Yahoo News Picard season 3 is the final adventure The Next Generation cast never got
Terry Matalas, the newly appointed showrunner for Star Trek: Picard's third and final season, felt the pressure to stick the landing — not just for the audience, but for himself.
Years ago, his love of The Next Generation fueled the Emerson College graduate to become a PA in the Trek production offices, through which he became friends with Seven of Nine (a.k.a. Jeri Ryan) while working on Voyager and taxied Jean-Luc Picard himself (Patrick Stewart) around in a golf cart to the studio stages. Now, here he is, decades later, and it's his prime directive to give the characters he loved as a kid the send-off they never got.
Matalas sees Picard season 3 as the proper "last story" for the Next Generation era. "I think the original series had a final send-off with Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country," he tells EW of the 1991 movie that brought back the William Shatner-led cast. "This cast," he says, referring to The Next Generation, "never really had that. So that was the goal from the beginning, to send 'em off in one final adventure that was both thrilling and deeply personal."
James Dimmock/Paramount + Patrick Stewart as Jean-Luc Picard in 'Star Trek: Picard' season 3
The mission was to re-assemble the main crew of The Next Generation around Stewart. Gates McFadden. Jonathan Frakes. LeVar Burton. Michael Dorn. Marina Sirtis. Brent Spiner. The whole Enterprise gang. There was no back-up plan.
"It was this or bust, so I had to go hard," Matalas admits. "The good news is I think everybody really wanted to do it. It was something that was in their hearts. The cast certainly wanted to return. They're all lifelong friends. And another chance for them to be reunited on a starship? Who wouldn't say yes to that? The pressure is really finding a story that's worthy of that."
Crushing it
James Dimmock/Paramount + Gates McFadden as Beverly Crusher in 'Star Trek: Picard' season 3
Watching Star Trek with his dad every Sunday from the living room couch, Matalas felt like Captain Picard and his chief medical officer on the Enterprise were among the "will they, won't they" greats of television. "It feels like, 'Why didn't they for decades?'" he asks himself. "It felt like it should have gone there in a feature film. Now that you're here at the end, wouldn't it be great to see, 'Oh, they went there alright.'"
With the return of McFadden as Beverly Crusher, Matalas says "we get to see the fallout of that," as well as "a coming together" in the final season.
"I also think that Beverly really never got her due," he adds. "That was one of the ideas I had from the beginning: The first person you actually saw this season was Beverly Crusher popping in the frame and defending her doctors. She was still a doctor, but she wasn't traditionally the kind of doctor you expected her to be. A lot of time and a lot of discussion with Gates went into that."
Forging a new path
James Dimmock/Paramount + LeVar Burton as Geordi La Forge in 'Star Trek: Picard' season 3
Matalas had conversations with all the legacy Trek actors returning for Picard. He admits there were nerves around telling them where there characters would be after all this time. To get ahead of that, he met with each one individually to lay out his plans. "I was fortunate that, creatively, we were very aligned," he says. "They know their characters better than I do."
He remembers the reaction from Burton, who returns as Geordi La Forge, now with two daughters. Burton's own daughter Mica Burton plays Ensign Alandra La Forge, Geordi's youngest who works alongside him, while actress Ashlei Sharpe Chestnut plays Ensign Sidney LaForge, Geordi's eldest.
"I remember vividly the Zoom conversation I had with LeVar Burton, where I took him through the 10-episode arc I had envisioned for him," Matalas recalls. "I pitched to him this big moment at the end of the season, and by the time I was done, there were tears in his eyes. It dawned on me that I just made Geordi La Forge cry with this story. And then I started to cry."
Worf by way of Kill Bill
James Dimmock/Paramount + Michael Dorn as Worf in 'Star Trek: Picard' season 3
Matalas' chat with Dorn went differently. There weren't many tears. Just some references to Kill Bill.
Multiple books and comics have been released since the last movie with the Next Generation cast, which was 2002's Star Trek: Nemesis. They offered clues as to what Worf could have been getting into. "We didn't want to say no to any of those ideas, but we certainly had a vision of where he was now," Matalas notes.
The writer-producer didn't see the fan-favorite Klingon as a starship captain, despite what the stories from those novels and comics might depict. "I see him as a samurai," Matalas notes. "I actually see him with this Klingon sword on his back. I also see him, although this doesn't quite line up with Klingon lore, with a white beard."
According to the showrunner, there was a long pause as Dorn processed this: "He's like, 'Do you mean like Pai Mei from Kill Bill?' I was like, 'That's a way to go.' And he goes, 'I love it.'"
