It gives me all the joy in the world that Star Trek: Picard is starting to feel like Star Trek: Voyager 2: Seven and the Doctor’s Electric Boogaloo.
Speaking to Trekkie Girls at London Film and Comic Con over the weekend, Picardo — who of course played both Voyager’s Emergency Medical Hologram, the Doctor, and said Hologram’s creator, Starfleet scientist Louis Zimmerman, in Star Trek: Voyager and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine — revealed that he had been approached by CBS to appear in the second season of the upcoming Star Trek: Picard:
I am pleased that they (CBS) have expressed interest in me. They have reached out to my agent about next season. So I’m looking forward to seeing what it is. As you know I play two characters, primarily the Doctor but also Lewis Zimmerman.
Nothing’s official yet — even Picardo acknowledged that it was all early days, and nothing had been agreed. But with Troi, Riker, Data, Seven, and even Hugh the Borg coming back for season one, the question becomes why not?
Now that we actually have a better idea of what Picard is about — and Patrick Stewart himself has long been teasing that the show has story plans that could see it last multiple seasons — it’s perhaps no surprise to see even more of Voyager’s crew show up. After all, we’re getting Jeri Ryan back as Seven of Nine, why not bring along one of her best partnerships on Voyager in the process? And also make it so we can all conveniently forget about that super weird time the final season tried to make Seven/Chakotay a thing instead of her and her holographic pal? Yes. That would be great, please and thank you, Star Trek: Picard.
But despite the fact Picard is primarily a follow up to The Next Generation, it does provide us a fascinating opportunity to explore what became of the worlds left behind by its immediate Trek successors. In the tail end of the 2390s, Picard is set in, U.S.S. Voyager has been back in the Alpha Quadrant 20 years.
The Dominion War that dominated the latter half of Deep Space Nine, and the fallout of which saw Ben Sisko basically become a space god, was 25. It’s nice to see the faces of the Enterprise crew again for the first time since Nemesis, but why not take the chance Picard provides to catch us up on all these shows?
We’ll bring you more on the series as we learn it — which, given that Star Trek Las Vegas 2019 kicks off Thursday, a year on from when we first officially learned of Picard itself, there’s a chance we could be hearing more about Jean-Luc and the rest of our 24th Century Trek faves coming back sooner rather than later.