Star Trek: Picard’s Line Producers Told Terry Matalas: ‘You’re Not Avengers: Endgame’

The Star Trek: Picard season three finale, “The Last Generation,” has finally arrived. MovieWeb is still in mourning over the loss of Admiral Elizabeth Shelby (Elizabeth Dennehy) and the U.S.S. Enterprise-F crew. But hey, we can take even more loss, right? We are strong.

Whether or not you enjoyed Jean-Luc Picard’s (Sir Patrick Stewart) farewell voyage – although this may not be the last voyage with the Star Trek: The Next Generation crew if you’ve been following Stewart’s hints on convention panels – this season has certainly left fans with a lot to talk about. Turns out, that some of what fans had hoped would happen were also what the season three’s showrunner Terry Matalas also wanted to see happen, like the return of Kathryn Janeway.

On Wednesday, April 19, MovieWeb attended a press junket with Matalas where he told journalists that there were other storylines and other characters that he wanted to include in Picard season 3, except a pesky part of TV making known as a production budget. “There were characters I really wanted to see again,” he began. “It was a giant movie that we’re building on a television time schedule. The fact that we saw what we saw was miraculous, and we pulled it off. It nearly killed us all.”

Matalas continued, “But there was a scene with Sochi [Isa Briones] and Data [Brent Spiner] that we couldn’t afford to do. Ro Laren [Michelle Forbes]—there was a scene in which they found Ro in the dungeons of the Intrepid with Tuvok [Tim Russ] and that she had survived. We couldn’t pull it off. We wanted Kate Mulgrew [Janeway] to be part of Seven of Nine’s promotion [to captain].”

To all of those fans who asked where Sochi was when she is an important part of the Soong legacy, or why Janeway didn’t appear when season 3 pulled so heavily from Star Trek: Voyager plot threads? Well, the answer is money. “They’re all in the first script,” added Matalas, “then your line producer says, ‘Are you out of your f*****g mind with these things? You’re not Avengers: Endgame.’ So, they had to go.”

Related: Star Trek: Picard Season Finale Review: The Action-Packed Series Goes Out on Full Thrusters

Terry Matalas Says Production Team ‘Still Gluing Pieces of the Carpet’ Two Days Prior

The TNG crew finally returned to bridge of the U.S.S. Enterprise-D in the penultimate episode of Picard, “Vox,” an experience that Matalas described as “terrifying.”

“We only had two days, and we were still gluing pieces of the carpet back on onto the ship,” Matalas said of filming on the Enterprise-D bridge. “And we had a lot to do on that ship. And it was early on in the schedule. So I, as a director, had to really make sure I knew what I was doing. [Those scenes] were the most emotional pivotal in the piece. And in some cases, I wasn’t entirely sure how I was going to pull certain moments off, but they worked.”