Star Trek: Picard Season 2 Had To Be Rewritten Because Of A Ridiculous Reason

The second season of "Star Trek: Picard" started promisingly, but ran out of steam pretty quickly. At the start of the season, the impish all-power trickster Q (John de Lancie) appears to an elderly Admiral Picard (Patrick Stewart) and announces that he'd like to play a game. Q then teleports Picard to an alternate timeline, very much like the Mirror Universe, where everyone is evil. Earth has become a galactic force for tyranny and spends all its resources hunting and killing all other living beings in the galaxy. Picard finds that his alternate self is a dangerous general who keeps a collection of skulls belonging to his fallen foes. 

Picard gathers his closest compatriots, also all transported into the Fascist Timeline, and aims to travel back in time to the point where the fascist regime began. Something happened, he finds, in the year 2024, and he needs to investigate the streets of modern Los Angeles looking for clues as to what might have gone wrong. His investigations lead him toward an ancestor of Data's, an ancestor of his own, and into a psychic dimension where he contemplates the fate of his mother. Also, there's a Borg Queen on the loose and references to the ultra-obscure Trek character Gary Seven. 

As one can see, the season is all over the place. And it seems that the version that aired was considerably stripped down from the ultra-complex season that was written. It also, it seems, once contained way too many "Star Trek" references for the studio's taste. Terry Matalas, one of the "Picard" showrunners, spoke with Collider back in March, and he revealed what was cut from the show after Paramount interfered, including a magical phone booth and a subplot with Romulans.

Matalas revealed that he and the show's other writers were almost done writing the season's ten episodes before Paramount stepped in to demand dramatic changes. He said that there were "many, many different versions of season 2," and that the finished product has "a lot of different ideas." Yeah. No kidding. There's an entire sequence in "Picard" where a psychic demon clown stalks the living dream space of Admiral Picard, one of the strangest subplots in any "Star Trek" story to date. Matalas doesn't clarify what ideas were in the initial drafts of "Picard" and which ones were wholly invented for the final product, but he did say that Paramount disliked how heady and insular the story was. In his words:

"[They said it was] a bit too sci-fi. [...] We wrote nine episodes at one point and the network was like, 'No, we don't really understand this, it's a bit too sci-fi, it's a bit too in-"Star Trek."'"

Matalas did make note of what ideas were ultimately cut out. For instance, he said there was "a whole thing" with Romulans that never made it to the screen. Also, there used to be a greater significance to 10 Forward, a bar owned by the young Guinan (Ito Aghayere) in 2024 Los Angeles. In the final version, 10 Forward is indeed visited often, and Guinan and Picard spend several scenes reconnoitering there, but as far as anyone can tell, it's an ordinary bar. 

According to Matalas, it used to be a far more complex conceit.

10 Forward was supposed to be a gathering place for many galactic species who merely liked dropping in on Earth, undetected, merely for its booze. And who could resist a planet where Drake has his own whiskey brand? Matalas said that the "intergalactic Cheers" idea was rejected. Which he felt was a pity, as he liked the idea. Matalas said: 

"The idea was that Guinan's bar was presented as a normal bar in Los Angeles, but if you knew the right thing to do, you could go into the back through the telephone phone booth and that was Rick's Café, and it was a stopping point for all these different species that were actually there on Earth with a 'Do not interfere' thing happening. So you had a lot more 'Star Trek' happening in the backdrop of it. Ultimately, the powers that be at that time were like, 'This is too much.' But there were some really good ideas there that were pretty cool." 

Rick's Café is, of course, Rick's Café Américain as seen in Michael Curtiz's "Casablanca," a bar that had drinking for international visitors up front, but a secret casino in the back. Matalas, however, was right about the busyness of "Picard." With references to Gary Seven, a time travel plot, a Borg Queen (Annie Werching), an ambitious evil geneticist, a pending space mission, Picard's clown-infected dream space, the reduction of Q's powers, and a cameo from Wil Wheaton, there was already way too much going on. 

Matalas took over as the showrunner for the third season of "Picard," and improved the series greatly. The ending was crass and clunky, but the third season was actually focused and followable. Matalas made good.