By Chris Snellgrove
| Published
Most Star Trek fans agree that Picard was pretty uneven for its first two seasons but managed to mercifully stick the landing for Season 3. However, one legend from this venerable franchise recently disclosed that his planned cameo was cut entirely, and this cameo would have made a killer final season even better. Voyager actor Garrett Wang revealed that he was going to be included in Picard Season 3 as a Starfleet captain but that he got cut out of the show altogether.
Harry Kim Loses Again
This came up in Garrett Wang’s sweeping interview with TrekMovie which covered everything from his hilarious Lower Decks cameo to his aborted Picard cameo. Originally, he was intended to play a similar narrative role as Shelby, the ambitious commander from the TNG two-parter “Best of Both Worlds” who later showed up on Picard as an admiral. The idea of including the Voyager alumnus never materialized, but the actor described just how close this idea came to happening.
According to Garrett Wang, he actually got the confirmation from his manager that he had been cast in Picard Season 3. However, his planned part just kept getting cut down. As he put it, he originally had “a three-episode arc, which then changed to two, then changed to one.” Still, his manager told him that he was going to need to be in Los Angeles for a costume fitting and that plans for his cameo progressed far enough for his character’s name to appear in scripts.
It was actually Garrett Wang’s Voyager costar (and Picard regular) Jeri Ryan that broke the news about how abruptly he was written out of the show. She told him that his character was written into the script but, after a round of revisions, the Kim character was nowhere to be seen. This caused Wang to be “depressed for months after that,” though he eventually got a second chance at a return thanks to his cameo in a hilarious episode of Lower Decks.
Picard’s Loss
Now, why are we so confident that Garrett Wang would have made Picard’s excellent final season even better? For one thing, he would have been a much cooler cameo than Admiral Shelby. Fans only spent two episodes with Shelby while we spent seven years with Ensign Kim, and his sudden appearance would have been just as memorable and moving as when Tim Russ reprised his Tuvok character for the final episode.
Plus, there are few Star Trek actors more passionate about the franchise than Garrett Wang, and he would have made the most out of a Picard cameo. For context, this actor takes time out of his busy schedule every year to serve as the Trek Track director for Dragon Con, the biggest and best sci-fi and fantasy convention in the Southeast. This is someone who forgoes simply signing a few autographs to make sure thousands of fans have the best time each year, and he would have certainly used his cameo to continue making fans happy in his own passionate way.
Finally, there’s a fair argument that Garrett Wang deserved a Picard cameo, especially after the actor’s harrowing tale of being punished on Voyager. On that latter show, he claims that he was prevented from directing episodes, that he was fat-shamed for putting on weight, and that his character was kept an ensign, all because he rubbed some producers’ noses the wrong way. A cameo wouldn’t magically fix all of that, but writing Kim as a captain could have belatedly made up for keeping him Voyager’s lowly whipping boy for so long.
At any rate, things worked out for Garrett Wang. He didn’t get his Picard cameo, but he did get a cameo in one of Lower Decks’ best episodes. And he and Voyager costar Robert Duncan McNeill continue to entertain fans with their awesome Delta Flyer recap podcast, one every Star Trek enthusiast owes it to themselves to check out. As for us, we don’t yet know what the future of this franchise is, but we know one thing that Paramount seriously needs to write down: the more Wang it has, the better it will be.
Source: TrekMovie