Hello, I'm Michael Chabon.
I'm an executive producer on Star Trek: Picard.
I was the showrunner for the first season,
and today I'm gonna be talking with
the wonderful, formidable,
Admiral Jean-Luc Picard himself, Sir Patrick Stewart.
Patrick, hello. Good morning.
Good morning, Michael.
It's so good to see your face. I miss you.
[Michael] You too. I miss you.
I keep getting from all our crew,
from all the Picard crew, the same thing.
It brings a wonderful, warm feeling,
especially at times like this when we can't be together.
I know.
As the season went on,
you know, we started as-
maybe this is almost trite to say,
but we started as this sort of disparate group of people,
and some of us had worked together before,
and most of us hadn't,
and we didn't really know each other very well,
and by the end of that season,
especially when we started doing the promotional work
as it was about to premiere
and we were doing the press junkets and everything
and traveling together,
I just really discovered
how tightly knit we had all become.
That was what made all the difference, I think.
It was the going to Comic-Con
and then doing our European promotional tour,
because before that all I'd done was work.
We were on the set day after day after day.
And it was so intensely busy
that when we had time to relax, and have meals together
and share a bottle of wine,
it transformed the relationships of the group.
And I think any new contract that I sign,
I'm going to insist
that the studio, or the producers, or whoever,
pay for a 10-day vacation for the entire cast
before production begins.
I think that's reasonable. Don't you?
Yes, I do. I think so too.
Well, you know, it's funny because,
I mean, partly it's a nature of serialized storytelling,
I think.
It might be different on an episodic show
where the same cast is essentially
always together for every episode,
and they're sharing scenes with each other very routinely.
Whereas with this show,
because there were multiple plot strands
and there were characters who were sort of
in that part of the story,
and there were characters who were in this part of the story,
and they didn't necessarily meet, even, or entwine,
like the character played by Peyton List, Narissa.
She was unknown-
even though she's in a fair number of scenes,
she was unknown to most of the...
I don't think Picard actually ever meets Narissa.
No.
I saw Narissa at the table read,
and I came down to watch her working one day, but we-
I don't think we ever actually met, formally,
which is crazy.
I know, it's funny.
And that even happened to a certain degree
with some of our, you know, just the regular crew members.
Not that you hadn't met,
but that there were many characters
who didn't have that many scenes together.
So, to be all together at Comic-Con,
to be all together on these press junkets,
was sort of the first time
people got to really schmooze for any...
It was absolutely delightful.
We have such a gorgeous group of people.
And I'm not only talking about
the lovely actors and actresses,
but about the whole creative team, and on the set too.
I don't think I've ever been quite so comfortable.
We're here to talk today about Episode 107
particularly, "Nepenthe,"
and speaking of friendships and people getting together,
this was in many ways a unique episode
in the course of the season.
Earlier, before Episode 107,
we had re-encountered the character of Hugh,
who is an important character played by Jonathan Del Arco,
from a number of The Next Generation episodes,
and Seven of Nine returning in the form of Jeri Ryan.
But 107 was the episode where Jean-Luc Picard
re-encounters Will Riker and Deanna Troi.
And in many ways I think this was the episode
that a lot of people, especially fans of TNG,
had been waiting for.
This was a moment they had been hoping for and waiting for.
And obviously that changed our expectations as writers.
I was one of the co-writers of that episode.
If you,
if you haven't watched that episode,
we're gonna be discussing it fairly in-detail,
so I'd recommend
if you're sitting watching this right now,
maybe hop on over to CBS All Access
and watch the episode,
and then come back here and join us if you have watched it.
You know, I guess the question
that you probably have been asked a lot already
but I think people are curious to know,
this was a reunion not simply of characters,
but of actors as well.
I know you do see Jonathan and you do see Marina Sirtis-
Jonathan Frakes and Marina Sirtis,
who play those characters.
You see them when you can, when you guys are together.
You do get together.
But to be reuniting with them on stage
for the first time since the last movie, I guess?
Mm-hm.
That was Nemesis.
Can you talk about just
how you prepared to return to that sort of place
and how it felt to be returning?
And maybe even say a little bit about just
your whole attitude towards TNG
in the context of Picard,
of how you felt about the other show
going into this new show.
