Would you be open to giving 12 Monkeys a try? It's streaming on Hulu. Could give a view of his wider work.
Plus, he'd be aware of all the low hanging fruit that Brannon Braga and company considered over the years that was vetoed by Rick Berman, UPN, or the studio -- or structurally impossible because of structural constraints in the late 90's / early 2000's.
This is the important part about Matals. Right here.
I was in these forums (on an old account) in the early 2000s / late 1990s. I remember folks basically SCREAMING at Berman and Braga to grab the obvious story paths and potential character development standing right in front of them. And they would not do it. We found out later some of that was because UPN wouldn't let them, some of that was burnout, and some of them was creative myopia.
Matalas is a seasoned producer by this point, but sees the franchise in the broad strokes. His interviews and statements paint a very clear picture. He sees the enormous missed opportunities of the Berman era, but also its strengths. He was a junior staffer, so seemingly "gets it" in a way a lot of us fans did at the time. But he was like 27 and had no power.
He said perhaps the cleverest thing I've seen a producer say about Star Trek in a long time regarding the Borg and Changelings in S3. He observed, rightly, that the Federation, through proxies (S31 and Janeway) felled it's two greatst rivals in the 2370s through the use of biological weapons, and in part, that hypocrisy motivated them to work together to hit back at the Federation when he could. That's the kind of storyline a fan in a forum post would draw up because the origin of them were entirely independent (different shows, different writing staffs, different years, different crews) but Matalas saw the Federation basically winning the 24th century because everyone else either had a real bad time (the Klingons, the Gamma Quadrant Dominion) or were nearly annhilated (the Romulans, the Borg). So by 2401, the way the Federation got attacked, was the ONLY way it could. It's the legacy of the two great fights of the second half of the 24th century. Good story. And how did they get back at the federation? Through a biological weapon fo their own... one Seven of Nine may have worked on (Dark Frontier) in its original form.
Few producers would have ever been brave enough to do that, because they would have thought it was too in the weeds. They're turned off by tying these disparate things together. Too fandom. But it worked. It really worked. And I think he'd have the courage to do it again.
