Star Trek: Picard will focus on more than just the culmination of Admiral Jean-Luc Picard’s journey.
By now, Trekkies know that most of the cast of Star Trek: The Next Generation will appear in the final season of Star Trek: Picard that will most likely air next year. We’ve heard that the third season is more than just a reunion of these characters, and that the actors don’t just return for cameos. And Terry Matalas, the showrunner for Picard, mentioned in TrekMovie’s All Access Star Trek podcast recently, that he never felt these characters got their due finale.
As far as the ending of the series goes, “All Good Things” is one of the highest-rated series finales in the Star Trek franchise. And had the series ended there, then fans would most likely say the characters had gotten a nice wrap-up. Essentially, the Enterprise would have kept on going, and the crew continued their search for new life and civilizations. Unfortunately, though, the missteps happened when The Next Generation moved from series to movies. The only movie that really stood out was Star Trek: First Contact with Insurrection coming in a weak third before Nemesis pulled the plug on future movies.
Star Trek: Picard is going to wrap up character arcs.
In the podcast, Matalas said that each of the characters returning to Picard play a major part, and their appearances will tie up arcs that go back thirty years.
"I had always felt like the Next Generation characters never got their due finale. Nemesis didn’t feel like the end. I was always hoping they were going to get their own Undiscovered Country where we got to see them in a high-stakes adventure. Each one of those characters plays a major part and ties up arcs that go back 30 years."
The movies did leave some threads dangling like what happened to B-4 or what happened to Worf’s appointment as an Ambassador to the Klingon Empire. What happened during Captain Riker’s tenure as the captain of the Titan? (Of course, that’s a broad question that would take more time than the series has to answer.)
It will be virtually impossible to tie all the threads together for all of the characters in Star Trek: The Next Generation, and we’ll probably never learn some things we still want to know. But at least the final season of Picard is going to attempt to give The Next Generation fans some closure and possibly even try to erase the damage Nemesis did.