Even more The Next Generation people are coming to Star Trek: Picard’s third and final season
LeVar Burton, Gates McFadden, and Michael Dorn will be heading to Star Trek: Picard
Aux News Star Trek: Picard
Paramount+’s Star Trek: Picard has always been a tribute to Star Trek: The Next Generation, or at least a response to the themes and storylines of that beloved series (less “things sure were great then” and more “were things really all that great then?”), and it leaned further into that with its recent second season, which reintroduced fan-favorite characters like Whoopi Goldberg’s Guinan and John De Lanci’s space-trickster Q—not to mention other Star Trek friends like Brent Spiner and Jeri Ryan.
When the show comes back for its third season, though, there will be even more old Star Trek friends joining the crew: According to Deadline, LeVar Burton, Gates McFadden, and Michael Dorn will appear in Picard’s third season, as will Jonathan Frakes, Marina Sirtis, and the aforementioned Brent Spiner (though they’ve been on the show before). They’ll all be reprising their roles from The Next Generation, we assume, with Burton playing Geordi La Forge, McFadden playing Dr. Beverly Crusher, and Dorn playing the Klingon Worf.
But that’s not the only Picard news that Paramount+ had to share on this, the pre-anniversary of First Contact Day (it won’t happen for another few decades). The streaming service also confirmed longstanding rumors that Picard will actually end with its third season, meaning this TNG reunion might be Star Trek fans’ last chance to see this whole team together again. Luckily, Paramount+ has a ton of other Star Trek offerings, so there’s still no need to boldly go and watch something that isn’t about Star Trek just yet. (This is a Star Trek news story, so we can comfortably say that the Star Wars offerings over on Disney+ have been real hit-or-miss without fear of being whacked by lightsaber toys the next time we go outside.)
(Please don’t tell the Star Wars fans what we said.)
61 Comments
The big news is that it’s mercifully ending after next season…only 3 seasons too late.
I’d be a lot more excited if Spiner weren’t returning. No offense to the person, but Data and the Soongs already got more of their fair share of attention in S1. Here’s hoping it’s just a low-key old hologram appearance, or something.
What’s funny is that Spiner looks fine without Data makeup on (sure, he’s older, but whatever, he looks normal for his age), but with Data makeup on he just looks horrifying.
Yeah, I loves me some Data, but we’ve definitely crossed over into uncanny valley territory with him. I have a lot less affection for the Soongs, and while I can tolerate an ancestor or two with a similar look, it’s doing another number on my suspension of disbelief that every male in the line for 400 years is an identical twin.
It was funny when they had Buford “Mad Dog” Tannen played by Tom Wilson in the Back to the Future series (and it helped that he looked and acted very differently from Biff), but then those movies were intentionally comedic in a lot of ways. Picard’s approach is weaponized nostalgia.
The Soongs come from the genestock as the Blackadder family.
Amen.
The fact that there was a previously unknown Soong son who just happened to show up at the end of S1 was one of the 187 dumbest things about that season of television. Dear god, it was just so, so fucking bad.
I don’t mind that so much but it is a pretty silly conceit that every male Soong for at least the last four hundred years looks exactly the same.
Also that! Spiner was also on “Enterprise” as a Soong relative who created Khan or something…..oy.
The only thing that can save that dumb reveal is if he’s actually Lore. Don’t know how things are looking in S2, but I ain’t renewing Paramount+ until it’s nearly over to find out.
Before everyone starts bashing season 1, season 2 so far has been entertaining enough. Don’t know if they’ll stick the landing, but then that was the main problem with season 1 for me. Yeah, unpopular opinion, but season 1 had a few good things going for it that unfortunately got overshadowed by the big things that ruined it.
I mean mainly, I look to these shows for a bit of good fun (not to shut down criticisms, it’s fair to, I just have lower expectations).
I’m super excited about this, but mainly because I can’t wait to see Worf again. 🙂
I love it when Star Trek, the show that uses sci-fi parable to address modern-day issues, abandons the parable and just describes modern-day issues. Fuck yeah!
I’ll take it over Discovery’s 80% let’s-talk-about-mental-health season 4.
I’ve been watching Star Trek since the early 80s, and while I gave it a hell of a chance, Discovery is the first Star Trek series I gave up on. Life is too short and it is unwatchable.
My partner agreed with you, and I almost did too. It certainly stopped being a weekly watch, which for me is not insignificant.
This season literally revolves around a single character’s mental health.
I remember pretty much any scene not discussing the DMA had at least one character ask another some variation on “how do you feel” and them talking about that for a few minutes.
But to be fair, I did try to ignore most of that so maybe I’m misremembering. I don’t think I am though.
The whole “Rios gets detained by ICE subplot” reminded me of a terrific line from the “Terminator: Dark Fate” Pitch Meeting.“And then we’re gonna visit one of those detention centers on the border so we can have some social commentary…”“Great, what’s the commentary?”“Wouldn’t it be cool if a Terminator tore through one of those things?”
