Let’s face it: Patrick Stewart was never going to return to the role of Jean-Luc Picard, as the actor has said publicly on a number of occasions… but through the passion and convincing of key players like series showrunner Michael Chabon and Trek franchise head Alex Kurtzman that Stewart has agreed to reprise his role.

While we’re still more than a month away from the long-awaited arrival of Star Trek: Picard and the return of many a fan’s favorite Starfleet officer — retired admiral Jean-Luc Picard — IDW writers Kirsten Beyer and Mike Johnson team up once more to kick off a new three-issue comic to introduce some of the series’ new characters, and give us some insight into what the former Enterprise captain has been up to since we last saw him in Star Trek: Nemesis.

Star Trek: Picard — Countdown #1 starts off with a tease to where things will go; briefly looking ahead to one year after the primary comic storyline is set. Two Romulans, Laris and Zhaban are in the rows of the Chateau Picard vineyard on Earth. The shots we have of Chateau Picard in the show’s trailers don’t appear to have any Romulans or even the artifacts of other people living with him at the vineyards.

How we will get to this state are not clarified in this first issue, but plenty of promising things are set up. Speaking to one another, these two Romulans are obviously refugees who owe a great debt to a man who is not named, but is presumably Jean-Luc Picard. It’s not anachronistic, it’s comfort. Sometimes the ways of the past are still the best way. There’s no replicating a fine vintage.

After this moment with the two Romulan refugees, the story jumps back to the year 2385, where Commander Geordi La Forge is running the show at the Utopia Planitia Shipyards above Mars. Admiral Picard contacts Geordi from aboard his starship, the Verity, which seems to be an Odyssey-class ship like the Enterprise-F seen in Star Trek Online.

The imagery of time, time accelerating, and clocks ticking down are used repeatedly throughout the story. It is now the duty of the United Federation of Planets to be the salvation of a systems-spanning diaspora from a deadly supernova expanding through Romulan space — the same supernova that resulted in Spock and Nero being thrown into the Kelvin Timeline back in the 2009 Star Trek film.

Picard keenly feels the time slipping away. Despite being ahead of schedule building the fleet of evacuation ships, fear of an unknowable timeline weighs heavily on the Admiral. Dealing with a mass evacuation is difficult in any number of ways — but he’s got a brand-new source of reliability at his posting, Lieutenant Commander Raffi Musiker, the Federation’s preeminent Romulan scholar — and this marks our first introduction to Michelle Hurd’s character from the upcoming series.

In an interesting inversion of Picard’s “Number One” informality, Musiker addresses the admiral as “J.L.,” claiming it’s owing to efficiency — and the esprit de corps between them.

The Verity now has orders to travel to Yuyat Beta, a world in Romulan space previously thought to be uninhabited by the Federation now exposed as a colony of the empire. Though the guards who escort the away team on the surface are silent, and the Major-domus who called them down to the surface are typically abrasive, these aren’t the Star Empire’s normal Romulans.

The population of Yuyat-Beta is a more casual group of Romulans, and this is going to cut both ways as they turn out to be both flippant and severe. Upon entering the conversation, Governor Shiana throws the titles of “hero of the Federation” and “vanquisher of the traitor Shinzon” at Picard by way of introduction. The Admiral says that he is “simply a representative,” as he throws his head back in the air and smiles broadly.

The art here will make fans of Patrick Stewart feel some interesting dissonance. This engaging smile would smack as patently false if it weren’t for the years of context watching the man himself move. It’s a hard choice to make, and in my opinion, artist Angel Hernandez caught a weird thread that made me pause and take notice. It’s not bad, but it took me out of the story for a minute.

As the away team steps into out of the Romulan government complex, Picard finds a visceral reason to stop in his tracks: working in the vineyards are two members of the planet’s previously-unknown native population, which he’s told numbers in the several-million range… compared to the “only” 10,000 Romulan refugees Starfleet expected.

The Romulans see trying to save the natives as being equivalent to rescuing “rocks and trees” and the admiral’s rage builds in Picard’s reaction: “These are sentient beings.” He reinforces the unseen part of this conversation by reiterating the Federation mandate to rescue ALL advanced lifeforms. Shiana turns this around, and the governor tells Picard that if the Admiral is refusing an immediate evacuation aboard the Verity for all Romulans, she’ll simply seize the ship.

The final page sees Picard confined in a prison cell, lamenting his own trusting nature. The Romulans, whether successful or not, have just crossed a line. There will be no “redemption of an old enemy.” Years of work with the Romulans, not only on the present crisis caused by the supernova, will be undone. He can hear “the unseen clock” ticking away.

The art is heavy. Every brow is furrowed, save for Lt. Cmdr. Musiker, who is depicted with a carefree competency and one of the only relaxed people we see. Everyone else is holding a lot of tension on their face.

The classical architecture of the Romulans and the highly technical nature of the diverse starships we see are given good line treatments that vary between hard and sketchy. The variety in heaviness serves to increase the feeling of each conversation and the power dynamics at play as the tension continues to tighten throughout the issue.

Finally, the top of the final page has three panels showing Picard’s incarceration, illustrated with lighting reminiscent of our first introduction to Stewart’s character back in 1987 — what a beautiful love letter to Jean-Luc’s return.

Admiral Picard and the Verity crew will be back in the second issue of Star Trek: Picard — Countdown later this month, with the final chapter coming in January.

What will happen between now and then — and if this story is leading up to the decision that leads Picard to leave Starfleet service altogether — remains to be seen.