10 TV Shows That Just Made Huge Mistakes
2. Killing Captain Shaw - Star Trek: Picard
The third and final season of Star Trek: Picard largely felt like an apology for the aggressively mediocre two prior seasons, finally delivering the nostalgia-fuelled fan-serving epilogue to Star Trek: The Next Generation that fans wanted all along.
Perhaps the biggest surprise of Picard season three, however, was the introduction of a new fan favourite character in Captain Liam Shaw (Todd Stashwick).
Rather than become yet another bureaucratic obstacle for Picard (Patrick Stewart) and Riker (Jonathan Frakes), Shaw was an amusing foil for the duo, his dryly sarcastic demeanour belying the fact he was indeed a thoroughly decent man.
Shaw was quickly established as the season's breakout character, with many fans begging Paramount to commission a spin-off series centered around him, yet that all came crashing down in the show's penultimate episode.
Shaw ends up sacrificing himself, being gunned down to help Picard and company escape the USS Titan.
It was an affecting hero's death for sure, but one which left many genuinely infuriated, demonstrating that showrunner Terry Matalas had vastly underestimated how popular Shaw would become.
With a proposed sequel series, Star Trek: Legacy, possibly in the works, fans have begged Matalas to find a way to bring Shaw back, which either means undoing his death or, far more likely, the series partially taking place in the past.
Either way, Shaw was a terrific character who many fans would've loved to follow into his own spin-off, and by failing to appreciate what they had, Paramount left money on the table when they killed him off.