Frakes is still involved with “Star Trek” — he recently had a last go as Riker in “Picard” season 3 and directed “These Old Scientists,” a crossover between “Strange New Worlds” and “Lower Decks.” Speaking to Variety, he looked back on his history with the franchise as an actor and director. Frakes didn’t direct “These Are The Voyages…” — that was Allan Kroeker, who also directed the “Deep Space Nine” and “Voyager” finales. Even so, Frakes gave his opinion on what went wrong with it.
“We didn’t quite fit. It was sold as, ‘Oh, come on and do the episode, it will be a Valentine to the fans’ — it wasn’t a Valentine to the fans. The fans didn’t want to see us. Scott Bakula [‘Enterprise’ lead Captain Jonathan Archer] was such a mensch about it, but […] nobody wanted to be on a ‘Star Trek’ show that didn’t get to go to seven. And the inherent insult in having characters from another series that had done well come in to essentially close the books on his episode — it just felt so wrong to me.”
Frakes doesn’t have only bad memories of the episode, though: “I mean, it was a good episode. We had a blast doing it in many ways […] It’s just unfortunate that that was the last episode of that show.”