward to the events of Star Trek: Picard, he's made it very clear in the seventh and eighth episodes "Nepenthe" and "Broken Pieces" that he has no idea how to deal with suddenly being a parental figure to Soji. He confided to Riker and Troi that he is out of his depth and even admitted to Soji that it's hard for him to reach out to her. He went so far as to compare his reserved nature to Data's inability to process emotions.
This leaves the lasting impact of "The Inner Light" in question. Picard has seemingly forgotten the experience of living an entire other life, one that made him happy no less. It seems odd the writers of Picard would ignore or overlook a piece of Jean-Luc's journey that was so well regarded that it won the Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation in 1993, especially when they have been drawing so deeply from the wealth of Star Trek lore that precedes them.
So if it wasn't a creative oversight, there are a few possible explanations for why he seems to not remember his life as Kamin. The first and most likely reason is these artificially implanted memories and experiences have faded over the decades. Jean-Luc may remember the circumstances of the incident, but he has forgotten the specifics. Possibly, all he has to go on at this point are his logs about the incident. He hasn't been shown playing the flute in the new series, so perhaps he's lost that talent as well.
There is a sadder explanation to this, one the show has hinted as an inevitability which Picard cannot escape. His friend and doctor from his former ship, the Stargazer, informed Picard in Episode 2, "Maps and Legends," that he is in the early stages of a degenerative neurological disorder that will, among other things, destroy his memory before it kills him.
It's heartbreaking to consider, but perhaps Picard is more ill than he realizes. It's entirely possible his memories have already degraded, starting with the loss of an imaginary life that had at one point brought him peace.
Star Trek: Picard stars Patrick Stewart, Alison Pill, Michelle Hurd, Evan Evagora, Isa Briones, Santiago Cabrera, and Harry Treadaway. New episodes of the series premiere every Thursday on CBS All Access.