Butch and Sundance
James Dimmock/Paramount + Jonathan Frakes as William Riker in 'Star Trek: Picard' season 3
Another reference Matalas had was the 1969 Western with Robert Redford and Paul Newman, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. That was his touchstone for Picard's relationship to his former No. 1, William Riker.
Frakes previously appeared on Picard as Riker, but he takes a more prominent role in season 3. "I thought it was important not to just get them all together in the first moment, but to earn each one of these character stories, to give each one of these characters their moment before they come together," Matalas explains.
"If you were going to do a last Next Generation movie, you would really only have two, maybe three hours to do that," he adds. "That's what's beautiful about a 10-episode sort of 'mini' series. You can explore all of them and see how they're different and pair them up."
"A classic Star Trek villain"
James Dimmock/Paramount + Amanda Plummer as Vadic in 'Star Trek: Picard' season 3
If we're going back to the first Golden Age of Star Trek, Matalas felt he needed "a classic Star Trek villain." That's how he describes Amanda Plummer's Vadic.
Details of this character are locked away in a guarded vault deep in Starfleet command, but we know she captains the Shrike warship and has targeted Picard and his old Enterprise buddies for her own reasons.
How is she more classic? "She's a bit more theatrical by intention," Matalas says. "She's a bit more like her father, Christopher Plummer, in Star Trek VI and that was by design." Plummer's Oscar-winning dad played General Chang in The Undiscovered Country. "We wanted someone who would chew the scenery a bit more, someone who was fun to watch," Matalas continues. "Having said that, when you get to know her story, you will find sympathy. Vadic has her reasons for all of this, I say cryptically. When you do [find out], it will make a lot of sense."
From Enterprise to Picard
James Dimmock/Paramount + Todd Stashwick as Captain Liam Shaw in 'Star Trek: Picard' season 3
Among the new faces is a familiar one from the Trek canon.
Actor Todd Stashwick once played a Romulan posing as a Vulcan in a 2004 episode of Star Trek: Enterprise. Stashwick is now back as the very human Liam Shaw, captain of the USS Titan, the flashy ship fans will see in season 3 of Picard. He's a former engineer with a long history within Starfleet. His first officer is Seven of Nine, who was placed in an accelerated Starfleet program after the events of season 2.
James Dimmock/Paramount + Jeri Ryan as Seven of Nine in 'Star Trek: Picard' season 3
Stashwick had worked with Matalas on another sci-fi series, 12 Monkeys. Many writers who worked on that show followed Matalas to Picard. "When we were creating the character, the first thing I said was, 'Captain Stashwick comes in,'" Matalas recalls. "We just kept saying, 'Captain Stashwick! Captain Stashwick!' There was never anyone else in our mind for that role."
What lies beyond the stars?
James Dimmock/Paramount + Brent Spiner is playing 'an old new character' in 'Star Trek: Picard' season 3, executive producer Alex Kurtzman previously teased.
Matalas is planning season 3 as the last outing for Picard, and the powers that be have already announced these last 10 episodes as the final season. However, executive producer Alex Kurtzman spoke up at the Television Critics Association press tour panel to suggest that maybe the door isn't so closed after all.
"When we started the series, Patrick and we all talked about really wanting it to just be three years, feeling like we could really tell a complete story with the season you're now seeing as our endpoint," Kurtzman, one of the architects of the new Trek-verse, had told reporters at the event in January. "That being said, anything is possible. If a show blows the doors off the place, as we're certainly hoping it will, and we're very, very proud of season 3, who knows?"
Matalas says the future of Picard depends on how viewers react to the "final" (with aggressive air quotes) season. "It's up to the television gods. And by that I mean Paramount+ and Alex Kurtzman," he says. "There's certainly a desire by me and many of the actors to continue some of these stories. I think the way this season ends, there's a tremendous opportunity. So I'd be lying to say that I don't have a thousand and one ideas ready to go. But you know the nature of television is mercurial. So we'll see."
Star Trek: Picard season 3 premieres on Paramount+ Feb. 16. See more exclusive photos of the cast below.
James Dimmock/Paramount + Marina Sirtis as Deanna Troi in 'Star Trek: Picard' season 3
James Dimmock/Paramount + Michelle Hurd as Raffi in 'Star Trek: Picard' season 3
James Dimmock/Paramount + Ed Speleers plays someone helping Crusher's medical team on worlds that Starfleet has forgotten in 'Star Trek: Picard' season 3.
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