The final season of “Star Trek: Picard” has come to a close, with the nostalgia overload of the previous episodes driven to new heights in the final two.
If the return of the U.S.S. Enterprise-D wasn’t enough last week, the season finale boasted multiple references, cameos and more. Turns out there could’ve been way more had there been the budget for it.
Showrunner Terry Matalas tells Slashfilm that cameos which were on the cards initially included Voyager’s Harry Kim and Kathryn Janeway, Soji from the first two seasons of Picard, and a return of Ro Laren who had been imprisoned alongside the real Tuvok.
He explains that basic issues of time, money and logistics prevented it:
“These are all things that … they’re all in the first script, and then your line producer says ‘Are you out of your f—in’ mind? You can’t afford these things. You are not ‘Avengers: Endgame’. So they got to go away. And so those are our regrets. But I’m very happy with what we were able to pull off.”
SPOILERS AHEAD FOR “PICARD” SERIES FINALE
We still got an audio cameo from Walter Koenig playing Pavel Chekov’s son Anton Chekov (named after the late Anton Yelchin, who played Chekov in the Abrams films), the return of Alice Krige as the Borg Queen looking in rough shape after the events of the ‘Voyager’ finale, Tim Russ back again as Tuvok, and John de Lancie back in a post-credits scene as Q.
Matlas says the Q return came up whilst shooting Q’s last scene in the second season. de Lancie was down for the idea and reportedly only had “20 minutes” to shoot the scene.
The time crunch was very real on these episodes, but one exception was made for the poker-playing scene where Matalas let the cast have nearly an hour of free reign:
“[T]his isn’t a movie set, where you have the time built in to let them do that. It’s television. You’re like, we got to go. Except for this scene. I let them improvise for 45 minutes, and I rolled the camera and just let the cameras go, and let them play poker because I wanted the audience to really feel what it’s like to hang out with these actors. To really feel like the jokes and the genuine smiles, the real camaraderie of what these actors, what it’s like with them. They’re really like you in real life.”
He add that the Blu-ray release will potentially see an extended version of that scene. The door is now seemingly left open for a further “Star Trek: Legacy” spin-off. Fan demand is high for said series, but whether it will move forward or not probably won’t be known for a while.
Should it come back, expect Todd Stashwick’s Shaw to return as Matalas has already built in a plan: “We knew from minute one there is a way for Shaw to return in the most wonderful way, that’s not a cop-out, if we ever were to come back and it’s awesome. Awesome.”
The entire third season of “Star Trek: Picard” is now available on the Paramount+ service.
