Star Trek: Picard Season 3 Cast on "Emotional Experience" of Next Generation Reunion and Enterprise Return
Star Trek: Picard' Season 3 brought Jean-Luc Picard and the rest of the USS Enterprise's former senior officers -- William Riker, Deanna Troi, Geordi La Forge, Worf, Data, and Beverly Crusher -- together once more. In the final two episodes, Star Trek: The Next Generation's cast returned to the rebuilt USS Enterprise-D, a recreation resembling the original right down the computer's voice, returning it to action to fend off the Borg's latest attack. Recreating Star Trek: The Next Generation's iconic Starship was quite a feat for Star Trek: Picard Season 3 production design crew and one that the fans greatly appreciated.
The experience was emotional for the cast as well. With Star Trek: Picard Season 3 campaigning for Emmy Consideration, Patrick Stewart, Jonathan Frakes, and Gates McFadden spoke to Deadline about their return to the Enterprise-D bridge.
Star Trek: Picard Season 3's Starship Enterprise Return and Next Generation Reunion
"Our family of friends never stopped knowing one another, so there was no feeling of reunion," Frakes said of returning to the ship and reuniting with the Next Generation cast. "We hadn't been apart. What was unfamiliar was stepping back into a turbolift, waiting to walk back onto the bridge of the Enterprise-D. That was quite an emotional experience."
Stewart added, "I found it wonderful because there was a lot of talking before it was finally confirmed there would be a new Star Trek show called Picard. During those conversations, I had felt strongly – largely based on my pride for what we had achieved with The Next Generation - that I didn't want to mess up the work by making the show a series of sentimental reunion episodes, with us having fun and going on adventures. We'd done that, and we'd done it very well. Not all the time, but most of the time [laughs].
"But 20 years had passed. And I remember Akiva Goldsman saying to me, 'Patrick, your life has changed in the past 20 years. So many things have happened to you. Are you the same person you were then?' I realized then that it didn't have to make reference to The Next Generation at all. What had been happening to these characters in those 20 years? Who were they today? I already knew mine had been up and down – captain, admiral, a desk job, not flying a spaceship.
McFadden concludes, "The reason to come back was that Terry [Matalas] pitched a really great story, and I loved it. I liked the fact it was different, that the character was much more three-dimensional as far as I was concerned. I loved that it was a story about the corruption of the Federation because our world today is so full of corruption; of the environment, of the values we'd grown up with. You read three newspapers in the morning and you're ready to go back to bed."
How to watch Star Trek: Picard
Star Trek: Picard Season 3 is streaming now in full on Paramount+. All previous Star Trek: Picard episodes, as well as all episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation, every other episode of Star Trek television, and, currently, every Star Trek movie are streaming now on Paramount+. Star Trek: Picard Season 3 comes to Blu-ray in September.
Star Trek: Picard streams exclusively on Paramount+ in the U.S., and on Amazon Prime Video in over 200 countries and territories. In Canada, it airs on Bell Media's CTV Sci-Fi Channel and streams on Crave.