Star Trek: Picard Season 3 Showrunner Terry Matalas Digs Into the Epic Series Finale and What Lies Ahead

Today brings the Star Trek: Picard Season 3 finale, and ComicBook.com had the opportunity to talk to showrunner Terry Matalas about the epic, crowd-pleasing series finale that was decades in the making. SPOILERS follow for Star Trek: Picard Star Trek: Picard‘s series finale saw the Star Trek: The Next Generation crew reunited on the bridge of the rebuilt Enterprise-D bridge and facing down their old foe, the Borg, as they attempted to save Earth and rescue Jean-Luc Picard and Beverly Crusher’s son, Jack Crusher. Luckily, they haven’t missed a beat since they last all worked together. The day was saved, and the entire crew and their families made it to the end.

ComicBook.com chatted over a video call with Star Trek: Picard Season 3 showrunner Terry Matalas. We discussed whether he ever had plans to kill off a member of the crew, what his future with Star Trek might hold, and that surprising return in the episode’s post-credits scene. Here’s what he told us:

You kind of put fans on edge on Twitter a while back when you said something along the lines of, “Hey, the Next Gen crew is back, but I can’t guarantee their safety.”

Terry Matalas: “Safety not guaranteed.”

Right. And yet, they all made it through. Was there ever any serious discussion in the writers’ room or in your mind about killing off any of these characters for the end of the season?

No.

It was just getting everybody worried?

Well, I think the finale works better if you think they’re not going to make it out, and I think the characters don’t think they’re going to make it out, that’s for sure. I think they’re having a lot of conversations going, “This is probably it.” I remember going to see — my best friend has flown in from New Jersey, sitting in the room with me, to come see the IMAX film, but we both saw Star Trek VI in the theater together. I remember thinking Kirk was going to bite it when I saw The Undiscovered Country. And that intensified that movie for me because I really didn’t want Kirk to die. And so, when you have that feeling of like, “Please don’t, please don’t, please don’t,” it certainly helps, but I didn’t have the heart to do that to any of these characters. I knew I wanted to end in that poker game, and I knew I wanted to feel a sense of joy with that cast one last time.

You mentioned Kirk there for a minute, and Paramount+ just dropped the new Strange New Worlds trailer before I hopped on this call.

Is Kirk in the new trailer?

Yes.

Okay.

I had this thought. You put this Easter egg in an earlier episode where Kirk’s body is with Section 31. What do you think the chances are that opens up the opportunity for Paul Wesley to come and play Kirk in the 25th century?

In Star Trek, anything is possible, right? Look, we put that in there as an Easter egg. I always thought that it was a shitty grave on Veridian III. It was a pile of rocks, I don’t care what fans think. It became a controversial idea. Starfleet showed up an hour and a half later. There was no way they were going to leave Kirk’s body that had just come through the nexus under a pile of coal on the planet. So it was less an insidious plan, and it was mostly a nod to Shatner and Judy and Gar’s [Reeves-Stevens] novel The Return in that way, and to give some opportunity to keep that character alive in some way, whether that would be Shatner or some new actor, or crazy gender swap clone, some fun thing. It’s science fiction, and your imagination is endless. That was the idea behind that.

I read the gender-swapped Kirk comic. It’s pretty fun actually.

Someone did it? Of course, they did.

It’s one of the Kelvin Timeline comics.

That sounds amazing. I want to read that. That sounds so cool.

You obviously had a hand in what seemed like the end of Q’s story in Season 2. Why do that only to have him show up now at the end of this episode?

Why do what?

Why kill him off? Why bring him back, I guess, at the end of season three after having done that?

Well, we didn’t undo anything, we were just telling a different part. I think what Q says to Jack is what he would say to you, is, “Don’t think so linearly, young mortal.” What better way to end it than at the beginning? In fact, his wardrobe almost matches what he wears in “Encounter at Farpoint,” in that judge’s uniform, quite a bit, and talking about the trials of humanity was the idea behind it, that the conversation he had with Picard in that first episode is now the conversation he’s starting to have with Jack, his son. And so, that just felt like what a great bookend.

It’s true, nothing gave me TNG vibes more than Q doing Q at the end of this episode, which leads to my next question: Assuming that another show happens, that you got to do Star Trek: Legacy, in your mind, is that show the streaming Star Trek serialized type of thing? Is it something like this season of Picard, where it was almost a 10-episode movie? Or do you envision it more as a throwback to the more episodic stuff, kind of like what Strange New Worlds has tried to do?

I think it could be a mix-and-match. Again, let me be clear: there’s nothing in development. It’s just an exciting pie-in-the-sky idea. But it would mix and match. But I would love to go back to the spirit of Star Trek: The Next Generation quite a bit. This last season of Picard is not Season 8 of Star Trek: The Next Generation. It’s more Star Trek 11. It’s a movie. The characters are much closer to their cinematic versions than they are Star Trek: The Next Generation versions of their characters. I would love to go back to the spirit of Star Trek: The Next Generation as much as you can, but we’d have to see if it would be possible. Who knows?

I’m going to assume that you’re not going to tell me what Seven-of-Nine’s captain catchphrase is, or else you would have just put it in the episode. However, I will ask if you know what that catchphrase in your mind already.

We had a few options, and we actually shot a post-post-credit to them reacting disappointed to it, and she’s like, “This is a work in progress.” But it’s better left as a mystery that we hope to see it one day. Yeah. We’ll see. It was pretty great though.

So, the Enterprise-G reveal was pretty amazing. 

Oh, I love to hear you say that.

Was the idea to rename the Titan to the Enterprise primarily driven by the desire to hide that reveal throughout the season? or was there some other theme or conceptual thing that you were trying to get at with that transformation?

Well, I love seeing the origin story of the new Enterprise. At the same time, the Titan was such a — I would be clear to the fans that the Titan name will live on. There will be another ship, the Titan-B, that will go on, and probably be a cool version of a new Luna class out there. But this ship is definitely a Constitution-class throwback, and we wanted it to feel like a scrappy Enterprise. It wasn’t as bulky as the E, and it wasn’t a battleship like the E or the F. It was an underdog like Kirk’s ship was.

And so, we wanted to have that feeling back, and so we didn’t know if it was going to work. We always wanted it to be the Enterprise. We did play with a couple of names. At one point, we even discussed, “Does it become the Picard?,” but when we got to the visual effects and we saw NCC-1701-G on it, and USS Enterprise, we all gasped. We all got chills because it looked so perfect on that Constitution class saucer, and then we were like, “Nope, we did the right thing. This is the thing.” And we feel really good about it. All of us who worked on it are having models built as we speak.

Lastly, I loved how many cool story hooks were in this season, like what happened to the Enterprise-E, and then there’s a year-long gap in this last episode. Have you talked to any comic book writers, novelists, or anybody involved with that kind of thing, about filling in those gaps?

I have ideas, and I hope that when they do one day start to tell those stories, they’ll talk to me first about it. They probably won’t. They’ll probably just go and make those things. But yeah, no, I have a ton of ideas about what Worf meant by, “That was not my fault.”

How to watch Star Trek: Picard

The Star Trek: Picard Season 3 finale is streaming now on Paramount+. All previous Star Trek: Picard episodes (as well as all episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation, and every other episode of Star Trek television) are streaming now on Paramount+.

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.

[UPDATE: A previous version of this story included a transcription error in Matalas’ quote about the authors of the novel Star Trek: The Return. We regret this error, which has been corrected.]