INTERVIEW: Terry Matalas' SPOILERY Reminiscences About Making 'Star Trek: Picard' Season 3

Terry Matalas.

APRIL 20, 2023 - Star Trek: Picard has reached its end, and most would say very satisfactorily. Terry Matalas was very generous with his time and met with several journalists in a round table on Wednesday to answer our pressing questions. What follows is a roundup of those questions and their answers. Before you read on, you might want to watch the final episode of Star Trek: Picard season 3, entitled “The Last Generation,” because there are SPOILERS GALORE.

---

What came first? Was it the actual structure of the whole season? Or how to use each of the characters to fit their skill set?

Well, you know, the story always comes comes first. But we wanted to make sure every character had their due and then the finale. You know, you didn't want to come away from the finale thinking that one character didn't have a great singular moment or contributed to saving the day. That would feel terrible. So that was the most one of the North stars to how do we make sure each one of these characters has a goosebumps moment.

What is your biggest hope moving forward?

My current biggest hope is that everybody really just enjoys this, that we sent the Next Gen characters off in a really good way, and that everybody likes this next generation of characters. These last two hours were really, really hard to make. It's a giant movie on a television scale. And it almost killed me. So I just want everybody to really like this. Having said that, gosh, I would love to do more. I would love to see Seven and Raffi and Jack and Sidney and the crew continue on. And I'd love to see more of Riker and Geordi and Worf and Beverly and the rest of the TNG gang continued on to in the 21st century. So we'll see, you know. I think it'll be up to the fans to be loud if that's a thing that they would like to see, you know. But there's a lot of Star Trek out there right now. Great Star Trek. Strange New Worlds and Starfleet Academy coming and Section 31. So we'd have to be something that would really be wanted by the fans.

“Five card stud, nothing wild, and the sky's the limit” is one of the greatest final lines of any TV series. How did you come up with ending Star Trek: Picard with “I’ve always felt the stars were in my favor”

I didn't, Cindy Appel did. And it was tough. We sat in the room and we thought, “We're never going to beat ‘All Good Things,’ but let's try”…and Cindy got the closest with that line. But “the stars have always been in my favor” is probably the closest that we could get. I knew I was going to end in that shot and stay in the shot for the credits.

So was the poker scene like leading up to that final line? Was that improv or was that scripted?

it's a great question. They're maniacs, that cast. Anytime you call cut, they're singing, they're dancing,..and this isn't a movie set where you have the time built in to let them do that. It's television. You're like, we’ve got to go. Except for this scene, I let them improvise for 45 minutes. And I roll the camera. I just had the cameras go and let them play poker because I wanted the audience to really feel what it's like to hang out with these actors, to really feel like the jokes and the genuine smiles are real camaraderie…and so I think on the Blu-ray we'll see an extended version of that scene. But those jokes, those smiles are all real. And I wanted the audience to feel that for a few minutes before we said goodbye. So yeah, that's what you're seeing there..

At what point in the creative process did the theme of names become so important? And how did this theme affect the development of the season?

Well, first, it was really a nod to that nepotism because we knew we were flashing forward to the fact that Jack Crusher was going to be accelerated through Starfleet. You have to call it what it is. And so that started that, but it was also about the importance of the name enterprise and what that particular legacy was for not only the Federation, Starfleet, but for the fans, and in a lot of ways that was the last character missing from the season. It was the final character added the ensemble. We brought back the Enterprise-D. And the final character given to Seven of Nine. Truly, that was super important for us for Seven and Raffi to be at the forefront of the Enterprise legacy. So it meant quite a few things. As far as this season goes, it does ask a lot of questions about family. [That question] makes me think about things like I am glad that Jack never took the name Picard at the end that he keeps his mother's name and you know, I think that that's super important.

What are the moments for you in this entire season, that are high points for you? And then on the opposite end looking at it from a critical eye, is there anything in the season that you look back on and you say, “Oh, I wish we could have done this better or added this is where we couldn't do it due to time constraints or story?”

Okay, let me start with the first part, the highlights. Things that are my highlight moments are probably the friends found on the way. It's quite a thing to go from being a Star Trek fan. And these are people that are watching on my television screen to now I'm just on text threads with Jonathan and Brent and LeVar. And they're just my friends. And it's weird. Like, I don't even think of Frakes anymore as Riker, it’s somebody I call and gossip with. So that's the that's, that's weird and remarkable.

