Editor’s Note: This article contains spoilers for Star Trek: Picard Season 3 Episode 7, “Dominion.”Star Trek: Picard Season 3 Episode 7 sees some of the franchise’s greatest heroes brought to a breaking point. When Vadic (Amanda Plummer) and the Shrike catch up with the Titan after Jack proposes that they use him as bait, the two crews spend a significant portion of the episode in a stalemate, with Vadic on the ropes as Picard (Patrick Stewart) and Crusher (Gates McFadden) consider making one of the gravest decisions of their lives in order to protect their son. With Vadic contained in a forcefield in the medbay, Picard and Crusher finally get to ask some questions of the Changeling who has been hunting them down. While Vadic stays cryptic about who—or what—Jack (Ed Speleers) is, she does reveal that she’s not actually hunting him for herself. She delves into her own dark origin story of how her physiology was altered by Starfleet’s not-so-noble Section 31 through intense torture and experimentation.
When it becomes clear that Vadic has no intention of stopping until she’s delivered Jack to whoever she’s working for, Picard and Crusher are forced to question if they’re ready to take a life in the name of their child—and the answer is yes, they are. Lead News Editor Maggie Lovitt recently sat down with Season 3 showrunner Terry Matalas to discuss this episode, and he told Collider that this is easily the moment that made him “the most uncomfortable in the episode.” He revealed that they even “debated [this moment] the most in the writers’ room and the editing room. Probably all the way until air.” As Picard and Crusher acknowledge in the moment, they’re on the brink of embracing “the antithesis of everything that was in these characters from Star Trek: The Next Generation.”
Matalas acknowledged that not every The Next Generation fan is going to be happy with this moment, saying: “That is really scary because you know right away doing this scene that there’s a large portion of fans that are immediately saying this is a character betrayal from the get-go.” But as he explains, Picard Season 3 is telling a different kind of story than the ones we would see on TNG. He told Collider:
“You have to ask yourself: in that moment, what would these characters really do? Would this be a question they would really ask? So in the writers’ room, you have an actual debate, and when you have a unanimous agreement from everyone in the room who would have every perspective on it, that it’s probably a good idea at this point to stop this, then maybe Picard and Beverly would feel the same as parents at this moment. But goddamn is it dark. And so, it’s really– as a fan of Star Trek: The Next Generation, to me, it’s a hard moment to watch your childhood heroes go through, but we’re doing it.”
What’s Next for The Next Generation?
Picard and Crusher were ultimately unsuccessful in their attempts to take out Vadic, leaving the crew of the Titan in dire straights in the final moments of this episode. With so much left to explore in the final three episodes, Star Trek: Picard fans are hungry for a Legacy spin-off featuring a mix of new characters like Jack and legacy characters like Seven of Nine (Jeri Ryan), with the iconic TNG crew popping up here and there. With Paramount+ announcing a Starfleet Academy series today, anything is possible in the world of Star Trek.
New episodes of Star Trek: Picard are available every Thursday on Paramount+. Be sure to check out our full conversation with Matalas when it’s live, and in the meantime, you can watch our recent interview with Speleers down below.
