10 Star Trek Deleted Scenes You Must See

Jean-Luc Picard: the very English Frenchman. In the 24th century of The Next Generation, French as a language was apparently no longer à la mode, and nationality was, normally, divested of its symbolic power. Nonetheless, Picard’s mismatched manner of speaking remained an oddity for the longest time. Patrick Stewart did attempt some of the scenes from Encounter at Farpoint in a French accent, as he stated during a 2014 guest spot on the radio show Wait Wait…Don’t Tell me! Sounding "more like Inspector Clouseau," as he puts it, than a starship captain, he quickly abandoned the idea.

The in-universe explanation for Jean-Luc’s leanings for Shakespeare over Molière came in the Star Trek: Picard season two episode Watcher. It turned out that most of Picard’s family had lived in England for generations, having fled Nazi-occupied France in World War II. For the sake of the French and francophone viewer, things probably should have been left there: that far and no further.

In a deleted scene from the first episode of Picard season one, the majority of which never made it to air but was released on Blu-ray, we are subjected to extended French dialogue on the grounds of Château Picard. Not content with the conversation he’s getting from Number One (in dog form), Picard (in French) castigates two of his vineyard workers, who he has spied making mocking gestures about Laris.

Stewart tries his level best, but his French is… not good. His pronunciation is, at times, difficultly decipherable, and the offending worker probably answers "Oui, monsieur" out of sheer bewilderment rather than a sense of guilt.

The interaction is a reminder of the Picard-Riker-Minuet holodeck scene in the TNG episode 11001001. Picard and Minuet’s French conversation in that moment had enough errors that it was noticeably altered when dubbed for the French version. Perhaps Picard should have got the hint from Q’s incessant mispronunciation of "mon capitaine".

Still, the above deleted scene is worth a watch. It was, no doubt, also cut because we see far too much of Number One’s… photon torpedoes… than is decent.