What is so important to the work that we did
when Jonathan, and Jonathan Del Arco, and Marina joined us,
and Brent, too, of course,
it is not just a pleasantry
that we all are so tight as a group,
all of Next Generation.
I love every one of those people deeply.
I feel as though they've been in my life all my life,
although I was...
what, 46 I think, when I met them, or 47.
And so, the episode that you
and the others created for us in "Nepenthe"
tapped right in to that real history.
So, there was both performed affection,
performed relief to see these people again,
delight in their company,
a sense of sadness of not having seen them
much in the preceding 18 years,
and at the same time
the sheer joy of being on a set
with chums, with pals, with beloved pals.
And so, I...
I can't speak for Jonathan and Marina, but I,
I connected those two things together
so that there was-
I did no preparation for these scenes in "Nepenthe."
I just wanted to let them evolve
with all of the natural feelings that Patrick was having
and connecting them almost spontaneously
to the feelings that Jean-Luc Picard was having.
You know, I feel like you can really see it,
especially in two key moments in the episode.
The first is when
you are approaching the house with Soji and with Kestra,
and Troi is out in the garden,
and she looks up, and she sees you,
and the moment the two characters come together,
and the look on her face and the look on your face,
you know, the love and the affection
and that thing that old friends do
if you haven't seen each other in a little while.
I mean, especially if you were together constantly,
very intensely, for a fairly long period of time,
as you guys all were when you were making TNG,
you get used to how you each know how you looked then.
And with old friends, I know this for myself,
when you see an old friend,
the first thing you do is just look at the face,
and look at time passing,
and think back to those moments
when you last had seen each other.
All of that is going on in your faces in that scene.
I think it gains that incredible power
because it's both played, as you say, it's acted,
but it's also authentically what's-
it's happening live.
It's really happening in front of your eyes.
And then the second one is with Frakes
when you walk into the house
and he turns around, and he sees that you're there.
It's so alive, it felt so real.
And many people pointed this out to me that after
he's been making pizzas,
right fter he hugs you and he steps back,
you have this floury hand print on the back of your,
the back of your shirt, which was not scripted at all.
It's a mark of the affection, in a way.
It's like a tracing.
There's a joy, and there's an exuberance.
There's also a sense of relief and comfort.
That played perfectly into the whole idea.
I mean, the name "Nepenthe."
Nepenthe is the name of the planet
where Riker and Troi have settled
after and during
a loss.
They came because they have this son.
In the interval since the last time we saw them,
they've had two children.
They had a son, Thad, and then they had a daughter, Kestra,
and Thad had a kind of rare illness
that eventually killed him around the age of 15.
And so that's about, a few years have passed since that.
They've come to this world
to find some kind of healing, to find comfort.
And the name Nepenthe comes from Greek mythology.
It's in the Odyssey, I think.
It's a sort of magical herb
that causes sorrow to go away.
So, that sense of relief and comfort,
it's in the title of the episode,
it's in the DNA of the episode,
and it's very much there.
And in a way, Picard has chosen to come to this world
on an impulse.
He has two seconds to make up his mind
about where to run to when they're leaving the Borg cube,
and the first thing that comes to his mind is to go there.
So he's come to get relief.
And when you were taking those embraces,
when you're giving those embraces,
you can really see that sense of [exhales],
taking a breath.
He's going to get relief,
but also safety too.
And what I loved about that episode
and what preceded it, is that
it was not like I had sat down and thought,
"Now, what shall I do for the next few days?
Oh, I know,
I'll go and see my old friends on Nepenthe."
He was in a critical situation,
possibly close to being murdered,
and he had to make a snap decision.
I think it was brilliant
that what instantly comes into his mind is Riker and Troi.
"That's where I must go. That's where I will be safe.
That's where I will find love and protection
and relief from"-
I mean, it had been so stressful for Jean-Luc
leading up to that moment.
That innocence, that came about because of
one of the sort of founding principles
that we worked with from the very beginning with Picard,
which was, you know, and one of the things
that you and we, the other creators,
Akiva Goldsman, Kirsten Beyer, Alex Kurtzman, and me,
talked about with you was just how and when and why
to bring back the other,
the so-called legacy characters from TNG,
and what is the-
how might it be done,
and of all the possible ways of doing it,
which ones feel
the most justified or the best way to do it?
