Today is First Contact Day so Paramount+ has dropped a teaser video to reveal the cast for Star Trek: Picard season 3, and it contains basically the whole cast of Star Trek: The Next Generation (TNG). The third and final season of Picard will include nearly the entire U.S.S. Enterprise bridge crew as LeVar Burton, Michael Dorn, Jonathan Frakes, Gates McFadden, Marina Sirtis, and Brent Spiner are all set to return for the series.
The Star Trek: Picard season 3 cast video released by Paramount+ features the voices of all the Next Generation actors as Picard signs a letter to someone. Then he gets up and opens a chest, where he finds his old uniform and comms badge waiting for him. The quotes revolve around the crew getting back together and Picard’s legacy. The teaser doesn’t hint at much else except to show us Picard and William Riker standing next to each other ready to take on something else, just like in the old days.
“I remember watching the premiere of Star Trek: The Next Generation almost 34 years ago with my father like it was yesterday,” Terry Matalas, Picard‘s showrunner, said. “It was the spark that ignited my love for science fiction. So, it’s most fitting that the story of Jean-Luc Picard ends honoring the beginning, with his dearest and most loyal friends from the U.S.S. Enterprise. It would be an understatement to say that giving these characters a proper send-off is an honor.”
Spiner, Frakes, and Sirtis have all already appeared in Star Trek: Picard, having roles in the first season, but this will be the first appearance for Burton Dorn and Gates McFadden and the first time the entire team has been together since the films ended. The first two seasons of Picard have played hard into nostalgia, and this seems to confirm that the third season will as well. While the series itself is entirely based on fans’ love of The Next Generation and seeing this team together again will, no doubt, be amazing, it’s a little disappointing that Star Trek: Picard season 3 will lean so hard into recapturing the past. Picard works best (when it fleetingly works) when it focuses on the character, not the history.
The missing factor from all this? Where the hell is Wil Wheaton’s Wesley Crusher? Is it really a reunion if Wesley isn’t around to screw everything up?
