Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Entertainment
  3. News

Star Trek: Picard season 3 brings back Next Generation cast

By

Today, April 5, is First Contact Day to fans of Star Trek. It stems from a pivotal event in the film Star Trek: First Contact, which was one of four feature films to utilize the cast of Star Trek: The Next Generation. That’s why it’s fitting that Paramount+ used today as the occasion to announce that the entire TNG cast will return for the third and final season of Star Trek: Picard.

Picard launched in 2020 as a showcase for Patrick Stewart’s beloved Jean-Luc Picard, two decades after the events of Star Trek: Nemesis. In the first season of Picard,  Jonathan Frakes and Marina Sirtis reprised their roles as Will Riker and Deanna Troi in guest appearances. Brent Spiner also appeared as the android Data and Dr. Altan Inigo Soong. But in the video below, Paramount+ confirmed that Michael Dorn’s Worf, LeVar Burton’s Geordi La Forge, and Gates McFadden’s Dr. Beverly Crusher will also take part in this onscreen reunion in the upcoming season.

Star Trek: Picard | Season 3 Cast Announce | Paramount+

Terry Matalas is the showrunner for Picard season 3, and he acknowledged the Next Generation reunion with a statement of his own.

Recommended Videos

“I remember watching the premiere of Star Trek: The Next Generation almost 34 years ago with my father like it was yesterday. 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. The entire Star Trek: Picard team and I can’t wait for fans to experience this final, high-stakes, starship-bound adventure in season three!”

The cast of Star Trek: Nemesis.
Image used with permission by copyright holder

The third season of Star Trek: Picard is filming now, and it will likely premiere in 2023 on Paramount+.

Blair Marnell
Blair Marnell
Blair Marnell has been an entertainment journalist for over 15 years. His bylines have appeared in Wizard Magazine, Geek…
Topics

Editors’ Recommendations

The 10 best Star Trek: The Original Series episodes, ranked
Captain Kirk, upset, buried waist-deep in Tribbles.

It’s hard to imagine today, but back in the late 1960s, the original Star Trek was not considered a hit. The ambitious science fiction series was constantly on the brink of cancellation and was cut short only three years into its planned five-season run.
However, it’s important to put Trek’s apparent failure into historical context as, given that most markets in the U.S. had only three television channels to choose from, even a low-rated show like Star Trek was being watched by about 20% of everyone watching television on a Thursday night, or roughly 10 million households. This year’s season of HBO’s Succession was viewed by roughly 8 million households a week, which makes it a hit by today's standards. Star Trek’s audience only grew once it went into reruns in the early 1970s, and by the time Star Trek: The Motion Picture hit theaters in 1979, it was a genuine cultural phenomenon. Today, the Star Trek franchise is considered one of the crown jewels of the Paramount library.
Though arguably outshined by its most prosperous spinoff, Star Trek: The Next Generation, Star Trek: The Original Series holds up remarkably well for a vision of our future imagined nearly 60 years in our past. It’s a space adventure series that tackles social or political issues from what was, at the time, a daring and progressive perspective informed by the contemporary civil rights movement, sexual revolution, and backlash against the Vietnam War. Conveying these values through fanciful science fiction didn’t only allow its writers to get away with a lot of subversive messages, it also delivered them in a way that remains fun to watch decades later — fun enough that fans are willing to forgive when its ideas, or its special effects, crumble under modern scrutiny.
These 10 episodes, however, unquestionably stand the test of time, and thanks to the continuity-light nature of mid-20th century television, any one of them could be your first Star Trek episode. (Be aware, however, that the order in which classic Trek episodes are listed varies depending on the source. For our purposes, we’re using the numbering from streaming service Paramount+.)

10. Mirror, Mirror (season 2, episode 4)

Read more
The 10 best Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episodes, ranked
Captain Sisko brandishes a phaser rifle outdoors in the DS9 episode "Rocks and Shoals"

For decades, Deep Space Nine was “that other Star Trek show.” It debuted in 1992, during the run of Star Trek: The Next Generation, the first Trek series to achieve mainstream popularity. DS9 overlapped in first-run syndication with TNG until 1994, and then with Voyager — which ran on primetime network television — from 1995 to 2001. Throughout its seven-year run, Deep Space Nine was never a top priority for studio Paramount or franchise executive producer Rick Berman. While this was a source of frustration for the cast and crew, the studio’s neglect also allowed them to take greater creative risks.
Under showrunner Ira Steven Behr, DS9 gleefully subverted the Star Trek formula, pulling open the cracks in the franchise’s futuristic utopia and refusing to be bound by the episodic nature of weekly television. DS9’s serialized stories and long character arcs may have made it harder to keep up with when it first aired, but it’s perfect for the modern binge-streaming model, which has introduced it to a whole new generation of fans. Thirty years after its debut, Deep Space Nine is finally receiving the respect it always deserved.
Selecting just ten episodes of DS9 to showcase is a challenge, as many of its most compelling stories are spread out across multiple episodes. Some of the episodes below are totally standalone stories, some are standout chapters in multi-part arcs that can be appreciated on their own, and some are two-parters that we simply couldn’t separate and had to list as a single entry. We hope you don’t mind us bending the rules just a bit — after all, that’s part of what made DS9 great to begin with.

10. In Purgatory’s Shadow/By Inferno’s Light (season 5, episodes 14 and 15)

Read more
At SDCC, Strange New Worlds goes full musical and more Star Trek trailers
Anson Mount Star Trek: Strange New Worlds' musical episode.

How do you celebrate Star Trek at Comic-Con when all of the actors stayed home? The actors and writers strike has greatly diminished the star power of San Diego Comic-Con, but Paramount+ had a novel solution. The streamer put its cards on the table early by promoting the remaining episodes of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds season 2, including a video preview for the upcoming musical episode.

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds | "Subspace Rhapsody" Trailer (SDCC 2023) | Paramount+

Read more