‚Star Trek: Picard‘ showrunner Terry Matalas discusses a possible a spinoff series and landing an unexpected guest star for the series finale.
This story discusses major plot developments in “The Last Generation,” the series finale of “Star Trek: Picard,” currently streaming on Paramount+.
The last time the cast of “Star Trek: The Next Generation” cast performed together on screen — in 2002’s “Star Trek: Nemesis” — ended with a sour one-two punch: the sudden death of Data (Brent Spiner) and the financial failure of the film, which caused Paramount to stop making movies with the cast. Effectively, after a brilliantly successful seven-season run on TV, “The Next Generation” had been canceled from movie theaters.
Two decades later, when Terry Matalas was tapped to executive produce the final season of “Star Trek: Picard,” the lifelong “Trek” fan knew that he not only wanted to bring back the full “TNG” cast, but provide them with the swan song they had never received.
“I wanted it to feel like a proper send-off in the way that I felt watching ‘Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country,’” Matalas says of the final film to feature the full original “Star Trek” cast. “In this case, we had 10 hours, so we could do better. We could give each one of these characters more, and end in a sense of family in ways that they didn’t have time in a two-hour movie to do.”
In doing so, Matalas sought to rectify some of the perceived sins of the “TNG” movies: He resurrected Data and endowed him with a consciousness that allowed the android to fulfill his lifelong dream of becoming fully human. And he brought back the Enterprise-D, the starship that had been destroyed in the climax of the first “TNG” film, 1994’s “Star Trek: Generations.”
“In the most fanboy sense, I wanted to place the action figure set neatly and safely back on the shelf,” Matalas says. “If it’s the last we see of them, we see them in a wonderful grand moment together around the poker table. Not mourning the loss of Data. The Enterprise-D not crashed, but in a museum. Knowing that there is a bright future for ‘Star Trek’ and for their families. For me, that felt important as a fan, to feel like that’s where we left ‘The Next Generation.’”
That’s exactly what Matalas has done with “The Last Generation,” the thrilling series finale of “Star Trek: Picard”: Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart) and Beverly Crusher (Gates McFadden) save their son Jack and the entirety of Starfleet — from assimilation by the Borg, with Data, Riker (Jonathan Frakes), Troi (Marina Sirtis), Geordi (LeVar Burton) and Worf (Michael Dorn) all contributing to save the day. In the final scene, they all toast to their success and happiness and play a game of poker, a callback to the final scene of the “Next Generation” series finale “All Good Things.”
If that wasn’t enough, in the aftermath of the battle with the Borg, the U.S.S. Titan is rechristened the U.S.S. Enterprise-G, and Seven of Nine the “Star Trek: Voyager” character who has been on “Picard” from Season 1 — is promoted to be its captain. Jack, a new member of Starfleet, is stationed on the ship, along with Geordi’s daughter Sidney (Ashlei Sharpe Chestnut). Even Q (John de Lancie) — the omnipotent being who has been a “Trek” mainstay since the “Next Generation” series premiere “Encounter at Farpoint” — shows up in a post-credits sequence in which he tells Jack that his trials “have just begun.
