Terry Matalas was hired as an executive producer to work on the final two seasons of Picard, which included being brought in early in the development of season 2, which was transitioning showrunners from Michael Chabon to Akiva Goldsman. Together, those three three executive producers, along with writer and co-creator Kirsten Beyer, worked out the initial outlines for season 2. In his Master Replicas Collectors Club Zoom chat in February, Terry Matalas said the show was immediately under pressure to bring costs down after an expensive first season. Matalas suggested they could take a page out of Star Trek IV and incorporate time travel to bring the characters to modern day, which would save a lot of money for the production. His other thought was to bring back Q (John de Lancie) as he was so linked to the character of Jean-Luc Picard. Matalas says both of those ideas were immediately adopted: “This was all day one.”
“There were Romulans—there was a whole thing. The idea was that Guinan’s bar was presented as a normal bar in Los Angeles, but if you knew the right thing to do, you could go into the back through the telephone phone booth and that was Rick’s Café and it was a stopping point for all these different species that were actually there on Earth with a ‘Do not interfere’ thing happening. So you had a lot more Star Trek happening in the backdrop of it. Ultimately, the powers that be at that time were like, ‘This is too much.’ But there were some really good ideas there that were pretty cool.”
On the one hand, Star Trek being called “too Star Trek” is moronic. On the other hand, that is cliched as hell.
I still didn’t like season 2, but I don’t think that would have been an improvement. Pre-First Contact Earth has way too many aliens on it as it is.
