Full spoilers follow for Star Trek: Picard Season 1.
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Now that Star Trek: Picard’s first season has come to an end, the CBS All Access series has resolved its major plotline revolving around the ban on synthetic humanoids and the search for a new race of Data-like androids. It’s also now firmly established Jean-Luc Picard’s new crew — the Picard Squad — as they head out for new adventures in Season 2 and beyond.
I spoke with Season 1 showrunner Michael Chabon about the return of Patrick Stewart’s iconic character, the decision to kill off the beloved Data (again), balancing classic Next Generation castmembers like Riker and Troi with the new crew, and — of course — whether or not we’ll see Picard’s housekeepers/Romulan super-spies Laris and Zhaban again. Read on for all that and more…
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The Death of Data
In a surprising turn of events, the Picard season finale bring back Brent Spiner’s Data — or his consciousness, anyway, via a VR simulation — only to kill him once and for all. Many fans had been expecting this season to end with Data being restored to life in some way (after his other death in the film Star Trek: Nemesis), and perhaps even joining the regular cast for year two. But that was never in the cards according to Chabon.
“I suppose you could imagine scenarios where, I don’t know, he became sort of a holo like the Doctor on Voyager or something like that,” says Chabon. “Maybe that would have interested Brent, I don’t know. But we understood from pretty early on, in breaking the stories, that in some way it was going to culminate with an encounter between Picard and Data, but that encounter was going to be constrained by what also pretty quickly emerged as this idea that it was only going to be possible in a sort of stimulation. That Data really is dead. That Data did die.”
It turns out Spiner did not want to undo his character’s original death in Nemesis, and so the story of Picard unfolded from there.
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“I guess what I’m remembering as a directive, or as a kind of guideline from Brent, was that he didn’t want us to un-kill Data,” says the showrunner. “That Data shouldn’t be undead, that he died and he really died. And he’s going to stay dead, and don’t try to undo that. So we had a pretty clear sense from the beginning it was going to be some version of what you actually see in the last episode.”
As for that other death that happens in the episode — the end of Picard himself, who is reborn shortly thereafter in a synthetic body — Chabon confirms that there was never any plan to permanently kill the admiral (retired) since a Season 2 of the show was always intended.
“Although it wasn’t announced until fairly far along in the process, for no doubt really sound reasons of marketing and publicity and everything, we’ve always known we had Patrick for at least two seasons,” says Chabon. “So there was always going to be a second season with Patrick playing Jean-Luc Picard. So no, that never… It was not like we were part way through and suddenly we were like, ‘Oh s#!t, we can’t kill him because he’s coming back.’ We knew we had him for two seasons from the start.”
Walking That Next Generation Line
One of the challenges of making this show was to focus on the title character while not simply retreading The Next Generation. That was a mandate of Stewart’s in signing on to the show, and it meant bringing in a whole new cast and setting, ditching the Starfleet uniforms and ships, and essentially charting a new course for Jean-Luc Picard. But Chabon admits that, as a self-proclaimed fan, it wasn’t always easy to leave the Enterprise behind, or to not fill in the blanks of what happened to all our favorite characters in the years since we last saw them.
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“That’s a fan’s impulse, and we’re fans,” he laughs. “So we had that impulse every five minutes. Anytime we reached a question of ‘And then what happens?’ or ‘And who do they go to?’ or ‘Who helped them, or who hinders them?’ or ‘What’s the next stop?’ The answer, in any kind of group discussion that we had — especially in the earliest iteration of the group when it was at its smallest and we were all just rabid Star Trek fans — somebody was guaranteed to say, ‘It’s Geordi! It’s the Doctor from Voyager! It’s Sisko! It’s Jake Sisko!’ It’s whoever. That was constant. It’s inevitable. And it’s totally understandable.”
So the staff would ask themselves, “Is that actually the coolest answer, or the most fun answer? Or is it actually the best answer?” The goal was to always lean into the new and different rather than the familiar when possible. Of course, the practicalities of television production — casting, schedules, budget and so on — also meant that implementing fan service was rarely realistic.
