Picture: Paramount
Star Trek: Picard’s remaining season goes all in on the nostalgia, bringing again the Subsequent Era solid for one final huge journey. Nevertheless it’s rapidly confirmed itself to be nostalgic for extra than simply TNG relating to Star Trek’s previous… together with with its main villain, who was virtually changed by one other acquainted foe.
Chatting with Collider at present about this week’s episode of Picard, showrunner Terry Matalas mentioned the choice to make the most important menace of season 3 a moderately 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 had 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 important, the place you’re undecided if the individual sitting throughout from you is a changeling or not,” Matalas mentioned. “And the one means that you may know is to have an emotional catharsis with that individual. It provides you such unimaginable drama.”
However whereas the Changelings had been an early a part of Matalas’ plans for season 3, for a short second they had been virtually changed by one other hidden Star Trek villain, this time straight 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.
G/O Media might get a fee
“I do just like the conspiracy bugs, I did take into account for a sizzling minute, the conspiracy bugs,” Matalas continued. “The difficulty with the conspiracy bugs is that they kill their host. So that might imply anybody that you just noticed with a bug in them was lifeless, and also you wouldn’t be capable of do the paranoia thriller that you just needed to do if it was any individual you really liked, that meant they had 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 one more—and fortunately it looks as if none of our faves will want their chests being burst open by phaser-fire due to it.
Need extra io9 information? Try when to count on the newest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what’s subsequent for the DC Universe on movie and TV, and every thing you should learn about the way forward for Physician Who.