Star Trek: Picard's Season 3 Showrunner Changed Show's Look and Sound to Be More Like The Next Generation

Star Trek: Picard Season 3 will feature some old-school touches that Star Trek: The Next Generation fans will appreciate. With Star Trek: Picard's final season bringing back the Next Generation crew for one last mission (or maybe not), showrunner Terry Matalas wanted to bring some aesthetic touches to the season that would make it feel more like a direct continuation of The Next Generation than Picard's previous seasons did. "I love the old Next Gen font," he tells Den of Geek. "I've missed titles on episodes and seeing them and going, 'hmm, I wonder what that means…?' And the music was extraordinarily important to me."

That's why Matalas replaced Jeff Russo, a mainstay of the modern Star Trek franchise, with Stephen Barton as the season's composer. Matalas feels Barton is better suited for bringing back the sounds of Star Trek's past.

"If we were going to say this is the last Star Trek: The Next Generation film, or 10 of the last Star Trek: The Next Generation movies—because all the episodes are very different—then it needed to sound like that, too," Matalas says. "And that required Stephen Barton. Then, later in the season, the score gets so massive as the story grows that we had to bring in some help from Frederik Wiedmann, who's a brilliant composer as well. I grew up with legends [like] Jerry Goldsmith and James Horner. Not to mention Dennis McCarthy and Cliff Eidelman. All those Trek composers have nods."

Matalas previously teased that Star Trek: Picard's final season will feel more cinematic, like a lost Star Trek: The Next Generation movie (or 10 movies, going by the episode count). "It is very different," he told Trek Movie. "We really wanted to make this as cinematic an experience as possible. If there wasn't going to be a final Star Trek: The Next Generation movie then this 10-episode series would serve that and feel like that. So when it comes out, my recommendation would be to turn off the lights, pop some popcorn, and you got 10 chapters ahead of you that should feel as cinematic as possible."

The first two seasons of Star Trek: Picard are streaming now on Paramount+, as are all seven seasons of Star Trek: The Next Generation. Star Trek: Picard Season 3 will premiere on February 16th on Paramouint+.