Picture: Paramount
Star Trek: Picard’s ultimate season goes all in on the nostalgia, bringing again the Subsequent Era forged for one final huge journey. Nevertheless it’s shortly confirmed itself to be nostalgic for extra than simply TNG with regards to Star Trek’s previous… together with with its main villain, who was nearly changed by one other acquainted foe.
Chatting with Collider as we speak about this week’s episode of Picard, showrunner Terry Matalas mentioned the choice to make the foremost menace of season 3 a relatively literal acquainted face from the franchise’s previous: a rogue faction of shapeshifting Changelings from the Founders, the leaders of the Dominion that menaced Starfleet and the remainder of the Alpha Quadrant within the latter half of Deep House 9.
“They have been the proper villain as a result of they’ll seem like any anyone, and there’s an episode across the midpoint [of Season 3] the place it’s completely vital, the place you’re undecided if the particular person sitting throughout from you is a changeling or not,” Matalas stated. “And the one means you can know is to have an emotional catharsis with that particular person. It provides you such unimaginable drama.”
However whereas the Changelings have been an early a part of Matalas’ plans for season 3, for a short second they have been nearly changed by one other hidden Star Trek villain, this time instantly from Picard’s roots in TNG—the parasitic bugs from the notorious season 1 episode “Conspiracy.” In that episode, Picard and Riker uncover a plot by a race of alien bugs to infiltrate Starfleet command, burrowing into their unlucky hosts and killing them, puppeting them in secret. Which was, for Matalas, the issue with bringing them again.
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“I do just like the conspiracy bugs, I did think about for a scorching minute, the conspiracy bugs,” Matalas continued. “The problem with the conspiracy bugs is that they kill their host. So that will imply anybody that you simply noticed with a bug in them was lifeless, and also you wouldn’t be capable of do the paranoia thriller that you simply wished to do if it was someone you liked, that meant they have been lifeless. So there [were] about three storylines I couldn’t do with out killing legacy characters.”
And so, Picard traded one hidden enemy for an additional—and fortunately it looks like none of our faves will want their chests being burst open by phaser-fire due to it.
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