Star Trek: Picard Showrunner's Biggest Regret About Season 3
It's hard to imagine a better ending to the "Star Trek: Picard" series finale than the one Trekkies received. Season 3's "The Last Generation" did something for its cast the "Star Wars" sequel trilogy was unable to do for its iconic characters: bring the "Star Trek: The Next Generation" mainstays together for a final hurrah. "Picard" showrunner Terry Matalas gave the fanbase a compelling story peppered with copious amounts of nostalgia, but his biggest regret was the lack of romantic entanglements.
"As far as other things that I wish we could have done better, I think I would say, looking at some of the criticisms across the board, I would say it's a decisively unromantic season," Matalas said in an interview with Screen Rant. "There was no real room for romance, whether that is Picard and Crusher, Seven and Raffi, Jack and Sidney had a moment of flirtation. Even Riker and Troi mostly deals with the tragedy of a couple losing a child. I wish I had fought for more time for a few extra scenes with those characters. I think the fans would have all wanted more romance throughout."
Matalas may have left out true romance, but the showrunner did the best he could with the time allotted to conclude "Picard." However, if Matalas had it to do over again, and with the proper resources, fans would have seen even more from Jean-Luc Picard's (Patrick Stewart) swan song.
Matalas regretted not including romance
Terry Matalas obviously regrets the lack of romance in the series finale, but the writer and director gave Trekkies so much, even without the inclusion of love stories. For instance, there was a basket full of cool "Star Trek" Easter Eggs to help bolster the well-crafted characters and story. Walter Koenig makes a voiceover cameo as President Anton Chekov, who is the son of "Star Trek: The Original Series" alum Commander Pavel Chekov. A nod to the films featuring the "TOS" crew shows up when Seven of Nine (Jeri Ryan) employs the old prefix code trick from "Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan" to lower the shields of all the fleet's ships, so the Titan can attack while uncloaked. But despite all those great moments which complemented the finely crafted script, Matalas still regrets the absence of romance.
"We stuck with the high stakes of it all," Matalas said during the same interview. "It felt like that was where we needed to stay. There wasn't really a lot of time to talk about feelings and for people to kiss. But in retrospect, I think that would have been satisfying to fans, but that's why we asked for more 'Star Trek,' that those characters aren't going away? Then we certainly leave all those characters in a place where we can do that. So that's probably my biggest regret." Something else that bothered Matalas in equal measure was his inability to include more classic characters in the series finale.
The lack of characters was an equally painful regret
To the delight of Trekkies, the core "TNG" characters and "Star Trek: Voyager" alumna Seven of Nine all appear in the "Picard" finale, and even Q showed up in the credits scene. However, if Terry Matalas had the time and resources, he'd have included even more characters in "The Last Generation." "My other one [regret] would be: there were characters I really wanted to see again," Matalas revealed in the same interview. "In the original finale script, it was a giant movie that we were building on a television time schedule. The fact that we saw what we saw was miraculous that we pulled it off. Like, it nearly killed us all."
Matalas also told Screen Rant that budget constraints left a scene between Data and Soji out of the "Star Trek: Picard" finale. In addition, a dungeon sequence featuring Tuvok and Ro Laren on the Intrepid was left high and dry. An appearance by Harry Kim was scrapped, and a Seven of Nine promotion featuring Kate Mulgrew was in the first draft of "The Last Generation," but didn't see the light of day.
"These are all things that are all in the first script and then your line producer says, 'Are you out of your f***ing mind? You can't afford these things. You are not 'Avengers: Endgame,'" Matalas continued. "So, they gotta go away. And so, those are regrets, but I'm very happy with what we were able to pull off."