Apparently Star Trek: Picard suffered from filming seasons back-to-back

The pandemic caused a lot of havoc to a lot of the world. One of the things that really mucked up for us was the filming of Star Trek content. Due to an interruption of filming and the costs that stacked up because of it, the decision was made to film a bunch of content back to back to cut down on costs. This included series like Star Trek: Picard.

Picard filmed season two, as season three was being written and as soon as season two was done, they started up with season three. At first, it seemed pretty logical, as it would appear to be an easy way to keep everything in tune with one another. That's not what happened, however. At first, it seemed like a solid idea as it would keep continuity and quality consistent from season to season, but instead, the opposite happened.

Speaking to members of the Master Replicas Collectors Club via Zoom, Picard series showrunner, Terry Matalas revealed that due to how the completion of each season was done, continuity was hard to keep up. As Matalas goes on to say (via TrekMovie.com), scenes were cut that seemed to be important, and caused confusion for viewers. Matalas goes on to say;

“Jurati’s Borg, there is a misconception that they are the Borg in general, that the Borg were good [after season 2], which would have undone Wolf 359, which would have undone Picard, and none of the future they came back to would have looked the same. I was off working on season 3 as those final [season 2] episodes were written.

And so we were reading scenes that didn’t end up getting shot. There was a brief scene with Jurati in which she explained that she stayed out of history’s way and they were a small collective of Borg, but they’re not the Borg of tens of billions of drones or anything like that.”

Due to the fact that season three was already underway while they were finishing season two, Matalas and the writers had to split focus, which ultimately caused a lot of confusion. Matalas goes on to explain that Jurati Borg essentially got lost in the shuffle due to the split teams;

“So while Jurati Borg was always going to be the payoff to [season 2], it was never really intended to be a longer-running thing. At the last minute, we added the thing where there was the hole that was going to open up and destroy—they added that to give a burst of action to the [season 2] finale, to give her a reason to do all of this. So that started to become retrofit into, “Hey could this be something for season 3?” But we were already way down the line on what we were doing with it.

So you could say that she was guarding this thing. We did have a line on the Enterprise-D from Riker—when he talks about the Borg transwarp conduit at Jupiter and that the one that Jurati was guarding was a distraction, the Queen’s way of saying, “Go over here.”… We had a whole thing about it. But when we got to the cut, it was just like this big exposition dump that was like, nobody cares. His
son is on board, Starfleet is assimilated. There’s this giant thing and now we are retrofitting and explaining the Jurati Borg.”

We've not been the easiest on Picard, but considering the hurdles they had to overcome, it's impressive they got any thing done at all. From the torrid shooting schedule to the pandemic and constant interference from Paramount+, the fact Picard exists at all is impressive.