TREKMOVIE:
"The new comments were made on the Dropping Names with Brent and Jonny podcast, where hosts (and TNG co-stars) Brent Spiner and Jonathan Frakes reunited with Terry Matalas. Together, they shed a little light on what could have come next for Star Trek if he had been allowed to make his sequel series to Picard. The former Trek showrunner talk talked about how Legacy would dig into an interesting arc for Worf and his son Alexander and how Sir Patrick Stewart was keen to play a different role as Picard.
https://trekmovie.com/2026/10/15/terry-matalas-talks-patrick-stewarts-star-trek-legacy-role-and-picard-season-2s-biggest-fail/
The series was never officially in development, much less greenlit, and some of the cast have given up on it, but Matalas still believes in the premise, and told Brent and Jonny:
“I saw this thing with Marina [Sirtis], Marina’s like ‘Never.’ Never say never again. You just don’t know. Legacy wasn’t supposed to just be like we’re just going to keep doing Next Gen. It was supposed to bring in new people, young, switch off. We had a great idea for for Worf and Alexander and the Klingons, and but it was going to be back to feeling like Next Gen. Patrick was like, ‘I want to come and be the one who gets on the screen and tells him missions.’ I was like, ‘I don’t know why we’re not doing this.'”
As many Trek fans know by now, the gist was that we’d follow Captain Seven of Nine, first officer Raffi Musiker, special counselor Jack Crusher, and the newly christened Enterprise-G into the 25th century, charting a course with new characters with room to bump into some old friends. Pretty much everyone in the cast has said they’d be happy to come back, and Matalas has said it several times, too. The idea is being carried out somewhat in comic books. As for Terry, he recently told TrekMovie he still believes in the idea, but if he were tasked to bring a new Star Trek show by the new Paramount bosses, “it wouldn’t be exactly the same” as his original Legacy pitch.“
The second season of Star Trek: Picard is not winning any popularity contests among Trek fans, and while Matalas worked on it before pivoting to season 3, he didn’t pull a punch on one aspect of the season: He didn’t like Spiner’s Dr. Soong running over Picard with a car. It came in the episode “Two of One,” when Picard and the La Sirena crew infiltrate a gala to protect an astronaut vital to keeping the timeline intact. Matalas says it just fails the Star Trek legacy test (pun firmly intended):
“It violated my sense of decent storytelling and character. Think about it: What are the great Star Trek moments? There’s Kirk and ‘Khaaaaan!’ There’s the Borg. And then there is when Brent Spiner hit Patrick Stewart with a car.”
That moment is one of a few over the course of the series that tested fans’ patience with where things were heading. It also bumped against the logic of Picard’s android golem body, which seemed no more resilient than a typical human’s (apparently by design). Perhaps his android-ness is also what kept his body intact after being hit with a car, and it set up the next episode where he explores his repressed memories of his mother and father while he recovers in a coma, opening up the question: Can androids fall into comas? Matalas has as good a theory about why this happened as any: “I think [Spiner] just wanted to hit Patrick with a car.”
While all of that was happening, Matalas had pivoted to organize the third season, which was to be shot back-to-back with season 2 as studios rushed back into production following the COVID lockdown. Matalas said the third season had to come together in about eight weeks. In that time, he needed to get the Next Gen cast together and figure out where their characters were and how they could help bring down the changelings and the Borg without feeling too much like fan service. Frakes and Spiner reiterated their praise for Matalas’ collaborative attitude towards that process, giving them input on what their characters were up to and who they had become.
Getting Spiner to do a third season of Picard was crucial, and everyone was on board with making something work, but Matalas and Spiner said it took a little while to settle on bringing Data back as an older version of himself. Spiner was initially worried that Data needed to be young for the audience to buy into his character’s innocence, but the more he processed it all, he realized Data needed to grow up — especially because he was unimpressed with efforts to de-age him in the first season.
“I kind of like the idea of being old because I had this really terrific scene at the end of of season one of Picard that Michael Chabon wrote this gorgeous scene and it was really, really excellent, but when they initially asked me to do Picard, I said, ‘But I’m old and how can I be Data?’ And now remember they pitched me, ‘we got CGI you’re gonna look exactly like you looked.’ And I wound up looking like somebody from Planet of the Apes; it didn’t look like Data at all. I saw myself on screen and went ‘My God!'”
They wondered if the older character should be Data or something slightly different with a new name: Datum, which among other things is the singular form of Data. Spiner said he called Matalas one day and said it had to be Data, and so it was.
[...]
Any Trek fan owes it to themselves to check out this episode of Dropping Names, where Terry’s love for the Star Trek comes through. He talks about his history with Trek (which dates back to the 90s when he worked as a PA on Voyager), the influence Trek producer Merri Howard (who was briefly on set with them as they recorded this interview) had on his career, and more. He also talks about how he kept 12 Monkeys on the air despite lagging ratings, and Spiner tells a story about how Rick Berman had to discipline him once (but it didn’t go very far)."
Bobby Oler (TrekMovie.com)
Full article:
https://trekmovie.com/2026/10/15/terry-matalas-talks-patrick-stewarts-star-trek-legacy-role-and-picard-season-2s-biggest-fail/
Dropping Names (YouTube) with Guest Terry Matalas:
https://youtu.be/Xfw4DfhiCG8?si=mAZOvz5AMc9f-MhK
