Last week, the third and final season of Star Trek: Picard debuted at a blue-carpet premiere event in Los Angeles, and the TrekCore team was there to chat up the cast and crew behind Season 3 — starting with this year’s creative lead, showrunner and executive producer Terry Matalas.
TREKCORE: What did it take to get the entire Next Generation cast back together, and get the season filmed before the news went out? How hard was it to keep that secret?
TERRY MATALAS: It is crazy that it didn’t get out. We shot almost four months before we announced it. I don’t know…. it’s not like we had tents or anything like that. We just did our best, but we didn’t go as hard as Star Wars or Marvel would. I also don’t know necessarily if there was that kind of speculation or eyes on it in that way.
But, yeah, I was surprised it hadn’t leaked.
TREKCORE: Now that you have all these TNG characters back, knowing you have this extended, though still finite length of time, how do you work to balance it so that everybody — along with Jeri Ryan and Michelle Hurd, and the newcomers –all get their time in the spotlight?
MATALAS: Well, it’s tremendously difficult. That’s 14 hour days in our writers room with the dry erase board, asking ourselves, “Is every character getting their due?” Pairing them up, making sure everybody has the right story arc, that’s just the work we have to do.
I hope we got it right.
TREKCORE: There were things, story points you were trying to do, but you just couldn’t pull it off in the length of time. You mentioned at one point that you had a Naomi Wildman story that you were working on.
Can you tell me anything about that, if it’s not a spoiler?
MATALAS: We broke an episode where Naomi Wildman was a Fenris Ranger, following in the footsteps of Seven of Nine — and maybe was a bit more aggressive in her style than Seven. The crew his season certainly gets into some trouble, and Seven might have needed to go to somebody for help, and that person would have been Naomi Wildman.
Ultimately, there just wasn’t the real estate for it this season. I love the story. I’d love seeing that. However, I’d love to do more and stay in this time period — and that’s a character you absolutely would want to see again.
This interview has been edited for clarity.
We’ll have more from the Star Trek: Picard premiere as the days ahead — and of course watch for our review of the season premiere, titled “The Next Generation,” tomorrow morning.
Star Trek: Picard Season 3 will debut February 16 on Paramount+ the United States, and on CTV Sci Fi Channel and Crave in Canada. It will debut internally on Paramount+ on February 17 in the UK, Australia, Italy, France, Germany, Austria and Switzerland.
The series is also available on Amazon’s Prime Video service in most other international locations.