If you haven’t seen Star Trek: Picard season 3 episode 9, then read no further. You’ve probably been seeing people talking about the episode, titled “Vox,” on social media and for good reason — the penultimate episode of the series delivered a massive surprise for Star Trek: The Next Generation fans. So how did they pull off the return of the biggest star of the franchise, namely, the U.S.S. Enterprise NCC 1701-D? Showrunner Terry Matalas has some answers.
Matalas told Variety that the big surprise almost didn’t happen because his team had to build the bridge using all of the old photos, construction plans and input from members of the original TNG creative team.
“Everyone tried to talk us out of doing this, because financially it’s a nightmare, and the timing was tight. To the moment we started filming, we were still gluing pieces together. But you can’t have a Star Trek: The Next Generation reunion without one of its major characters, which is the Enterprise.”
Picard production designer David Blass was tasked with the job of bringing the Enterprise D back to life, and he explains that it really was a monumental effort. “There’s the ongoing rumor that there’s a warehouse somewhere that has all this Star Trek stuff, but what exists is not a lot,” he said. “We went into the deep dive of looking at every photo ever taken and every screencap, and we had a giant wall of inspiration at the back of the soundstage with photos of every single detail, so that everyone could see that we had thought this through.”
Blass turned to Mike Okuda and Denise Okuda, who worked on The Next Generation, for help. “The first thing we did was to go in the garage and dive into boxes and see what we still had,” Mike Okuda said. “We had some original drawings and art, but large chunks of it disappeared. You realize you’re going to have to reconstruct a lot of this from scratch.”
Fans have been treated to all kinds of cameos and Easter Eggs throughout the third season (as well as throughout the series, as there have been lots of blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moments of nostalgia for eagle-eyed fans), and with the entire Federation fleet gathering for Frontier Day, it seemed like only one thing was missing: the Enterprise D.
The last time the Enterprise D was in action was in the 1994 feature film Star Trek: Generations, when the saucer section of the ship detached and crashed on the planet Veridian III. Geordi LaForge (LeVar Burton) has been painstakingly restoring the Enterprise D as a surprise for Frontier Day, but now it just so happens that the old ship is the only ship not linked together and subject to Borg control, as revealed in the final moments of episode 9.
Thankfully, the Enterprise D won’t be too far away should it be called back into action in the future. “There were lots of interested parties who wanted to save the set,” Blass said. “Luckily it has a home in the Star Trek archives.”
