With the Star Trek Picard season 3 release date coming quickly down the tracks, the showrunner of the sci-fi series had defended a huge change that fans are bound to notice. Star Trek Picard is the Star Trek series that comes with the most anticipation is a long while, because it’ll the first time that the main TNG cast have been together since the Star Trek movie Nemesis.
The show will see retired Admiral Jean-Luc Picard roped into a galactic adventure on the search for Doctor Beverly Crusher. He seeks help from Riker, Worf, and Geordi, and plenty of other familiar faces show up along the way too.
Given the amount of time – both out of and in-universe – that’s elapsed audiences can expect there to be a great deal of change. There’ll be new Star Trek starships, Star Trek captains, and Star Trek characters to get used to, especially as so much of the Picard cast has been left behind.
One of the biggest changes to the TV series , though, is that Star Trek Picard season 3 will not have the late Majel Barrett as the voice actor for the Starfleet computer. As well as performing as Nurse Christine Chapel in The Original Series and Lwaxana Troi in later Star Trek series, Majel Barrett was best known for being the ever-present voice of the Starfleet computer systems.
Terry Matalas, the showrunner for Star Trek Picard season 3, confirmed on Twitter that “Starfleet and civilian computer voices will each be voiced by different actresses” and that they would not attempt to recreate Barrett’s voice to bring the ships’ computers to life.
Defending the decision, he said that “Time [and] money” were the principle reasons behind the decision. “Fans may not love to hear this: TV shows actually have a finite amount of time & resources. You can’t dial up some subpar deepfake on a website and call it a day. If you’re going to do it, do it right.”
While Barrett’s voice work will always be synonymous with the Starfleet computer systems, looking forward fans of the show will have to reckon with the fact that things will all look – and sound – very different as the legacy of Star Trek starts to be passed onto the next generation of characters and actors.
For more on Star Trek, check out our guide to where everything fits in the Star Trek timeline, as well as our guide to Star Trek Discovery season 5 release date and the Strange New Worlds season 2 release date.