As far as accomplishments go, I would say one of the things since I was a little kid that I always wanted to do was be part of a gigantic scoring session, big large orchestra on a big sci fi opera, operatic piece. And being able to do that with my friend Steven Barton was a real highlight, to be in a room with some of the finest musicians in the world. Specifically in this finale, doing Jerry's theme at the end, there over the poker game with some of the people who did the theme with Jerry, some of that string section and brass people played with Jerry on on some of the movie scores. That brings chills. That was really something to me.

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 it's a decisively unromantic season. 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 of losing a child. I wish I had fought for more time. For a few extra scenes with those characters. I think that the fans would have all wanted more romance throughout. We stuck with the high stakes. 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 the fans. But that's why we asked for more Star Trek. Those characters aren't going away. We certainly leave all those characters in a place where we can do that. So that that's probably my biggest regret.

My other one would be there were characters I really wanted to see again, in the original finale script. There was a scene with Soji and Data we could not afford to do. There was a scene in which they found Ro in the dungeons of the Intrepid with Tuvok and she had survived. We weren't able to pull off. Harry Kim had appeared at one point, we really wanted to bring back Kate Mulgrew to be part of Seven of Nine’s promotion. These are all things that are all in the first script and then your line producer says “Are you out of your fucking mind?” So they gotta go. And so those are those are regrets, but I'm very happy with what we are we were able to pull off.

Captain Shaw is a fan-favorite character. What led to the decision to kill him?

I mean, he's named Shaw after Robert Shaw in Jaws. He was going to get eaten by the shark. He was going to be killed by the Borg. That was always a very, very simple story. It was part of his fate. I think what happened was that we never could have anticipated how loved he became by the fans. And that's a testament to some wonderful writers we have, and Todd Stashwick and how charming he is. And you know, I've always known that from his performance on 12 Monkeys. We tailor-made this role for him. So, you know, there was never anybody else for this role but Todd. But having said that we knew, from minute one, there is a way for Shaw to return in the most wonderful way, that's not a cop out. If we ever were to come back, man, it's awesome. Awesome.

What was the experience of getting the original TNG crew on the Enterprise-D like for you?

Terrifying. We only had two days, we were still gluing pieces of the carpet back on onto the ship. And we had a lot to do on that ship. So and it was early on in the schedule. So I, as a director, I had to really make sure I knew what I was doing. And in some cases [I was] not entirely sure how I was going to pull certain moments off, but they worked. And so terrifying. And then in postprocess it was a great relief to see that they worked.

What rank would Harry Kim have been if he’d stayed in the finale script?

He was Captain, actually. I know I talked to Garrett about this and he was very, very disappointed. Again, it's time, it's money. We also didn't want to step on Prodigy’s toes. You don't want to be greedy, right? When we're talking about Frontier Day, if you had another 20 minutes for Frontier Day you'd be seeing everybody who was in Starfleet and the 25th century.

Can you talk about the decision to bring Q back at the end and how that came to be the post-credits scene?

It was an idea I had all the way back when we were shooting his last scene in season 2. I knew we were going to tell this story. And I went up to John and I was like, I've got this idea for a post-credit scene where he's back. And he was like, “Yes.” And John and I are dear friends, so we continued to talk about it whenever we’d hang out. And he was like, “I'll be back.” We only had 20 minutes to shoot the scene. So we literally got him in that amazing outfit. I mean, he's phenomenal on his worst day. And we just we just bang it out. I love that scene so much. It's one of my favorite scenes in the finale.

Did you shoot it during season two?

We literally shot it during the same scene in which Picard tells Jack he’s Borg. It was early, we wrap up, we wrap Patrick and we quickly changed the lighting scheme. That's why it's still kind of foggy. And we went, “Go, go go.” Because we had no time. I mean, yeah. All right. Thanks. How cool does he look? In that costume we learned it's like amazing.

---

Something we didn’t answer? Ask him yourself! Terry Matalas will be doing an AMA on Reddit tomorrow, 4/21 at 10:00 a.m. PT. See the announcement on Twitter with the details.