Vadic's Ship In Picard Hid A Nod To Another Classic Star Trek Villain
In the third and final season of "Star Trek: Picard," a vicious Changeling named Captain Vadic (Amanda Plummer) is eager to apprehend Jack Crusher (Ed Speleers), the son of Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart). Vadic is a vicious killer who has no compunction about blowing up ships and murdering thousands. It seems she and several of her Changeling compatriots were medically tortured during the Dominion War (a conflict dramatized on "Star Trek: Deep Space Nine") and was in no mood to offer forgiveness. Vadic commanded a starship she called the Shrike, a massive, pointy, claw-like vessel that was armed to the teeth. Captain Riker (Jonathan Frakes) took one look at the Shrike and declared it to be more guillotine than starship.
On the bridge of the Shrike, Vadic sat in an enormous chair, surrounded in the shadows by masked servants who fired weapons and cut down enemy combatants. The chair, as it so happens, was built to Plummer's specifications, dictated by the way she wanted her character to sit. There are several shots of her cackling in the chair, laying back, and enjoying the mayhem.
It's worth pausing here to recall that in the 1991 film "Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country," one of the villains was a conniving Klingon general named Chang. The film's climax involved Chang firing on the U.S.S. Enterprise while quoting "Julius Caesar," swiveling in his chair and enjoying the mayhem. Chang was played by Christopher Plummer, Amanda's father.
In a new interview with ScreenRant, Dave Blass, the production designer on "Star Trek: Picard," talked about that chair and how it came to be an homage to Christopher Plummer while also serving Amanda Plummer. Blass geeks out a little bit.
Cry havoc!
Blass recalls the setup that would see Vadic looking at her ship's viewscreen from her captain's chair, and how he and the other showrunners, including chief showrunner Terry Matalas, realized something needed to be made more dramatic. The chair, he recalled, needed to be bigger. Blass said:
"It started out that it was just gonna be a viewscreen shot. And then Terry's like, when we saw her first day of work, we're like, 'Yeah, she's killing it. We need to make this bigger thing.' So I worked with her and ... Obviously, her father was in ['Star Trek VI']. And, he had the chair! 'Cry "Havoc!" Let loose the dogs of war!' And we wanted to ... give a slight nod to that. But she's also, like, "I'm trapped in this chair. So I want it to be part of [me].' She told me how she wanted to sit."
Note: Blass got his Shakespeare slightly wrong. The line from "Julius Caesar" is "Cry 'Havoc!' and let slip the dogs of war." Blass also admits he was a fan of Amanda Plummer's work, saying:
"Amanda Plummer! 'The Fisher King' is one of my go-to favorite movies. To work with her! And then she's just the sweetest, nicest person. And then, all of a sudden, just this attack of Vadic comes out of her. But just getting to work with her, and to make her feel like this chair was something special ... we had a lot of fun with that. [... T]hat was a set that we knew that we didn't have a lot of money to do. So we put in the money and we made a cool chair. And the rest of the set was something different."
Not every captain gets a full-blown recliner.
The corpse of the La Sirena
Blass also revealed that the set he built for Vadic's bridge might look familiar to people who had been paying close attention to the first season of "Star Trek: Picard." Much of that season's action took place on board a small non-Federation vessel called the La Sirena, captained by Cristóbal Rios (Santiago Cabrera). David Blass used clever lighting and some slight design changes to hide this fact, but the Shrike was built out of the bridge of the La Sirena.
On the change, Blass said:
"[...I]t's a typical start. And that's the thing with 'Star Trek' fans; you can do things and get away with it because part of 'Star Trek' history is the remaking of things from one thing to another. And fans buy it ... It's something you have to do because that's just the way. And in order to save the money. And [to] get the Enterprise-D up there for two days. It's like, you gotta cut corners elsewhere."
Blass recreated the bridge of the Enterprise-D as it looked on "Star Trek: The Next Generation" from 1987 to 1994. Given that so many Trekkies have nostalgia for that show, it was clearly more important to get the details of that set just right, as fans would notice even the slightest discrepancies. The bridge of the Shrike merely needed to look new. Blass did an exemplary job on both.