Mike McMahan had intended to bring Voyager's EMH aboard the Cerritos

Robert Picardo has made a return as The Doctor from Star Trek: Voyager not only on Star Trek: Prodigy, but he's one of the main characters for Star Trek: Starfleet Academy, the newest series coming from Paramount+. Should Prodigy get picked up for a third season, there's no reason to believe that The Doctor won't still be part of the team. Not that fans are complaining. We'd missed the acerbic wit of the Emergency Medical Hologram and were thrilled to see him in the first look for season two of Prodigy, which is available on Netlix.

Had Picardo not made his way to Prodigy, though, there was another option awaiting him as Mike McMahan, the creator of Star Trek: Lower Decks, had every intention of bringing the doctor aboard the Cerritos to tutor Tendi, according to an interview he gave to Trekmovie. According to McMahan, though, before any of the series cast a legacy character, all of the showrunners would have a conversation about the plot and how that character was going to be used so there wouldn't be overlap in the series.

"Anytime we were gonna use legacy characters or do a big plot line, or even if we had the season kind of figured out, all the showrunners from all the Trek shows would get together and talk through everything, and if there was something that was sounding a little similar, we’d be like “Okay, hold on, when you’re doing that, how are you going to express that?” Because we don’t want somebody to sit down and be like “I just watched this on another Trek.”"

When McMahan was told Prodigy intended to bring The Doctor into season two of the series, he thought it made sense as, to him, Prodigy is "really like the Voyager show." This decision from the Prodigy team had him making a course correction for Tendi, which he thinks worked out for the best. And he did think it was cool of Prodigy to drop a mention about the Cerritos in its second season.

The first episode of the final season of Star Trek: Lower Decks is now streaming on Paramount+, and you can catch new episodes every Thursday.