‘Picard’ Season 2 Was Rewritten After Paramount Deemed It “Too Star Trek,” Says EP

I think this is an extremely lousy headline, but the content is good.

Firstly, the headline slightly misquotes what Matalas actually said (emphasis added):

“We wrote nine episodes at one point and the network was like, ‘No, we don’t really understand this, it’s a bit too sci-fi, it’s a bit too in-Star Trek.’”

I think a story being a little too "inside baseball" and reliant on stuff from decades ago is a perfectly valid note, especially when we're talking about ideas like this:

The idea was that Guinan’s bar was presented as a normal bar in Los Angeles, but if you knew the right thing to do, you could go into the back through the telephone phone booth and that was Rick’s Café and it was a stopping point for all these different species that were actually there on Earth with a ‘Do not interfere’ thing happening.

The stuff about COVID messing with the writing and shooting schedule is understandable, and created problems that can be seen in many TV shows filmed around that time. All the same, it makes me wish they had decompressed the schedule and not rushed through things as much as they did.

The comments about there being a lot of different ideas in season two are interesting, since I think she overall series' biggest flaw is that it crammed a lot of ideas, many of which I like quite a bit, into only 30 episodes, with few (none?) of them being fully explored.

And regarding the Jurati Borg...I don't know, I never found that confusing in the slightest. I think their intent came through just fine.

And regarding the Jurati Borg…I don’t know, I never found that confusing in the slightest. I think their intent came through just fine.
Yes, I was surprised to read that there was any misconception. It seemed pretty clear to me that nothing they did in the past would have altered the history of TNG/Voyager/etc.
As I recall, the order of events played out like this:
Picard and crew entered an alternate timeline in the Picard era (25th century, ~20 years after TNG era).
Picard took that timeline's Borg Queen into the shared past of the two timelines.
Jurati merged with that Borg Queen.
They fixed the timeline and returned to the standard Star Trek timeline. Queen Jurati remained in the past. At this time, "Borg Queen Prime" (the one we know from First Contact) was still in the Delta Quadrant, unaffected by any of this.
In the 25th century, Queen Jurati re-appears with her own collective, entirely separate from the Prime Collective we've known throughout TNG, Voyager, etc. From the 21st century up the 25th, Queen Jurati just stayed out of history's way to avoid a time paradox, ensuring that the chain of events that led to her creation would still happen.
I really enjoyed Jurati's story in season 2, and was a bit disappointed that we didn't see her at all in season 3, since she and her collective should no longer be required to stay out of history's way. But at the same time, they set that up at the end of season 2 pretty explicitly. I just felt like if they were going to bring the Borg back again, they ought to least mention that there's a whole other collective of friendly Borg who are possibly much more technologically advanced than the Prime Borg and are kinda-sorta part of the Federation.
- In all fairness, Captain Shaw did mention the Jurati Borg, albeit a bit offhandedly.
  "Forget about all that weird shit on the Stargazer. The real Borg are still out there"
If the network had a problem with the plans for season 2 being too dependent on older stuff it's odd that season 3 still managed to be so dependent on older stuff, considering the seasons were apparently filmed back-to-back. Did the network folks give their notes on season 2 and then stop paying attention?
- My cynical take is that season three was pretty shallow overall, and I'm not sure there was anything in it that would make someone say, "wait, what?"
I'm not going to complain that it wasn't specifically written for long-time fans, but I am disappointed that it wasn't specifically written for long-time fans.

99% of the time, if a show set in the future travels back to the present day, it's a budget thing, a "we're fucking over this shit" thing, or both. Sometimes you still get a good script out of it, but it's pretty much always a compromise.

I'm satisfied to learn this. It answers so many questions I have that begin with "WTF?".

that explains it

The title is a misquote:

“We wrote nine episodes at one point and the network was like, ‘No, we don’t really understand this, it’s a bit too sci-fi, it’s a bit too in- Star Trek.’”

A weird choice Trekmovie is usually better than this

EDIT I see it was already addressed

I'm still salty that we never got an epic Borg Vs. Jorg battle at the end of S3. They totally wasted whatever it was they were trying to set up with Jurati at the end of season 2.
- Like they totally wasted that outer-dimensional race of machines coming to destroy all life when you open a portal from season 01. They've been consequent on building up something in a season and then completely forgetting about it the next.
- lol I like "Jorg"

The meat is too meaty!

I thought it was funny that they set it one year ahead of the present day because of the pandemic