Patrick Stewart Admits He Was Wrong to Fight the TNG Reunion, as Star Trek’s Future Hangs in the Balance

Patrick Stewart contractually blocked a Next Generation reunion when he first signed on for Star Trek: Picard, and now, in a new interview with TV Insider marking Star Trek’s 60th anniversary, he says he’s glad the writers talked him out of it.

Stewart wrote in his 2023 memoir, Making It So, that reuniting the TNG cast was never part of his plan for the character. “For Season Three, our last, Terry Matalas, by then Picard’s showrunner, told me that the studio wanted a full ‘Next Generation’ reunion,” Stewart wrote. “Ugh, just what I had firmly said I didn’t want. But that had been three years ago. Now I was less resistant, having enjoyed working with Jonathan, Brent, Marina, John, and Whoopi. As an executive producer, I had a say in how we might go about achieving such a reunion. I told Terry, ‘I like the idea, provided that we don’t bring them all back at once.’”

He’d made the no-reunion stipulation a condition of his return in the first place, telling Variety back in 2022 that the idea felt like it “would be paying too much attention to the fan appreciations of what Next Generation had meant to them” rather than moving the character forward. The first two seasons of Picard largely honored that instinct, keeping Stewart’s Jean-Luc surrounded by a new cast instead of his old crew, and both seasons underperformed with critics and fans alike.

By the time Picard reached its third and final season, Stewart had changed his mind. “I’m so glad I listened to the writers and producers of Picard,” he told TV Insider. “Having the whole cast involved in that final season made for an absolutely joyous and satisfying experience. They’re all such dear friends, but also exceptionally talented artists.”

Stewart also addressed the wider anniversary moment, calling the overlap of Star Trek’s 60th, The Next Generation’s 40th, and Picard’s sixth “wildly surreal” and saying he still remembers his first day driving onto the Paramount lot “like it was yesterday.” Asked about retirement rumors, Stewart, who turns 86 this month, said he continues to receive interesting offers and can’t imagine officially retiring.

The reunion he resisted turned out to define his Star Trek legacy. Jonathan Frakes, Brent Spiner, and LeVar Burton have all since described how visibly it revived Stewart on set, with Burton recalling that the exhausted actor was “glad to have us with him” once the old cast reassembled on a recreation of the Enterprise-D bridge. Stewart called Jean-Luc “the most significant role of my career” and said he’ll be “forever grateful to have had the opportunity to be a part of what is now such a historic franchise.”

None of that nostalgia changes what’s happening around him at the studio level. Star Trek: Starfleet Academy was canceled after two seasons. Discovery, Prodigy, and Lower Decks have all ended. Strange New Worlds is heading into an abbreviated final season. Star Trek: Legacy, the reunion series fans have pushed for since Picard ended in 2023, remains a non-starter, and Star Trek: Year One died when Paramount struck the Enterprise sets it would have used.

Behind all of it is Alex Kurtzman, whose deal with Secret Hideout has controlled Star Trek television since 2017 and is set to expire at the end of 2026. Kurtzman told TrekMovie he’s had conversations with Paramount Skydance about the franchise’s future and received “nothing but support,” but admitted he’s “truly at the beginning of the conversation” and has “nothing to report yet.” He pointed to the scale of the merger as the holdup, telling TrekMovie there’s “an unbelievable amount of organizational things to decide” now that Skydance is also absorbing Warner Bros. Discovery.

Fans are exhausted from the treatment of characters in both Picard’s early seasons and Starfleet Academy, with Strange New Worlds looking to be not that much better. They’re ready for this whole era to be over, and Paramount on Trek’s 60th anniversary seems to agree that it’s time to put all of what Kurtzman has done to rest.

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