Fans were thrilled when Paramount+ announced last month that the entire primary cast of Star Trek: The Next Generation are set to return to next year’s Star Trek: Picard episodes, bringing back all of Jean-Luc Picard’s Enterprise shipmates for one final adventure.

While the back half of Picard’s second season has been managed by series co-creator and co-showrunner Akiva Goldsman, writer Terry Matalas (co-showrunner on Season 2 and primary showrunner for Season 3) took over crafting what he’s called “a proper send-off to the TNG crew.”

We had the opportunity to ask franchise head honcho Alex Kurtzman about this massive reunion coming to Star Trek: Picard next season, where he shared how the series required a build-up to such an event — and how the Next Gen cast will have much more than cameo roles in Season 3.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RhX9ozwBb6M

ALEX KURTZMAN: “When you take on Picard, the first thing you think is I want to bring everybody back, right. Of course. But Patrick Stewart, and he really deserves the credit for it, equally wanted to bring everybody back, but I think was insistent from the beginning and saying if we’re going to do that, we have to earn it. We can’t just drop that all at once.

It won’t land in the right way because there won’t have been enough time to set up what had changed about Picard and what had changed about all the other characters in the intervening years. So I think we felt that by the time we get around to Season 3, now you’re like, “Okay, we’ve established the world, we’ve established the characters,” and it makes a lot of sense to bring them back and we have a really good reason to bring them back.

I mean, again, any story is always, “why?” What’s the “why?” And we finally found our “why.”

TREKCORE: And for folks who are worried — not worried, but maybe concerned — that it’s just going to be cameos, they’re just going to be popping in, five minutes in and out… they’re like, real regulars?

KURTZMAN: They’re not cameos. I assure everybody. They can just take that right off the plate.

Returning star Gates McFadden (Beverly Crusher) shared on Twitter today that she’d already completed six episodes worth of ADR (dialogue replacement) work in post-production for Star Trek: Picard’s ten-episode third season — who shared a note of support for Matalas’ story idea.

She’ll join Patrick Stewart, along with fellow TNG co-stars LeVar Burton (Geordi La Forge), Michael Dorn (Worf), Jonathan Frakes (Will Riker), Marina Sirtis (Deanna Troi) and Brent Spiner (playing an unknown role) in the final year of the series.

Star Trek: Picard concludes its second season with “Farewell” on Paramount+ May 5 in the United States, and on CTV Sci Fi Channel and Crave in Canada. Outside of North America, the series is available on Amazon’s Prime Video service in most international locations.