Posted in: CBS, Star Trek, streaming, TV | Tagged: alison pill, Annie Wersching, back to the future, Borg queen, Lea Thompson, paramount, Picard, star trek

Star Trek: Picard Director Lea Thompson Talks Time Travel & Borg Queen

While some can chalk it up to fate that Back to the Future star Lea Thompson ended up directing the time-traveling-centric episode "Assimilation" on the Paramount+ series Star Trek: Picard in the second season, the actress broke down the coincidence on the experience talking to SYFY Wire about her involvement. "Originally, when I first got the script [for the third episode], I didn't get to take them back in time. It was all supposed to happen in episode two," Thompson said "But due to rewrites or whatever, I got to do the part when they go back in time. Which made me so happy, because I was like: 'I did 'Back to the Future.' I'm a time travel expert!"

The episode had the crew of the La Serena trying to escape their dystopian hell of the Confederation, the polar opposite of the reality they came from by traveling to the past using a familiar maneuver used in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986) that used the ship to slingshot itself around the sun while making the appropriate difficult calculations with the Borg Queen (Annie Wersching) taking the place to do them instead of Spock (Leonard Nimoy) on the Klingon ship. "I can definitely say I came up with that" Thompson said on the traveling sequence on Picard where sparks rained down on the ceiling of the La Sirena only to start moving backward once the crew broke the laws of physics along with the tear that rolls backward up Agnes' (Alison Pill) cheek.

"Time travel is such a big part of the Star Trek canon," Thompson explains. "There are so many different ways of taking them back in time, and I was really grateful to [Executive Producer] Akiva [Goldsman] and [showrunner and Executive Producer] Terry [Matalas] because they do have respect for the director, and they were like: 'Do the way you think you want to do it.' But I was really happy that they kept my ideas there." Another memorable scene was the interaction between Agnes and The Borg Queen while linked that didn't use any additional filmed sequences as Jean-Luc [Sir Patrick Stewart] was directly communicating with Agnes' subconscious with the Queen largely incapacitated.

"I was so excited to work with the Borg Queen, specifically with Annie, who was just trying to figure it all out still when I started working with her, trying to find how to be that character, which is really difficult," Thompson said. "This is a big character, and I think she created such a big character so subtly, she is great. And the way Akiva and Terry and Alex have come up with such a beautiful way into this character, and her relationship with [Jurati], who is just drawn to the Queen. They are just drawn to each other. And the fact that Patrick, who was Locutus, is also drawn to her — it's emotional. It's not just a plot device." Wersching is the third actor to play the Queen after Alice Krige and Susanna Thompson. For more on the planning of the episode, you can go to SyFy. Star Trek: Picard streams Thursdays on Paramount+.

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