Patrick Stewart, Star Trek: Picard showrunner on resurrecting the Borg Queen
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Warning: This article contains spoilers for Thursday's episode of Star Trek: Picard, "The Last Generation."
The first words we hear in the premiere of Star Trek: Picard season 3 — other than the sound of The Ink Spots singing "I Don't Want to Set the World on Fire" — is a log recording of Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart) talking about the Borg, the cybernetic hive mind species and one of the most famous Trek adversaries. In hindsight, perhaps it shouldn't have come as a surprise to see the Borg make their return in dramatic fashion in the conclusion to Picard's final season, but here we all are, still floored by the sight of the floating cube and the Borg Queen reprisal.
Showrunner Terry Matalas confirms this surprise had been kicking around as early as the concept of Picard and Crusher's son, Jack (Ed Speleers). "We have been keeping the Borg alive in the storyline throughout, so we knew we were going that way from the very beginning," he says.
It's a story that hits close to home for Picard. On Star Trek: The Next Generation, the renowned Starfleet captain was chosen to be the human voice of the Borg and he was assimilated into the hive mind "Collective" as Locutus. The penultimate episode of Picard season 3 revealed that the Borg had implanted organic technology into Picard, who then passed it along to his son when he conceived Jack, inadvertently turning his progeny into a Borg transmitter.
CBS; Paramount+ Just as Patrick Stewart's Jean-Luc Picard became Locutus, so too does his son, Ed Speleers' Jack Crusher, in 'Star Trek: Picard'
In the finale, Picard and Crusher, surrounded by their former crew mates on the Enterprise-D, execute a rescue mission to extract Jack from the Borg Cube, where he's found under the influence of the Borg Queen as the new Locutus. Alice Krige, the South African actress who played the role in the 1996 film Star Trek: First Contact, returned to voice the Borg Queen. Jane Edwina Seymour served as her body double on set.
"We asked ourselves, 'What's the very worst thing Picard could go through?' It would be to watch his son become the Locutus, to watch his son go through the very worst thing that happened to him," Matalas explains of the kernel that started it all. "That led to, 'What if some dormant part of that Borg experience was passed on inadvertently to his son?' Thematically that became about parents and their children and what we pass on. The story of legacy."
Though Speleers as Jack hit a lot of the familiar story beats Stewart once went through as Picard, the 82-year-old icon of Star Trek never felt he needed to be a "counselor" to lead his costar through this process. "One of the greatest pleasures was in rehearsing and shooting the two-hander scenes that I had with him," Stewart recalls. "We had a great on-camera... 'relationship' isn't quite the right word, but vulnerability. I think that counted for a lot in bringing fresh emotions, fresh turbulence into these scenes."
Recreating the interior of the Borg cube "was a painstaking, expensive process," Matalas divulges — one that began as soon as Paramount+ pulled the trigger on a third Picard season. "By the time we started shooting on the Enterprise-D, we were still gluing on pieces of carpet." Nothing about it was digitally enhanced, he adds.
At first, the look of the set wasn't working. It didn't give off the right Borg cube vibes. "It looked like Dagobah the first time," Matalas remarks, referencing the planet from Star Wars where Luke Skywalker honed his Jedi skills with Yoda. (We all know how heated fans can get when Star Wars spills into Star Trek and vice versa.) "We had gone down some paths that weren't working," he admits. Thank the Borg gods for camera tests.
Paramount+ 'Star Trek' alum Alice Krige returns to voice the Borg Queen in the 'Picard' series finale, while Jane Edwina Seymour served as her body double
As for the queen herself, Matalas knew he didn't want to put 68-year-old Krige underneath all the heavy prosthetics. The Borg leader "looks so emaciated and wildly different" than Krige's look in First Contact, the showrunner points out, "but we had to have Alice. It had to be her."
According to Matalas, Krige was eager to get into the recording booth, where he says they embarked on "very long, intense voice sessions." The Borg Queen is no longer what he describes as the "sensual, sort of perfect" image fans remember from First Contact. "It's this other H.R. Giger-esque demon," he describes.
Creature designer Neville Page started off with the iconic Borg Queen look, which then evolved through several different stages of deformation. Prosthetics guru Vincent Van Dyke then sculpted practical Borg pieces based off that concept, and James MacKinnon led the make-up team in applying those prosthetics onto Seymour. "It was an arduous process," Matalas says. "Poor Jane. She was a trooper."
Stewart didn't get to spend too much time reconnecting with his former scene partner Krige, who wasn't present on set. "We had very few scenes and encounters," he recalls. "It was a little disappointing. We shot seasons 2 and 3 back to back, literally. In series television, there's always a significant break, but we wrapped season 2 at 7 o'clock one evening, and we started season 3 at 7 o'clock the next morning." In other words, there wasn't much time for reminiscing. "I had to be very cautious about abusing my stamina. Everything had to be saved for the days that I was filming," he continues. "The producers were extraordinarily generous and compassionate towards me because I'm an old geezer, as Marina [Sirtis, his costar] loves to call me."
Matalas at least remembers when Krige saw the final rendering of the new Borg Queen. "We shot it and then she saw the footage and was like, 'Oh my God! That's what I look like?'" he says. "It's such a different take that she enjoyed jumping into it."
The Star Trek: Picard series finale is available to stream on Paramount+.
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