I mean, it would have been
maybe the easiest way, the fastest way,
and the most obvious thing to do is just sort of
bring them all back, and put them all on a starship,
and call it the Enterprise,
and just send them all out into space.
You know, you're shaking your head, like, you know what-
maybe we can talk a little bit about
why we knew that's not what we wanted to do
or that wasn't what was, what felt right or how to do it.
I remember in those very early meetings, Michael,
we did talk about that a great deal,
because clearly it was a creative option
to bring everybody back,
let's just see what happens.
But...
I am very happy that we didn't.
And as you know, it was actually quite important to me
that we did not just reference TNG,
but that we had to be in a world
that was not the same as the world of Next Generation.
Starfleet and the Federation would change our relationship
with other alien worlds, was different.
And for me, in my 78th year,
coming back to this world,
but not the same person who left it 18 years ago.
It's not only that-
I'm not only talking about Picard.
I'm talking about Patrick Stewart as well.
18 years have passed,
and my life has been very changed during those years.
And so, we were doing that as well.
I know you were aware,
but maybe our audience would not be so aware
that Marina suffered a tragedy
not along ago, when her lovely husband, Michael,
suddenly died unexpectedly.
And watching Marina,
I felt so acutely all of that.
Well, for me, the-
no, to say it was a revelation would be patronizing.
It wasn't that.
But Marina's work in that episode was extraordinary.
That long speech she had when we were in the garden,
and she was talking to me,
and she was talking to Soji,
I had never seen Marina quite working in that way before.
It was not the world of Next Generation,
but it was a person who had been changed
by the incidents in her life.
And I thought the work that Marina did was brilliant.
I agree.
I don't think-
meaning not disrespect whatsoever
to the creators and writers of TNG,
which is a show that I absolutely worship and adore,
but of all the primary cast members of that show,
I don't feel that the character of Deanna Troi
on screen was ever...
She never really got to shine
as the character that she was,
this empathic Betazoid
living with this capability
to sense and feel other people's emotions all the time
and that that became her job to do that.
That's her role on that ship.
And what is it like to be that person
and to have that ability,
to constantly be so beset
by the emotions of the people around you
and, ultimately, to sort of be responsible for those emotions?
That's your mission on this ship,
is to sort of care for people's emotional lives,
to be that counselor figure.
You know, I don't...
We never get to see that in the depth that,
I think you might see it, for example, in some of the novels
that have been written subsequently about Deanna Troi.
And so to then,
one of the things we tried to do in this episode was,
in the limited space and time that we had,
to just let the character of Deanna Troi
sort of be Deanna Troi, whatever that was gonna mean.
And I agree with you, I think Marina just,
it was an empty vessel
that she just flowed into so completely,
and it was stunning.
It was exhilarating to watch.
And the clear, profound
affection between Deanna and Will Riker
was so strongly present,
and I have got to say
was emphasized by the performance of Lulu.
[Michael] Oh, she's fantastic.
[Patrick] I mean, from the moment that we saw her on that hillside
with her bow and arrow and her makeup on,
I was astonished by that...
Well, I think she was 11, 11 years old when we shot that.
And what she contributed to that episode was huge.
I just hope she is going to have an extraordinary career.
I can't imagine that she wouldn't.
We got so lucky, because
I knew as I was writing that character, to make a,
you know, she's precocious.
She's sort of wise beyond her years,
but she's also a child.
She's capable of insight,
but she's also sort of innocent and naive.
And to put all those qualities on a page,
it can all work on the page,
and if you're reading it in a book,
it would probably work on the page of a book,
but to then ask an actor
to embody those contradictory things,
and a young actor in particular,
it's such a challenge, and she just,
she just nailed it.
Classic Picard arrogance.
You get to make the decisions
about who gets to take the chances and who doesn't,
and who's in the loop and who's out of the loop,
and naturally it always ends up with you.
Will...
That's fine on the bridge of your starship, captain,
but now you're dealing with a teenager, more or less.
That can be an extremely humbling experience.
