Star Trek: Picard’s third and final season had a lot going on—and that’s even before you throw in half the regular cast of The Next Generation, and then some, showing up as the weeks went on. But it turns out, there were almost even more returning faces—and not necessarily just from TNG.
Speaking to Master Replicas Collectors Club members in a Zoom Q&A recently (via TrekMovie), Picard showrunner and perpetual hoper-for-a-spinoff Terry Matalas revealed that Picard almost brought back several figures from across TNG’s sister series, Voyager and Deep Space Nine, at various points across the third season.
One prominent addition would’ve been the return of Scarlett Pomers’ Naomi Wildman—the Human/Ktarian child who became the first baby to be born aboard Voyager during its time in the Delta Quadrant, growing into a young acting ensign, regular confidant of Seven of Nine, and Captain Janeway’s assistant. According to Matalas, Naomi’s return would’ve been an important character beat for Seven, but the season’s 10-episode runtime necessitated the episode’s removal.
“There was an episode once the Titan was on the run and it needed to hide. And so we had this idea of Seven bringing them to sort of like space Tortuga, like spacedock for pirates where the Fenris Rangers were. And she gets help from an older Naomi Wildman who had also followed in her footsteps as a Fenris Ranger and was a badass. But Seven realizes she sort of created a monster because Naomi had become harder than she was,” Matalas explained. “And so it was it was a Seven/Naomi story. We broke the story and we had reached out to the actress who played Naomi. But it just didn’t feel—if you had 13 episodes, you were doing this for sure. But if you had 10, you’re like, ‘I need to get to LeVar [Burton].’ It’s time to get there.”
Further cut cameos would’ve come in the climax of the season, when the Federation—gathering Starfleet’s finest to celebrate Frontier Day—found itself under attack and taken over by a rogue Borg infection targeting the younger generations of Starfleet officers. But as they were mostly related to Star Trek: Voyager, the concurrently airing Star Trek: Prodigy’s narrative dealing with those legacy characters presented a potential conflict.
“Harry Kim appeared as the captain of the Voyager-B in the first draft of Frontier Day. But Prodigy was telling a lot of Voyager stories and we didn’t know if Harry was going to appear and we didn’t want to step on their toes,” Matalas continued. “But yeah, for me, I would have had as many as we could get. I would have made that Star Trek Avengers: Endgame. I would have made Frontier Day with many ships… I would have Kira [Nerys, Nana Visitor’s character from Deep Space Nine] there, even if all you get is a bridge shot. But all of that is very expensive. We were already way too ambitious.”
This also included Kate Mulgrew’s Kathryn Janeway, who also appears on Prodigy—in both a hologram of her captaincy days and in physical form as a current Starfleet Admiral—and almost appeared to set the stage promoting Seven to the new captain of the Titan, rechristened into the Enterprise-G. “It would have felt like if we had put Janeway in the in the finale, specifically in the last scene where [Seven of Nine] is promoted… it might have overwhelmed the scene and made it more about Janeway and less about Seven of Nine,” Matalas concluded.
It makes sense to remove a lot of these—especially given how much Picard was already doing weaving in the Next Generation cast at large already. Plus, as nice and nostalgic as it would’ve been, it would’ve detracted that this is at least a very specific goodbye to Picard and that very specific set of TNG characters. Well, that is until that movie Patrick Stewart keeps talking about comes out, I guess. Maybe we can get some cameos then.
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