Me and the wife are two episodes in and it’s a lot more engaging then season 1 for sure.
Season 2 started well, but it’s rapidly gone down the crapper since. Every episode feels like it’s from a different series, and it commits that cardinal sin so many poorly-written modern shows do where it forces its characters to act stupid because the plot requires it of them.
Season 2 is definitely bad and stupid, but not nearly as bad as Season 1. So, at this rate, the show should be approaching good sometime in the 6th or 7th season. Too bad there’s only one more.
“Lower Decks” > All other current Trek offerings
Agreed. Though I really hope Strange New Worlds will be fun.
Count me as another vote for the awesomeness that is Lower Decks.
I haven’t started season 2 yet because too cheap to pay for Paramount plus and too lazy to pirate, but I really liked the way Season 1 started off exploring a lot of promising ideas about how maybe things in the Federation weren’t so all-fired great as we’d been told. But the ending really did dissolve into a bunch of bad choices and unnecessary character deaths.
Season 1 was garbage, season 2 has been interesting to pretty good so far. It is tradition for a Star Trek series to have a weird or bad first season though, so fair play.
Can’t wait to see how miserable everyone is, and how much they’re haunted by past trauma that they’ve never seen a therapist about, because the Federation has all the same problems as today and does a terrible job with mental health.
But I will be pleasantly surprised if we learn that Geordi is happily married with kids and grandkids.
I’m not some Rodenberry purist who demands a conflict-free future, but one of the appeals of TNG was that it was a crew of competent professionals who had mostly made peace with their personal issues and handled interpersonal disputes healthily, in a spirit of friendship and mutual respect. I wouldn’t even have objected to one or two of the core seven having had a rough go of it since the Enterprise, just to add some variety. But they’ve veered wildly too far the other way, and between a dead Data, the Trikers’ dead kid, and Picard’s genocide guilt and sudden mommy issues in his what, eighties? Hundreds? the other three pretty much have to have enjoyed a blissful retirement after wildly successful careers just to break even tonally.
And Discovery also veered the other way, in that the whole crew act like a bunch of college freshman in a dorm trying desperately to fit in and become besties with each other. And they picked the worst of them to be the RA.
Klingons are considerably longer-lived than humans, so there’s no reason that Worf can’t just continue to ride the awesomeness he acquired in DS9 with a ship of his own, or perhaps a diplomatic posting to the Klingon Empire.
I could never buy Picard giving up after Starfleet withdrew support for the Romulans. He would call in every favor he could to get unofficial support. Every Starfleet ship has some discretion in what they do when they’re not on a mission. You’re telling me that Picard wouldn’t have contacted every admiral, captain, officer, civilian ship he knew to help evacuate the Romulans?
People used to rake TNG over the coals for elevated a mental health professional to such a prominent role in the crew.And yet here we are….
I really hope this makes them realize that what a lot of fans want to see from Star Trek is not prequels around TOS. It’s about time we get The next “Next Generation”. I assume Stewart is probably not game for to much more but I’m sure he’d be game for a guest spot. Same with Frakes and most the rest. Give us the adventures of the Enterprise F(or G).
Too bad they already ruined the far future with Discovery. God, I hate that show.
I like all of the new Trek shows to some degree, but I think CBS/Paramount may have got it in their heads that in this Golden Age of TV you can’t just do a show about a ship exploring space.
“…you can’t just do a show about a ship exploring space.”I think this has to do with having shortened seasons, but also perhaps more to do with trying to pull people into a single overlapping story over those 6-10 episodes. Which is a detriment to both the viewer and the series arc overall I feel. If you’re familiar with the characters and miss and episode and just happen to drop in and it’s a one-off, no big deal, because there’s still gonna be some forward development of the season and characters. If you do these shortened seasons and have that underlying theme in every episode, and you miss one, you just lose interest. On top of that, if it’s not a good theme or one that pulls the viewer in every single episode, you’re just losing those viewers.The folk at Paramount etc need to pull their heads out of their asses and realize that you can have a series extended arc without it playing into every episode. TNG did it right with having Q bookend the premiere and the finale, and only having him pop up maybe once (?) a season, but also having him as the critical impetus for meeting the Borg (who were also a primary plot point, but also only popped up perhaps once a season after the initial episode IIRC). TL:DR. “To seek out new life and new civilizations.” Let’s get back to basics.
Not from this production team. I want them to hand the reins over to different creative leads before they attempt a Next-Next Generation.