One of the most interesting aspects of it for me was that,
you know, I always had authority
on the bridge of the Enterprise,
and even my first officer, Commander Riker,
was a junior officer below me.
And now here in this episode, in "Nepenthe,"
I was coming back because I was so vulnerable
and almost helpless, and weak, and needing...
Although it was an impulse to go to Nepenthe,
it was an impulse that was built on years of history,
and he needed that feeling of security and safety
before moving on with his story.
As you will recall, Michael,
in the very early days,
I think even, I would say, at our first meeting,
I did talk about my experience of shooting Logan,
the last of the X-Men movies,
and what an experience that had been, a great experience,
and what an impact it had had on me.
And I also remember saying,
"I do not want to make another Logan.
I've made Logan."
All I'm saying is that
the joy and delight with Hugh Jackman,
of creating a different X-Men world,
we could do with Picard
if we chose the right course and took the risks.
And there were big risks of bringing,
in front of the camera for Episode 1,
a Picard who was anxious, guilty, angry,
remorseful, sad, lonely, frustrated-
all of these qualities that we never, or rarely,
rarely encountered in Next Generation.
There was no doubt for me, especially with Riker,
with Picard and Riker,
when it came time to write those scenes,
I got more help in some ways
from having seen you and Jonathan together
when he was directing you
in the episodes he directed before 107,
Episodes 4 and 5.
Watching the two of you, watching how he
both defers to you in the way that
Riker would defer to Picard, in a sense,
of a sort of, you know, he's a younger man than you,
and there is that, not father-son,
but uncle-nephew sort of possibility or something there.
But also the way he looks out for you as the director,
and you are the actor, that he's,
the way a good director does,
that he's solicitous,
and making sure you have what you need,
and making sure that you feel,
making sure, not just you,
that all his actors feel secure, feel safe,
feel that they're protected to do their work,
and have everything that they need.
And watching,
and watching him do those two things
and be so exuberant, personally,
the way Frakes is so exuberant, so buoyant,
the way you almost could turn off the lights on the set
and just let him light the scene with his exuberance.
You know, those things all flowed, unconsciously I think,
into the writing of this Riker, the older Riker
who has retired,
who has undergone this loss that is still painful to him,
but has also loosened up some over time.
And when he sees his former commanding officer
who's no longer his commanding officer,
even though there's still,
they retain a certain
hierarchical structure in their relationship.
It's very light, it's very much diminished
from what it would have more properly been
on the bridge of a starship,
and he no longer has any reason
not to say what he thinks, not to tell Picard
in the gentle, solicitous way that a director
almost might speak to an actor,
"Are you sure you're doing this-
do you wanna maybe try it a different way?
How about we try it this other way?"
Yes.
Michael, what was it that made you decide
that Episode 7 should happen
and that it would involve bringing back
two of the legacy cast?
Well, you know, we had these,
I think we had evolved a set of not rules,
but just any time the subject
of bringing back a legacy cast member,
any time a role appeared in any story
for each of the episodes where it was like,
"Well, we need Raffi to call someone,
to ask for access to the Borg Cube," for example.
At that moment, that creates then, "Who is she calling?"
And every time that question would arise, we'd say, like,
"Well, it could be Geordi, or it could be Worf,
or it could be a character from Deep Space Nine,
or a character from Voyager."
That's the first impulse, right?
Is to sort of just, any time there's a hole,
fill it with a legacy character.
But we had this principle we had set for ourselves,
based on all the conversations
that you had with all of us from the beginning,
of like, if we're gonna bring back a legacy character,
it has to feel like it could only be that character.
It couldn't be any other character
and we're just sort of arbitrarily, for the fun of it,
for the fan service or whatever you wanna call it,
we're casting one of the legacy cast members.
So, you know, with Jonathan Del Arco,
we evolved this idea that there's this
Borg reclamation project going on,
where Borg are being assisted
to be returned to their biological, original selves,
and to get some kind of therapy and treatment
because it's a traumatic thing.
You're thinking, "Well, who would be running that program?"
To think it should be someone
who has themselves been a Borg before,
that's a natural impulse.
And then you think, "Well, it's Hugh, right?
It should be Hugh. It's got to be Hugh."
That's when we did it.
So with this, when we're like,
we knew we wanted Picard...
