When Star Trek: Picard Season 3 ended in 2023, the final revelations of the show and one very specific post-credits scene made it seem like a sequel series was coming at us at warp speed. But now, two years later, showrunner Terry Matalas has seemingly moved on from Trek and has just wrapped production on the upcoming Marvel Studios miniseries, Vision Quest. He’s also brought some of his Picard cast members with him, including Orla Brady as F.R.I.D.A.Y, and Todd Stashwick as the mercenary known as Paladin. But what about Legacy? Wasn’t Stashwick’s Captain Liam Shaw supposed to return from being slain?
At the STLV convention, speaking to a crowd of Star Trek fans, Matalas and Stashwick recently revealed exactly how Shaw would have come back to life in the pitch for Star Trek: Legacy.
As reported by TrekMovie, although Captain Shaw was slain on the USS Titan in Picard Season 3, there was always a plan to bring him back. Sort of. And after two years of teasing fans about what that resurrection would look like, Matalas has laid out what he actually put into the Legacy pilot pitch. Here’s what he said on stage at STLV:
“I will say, since we’re so far away from the possibility of Legacy, that he wasn’t going to come back to life with Borg nanites… He was going to be the Emergency Engineering Hologram who did not want to turn off and was really pissed off that the Titan was turned into the Enterprise, and would refuse to call it the Enterprise, until late.”
The concept of emergency hologram AIs to oversee certain parts of the ship dates back to Star Trek: Voyager and the introduction of Emergency Medical Hologram or EMH (Robert Picardo.) Picard Season 1 expanded this notion in a big way, with several of Captain Rios’ (Santiago Cabrera) holograms performing various functions on his ship, the La Sirena. So, the idea that an Emergency Engineer Hologram could be made in Captain Shaw’s image has a canon precedent in two ways, from Voyager and from Picard. On top of that, throughout Picard Season 3, we learned that Shaw started his Starfleet career as an engineer, and of all the TNG characters, was only starstruck by meeting Geordi La Forge (LeVar Burton) because both men shared a background in making warp engines work, rather than commanding starships.
Stashwick noted that this new version of the character would be called the “Shawlogram,” though probably not on screen.
That said, as Matalas noted, the possibility of Legacy happening is “far away.” While the cast and various creatives behind Picard Season 3 still remain hopeful, Paramount is seemingly downsizing its various Star Trek projects. Strange New Worlds Season 5, which is expected in 2027, is set to be the final season of that show, which would leave the yet-to-premiere Starfleet Academy as the only new Trek series in production after that point.
Could Star Trek: Legacy, featuring Captain Seven of Nine (Jeri Ryan), Jack Crusher (Ed Speleers), Raffi Musiker (Michelle Hurd), and Todd Stashwick’s Shawlogram boldly return? The odds are slim, but for some fans, that resurrection is the one they’re hoping for the most.
