Star Trek: Picard Ed Speleers talks about working with John de Lancie.
Ed Speleers arrived on Star Trek: Picard in a big way. Joining the cast for the third and final season, Speleers was given the task of being Jean-Luc Picard’s son. And granted, the storyline around his arrival wasn’t great and the whole thing made his mother, and Picard’s ex, Beverly Crusher look bad, at the end of it all, Speleers won fans over despite the underwhelming writing due to his charisma.
At the end of the series, Speleer’s character, Jack Crusher, ends up getting abducted by the Borg, followed by an enlisted into Starfleet, all to be topped off by a chance encounter with Picard’s most beloved rival, the alien entity Q.
Recreating Picard beat for beat was certainly a choice that Star Trek made, but fans seemed to like how Speleers was set up for future adventures, and for his credit, so did Speleers, who was over the moon with working with de Lancie.
Speaking to Star Trek: Explorer magazine (via TrekMovie.com), Speleers talked about the excitement around working with de Lancie, saying;
"I just remember reading it and then finding out that John de Lancie and Q, and what that means to Star Trek canon. I was obviously kind of chuffed that I would be working with him. I think the scene is quite interesting because it’s not that long, but I feel the way Terry constructed how he wanted the scene to play out and the way John and I went about making it happen was, we just tried to leave as much space for the scene to breathe in between the lines. …We also shot the scene right at the end of the shoot, and Terry and I talked a lot about maybe doing more in the spin-off, so this scene had to land."
Star Trek has to be careful how to proceed with any new show revolving around Jack Crusher
Continuing the Star Trek story centered around Jack Crusher and Q could be interesting but the one thing they need to do is stay away from just reusing past storylines with new characters. It’s a bit much that they had Jack and Jean-Luc go through the same story arc essentially, and while it wasn’t the best idea, it’s forgivable if they keep it to just this situation. If they go ahead and do the Star Trek: Legacy idea, and star repeating ideas then it’ll fail.
For instance, LeVar Burton played Geordi La Forge, and Burton’s real-life daughter, Mica Burton, played his on-screen daughter Alandra La Forge. Geordi was known for his blindness on the show and the need for a visor, and if they were to replicate that story with Alandra, fans would leave in mass.
It’s one thing to tie characters together, it’s another thing to tie them down by making them copies of prior characters.