Star Trek Cancellation Killed a Dream Voyager Payoff With 30 Years of Build-Up

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In an appearance on The D-Con Chamber podcast with Connor Trinneer and Dominic Keating (Star Trek: Empire), Robert Picardo said that he had pitched something to the showrunners of Star Trek: Starfleet Academy, and they were going to do it in the third season. It all involved pulling a 30-year-old storyline into the modern day.

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Robert Picardo Wanted The Doctor to Meet Himself On Star Trek: Starfleet Academy

Robert Picardo said that his pitch was for a “Doctor meets backup Doctor” story in Star Trek: Starfleet Academy Season 3. However, Paramount cancelled the new Star Trek series, and the already filmed Season 2 will be its last. “I wanted to do an episode… Now, we can talk freely about it because the show’s canceled,” Picardo said. He reminded the podcast hosts of the Voyager episode where his backup program was discovered 700 years in the future and was helping people.

“I wanted to meet my Voyager backup, my old self, and be as I looked at 41, and play off myself as 71 or now, 72,” Picardo said. So, I wanted to play opposite my younger self and basically have my younger self ruthlessly insult my older self, saying, ‘Why would you possibly want to alter your appearance? Why would you want to look like that?’”

Picardo went on to say that he pitched the entire idea and showrunner Noga Landau loved the idea and said that it would be a Season 3 story. However, thanks to the Starfleet Academy cancelation, that can never happen. Picardo said that it would start off humorously with the one program insulting the other one, but in the end they realized they were both twins raised separately and it would help his character on Star Trek: Starfleet Academy resolve his “daddy issues” with De. Lewis Zimmerman, who programmed him.

Picardo even said this was an idea he had on Voyager 30 years ago, and he really wanted to do it as a “song” for his own father that he never got to sing. This was from Star Trek: Voyager season 6, episode 24, “Life Line.” The sequel that will never happen now since Star Trek: Starfleet Academy would not only have shown what happened to his backup program, but it also would have been a sequel with The Doctor trying to save his “father.” Sadly, the cancelation of the show ruined that. Picardo said in the podcast that Starfleet Academy reflected “Gene Roddenberry’s values, [but] was out of step with today’s changing political and cultural climate.”

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