“You couldn’t make the show that would sort of fulfill every fan of every series — not just the TNG fans but our Voyager fans and Deep Space Nine fans,” says Chabon. “There are so many reasons why you can’t make that show on a practical basis. And you’d always be compromising, you’d always be leaving people out, and therefore you’d end up with something that would still be disappointing to some people, who didn’t get to see the return of Odo or whatever.”
Chabon said he would sometimes be surprised by some of the fan requests for character returns that they’d hear — Captain Janeway from Voyager and Dr. Crusher from Next Generation were two frequent ones — before he realized that the impulse comes in part from the kind of crossovers fans are used to seeing in the many official Star Trek novels out there (not to mention fan fiction).
“It doesn’t cost anything,” he laughs of the book crossovers. “There’s no scheduling issues.”
The showrunner points to the episode “Nepenthe” as an example of how difficult such things are when shooting a season of television. That’s the hour where Jonathan Frakes and Marina Sirtis returned as Riker and Troi, but as Chabon puts it, “we killed ourselves” to get it made because Sirtis was performing in a play in London and had a very limited window to shoot in. And that was just to get two legacy characters in one episode, let alone any kind of Avengers: Endgame-scale epic.
As for that episode, which is a highlight of the season, Chabon — who penned it himself — says it came with “surprising ease” when it was time to sit down and write it.
“I think maybe just it was always meant to be a kind of a respite episode, a pause,” he says. “A chance for Picard to recharge. That notion fed into the nature of Nepenthe, the planet itself, and what it is known for. Which in turn led to the story element of the Rikers, the Riker/Troi family having lost a kid, and that’s why they’re there. And in the middle of a long production and shooting season that was in many ways as complex as the plot of the series itself, I think writing it was kind of a little bit of a respite too.”
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Seven and Raffi
One interesting tidbit in the season finale was a shot of Jeri Ryan’s Seven holding hands with Michelle Hurd’s Raffi. It comes as something of a surprise as the characters had not had much interaction up until that point, but Chabon says that the seeds were planted for a potential relationship between the two back in the fifth episode of the year, “Stardust City Rag.”
“That’s something that really emerged through a kind of collaboration, I would say, between the writers and the actors,” he explains. “I think Jeri and Michelle picked up on something that was present in Episode 5 when Raffi is handcuffing Seven, but like stage handcuffing her because it’s all part of this elaborate grift they’re trying to run. And there was just that suggestion of a kind of instant connection there, I think that was on the page and was intended. But the nature of that connection was maybe left a little open and they both picked up on it and it emerged. I could just feel it on the set when they were doing the scenes. It was something they clearly seized on as a key to that scene for both of them.”
At the same time, Chabon admits that there wasn’t much time to develop romantic subplots this season, and Seven and Raffi are basically separated after that episode until the end of the season anyway. But what does that final moment mean then?
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“I think it’s sort of they’re just taking steps at the end, in that last episode, towards exploring something that they haven’t had the chance to explore so far, because things have been so crazy,” he hints.
In other words, check back next season! Speaking of which…
Laris and Zhaban, Where Have You Gone?!
You remember Picard’s housekeepers Laris and Zhaban? Of course you do! They were breakout characters at the start of the season, with their bickering interactions, their kick-ass secret-super-spy fight movies, and their constant doting on Jean-Luc. Unfortunately, they disappeared from the show after Picard left Earth in the third episode — somebody needed to look after the grapes! — but many fans loved them and hoped they might return in the finale. That was not to be, alas.
“I mean, we loved them,” laughs Chabon. “And it was really fun to write for them. And we expanded, particularly, Laris’ role sort of on the fly as we were writing, because she was so awesome. But the degree to which those characters just so quickly became seemingly so beloved was a surprise. Definitely.”
So the question remains: Will they be fecking back in Season 2?
“We have no plans to ignore that enthusiasm,” Chabon responds. “Let me say that.”
Star Trek: Picard Season 1 is available to stream now, and Season 2 is currently being written.
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Talk to Executive Editor Scott Collura on Twitter at @ScottCollura, or listen to his Star Trek podcast, Transporter Room 3. Or do both!
Source: IGN.com Picard Showrunner Answers the Biggest Questions About the Season Finale