How did Star Trek: Picard bring back the Enterprise-D

The Enterprise-D returned on Star Trek: Picard.

Star Trek: Picard surprised fans everywhere when they brought in the Enterprise-D for the final two episodes of the season. While many fans thought they just had the old set somewhere, and all it needed was a dusting and some new paint, what actually happened was far more complicated than that.

According to Terry Matalas, as he spoke to Variety, the entire set is basically all brand new. As Matalas revealed via Variety;

"Everyone tried to talk us out of doing this, because financially it’s a nightmare, and the timing was tight. To the moment we started filming, we were still gluing pieces together. But you can’t have a ‘Star Trek: The Next Generation’ reunion without one of its major characters, which is the Enterprise."

The complexities of building the set were pretty bountiful, and Matlas gave the task o make the set to production designer Dave Blass and art director Liz Kloczkowski. Blass told Variety that there wasn’t much to work with, saying;

"There’s the ongoing rumor that there’s a warehouse somewhere that has all this ‘Star Trek’ stuff, but what exists is not a lot. We went into the deep dive of looking at every photo ever taken and every screencap, and we had a giant wall of inspiration at the back of the soundstage with photos of every single detail, so that everyone could see that we had thought this through."

Blass would need a little extra help with the project, so he brought on Mike and Denise Okuda, a couple with long ties to Star Trek. The couple talked about what they could use to help build the new set, saying;

"The first thing we did was to go in the garage and dive into boxes and see what we still had. We had some original drawings and art, but large chunks of it disappeared. You realize you’re going to have to reconstruct a lot of this from scratch."

Blass would later go on to explain how hard it was with everything else they had to make this season, saying;g

"We were doing all the interiors of the starship Titan – like the bridge, the transporter rooms, the crew quarters, the hallways and sickbay – as well as [the enemy ship] the Shrike, Daystrom Station and the Borg. So, all that all on top of each other.”"

Making the Enterprise-D set was not easy for the Star Trek: Picard crew

It wasn’t just the set that had to be done right, but the iconic yet tricky furniture. Blass described how it was hard to recreate such complex curves;

"It’s a complex curve that arches and changes thickness. You can only get so much information off a blueprint. The construction team printed out a full-size paper plan to lay it out and then used a number of templates to shape the final piece.…We had to sculpt the right shape based on the basic form, then do a deep dive on the right materials that have the right color and texture,” Blass says. “Each chair has four different materials."

Thankfully, the set isn’t going anywhere, as Blass said the set is secured now;

"There were lots of interested parties who wanted to save the set. Luckily it has a home in the Star Trek archives."

The complicated furniture wasn’t the only thing that returned to the ship, the ship’s voice was also brought back, once again done by Majel Barrett, who has long been deceived.

As Matalas told Collider, there was no other option but to use Barrett’s iconic lines for the Enterprise-D, saying;

"It had to be her. And then we went back and forth as to whether or not we use AI, but at the time we were doing it, it wasn’t quite there. So we used clips from [Star Trek: The New Generation] to make it even more authentic, but it had to be her on that ship or else it wasn’t right."

While Barrett’s lines were re-used, the only piece of the set that was re-used was a dedication placard that was on the original set that was saved after The Next Generation ended.