Meet Terry Matalas, the new king of sci-fi TV

The showrunner of "12 Monkeys," the third season of "Star Trek: Picard" and the upcoming MCU series "VisionQuest" has been immersed in the genre since childhood, and his care shows in every frame.

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Terry Matalas is surrounded by science fiction. Best known for the SYFY series "12 Monkeys," the third season of Paramount+'s "Star Trek: Picard" and the upcoming Marvel Cinematic Universe series "VisionQuest," the showrunner has been immersed in the genre since childhood, watching "E.T." On the opening day of When I Was Too Young to See, I grew up on Close Encounters, even starting a side career restoring the DeLorean from Back to the Future.

And when IndieWire reached out to the showrunner on Zoom, his office contained everything from a life-size Audrey II doll from "Little Shop of Horrors" to one of the "real aliens" from "Close Encounters." "It's just part of my DNA, how I was raised," Matalas told IndieWire. "I took too much." Michael Douglas related stories about his relationship and legal battle with Kathleen Turner, and almost landing in a Moroccan prison during Nile Jewel, Jacob Tierney created the smash hit series "Heated Rivalry" - then wrote a book about it.

Raised in New Jersey, long before graduating from Emerson College, finishing the MCU trilogy that began with "WandaVision" and continued with "Agatha All Along," he landed his dream job as an intern at the Paramount lot. Obsessed with "Star Trek: The Next Generation," Matalas found himself working on three soundstages occupied by "Star Trek: Voyager," while "Deep Space Nine" was across the street on three other stages.

"Going from being a fan to suddenly being on it and walking around those sets with creatives that I admired, it was really an incredible place to learn, to sit [with] that writing staff and art department, and to be on stage and see how television is made," Metallas recalls. It was the best education I could have had.

And, as you might expect from someone who spent the next few decades delving further into science fiction, instead of being in the dream factory and turning him away from the genre, it thrilled the young Matalas. "Making TV and making movies is really hard, but there's nothing like getting that finished product and watching it turn into something else, this other entity that has nothing to do with what happened on the set that day," he says.

Matalas went from bringing the script to the cast to writing Star Trek: Enterprise, which he describes as "like free admission to Harvard." It was also a very different time for television, instead producing 26 to 28 episodes a year, the pace we see now ("VisionQuest," by comparison, has eight episodes released each week on Disney Plus). "It was very fast. It was an intense training in how to make television," he said.

"Oh, God, you learn so much," Matalas said when asked about his takeaways from directing the show's four seasons. "You learn what battles matter. When you first get into the game, you feel like you have to fight for everything, when a lot of times, the cards fall where they fall. It teaches you to be more patient and open to different kinds of storytelling. It's from interacting with amazing creatives, amazing writers who have different perspectives. To this day it's still a reference to 'My Baby.'" It's scattered, here and there, for those who know, because for very few audiences who know, it was an incredible experience, especially today, where you can complete a four-season serialized story.

While "12 Monkeys" is Matalas' baby, she continued nursing other people's babies for a while with "Blood Drive" and SYFY's "Nightflyers," and then a season on "MacGyver." But after that, he went right back to "Star Trek" and joined the second season of the old series "The Next Generation" Picard.

Despite having worked in various capacities previously on the franchise, helping showrunners Akiva Goldsmith and Michael Chabon shape the second season of the Paramount+ series was a learning curve. "I was still learning the concept of New Star Trek," Matalas said.

It wasn't until season three, when she was cast as the show's sole host, that Matalas truly felt like she was "coming home." Part of that was reuniting with an actor named Jerry Ryan, who played a modified Borg (an alien, usually evil, cyborg race) in Voyager. "We were both the new kids on the show," Matalas explained. He came on Voyager late, and that's when I came on as a PA, so we didn't know anyone at the same time. We have been friends ever since."

Even as she reunited with Ryan, Matalas continued to amaze Matalas that she could go from handing him scripts to writing them for him. Or that he walked away from contributing to the Star Trek feature films by driving Patrick Stewart in a golf cart, and now here's his latest character story. It was very extraordinary.

And this extraordinary experience led in part to VisionQuest. While Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige was reportedly looking for Matalas based on "Picard" season 3, it was a bit more complicated from the showrunner's perspective. Although they met and became friends over their "shared love of Star Trek", Matalas made it clear to Feige that he shared the same "fandom and passion for Marvel" and was desperate to be a part of it.

After meeting a few times, Feige called Matalas and played the massive beats of "VisionQuest" for him. At the time, all they knew was that from the end of "WandaVision" in 2021, they would return to White Vision (Paul Bettany), a version of the character with the body and abilities of an android previously seen on screen, but none of his memories and experiences. And they also include Wanda (Elizabeth Olsen) and the Vision's son Tommy (Ruarid Mollica), who used to be part of a spell from the Scarlet Witch (that would be Wanda), but is revealed to be alive and real in the final moments of 2024's "Agatha the Omniverse."

Perhaps not coincidentally, Picard finds the title character in a new android body and discovers that he has a son he never knew existed. The twist Matalas put on the Marvel series was to have an intergenerational story. Not just Vision and Tommy, but Ultron 'Father' Vision (James Spader) from 2015's Avengers: Age of Ultron. "I suddenly got to see this generational story of these three characters," Matalas explained.

Naturally, there's a lot of continuity to contend with, given the "VisionQuest" follow-up to several movies and TV shows. An integral person to make everything work? Mary Livanos, EP on WandaVision and EP on The Marvels, Agatha All Along, and Marvel's VisionQuest, who helped us "keep the directions right" given that Agatha was still unreleased while VisionQuest was in development—especially as her brother tells Tom.

But the other side of keeping things steady has to do with instinct. "There's a lot of effort to put yourself in the shoes of an audience that may or may not have seen the rest of it," Matalas said of diving into heavy productions like "Picard" and "Vision Quest."

The goal is to "tell a clear and entertaining story for a newcomer, so that someone can jump into 'VisionQuest' without having seen anything before. At the same time, to make sure that fans feel seen; because I'm a fan and I want to be seen. So, what stones are important to that? Where do you want to impress them because 'aVision' was so emotionally easy" and "it was so easy" an amazing start to this new vision."

Matalas explained that he loves a big swing and "I like to imagine that the audience is smart and they will look for it, but you always sometimes panic a little bit that maybe it's not clear." How does he deal with that? You go over the script with the executives, with the studio heads, "and then you shoot it and you go over it with the actors."

At that point, the hope is that you have a good sense of whether things are going to work, but it really comes down to post-production. Matalas recalls a moment in the pilot that he thought was the right way to start the new series, but "once we got it going, we couldn't figure out why it wasn't working." Finally, they took that opening moment in the edit and changed it to later, and lo and behold, the opening worked.

Beyond the "12 Monkeys" Easter eggs, another aspect of his popular series Matalas that he brings with him is his cast. With "VisionQuest" in particular, former "12 Monkeys" actors Todd Stashwick, Emily Hampshire and Faran Tahir all appear in the new series (Stashwick was also in "Picard").

For Matalas, it's less about getting his fans into a new show than feeling how it could happen organically. For example, Stashwick plays a ruthless bounty hunter named Paladin, and while the show repeatedly cuts his point of view while Matalas was developing the character's voice, "you say, 'Hey, I know who could do that.'

Hampshire's beloved Schitt's Creek arrives as an AI named E.D.I.T.H., which MCU fans may remember as the AI in Spider-Man's glasses from Spider-Man: Far From Home. Knowing that they want E.D.I.T.H. Bodenmatalas, "a fun agent of chaos in the space of the mind, who brought this youthful energy," immediately recalled Hampshire's performance as Jennifer Goins in "12 Monkeys," adding that "any time is good to work with Emily Hampshire."

And he may have found two lifelong employees/friends in the stars of "VisionQuest." "I want to work with Paul Bettany and James Spader forever," Matalas said. "If I just double with them for the rest of my life, two-handed, I'll be incredibly satisfied with my career."

But perhaps the most difficult aspect of "VisionQuest" is providing a satisfying conclusion to a popular television trilogy. Fortunately, Matalas has practiced this with 12 Monkeys and Picard. "You definitely have to have a vision, so to speak, of the finish in mind," Matalas explained of his approach to the final. That's not to say it can't change along the way, but you have to ask yourself, especially with characters like the Vision or Jean-Luc-Picard or James Cole [from 12 Monkeys], who are characters who have been on a very long journey: What is the most satisfying and unexpected ending that resonates with them?''

Looking at examples like "Avengers: Endgame" (which recently got its extra ending with "Avengers: Endgame: Encore"), Matalas explained that you have to look at the whole journey, from the beginning, to the middle, to the end. "Luckily, I had a good sense of what it could be, and in talking to the writers' room, it just got better and better."

So, assuming that "VisionQuest" is accessible to both new viewers and loyal fans alike, how does Matalas bridge the gap between "science" and "fiction"? It's a genre that can be extremely confusing and alienating to casual viewers. Or very vast and alien to those who crave information Star Trek is known for.

"If it's emotionally satisfying to the audience, the audience will go with it," Matalas said simply. Big, big science ideas are great, but with 12 Monkeys, we were taking a completely different view of how time travel works. It was, do we really jump to quantum theory? We mentioned things here and there, but it didn't really fit with a lot of science. So it would become something else. This is what is in "Picard" or "Vision Quest". What does it look like and how does that thing that is outside of his mind come together?''

It's more like the house that Vision lives in with all his AI, which leads to another question, given that AI is such a fixture of the news cycle: How do you bring up a hot-button topic without jumping into the debate? This was a big deal for the showrunner, because earlier that week when we spoke, he made headlines when he announced that they weren't using Generative AI for "VisionQuest." Marvel previously faced backlash for using artificial intelligence in the opening credits of Secret Invasion, while denying its use in the Fantastic Four: First Steps poster. But Matalas' entry (or not) into the artificial intelligence debate is more of a stance than a necessary issue.

"We started this two and a half years ago, right?" Matalas said. So anything you put on paper about AI will no longer be relevant. ... everything changes. We live in a rapidly changing world. How do you really think about what exactly is happening right now?”

While Matalas isn't necessarily done with Marvel after "VisionQuest" — "The Marvel Universe is so huge you could spend an entire career in it, telling so many different stories and focusing on so many different characters that you'd never get bored" — he's thinking about the future. The first switch from sci-fi to fantasy is for "Magic: The Gathering," Matalas' animated series in the works for Netflix from 2023, though the idea has been around for decades (at one point, "Avengers: Endgame" directors Joe and Anthony Russo were slated to have a take after "Avengers: Endgame").

"What's interesting about 'Magic' is that, like Star Trek, the world is so rich with different ideas and different worlds," says Matalas. It's your way of telling different kinds of stories, the way Star Trek: The Next Generation can be a story about trauma, religion, societal trauma, big swings, great concepts, time travel, 'magic.'

But what about going beyond IP? Having starred in Star Trek, the MCU, and even the adaptation of 12 Monkeys (sort of) and now Magic, does Matalas feel like doing something as original as his script for Splinter?

"I do," Matalas said. “There are a few things I'm noodling and brewing now. But an IP that's subject to minor tweaks, but still respects its core, is always really exciting to me. I mean, I can think of 10 properties right now that I'd take a chance on if they were like "yours" because of that sandbox you can play in. I'd love to do something terribly awesome at some point. But I couldn't be happier living in science fiction, or even light science fiction."

So if he had the chance, would Matalas jump in the DeLorean and change anything? "Nothing," Matalas said. I don't want to risk screwing this up and not being able to do VisionQuest. "VisionQuest" was one of the most creative things I've ever done, and in no small part was working with Paul Bettany and James Spader. It's very rare that we have a friendship on set and really excite each other while creating it. I was lucky enough to direct the last two [episodes], and it was the best five weeks of my life that I got to do that. I'm excited to see what people think of what we've done."

The first two episodes of "VisionQuest" premiered Wednesday, Oct. 14 on Disney Plus, with weekly episodes to follow.