Bringing the
TNG crew back together is not just a love letter to the fans who have been missing this particular flavor of
Star Trek, but it proves, as Picard says, “the past matters.
” That said, there is knee jerk criticism of this kind of thing in big pop-culture franchises, with some armchair social media critics determined to write things off for “too much fan service” or “nostalgia bait.”
For Matalas, this argument feels “lazy,” because with something as massive as Star Trek, it’s not just about Easter eggs and throwbacks, it’s simply the fact that the franchise has been around for five decades.
“If you ever sit down with somebody who’s 83, if you ever sit down with somebody who’s 46, we spend a lot of time talking about the past,” Matalas says. “
Star Trek is 56 years old now.”
He continues, “If you go into somebody’s house and they’ve lived there for 56 years, do you point at everything on their walls and their furniture and the music they listen to and say, ‘Member Berries!’ Or is that just the world that they lived in, you know? I get that there may be some people who have that point of view, but you know, when you have
this many people responding to it in some way, I don’t think you can thumb your nose at this stuff.”
Matalas also points out that the point of
Picard wasn’t to be a subversive show that questioned why fans liked the things they liked. “
Andor is one way to go. I love
Andor and I think that it’s brilliant. But this series could never be that and that’s not what these people wanted to do. I think there’s a valid criticism somewhere in that nostalgia argument, but I think this was earned. If all we cared about was member berries we would have just plopped the crew on the
Enterprise-D in the first episode.”