As you said, Picard's been through a lot by this point.
He's been through a wringer.
Going back to the Borg cube is incredibly powerful.
It brings back all the trauma
that he never really dealt with
after he was returned from being Locutus, emotionally.
We had an impulse like, we need to give him a break.
And we need him to, like...
There's been so much happening up 'til now in the season.
Let's give the audience kind of a breath.
Let them take a breath too.
Picard will take a breath, the audience will take a breath,
and let's send Picard somewhere where he can feel safe.
Behind that decision,
which was also to set it in a very rustic world,
we might have been,
we might have been near my home in West Oxfordshire.
It was so not,
so much not the Enterprise,
not Starfleet, not the Federation.
And there was a sort of ease and comfort that the setting,
and as you remember, we filmed it-
I think for me it was the first time
I'd ever actually filmed on the Universal lot,
but their home, their house
was apparently a permanent part of the Universal backlot.
[Michael] Right, yes. The cabin, the log cabin.
The log cabin, yes.
It had been there quite a long time.
So that environment was also
creating an atmosphere which we could relish and sink into,
and knowing that it would produce new things,
not just novelties but-
I mean, like Jonathan making pizza. [Laughs]
Which we all loved.
And the...
It...
For me, of course, I mean, the big thrill about that
was when I realized
that where we were shooting at Universal Studios,
just up the hill was the Bates Motel.
[Michael] Right. [Laughs]
Was the location for so much of the action
in that brilliant, brilliant movie Psycho,
the Hitchcock movie.
And the Bates Motel is still there.
So, one afternoon at lunchtime, instead of napping,
I crept up the hillside, did a little circuit around,
and it was so exciting.
For me, as an English actor
who had not spent much time in Hollywood at all
until I came to do Next Generation,
to be on the Universal backlot
and to be sharing a location with that
so resonant set of the Bates Motel
was thrilling for me, I have to say.
I'm still,
I'm just a child, really,
when it comes to much of Hollywood.
For me too, as a first-time showrunner
who's spent very little time on sets
up until this season of Picard,
to be making a movie at Universal Studios on the lot,
as you say, with Bates Motel
and with the Amity, whatever it's called,
Amity set from Jaws,
it couldn't feel more like,
"Hey, we're actually making a movie here."
There's the trailers and the extras walking around.
And then,
so, it had that "movie magic" kind of magic.
And then there was also the,
I may never experience again anything like
the sort of vicarious joy that I and that we all watching
experienced when you guys get together,
when it's you and Frakes,
when it's you and Marina and Frakes.
It's palpable,
and it makes everyone around you smile and feel happy.
But then it even got turned up a notch
when Michael and LeVar,
Michael Dorn and LeVar Burton, came,
dropped by one day, just to watch you guys.
What was that like?
Can you talk about that?
It was extraordinary and very, very emotional.
LeVar and Michael are wonderful men,
and to have them visit us on the set, you know,
in one sense it might have made me nervous,
might have made Marina nervous,
but instead, it was just a joy.
Of all the people watching us work
who could bring us
memories, and happiness, and reassurance, and encouragement,
it was LeVar and Michael.
You guys create a world.
You were part of a world that lasted a long time,
both the series for seven seasons, and then the films.
And as actors there's so much history there.
The relationships among the characters
are so well established,
And you yourself, you are viewed as one of the
finest actors of your generation.
And into that situation we dropped
an extremely young woman,
I think younger than any of us actually even quite knew.
I'm talking about Isa Briones.
You know, we dropped her into, for her first starring role,
Star Trek, just the whole world of Star Trek itself,
54 years of history, the whole history of TNG,
and its fandom, and you,
and said, "Here you go.
Start acting. Jump in, right in there."
The difference with Isa
as opposed to the rest of our company,
was that she was the one person
that I asked if I could be with
and read with her at her final audition.
I think probably the world knows by now
that Isa Briones came to us
directly from the North American tour of Hamilton.
She's a wonderful singer.
So, I went to the casting directors' offices,
and Isa and I worked together.
I think we did two scenes.
I was off camera, of course.
But I wanted to not only have the experience
of looking her in the eyes and working with her,
but of seeing what it would do to her.
