MARCH 14, 2023 – Space, the final frontier! These are the adventures of Star Trek: Picard. Its final season, to explore strange new emotions, seeking out nostalgia berries and legacy villains. To boldly go, sort of behind us, where no Nu-Trek has gone before.

We have been told that PIC’s third season will be their last, and the TNG crew has been rounded up (well, about half of them at this point) for one last “The Big Goodbye.” We’ve seen more nostalgia than just the crew coming back together, but we’ve also been surprised to see a legacy ‘big bad’ back for more galactic Dominion.  (See what I did there?)

But…Star Trek: Picard Almost Brought Back a Different Classic Villain…

Speaking to Collider about last week’s episode of Picard, showrunner Terry Matalas discussed the decision to make the major threat of season 3 a rogue faction of shapeshifting Changelings from the Founders. Deep Space Nine fans remember these guys.  They are silly putty leaders of the Dominion that menaced Starfleet and the rest of the Alpha Quadrant in the latter half of that beloved series.

Matalas was quoted as saying:

They were the perfect villain because they can look like anybody, and there is an episode around the midpoint where it is critical, where you are not sure if the person sitting across from you is a changeling or not.  And the only way that you can know is to have an emotional catharsis with that person. It gives you such incredible drama.

While he was always thinking about the Changelings being a big threat, for a while, he thought that he might have another villain from TNG’s past come back to bug the crew.

These would have more direct roots in Picard’s past.  The parasitic bugs from the infamous season 1 episode “Conspiracy.” Where Picard and Riker uncover a plot by a race of alien bugs to infiltrate Starfleet command, burrowing into their unfortunate hosts and killing them, and then puppeteering them in secret. Which ultimately became the problem with bringing them back.

Matalas said:

I do like the conspiracy bugs, I did consider for a hot minute, the conspiracy bugs.  The issue with the conspiracy bugs is they kill their host. So that would mean anyone that you saw with a bug in them was dead, and you wouldn’t be able to do the paranoia thriller that you wanted to do if it was somebody you loved, that meant they were dead. So there [were] about three storylines I couldn’t do without killing legacy characters.

And so, a rogue branch of The Founders went ahead into production.  At least we won’t see any legacy characters having their chests burst open by concentrated phaser fire now. For expanded coverage of this and other stories, ‘shift’ over to Gizmodo.com and check it out.