The fantastic third season of Star Trek:Picard is now complete, and Cherry the Geek TV spoke with Showrunner Terry Matalas about the finale, the highs and lows of the season, and what the future of Star Trek might be if he got his way.
WARNING: This article contains spoilers about season 3 of Star Trek:Picard. If you haven’t watched it yet, stop what you’re doing and boldly go to your sofa and finish watching. You have been warned!
CHERRY THE GEEK TV: Terry, thanks for chatting with us on Cherry the Geek TV. First off, congratulations on a fantastic season. I’m a long time Trek fan for 40-plus years and Season Three was just perfection for me. i think you just nailed everything from beginning to end.
MATALAS: Thank you, Joe.
QUESTION: I’m curious–for you as the showrunner now that we can look back and talk about the entire season, what are the moments for you that are high points? Scenes. Moments. Things that you accomplished that you can look back on and say ‘Wow, we did that.’ And then, on the opposite end, looking back at it with a critical eye, are there any things you look back on as things you wish you could have done better or things you wanted to add that maybe you couldn’t due to time, or budget, or story constraints?
MATALAS: Let me start with that first part. The highlights. Highlight moments are probably the friends found on the way. It’s quite a thing to go from being a Star Trek fan, to these being people I watched on my television screen to now being on text threads with Jonathan (Frakes) and Brent (Spiner) and LaVar (Burton). Now they’re just my friends. And it’s weird (laughs). I don’t even think of Frakes anymore as Riker. He’s now somebody I call and gossip with. That’s weird…and remarkable.
As far as accomplishments go, I would say one of the things since I was a little kid that I’ve always wanted to do is be part of a gigantic scoring session with a large orchestra on a big sci-fi operatic piece and being able to do that with my friend Stephen Barton was a real highlight. To be in the room with some of the finest musicians in the world, specifically for this finale, doing Jerry Goldsmith’s theme over the poker game with some of the people who did that theme WITH Jerry–some of that string section and brass people played with Jerry on some of the movie scores–that brings chills. That was really something to me.
As far as things we could have done better–It’s a decisively unromantic season. There was no real room for romance, whether that was Picard and Crusher, Seven and Raffi, Jack and Sidney had a moment of flirtation, even Riker and Troi mostly just deals with the tragedy of a couple losing their child. I wish I had fought for more time for a few extra scenes with those characters. I think the fans would have wanted more romance thoughout. We stuck with the high stakes of it all. It felt like that was where we needed to stay. There wasn’t really a lot of time for people to talk about their feelings and for people to kiss, but in retrospect I think it would have been satisfying for fans. But that it why we ask for more Star Trek, you know? Those characters aren’t going away. And we certainly leave those characters in a place where we can do that.
My other regret in that there are certain characters i wanted to see again. In my original finale script–look, we were doing a movie on a television schedule. The fact that you saw what you saw is miraculous that we pulled it off. It nearly killed us all. But there was a scene with Soji and Data that we could not afford to do–to bring in another actor. There was a scene where they found Ro Laren in the dungeons of the Intrepid with Tuvok and that she had survived and that we were not able to pull off. Harry Kim had appeared at one point. We wanted to bring in Kate Mulgrew to be a part of Seven of Nine’s promotion. These are all things that are all in the first script and then the line producer says “Are you out of your fucking minds?! We can’t afford this! This is not Avengers Endgame.” So they’ve got to go away. Those are regrets. But I’m very happy with what we were able to pull off.
QUESTION: What rank was Harry Kim going to be?
MATALAS: Captain. I talked to Garrett (Wang) about this and he was very disappointed. Again, it’s time. It’s money. We also didn’t want to step on Star Trek Prodigy‘s toes. You don’t want to be greedy, right? We’re talking about Frontier Day. If we had another twenty minutes I’m sure you’d want to check in with everybody from the 25th century and see what they’re doing.
QUESTION: I want to talk about Captain Liam Shaw. Great character. Fantastic performance by Todd Stashwick. I feel he’s one of the best new characters in the Star Trek Universe since Kirstie Alley appeared as Saavik in Star Trek II. I was really happy to see him pop back in briefly in hologram form in episode 10. As the episodes were airing weekly, and online buzz began to grow amongst fans and there was all this outpouring of love for the character and speculation that he would carry a new show, did you ever second guess the decision to kill him off in episode nine?
MATALAS: He was always supposed to die. It was always his arc. He’s named Shaw after Robert Shaw in Jaws. He was always going to get eaten by the shark. He was always going to get killed by the Borg. It was a very simple story. It was part of his fate. What we never anticipated was how beloved he was going to be by the fans. That’s a wonderful testament to the wonderful writers we have and to Todd Stashwick and how charming he is. I’ve always known that from his performance in Twelve Monkeys. We tailor made this role for him. There was never anybody else for the role but Todd Stashwick. But having said that, we knew from minute one that there is a way for Shaw to return in the most wonderful way that’s not a cop-out if the show were to come back. And it’s awesome. Awesome.
QUESTION: In developing the season, what came first–the structure of the whole season, or how to use each of the characters to fit their skill sets?
MATALAS: Well the story always comes first, but we wanted to make sure that every character had their due. We didn’t want you walking away from the finale thinking that one character didn’t have a great singular moment or hadn’t contributed to saving the day. That would feel terrible. So that was one of our North Stars–“How do we make sure that each one of these characters has a ‘goosebumps save the day’ moment?” So that was part of breaking the story for sure.
QUESTION: What was it like going aboard the bridge of the Enterprise D, and directing on it?
MATALAS: Terrifying. We only had two days. We were still gluing pieces of carpet back on the ship. We had a lot to do on that ship. And it was early on in the schedule. As a director, I had to really make sure I knew what I was doing. And it was some of the most emotional, pivotal points in the piece. In some cases, I wasn’t entirely sure how I was going to pull certain moments off, but they worked. So terrifying and then wonderful in post process. Great relief to see that they worked.
QUESTION: At the end of episode ten, we see Captain Seven, Raffi, and Jack Crusher on the bridge of the Enterprise G. We also have a post-credits scene with Jack Crusher and Q. You’ve definitely left the door open for future stories. What are your hopes for the future of these characters and for Star Trek in general? Is this a show you’d like to make?
MATALAS: First of all, my biggest hope right now is that people enjoy this (Star Trek:Picard)–that we sent the Next Gen characters off in a really good way and that everyone really likes this new generation of characters. These last two hours were really hard to make. It’s a giant movie on a television scale and it almost killed me. Having said that, I would love to do more. I would love to see Seven and Raffi and Jack and Sidney and the crew continue on and I’d love to see more Riker and Geordi and Worf and Beverly and the rest of the TNG gang carry on in the 25th Century. I think it’s up to the fans to be loud if that’s something they’d like to see. There’s a lot of great Star Trek out there right now–Strange New Worlds and Starfleet Academy is coming, and Section 31. It would have to be something that is really wanted by the fans for it to happen.
QUESTION: Can you talk about the end credits scene and the decision to bring Q back?
MATALAS: It was an idea I had when we were shooting season two. I went up to John (de Lancie) and I said I have this idea for a post-credits scene for season three and John was like “Yes!” John and I are dear friends so we continued to talk about about it whenever we’d hang out and he’d say I’ll be back. We only had twenty minutes to shoot that scene. He came in, we got him in that amazing outfit. He’s phenomenal on his worst day. I get chills about it. It’s one of my favorite scenes in the finale.
Star Trek:Picard is streaming on Paramount+.
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