I think the end result was that
in the three roles that Isa plays in Season 1,
her work is fascinating and extraordinary,
and that after that audition when I said,
you know, "She's the one,"
it has so proved to be true.
And I'm-
we're a young company, except for myself.
I raise the average age horribly on this series.
But Evan, Evan Evagora, is also a very young actor
at the beginning of his career,
and working with him
I felt the same thing as I did with Isa.
In fact, if anything, more potently.
I really wanted to give Evan
a feeling of security, safety, that he was...
Nothing bad could happen to him on our set.
Now Jonathan, who directed him,
yelled at him a little bit.
And I remember thinking, "Ooh, ouch. Ooh!"
But he did exactly the right thing,
because he didn't slap Evan in the face,
but it was kind of like a slap.
And I saw Evan startled,
and then instead of just yelling back at Jonathan,
went to his mark, and said, "Let's do the scene again."
And bam! Then something happened,
and it was extraordinary.
And we've got Alison Pill, who's,
I don't know.
I look at Alison and I always think she's 16.
[Michael] I know.
I know that she's not.
But she's also,
she's also 75 too.
In her soul there's a kind of-
Oh, what,
what phenomenal work she does. It's extraordinary.
So, we have become,
we've become an ensemble.
You know, I always made a point,
I insisted that The Next Generation was an ensemble,
and I feel very much the same way about this.
I'm just very lucky still to be the captain.
[Picard] Do you ever think about shipping out again?
[Riker] Well, I am still on active reserve.
There would have to be a very good reason.
I loved the scene in "Nepenthe"
when Jonathan and I had been walking through the woods,
drinking a mug of coffee,
and then we went out and sat on a bench
on a little pier over the water.
I gotta tell you,
that was Jonathan Frakes and Patrick Stewart.
I mean, it felt that way.
And I have to tell you, when I was writing that scene,
it was Jonathan Frakes and Patrick Stewart too.
Like, in my mind, though I've never seen you and he
take a walk together
or sit down and have a cup of coffee together.
I pretended that I had, in a sense,
when I was writing that.
And you know, I came, I wrote that episode in order,
you know, start to finish,
so when I got to that moment in the writing,
which was sort of a very frenzied 27-hour,
with-not-much-sleep period
when I wrote the first draft of that,
like to come to that moment of the script,
it felt like a reward to me.
There were so many other,
trying to get the emotional values right,
the death of the son, and Soji's mental state,
and Picard's mental state,
and the family's relationships to each other,
and many characters in certain scenes,
like five characters all having to talk to each other.
There were a lot of technical challenges
to get to that scene,
to be able to just have two people who love each other,
who have come to a place of resolution
within the episode itself,
and in a certain way, in a much longer arc,
and just to let them be together and talk a little bit.
I felt a sense of relief and sort of,
I was happy to be there with them at that moment.
And then to see the two of you make it come to life,
and it feels so much that way watching it.
And everyone who watches,
when we were going and editing,
and the various editing people would come in and out,
or other people come in to watch it, to watch that scene,
as soon as it ends, everyone would just say,
"Oh, God!"
There's a moment in it which always moves me,
where Jonathan puts his arm around my shoulders,
and he says something, and then I reach up,
and I put my hand on top of his.
I find that very, very emotional.
There was another scene
which had, naturally, some of the same elements
as my scenes with Jonathan and Marina,
and that was almost the last scene
in the final episode of the season,
the long six-page duologue with Brent, with Data.
We used up about two-thirds of the shooting day
to make that scene.
And actually, where I'm sitting right now,
I am looking across my study here
at the chair that I sat in when we played that scene.
[Michael] Oh, really?
Because doing that scene with Brent was so important to me,
one of the most important scenes I've ever played anywhere,
on stage or in television or film.
And so,
I went to the head of the stage settings department
and asked if I could buy the chair
because I wanted to be able to sit in it again.
So there it is, sitting over there.
That's fantastic.
I promised them if ever we go back into that scene,
I will,
I will maybe not loan them, but rent the chair.
It's gonna be very expensive, but...
[Laughs]
They can have it back.
My dream for that, my just fantasy,
was never really going to be able to happen, I knew,
but the fantasy was to have the entire episode
just be Picard and Data for an entire episode.