I grew up watching TOS on reruns and was super stoked as a 12 year old when TNG premiered. It was required viewing in my family every single season. I lost total interest in Picard and Discovery not even halfway through both of their first seasons, despite how much I anticipated both of them. Perhaps this shows my lack of attention span these days, but the only Trek-based series I’ve watched all the way through (and then *cough* re-watched) was Lower Decks.I’m gonna give both Picard and Discovery another try in the next few weeks (nothing like some dedicated time off from work) and it seems the former does improve with season two, while Discovery is still up and down, but I’ll go with it. I think that the thing I always forget about TNG when I eventually re-watch it again every decade or so is that there really are a lot of go-nowhere episodes that amount to nothing, interspersed with the ones that still stand out to this day (“Yesterday’s Enterprise” being the singular example I’ll always go back to).
I’m tired of Enterprises. Find a new ship. The longer a universe as rich as Star Trek (or Star Wars, for that matter) sticks around the same small group of people and familiar things, the less appealing it gets.One of the reasons I love Lower Decks is that it lets me invest in a whole new ship (and type and role of ship) and crew with only glancing narrative blows off the rest of Trek lore. The Cerritos is a fun place to live as a viewer. Same reason why I liked The Mandalorian until it started bringing in guys like digiLuke and Boba Fett.
To be fair we have not had a truely new Enterprise and crew since TNG. I am talking that level of change and jump. Look at just how different TOS and TNG are. All new crew, all new stories, whole new look. I just feel like the ship name is just sorta tradition and also marks it as the next true sequel in the line(other shows are spin offs, which is fine, but this is the next Star Trek era). Barring that, a show set in the TNG era about another ship could be fun too. I just wish we would get out of the TOS era. I realize Discovery did that with some time travel shenigans but I feel like once Discover is done they are gonna recon that whole thing away
The problem with doing a prequel show about exploration is that you’re either discovering things that we already know about, or it doesn’t take long before the whole timeline gets really messy. I’m 80% sure they kicked Discovery into the future because otherwise, the fact that no one ever mentioned that there was a mushroom network that lets you teleport around the galaxy is really awkward. Hell, it’s already pretty awkward that it’s never come up in casual conversation, particularly on Voyager, where you’d think they’d be giving any possible alternative for ultrafast travel a second look. I guess it still hasn’t been declassified a hundred years after the ship was lost?
Discovery and Prodigy feature different ships.
The cynic in me says this revamped version isn’t going so well so they’re bringing forward everyone and anyone who’s ever been associated with the property.But enough about Sam.
So excited for this. Then again, I was so excited for de Lancie returning…and that’s been a big, wet fart. This show has disappointed me at every single turn. Don’t care. So excited.
The writing for Q gets the character so fucking wrong in every possible way it’s as if the writers only had the character described to them third-hand without having seen a second of his actual appearances. Stunningly awful.
Agreed, but… my god, de Lancie is so damned good in the role, I almost – almost – can gloss over how big a disservice they’re doing to Q narratively.
I mean, they’ve been hinting that something’s wrong with Q, so maybe he’s not the same guy we saw TWENTY YEARS AGO. Kinda like how Picard is different after TWO DECADES.
(Yes, I know Q is an immortal being and 20 years is like a blink of an eye for him, but static characters are boring, so having some change in him is interesting. At least it’s not the whackadoodle Q that was on Voyager.)
Do we have any sense of whether they’ll be part of the regular cast, or just making guest appearances?
Limited number of appearances. While I’m sure some of them would accept per diem and a meal stipend, there’s no way in hell Paramount would shell out to add this many people to the full cast.
The showrunner responded to the same question on Twitter yesterday, saying that these ARE NOT cameos. Terry Matalas basically said this is the send-off the TNG crew deserved (nice, accurate dig at Nemesis).
Yes, things were actually great then. There were some clunkers like all shows, but TNG was by and large absolutely fantastic with a stellar ensemble and truly thought provoking storylines, and one of the only actual hopeful visions of the future on TV.
Great writers would be an improvement. Goldsman and Kurtzman involved really stink the place up.
The only good thing that came out of Star Trek: Picard are Red Letter Media’s reviews of it.
I’ve been very vocal about my dislike of the SW offerings on Disney +. Hit and miss indeed.Unfortunately, as for Paramount+’s new Star Trek content, the verdict is strictly Miss and Miss and Miss again.Oy, I really need to stop hoping that my beloved franchises of yesteryear will ever actually be good again.
My favourite part of all the new Star Trek shows are the manbabies losing their shit over it.It’s all been great – you’re wrong, go watch something else, there are enough people watching Star Trek for Paramount to be throwing all the money at it.
I am so disappointed in Star Trek: Picard. I intensely disliked the first season, and while this season is an improvement, I am mostly bored so far. As I have posted here before, I am so sad that this show is not resonating with me. Picard is one of the most fantastic characters in television history.All that said, I am so far in the bag for TNG that I will absolutely be there to check out a third season, hoping that is the one that brings this all together. Seeing these favorites together again is a great start.
WHAT?!??!?! No Wesley Crusher?!?!?!?
He died on the way back to his home planet.