Posted in: Paramount+, Preview, Star Trek, TV | Tagged: Brent Spiner, Gates McFadden, Jonathan Frakes, LeVar Burton, Michael Dorn, paramount, patrick stewart, preview, star trek, Star Trek Picard, Star Trek: The Next Generation

Star Trek: Picard: "Next Gen" Cast on Getting Proper Send-Off & More

Heading into Star Trek: Picard Season 3, cast members from "The Next Generation" discuss rewriting TNG's ending, "Nemesis," and much more.

When Star Trek: Nemesis was released in 2002, it was only the fourth film in The Next Generation portion of the franchise. The maligned sequel, directed by Stuart Baird, teased dramatic changes among the U.S.S. Enterprise-E crew, with William Riker (Jonathan Frakes) finally accepting a promotion for his own ship but serving his final commitments to his former captain Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart). Brent Spiner would also be the fourth major Trek cast member to have a character death in Data saving Jean-Luc and sacrificing himself from Shinzon's (Tom Hardy) ship. With the film's poor box office showing, the film franchise stalled until 2009's J. J. Abrams soft reboot, but the path to a full TNG reunion wouldn't start until 2020's Star Trek: Picard with Stewart starring in the legacy sequel. As it finally comes to fruition, the TNG cast opened up to The New York Times about how the Paramount+ series finally allows them to have that proper ending they never got in 2002.

How Star Trek: Picard Rewrites The Next Generation's Ending

"Well, a lot of it is based on disappointment, frustration. I was promoted, which meant a bit of farewell," Stewart said on the inspiration where he draws Admiral Picard from. "A goodbye. But the admiral job turned out to be an office trip, basically. It was not what he had known all his life, which was being on a ship. I've heard this from Navy people that they have the same thing. So he had gone back to France and was running his vineyard, and then he encounters this profoundly troubled young woman and feels that he needs to do something. That's where the engagement begins, and it is also the last time that, as an actor, I ran up a flight of stairs. You'll never see me do that again."

When it came to how much of the actors bring themselves into their characters, Michael Dorn admitted Worf is a little more like him. "I've tried to bring as much LeVar into Geordi as has made sense," LeVar Burton said of Geordi La Forge. "I won't say that there's an absolute melding of the two, but there's a little Geordi in me now, absolutely." "I've said this before, and it may be redundant, but I think there's a little Data in every man," Brent Spiner said on his android character Data but will play his twin Lore in Picard's final season. "But since I am Data, there's more of it in me."

One thing Dorn was reluctant on was the makeup process which he admits during his original time on TNG took three hours, but took less than one for Picard. When it comes to how it felt to play their characters in Picard, Frakes credited executive producer and showrunner Terry Matalas for writing Riker on a whole another level. "He had Patrick and me to lunch, and he said, 'What I'd like to do is write conflict for you two guys who never really had any conflict,'" he said. " To which we both said: 'That's great.' [Gene] Roddenberry wanted our ship to exist in a bubble in which the family lived without conflict, which is unrealistic and uninteresting in many ways and is undramatic. So for Picard and Riker to be at loggerheads was great for us. To look at Patrick's eyes and the characters disagree — it was so much different than bringing him reports. Our relationship was so gentle, and here we really had big issues, and that made the drama better. It made the story better."

For more, including if Spiner has any regrets about Data's fate in Nemesis, how the rest of the cast felt about the film, how the films left a Gates McFadden feeling "practically nonexistent," how Star Trek has changed in the streaming era, and TNG memories, you can check out the rest of the interview here. Season three of Star Trek: Picard premieres February 16th on Paramount+.

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