In an interview with TrekMovie.com, Star Trek: Picard showrunner Terry Matalas revealed key details about the U.S.S. Titan-A, a "hero ship" that will be featured in the upcoming third and final season of Picard on Paramount+.

In addition to introducing the Titan-A, Picard’s third season will see the return of the majority of the main cast of Star Trek: The Next Generation, which first aired in 1987. The OG cast includes Sir Patrick Stewart as Jean-Luc Picard, Jonathan Frakes as William T. Riker (former Captain of the U.S.S. Titan, the Titan-A's predecessor), LeVar Burton as Geordi LaForge, Michael Dorn as Worf, and Gates McFadden as Beverly Crusher. Former cast member Brent Spiner, who played two of Dr. Soong's relatives on Picard and Data on TNG, is also returning, alongside actress Denise Crosby, who is best known as Tasha Yar, a good friend of Data and the U.S.S. Enterprise's first security chief. However, it's unclear what characters (or versions of characters) they will be playing in Picard's final season.

Riker took command of the Titan after leaving Picard’s Enterprise-E crew. While it was mentioned in 2002's movie Star Trek: Nemesis, and it has appeared in many prose novels, the Starfleet vessel didn't make its onscreen debut until the season finale of Star Trek: Lower Decks Season 1, “No Small Parts.” The classic exploratory vessel is a Luna class starship designed by Sean Tourangeau.

This Titan, under the command of Captain Riker, went on to make appearances in multiple episodes of the second season of Lower Decks, and did things exactly how you'd expect the gung-ho Starfleet commander to do them. In the audio commentaries for these Lower Decks episodes, Frakes accidentally hinted at the fact that the Titan was destined for the scrapheap (although his exact comments were bleeped), and made it seem likely that ship was soon to appear in live-action.

In the TrekMovie.com interview, Matalas explained the relationship between the Titan on Lower Decks and the Titan-A on Picard. “After the Luna class’s legacy run with Riker, that ship was damaged and retired. Some systems were refit and put into this new Titan, the Titan-A,” said Matalas. In the current continuity of Lower Decks, the Titan is still soaring around the quadrant under the command of Riker, so it remains to be seen whether we will witness the Titan’s moment of critical damage onscreen.

Another Titan?

USS Titan Lower Decks
Paramount+

The Titan and Titan-A aren’t the only possible Titans that will appear in Picard's third season. According to Matalas, we’ll also be seeing at least one predecessor to the Titan that plays a role on Lower Decks. He explained that Lower Decks' version of the ship is based on a “previous incarnation from the TOS movie era,” a Titan that was “a bit of a Constitution class as well, the original Shangri-La class.”

Matalas also teased that we don’t yet know who will be Captain of the Titan-A. “That captain is also a major character,” he said. “It’s not a character you’ve ever seen before, and you will be hearing more about the Titan-A from this captain. And it’s an actor that I’m very, very fond of.”