'Star Trek: Picard' Star Gates McFadden on 'Visceral' Experience of Seeing [SPOILER] Again & Dr. Crusher's Controversial Decision

SPOILER ALERT: This story covers major plot developments in Season 3, episode 9 of "Star Trek: Picard", currently airing on Paramount+.

Gates McFadden didn't know what to expect when she got a Zoom call for the premiere times with "Star Trek: Picard" executive producers Terry Matalas and Akiva Goldsman. A few years earlier, Patrick Stewart brought the cast of "Star Trek: The Next Generation" - Jonathan Frakes, LeVar Burton, Marina Sirtis, Michael Dorn, Brent Spiner and McFadden - had dinner to announce that he was going to star in the spin-off series without them. But for the show's third and final season, Matalas wanted the entire cast together.

"TNG" storyline ended, some feel prematurely, in 2002, after" Star Trek: Nemesis" bombed in theaters. But for McFadden, his run as Dr. Beverly Crusher had truly ended with the show's series finale in 1994. Stewart Jean-Luc Picard - had almost nothing to do.

"A lot of character history - you haven't even seen it", says McFadden. "Jean-Luc Picard could have this brand new love interest every time, and it was like he and Crusher had nothing between them, or never had. That was a big part of the character that came just to be cast aside."

To McFadden's surprise and delight, Matalas offered him what turned out to be the strongest storyline for his character has ever been given. At some point after the events of "Nemesis", Crusher and Picard consummated their relationship in an affair that resulted in a child. Rather than tell Picard, however, Crusher cut herself off from the rest of the U.S.S. Enterprise-D and raised his son, named Jack Crusher (and played as an adult by "You" co-star Ed Speleers), alone.

The season begins with Crusher reaching out to Picard in desperation as she and Jack are hunted down relentlessly by an unknown force. In the penultimate episode of the season, that force is revealed to be the Borg, who, together with a rogue faction of shapeshifting Changelings, have successfully infiltrated Starfleet to the highest levels. It turns out that when Picard was assimilated by the Borg during "TNG", they altered his DNA, which Picard passed on to Jack. This modification, combined with a technological subterfuge that alters the DNA of anyone under the age of 25 in Starfleet, allows the Borg to assimilate all of Starfleet in one cataclysmic blow.

If that wasn't enough, the episode ends with one final shocking twist: the cast of " TNG" finding the Enterprise-D, which Burton's Geordi LaForge has painstakingly rebuilt since it was destroyed during the events of "Star Trek: Generations" in 1994.

McFadden spoke with Variety about what it was like to come back to the old Enterprise-D and reuniting with all of his old friends on camera, as well as his own mixed feelings about Crusher's controversial decision to keep Picard in the dark about his own son - and the episode " TNG" which made him feel better about it. /p>