Star Trek: Picard season 2 showrunner Terry Matalas is taking Trekkies back to the future with some style in the sophomore season of the series. Matalas, who is best known for co-creating and showrunning the SyFy series 12 Monkeys (which included a second season Easter egg of a clock that is always set to 10:04 referencing Back to the Future), began his career writing for Star Trek: Voyager and Star Trek: Enterprise. With the second season of Picard exploring time travel, the lifelong Back to the Future fan and Trekkie will finally get a chance to combine both of his passions.
In a tweet shared on Tuesday, Matalas revealed that he owns one of the most distinctive vehicles ever made: a DeLorean DMC-12 modified to become a replica of the Time Machine from the Back to the Future trilogy!
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LEGO’s announcement of the new LEGO Creator Expert brick kit for the iconic DeLorean “Time Machine” isn’t the only time that Matalas’ restored DeLorean DMC-12 was featured in something, as Jay Leno’s Garage on YouTube also featured the restored Time Machine. Perhaps it’s no surprise Matalas would own a Time Machine’d DeLorean: not only does the second season of Picard wholly embrace a broad spectrum of time travel tropes, but it also takes many of the key lessons of the Back to the Future trilogy to heart. One example is the vehicle used to travel back in time isn’t a clunker like the S.S. Bounty, but rather the Kaplan K17 Speed Freighter La Sirena—if you’re going to travel through time, you might as well do it in style, after all.
That’s far from the only connection to the Back to the Future trilogy which can be claimed by the sophomore season of Picard. The third episode of the season, “Assimilation,” as well as the fourth episode of the season, “Watcher,” were both directed by Lea Thompson.
Thompson played an important role in all three Back to the Future movies: Lorraine Baines-McFly, the mother (and occasional love interest) of trilogy protagonist Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox). Plus, like many of the other actors in the trilogy, she also played additional roles, including an ancestor of the McFly family and an older version of Lorraine. Then, in Back to the Future Part II, she played an alternate version of 1980s Lorraine created due to a change in the time stream, although it’s never confirmed whether if, just like alternate Picard, alternate Biff killed the Yoshi of his timeline.
Terry Matalas and Lea Thompson Are Friends
Paramount+
According to Thompson, one of her lifelong dreams was to do something with the Star Trek franchise, so getting to direct two episodes of Star Trek fulfilled one of her dreams as a lifelong Trekkie. And in a Tweet sent on the day that “Assimilation” was released for streaming, March 17, 2022, Matalas wrote, “Today’s Star Trek: Picard was directed by my friend, Lea Thompson. She knows time travel. Watch it, it’s your density. I mean… it’s your destiny.”
In addition to plenty of time travel tropes, the Thompson-directed episode also included plenty of callbacks to previous Star Trek time travel stories, including the movies Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (via the method and visualization of their way of traveling through time) and Star Trek: First Contact (the Borg Queen, played by Annie Wersching) was instrumental in assisting Picard (Sir Patrick Stewart) ’s crew in traveling back in time.
Plus, the third episode of the season also referenced the animated series Rick and Morty. While the show is undoubtedly a nightmare version of the character dynamic, the mad scientist-teenage boy duo was directly inspired by the two main characters of Back to the Future, Doc Brown and Marty.
Are there more Back to the Future references waiting for fans in the remaining seven episodes of Picard season 2? My Grays Sports Almanac doesn’t have all the answers, but the future is certainly looking bright!
