Star Trek: Picard Almost Brought Back the Best Voyager Characters

Life has never been better for Star Trek: Voyager fans. Prodigy functions as a sequel to the show, with return performances by Kate Mulgrew, Robert Beltran, and Robert Picardo; Tim Russ’ Tuvok and Robert Duncan McNeil’s Tom Paris have dropped by Picard and Lower Decks; and Seven of Nine ended Picard as the Captain of the Enterprise-G.

But the final season of Picard almost brought back even more Voyager characters to the 25th century. During a Zoom chat attended by Trek Movie earlier this year, Picard season three showrunner Terry Matalas revealed that he originally planned to bring back two other beloved members of the Voyager crew: Harry Kim and Naomi Wildman.

The latter would have appeared as part of a Star Trek version of “Avengers: Endgame” that Matalas envisioned. “Harry Kim appeared as the captain of the Voyager-B in the first draft of Frontier Day,” Matalas explained, but he ultimately decided to yield to another series. “Prodigy was telling a lot of Voyager stories and we didn’t know if Harry was going to appear and we didn’t want to step on their toes.” Of course, there were also the financial restrictions that kept Matalas from bringing back Harry Kim and all the other ’90s characters he wanted. After all, he wanted more than just Voyager cameos: “I would have Kira [Nerys from Deep Space Nine] there, even if all you get is a bridge shot. But all of that is very expensive. We were already way too ambitious.”

As most viewers know, Captain Harry Kim would be quite the upgrade from the character’s usual standing. Across all seven seasons of Voyager, Harry remained an Ensign, despite serving with distinction on the ship. Heck, even Harry’s pal Tom Paris got promoted after getting demoted from Lieutenant Junior Grade to Ensign for disobeying Captain Janeway. Sure, a couple of alternate futures saw Kim reach captain, but Picard would be the first in-canon evidence that Harry and his clarinet moved up in Starfleet.

Meanwhile, Naomi Wildman would have enjoyed much more than a cameo, which makes sense, given Seven of Nine‘s role in the series. A baby born on Voyager while it made its way through the Delta Quadrant, Naomi Wildman joined Nog from Deep Space Nine as one of the few times that Star Trek did kid characters right, thanks in part to her kadis-kot games with Seven.

Matalas planned to have Naomi follow Seven as an adult as well. In the initial storyline, Naomi would have reunited with Seven while the USS-Titan, on which Seven served under Captain Liam Shaw, hid among the Fenris Rangers, the intergalactic vigilantes to which Seven once belonged. “And she gets help from an older Naomi Wildman who had also followed in her footsteps as a Fenris Ranger and was a badass,” Matalas said. But instead of inspiring pride in the older woman, “Seven realizes she sort of created a monster because Naomi had become harder than she was.”

In Matalas’ description, the Seven/Naomi story sounds like the inverse of Icheb’s fate in the first season of Picard. Icheb was the most notable of the Borg children that Seven helped rescue and reform in later seasons of Voyager. Icheb returned briefly in the first season of Picard, where he was famously vivisected alive on screen. For many Trekkies, that moment of excessive cruelty, even to a little-loved character like Icheb, was a sign of Picard trying too hard to be edgy.

Naomi’s story would have helped further distract from that first season mistake, but it never worked out. “We broke the story and we had reached out to the actress who played Naomi [Scarlett Pomers],” Matalas explained, but then decided not to move forward. “[I]f you had 13 episodes, you were doing this for sure,” he admitted. “But if you had 10, you’re like, ‘I need to get to LeVar.’ It’s time to get there.”

It’s hard to disagree with Matalas’ logic, but there is still one reunion that really disappoints. Seven received her commendation from Tuvok, who was her crew mate, but not the one to whom she was closest. Initially, Matalas planned on using a different character in that scene, the one most important to Seven.

What? No, not Chakotay. Kathryn Janeway!

“We had talked about Janeway, obviously, because her name got dropped a bunch of times,” Matalas revealed. “It would have felt like if we had put Janeway in the in the finale—specifically in the last scene where [Seven] is promoted—that was the original idea, she gets a promotion from Janeway, it might have overwhelmed the scene and made it more about Janeway and less about Seven of Nine.” Beyond that emotional logic, there was a practical reason for going with Tuvok instead. “And we couldn’t afford Kate [Mulgrew] even if we wanted to. So it all worked out as it was supposed to.”

Indeed it did. Picard‘s third season gave fans wonderful cameos beyond the main crew. And with Voyager returning to the public consciousness once again, it’s only a matter of time before Harry Kim and Naomi Wildman get their due.