Star Trek: Picard Explains Adam Soong's Future Confederation Statue

Star Trek: Picard Explains Adam Soong's Future Confederation Statue

Star Trek: Picard's Dr. Adam Soong is honored by the Confederation in the 25th century and the reason stems from the tech he built for his daughter.

Warning: SPOILERS for Star Trek: Picard Season 2, Episode 5 - "Fly Me To The Moon"

There's a surprising explanation in Star Trek: Picard season 2 for why Dr. Adam Soong (Brent Spiner) has a statue in the 25th century of the dark Confederation future. When Star Trek: Picard season 2's timeline was changed by Q (John de Lancie), a statue honoring Adam Soong appeared in San Francisco Bay, near the headquarters of the Confederation of Earth. Star Trek: Picard season 2 later revealed that Q recruited Dr. Soong in 2024 to help him target Renée Picard (Penelope Mitchell), the ancestor of Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart), who is the divergence that Q uses to alter the timeline.

In 2024, Dr. Adam Soong is a brilliant geneticist living in Los Angeles in Star Trek: Picard season 2. Soong finds himself in dire straits when his funding is cut due to his illegal experiments into eugenics, which was banned as a result of the Eugenics Wars that produced genetically-engineered tyrants like Khan Noonien Singh (Ricardo Montalbán). But Adam's desperation to continue his work is to save his daughter, Kore (Isa Briones), who was born with a rare genetic disease where exposure to open air and the sun's ultraviolet light turns her blood to fire and will kill her. Knowing of the Soongs' predicament, Adam was easy prey for Q, who promised the geneticist a cure for Kore's disease in exchange for his help in eliminating Renée Picard from the timeline. This potentially puts Adam Soong on a collision course with Picard and his motley crew, as well as Tallinn (Orla Brady), a Supervisor like Gary Seven from the Star Trek: The Original Series episode "Assignment: Earth" whose mission is to protect Renée.

The reason why Dr. Adam Soong will have a holographic statue honoring him in the Confederation's 2401 timeline was confirmed by Star Trek: Picard season 2's showrunner Terry Matalas. Responding to a Twitter user who asked whether the drone shield Dr. Soong created to protect Kore is the same as the shield covering the Earth in the Confederation's future, Matalas tweeted, "yes."  In Star Trek: Picard season 2, episode 5, "Fly Me To The Moon," Adam employs an army of drones that erect an energy shield around Kore, who the 24th-century synthetics Dahj and Soji are based upon, in order to protect her from exposure to the sun and open air. The drones saved Kore's life again when Q's cure turned out to only be temporary. But Matalas' tweet verified that Soong's technology is employed on a grand scale by the Confederation 400 years later to protect Earth from the ravages of climate change. Thus, Dr. Adam Soong is a hero to the Confederation in the future.

Dr. Adam Soong's future heroism (or infamy, depending on one's point of view) also marks a major change to the Soong legacy in Star Trek: Picard season 2's dark Confederation-ruled future. In the 24th century of Star Trek's Prime timeline, Dr. Noonien Soong is the genius who created the positronic androids Lore, Data, and B-4. Soong's inventions later inspired Dr. Bruce Maddox (John Ales) and Noonien's descendant Altan Inigo Soong to build Soji, Dahj, and a new race of synthetics from Data's positronic neuron, as well as Jean-Luc Picard's synthetic body. But creating the drone shield that protects Kore becomes a new foundation of Adam Soong's dynasty along with androids, which led to his holographic statue in San Francisco Bay.

Adam Soong's eugenics background in Star Trek: Picard season 2 also foreshadows his sinister 22nd-century descendant, Arik Soong, in Star Trek: Enterprise. Arik used illegal genetic engineering to create enhanced people he called Augments. What happened to Adam's descendants Arik and Noonien in Star Trek: Picard's Confederation future is not yet known, but Adam is apparently revered for his technology that helped save the planet Earth. Adam's holographic statue also announces the Confederation's xenophobic slogan, "A safe galaxy is a human galaxy," which foretells what could be Dr. Adam Soong's insidious belief system in Star Trek: Picard season 2.