Star Trek: Picard’s production designer recounts how crazy shooting back to back seasons was

Rebuilding the Enterprise-D sets was not easy according to Star Trek: Picard’s production designer.

Star Trek: Picard’s third season was a landmark season for the series, as not only did it bring back the entire U.S.S. Enterprise-D core crew, but it also brought back the Enterprise-D as a whole. Since the ship was destroyed in the closing moments of the first Next Generation film, Star Trek Generations, finding a way to bring it back organically was important.

But more important was finding a way to bring back the set, while on time and under budget, something that fell to the shoulders of Dave Blass, the production designer on Picard.

Blass spoke to TrekMovie.com’s podcast and revealed just how fast they had to get the setup.

"But two days before we shot that we were still in season 2. We finished season 2 on a Friday and we started season 3 on a Monday. I remember Terry coming to me saying, “Yeah, we want to do the D.” Then it was like, how do we do that and how do we afford it, and what version of it we were going to do? That was an evolving process. ….But it was in our mind that we knew the D was possibly going to be there, but how and why was still to be figured out. It did take us three months to build it, so it was something that we ran into really quickly."

Recreating the Enterprise-D was Star Trek: Picard’s biggest achievement

While it’s one thing to give acclaim to Star Trek: Picard for bringing back the entire Next Generation’s core cast, what really should be given more praise was the pain-staking efforts that the cast and crew put in to recreate the Enterprise-D.

Building a set, especially one that is only going to be used for a handful of scenes like the bridge of the Enterprise was going to be, isn’t cheap, and the fact that they were able to pull off a visual achievement on time and with a limited budget is very impressive.

So kudos to the crew who were able to pull off such a daunting task.