Robert Picardo Pitches His Return to Star Trek
Robert Picardo as The Doctor on STAR TREK: VOYAGER. Image: Paramount.
NOVEMBER 9, 2022 - With Kate Mulgrew reprising her role as Katherine Janeway, (both holographic and solid) in Star Trek: Prodigy, as well as Robert Beltran lending his voice to Chakotay in the same series, and the announcement that the Star Trek: The Next Generation cast is coming back for the third (and final) season of Star Trek: Picard, other Legacy actors are expressing interest in bringing their characters back to Trek as well.
Now Robert Picardo has expressed his interest in returning to the role of The Doctor, as well as his other character, Lewis Zimmerman, the creator of the EMH program. In fact, Picardo thinks that Zimmerman is the way back in! He assures fans that if he’s asked to do so, “the answer is yes, it’s fun to visit the character.” He went on to say:
I’m really happy that Kate is talking openly about it now. That they’ve established the precedent with Star Trek: Picard, there’s a passion in the audience out there to see the legacy actors again in new stories mixed with wonderful, younger, new actors. So, it’s certainly something I’m open to as the character lives on inside me.
He also stated that unlike other characters, there is a unique challenge in returning as The Doctor, citing the holographic doctor “is not supposed to age.” Picardo described his idea for the return:
I could easily play Doc Zimmerman again, because Zimmerman is in the same timeline as certain of those Star Trek series… To me it’s a funny idea. What I would find very funny is to have The Doctor and Zimmerman working together… Let’s say you’re a 40-year-old person, imagine your 18-year-old self, working side by side with you during the day on some very critical or important mission… Wouldn’t that annoy you? I think there are a lot of comic possibilities if you can age down The Doctor to do a scene, now that there’s a giant age gap between The Doctor who’s 41 or 42 and his late 60s creator.
Or, maybe he’s just over-thinking it too much. The Doctor could easily just slowly update his appearance to keep up with the very human woman that he married in the VOY episode; “Endgame.”
To see more of his idea for returning, warp over to TrekMovie.com.
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