We jokingly called it "My Dinner with Data."
Oh, my.
So that was the approximation.
Well, it was-
I know for both of us,
I know Brent feels exactly the same way-
there was a moment at the end of that scene
when Picard stood up to leave the room
because he now understands
what it is that Data is looking for.
He is looking for the one thing
that makes humanity what it is,
which is the end of life.
And I had to get up and then turn around and say,
"Goodbye, Commander."
I think you were on the set that day.
Yes, I was.
You probably remember how many times I had to do that,
because I would hit my mark, turn around.
The emotions were so strong.
I couldn't say the line.
It was exactly the same at the end of Nemesis
when Jonathan was in the captain's ready room
and he said-
it was a goodbye scene again.
I don't know why goodbye scenes
have such a powerful hold over me,
but he said to me, "It's been an honor, Captain,"
and my reply was,
"No, the honor was all mine."
You see?
I know.
Chills.
It's taking me over now.
But that was,
with Brent, that was the same feeling.
And there were other moments, you know,
when I embraced Marina
when we were saying goodbye.
There is one shot, slightly high-angled shot
of the four of us with our arms around one another.
It's beautiful.
Have you had a fan response to,
well, "Nepenthe" in particular?
What people felt about bringing back Riker and Troi
and having an encounter with Picard?
Yes.
At the time, when the episode first aired,
I tried during the course of the season
to be very engaged as the showrunner with the fans,
and so on my Instagram feed
I maintained a weekly question- and-answer sort of session,
where after every episode dropped
I would make myself available for questions.
And so, I got a sense of reaction episode-by-episode.
And people, for the most part,
even if they had a negative reaction,
they tended to be fairly polite,
or very polite, or very respectful and courteous,
but I could still tell from, in a way,
the sort of nitpickiness level would go up
as a sort of expression of dissatisfaction
that maybe they wouldn't want to articulate,
like, "I didn't really care for this episode"-
not "Nepenthe," but "this particular episode."
They wouldn't wanna say that,
so they would ask questions like, "Why did this happen?
And why did that happen?
And why was it like this and not that?"
And then I would,
I could understand, like,
there was maybe some dissatisfaction from certain fans.
With "Nepenthe," it was,
I would say of all the episodes, it was among the episodes
where I sensed that the least,
where there was, the most sort of uniform pleasure
had been taken in the episode, in the characters,
in seeing them return.
I mean, the return of Riker and Troi was so exciting
for fans of the show.
It was so meaningful to see them together,
that they're married.
We saw them get married at the end of Nemesis,
so we knew they had gotten married,
but that they're still married,
that they had children,
they suffered this loss that's very sad.
And I don't think I really understood,
even as a fan myself,
and I really am a fan
and I love these characters,
but I don't think I fully understood
the longing among fans of TNG
to know what has happened to the character,
to be told, like,
"Where are they?"
So, right now, in canon, on the show itself,
we don't really know where Geordi is.
It hasn't been said.
Is he alive or dead?
We would assume he's alive because in Episode
1 or 2, I can't remember now,
Zhaban suggests to Picard, like,
"Maybe you should ring up some of your old friends,"
and he names a few.
But he doesn't mention Crusher.
He just happens not to mention Crusher.
He mentions three people,
but he doesn't say anything about Crusher,
and Crusher's not really referred to at all
in the course of the season-
Beverly Crusher, I mean.
So, that creates this anxiety
that I didn't actually really understand.
Like, people are out there saying, "Is she okay?
What happened to Beverly Crusher?"
So, the sense of pleasure is partly a sense of relief
when they see Riker and Troi together
and they're still married.
There's a kind of added pleasure
just from being told they're still with us,
that they're still alive.
I didn't really understand that, and
I knew it would make people happy.
I imagined it would make people happy,
but I didn't understand that there's a kind of longing
to know and to be reassured.
You know, you want the dream to continue.
You don't want the dream to be over.
I look on that as being a wonderful compliment.
Patrick, this was so much fun for me.
Just getting to spend any kind of time with you
is always such a pleasure.
I really enjoyed talking to you.
And I'd like to thank everybody for watching and listening,
and we'll see you on down the road.
Two to beam up.