Star Trek fans were pleasantly surprised last week when franchise boss Alex Kurtzman and Star Trek: Starfleet Academy showrunner Noga Landau announced that Bob Picardo — who portrayed the holographic doctor on Star Trek: Voyager — would be reprising his role for the upcoming Academy series.
Picardo was most recently seen as The Doctor in Season 2 of the animated series Star Trek: Prodigy, which debuted on Netflix on July 1. In an unexpected moment during his appearance at this weekend’s Star Trek convention in Las Vegas, Picardo actually called the Academy leaders during an on-stage panel, which allowed panel moderator Ian Spelling to ask a few questions — notably, “How did you decide on The Doctor as a character to bring back?”
Kurtzman replied:
“[If the audience has] seen ‘Star Trek: Prodigy,’ there’s a lot of Doctor there – and obviously the Doctor is teaching cadets at Starfleet Academy. It seemed very logical to us that he would still be there in the 32nd Century.”
Additionally, Landau shared her love for the character, noting that she was “raised by” Voyager’s EMH:
“I don’t know if Bob knows this, but the Doctor, like, raised me. So I was worried… that I would come on [the video call to pitch his return] and scare him away. But then I realized that nothing scares Bob Picardo!
I sent him the script and told him a little bit about the part he would have in the show for the first season. He’s going to do things we’ve never seen The Doctor do before — and The Doctor’s done a lot, think about it! — and he said ‘yes.’ I don’t think we had to twist his arm too hard, actually.”
Finally, Alex Kurtzman noted that production on Academy was set to kick off by the end of August.
“We are starting at the end of the month. We are very quickly barreling towards production at this point. The cast is starting to arrive, sets are being built, they’re almost finished, and it’s an incredibly exciting moment for everybody here in Toronto.”
As Creation Entertainment’s Trek convention is not an officially-licensed event, no other big news was expected to come out of the event… but there’s still one more more day left in the show, so if something else happens we’ll be sure to let you know!
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