I remember getting goosebumps and just hoping that show got made because if it did, it was like he was writing it just for me. “Ron enthusiastically pitched us his take for the miniseries - all the way to Adama's final bluff about Earth. “Funny story: when I was working as an assistant to Bryan Fuller, we went to lunch with Ron as BSG was just in its early stages,” Matalas recalls. Roughly twenty years ago, Matalas was a production assistant on Star Trek: Voyager, and then Star Trek: Enterprise, and around that time, something interesting happened. And then he goes deep into his history with the Trek franchise. No doubt those aspects of BSG are certainly burned into my brain and would be subconsciously part of the recipe,” Matalas explains. “It’s less of a nod, but impossible not to acknowledge Ron's influence on me as a writer and storyteller. Because of the writing connections between BSG and Star Trek, and Terry Matalas’ admiration for Ron Moore, was this a specific homage? Spearheaded by TNG and DS9 veteran Ron Moore, the very beginning of Battlestar makes a point that the titular ship, Galactica, is not networked with other ships in the fleet because it’s much older, which, allows it to be free from the Cylon attack. As Geordi says in the episode they need “.something older, analog, offline from the others.” This specific detail - that the Enterprise-D can survive the new Borg threat because it’s not hooked up to a larger network - might remind sci-fi fans of the basic premise of the rebooted Battlestar Galactica way back in 2003. In the context of Episode 9 and the finale, the crew needs a ship that isn’t connected to the new network of Starfleet ships. The return to the restored Enterprise-D isn’t just a nostalgia play though. In Picard Season 3, the Enterprise-D is a lot like the Battlestar Galactica. It had to feel authentically the old show but look right with these new cameras.” Picard’s roundabout connection to Battlestar “It's a bit of our Titan lighting mixed with TNG old school. “It's a kind of hybrid actually,” Matalas explains. On top of that, even though the lighting of the bridge will remind fans of the brightness of the ‘90s show, Matalas points out that newer camera technology had to be taken into account to recreate the mood we all remember. This means that Picard production designer Dave Blass, along with Michael Okuda had to utterly remake the entirety of a set that hasn’t existed since 1994. Matalas points out that because nothing was left of the Enterprise-D set from the ‘90s, what you see in Picard Season 3 “was totally rebuilt from scratch.” “It’s all real.” While both Discovery and Strange New Worlds utilize an AR wall for aspects of filming, the production of Picard does not. “Nothing is CGI,” Terry Matalas tells Inverse. While some fans might assume aspects of the Enterprise-D bridge in Picard were created by CGI or AR wall technology, the truth is, everything you see here exists in the real world. The crew of the USS Enterprise-D, back on the bridge. (It’s sort of like if an advanced alien race crashed a ship on the Moon during the Stone Age and then decided to yank it to prevent humans from finding it in the future.) So, basically, even though Verdian III was uninhabited, the crashed ship was removed so as to “not influence the system.” In Generations, Data said the neighboring planet, Verdian IV, had a “pre-industrial society.” Meaning that just the presence of advanced technology from Starfleet in a burgeoning star system was enough to yank the ship, which actually makes a lot of sense. Picard asks, pointedly, “But how?” And Geordi reveals that Starfleet removed the crashed saucer section of the Enterprise-D from the surface of Verdian III in accordance with the Prime Directive (that famous Star Trek rule that says Starfleet can’t unduly influence cultures who haven’t yet developed interstellar travel on their own). In Episode 9, Geordi reveals that it’s a fully restored version of the Enterprise-D! In Episode 6 of Picard Season 3, Alandra La Forge (Mica Burton) hinted that her father Geordi (LeVar Burton) was hiding something in docking bay 12 of the Fleet Museum. The Enterprise-D leaves the Fleet Museum in “Vox.” Paramount+
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |