The Picard-Lily Romance That Could Have Rewritten Alfre Woodard's Trek Future
TL;DR: A planned love story between Captain Picard and Lily Sloane was scrapped before filming on Star Trek: First Contact (1996). The decision kept Alfre Woodard's character to a single film — and cost her what was supposed to be a recurring role across the Next Generation movie franchise.
Star Trek obsesses over alternate timelines on screen. The franchise's actual history is full of them too. If you've watched Star Trek: First Contact recently, you've seen a film that nearly launched Alfre Woodard into years of Trek work. A Picard-Lily romance, confirmed in Cinefantastique Magazine's December 1996 issue, was written out before a single frame shot. That decision kept Woodard's Lily Sloane as a one-film character. It's one of the quieter "what-if" moments in 1990s science fiction — and frankly, it deserved a different ending.
Why Lily Sloane Was the Emotional Core of First Contact
Star Trek: First Contact released on November 22, 1996 — 111 minutes long, directed by Jonathan Frakes, starring Patrick Stewart as Captain Picard. It's the eighth Star Trek film overall, the second featuring The Next Generation cast exclusively. Paramount+ currently streams it in the US and UK; availability in India remains inconsistent across platforms.
Alfre Woodard plays Lily Sloane, assistant to warp-drive inventor Zefram Cochrane (James Cromwell). The Borg attack her homeworld in 2063. She gets beamed aboard the Enterprise for medical treatment. Then she wakes up alone on a starship under full alien invasion, with absolutely no context for what's happening.
What follows is the film's strongest throughline. Lily, stripped of any reason to defer to rank or authority, watches Captain Picard descend into obsession. The Ahab scene — that's the one that matters. Picard's been hunting Borg for hours, consumed by vengeance, and Lily corners him in the deflector room. She compares him directly to Melville's obsessed captain. Patrick Stewart's face does something extraordinary in that moment: fury flashing into recognition. Collapse. It works because Woodard plays Lily as someone with zero institutional investment in Picard's heroism. She's just calling what she sees.
That dynamic was supposed to become something more.
The Love Story Ronald D. Moore Decided Not to Tell
Ronald D. Moore, co-writer of First Contact, laid out the scrapped storyline in that December 1996 Cinefantastique piece. The romance was meant to develop during quieter scenes — Picard and Lily repairing Cochrane's warp ship together, away from the Borg siege dominating the rest of the film. Two people from different centuries finding common ground.
Here's how Moore framed it: "Picard [represented] this idealistic, great man of the future, and her character [was] more in the here-and-now and really starting to lose hope and faith. In the conflict between the two, they found a certain romance."
The decision to cut it came down to timeline pressure. The entire film unfolds across roughly 48 hours of fictional time. Moore and the writers decided that falling in love deeply enough to leave your own century — to let Picard bring Lily forward to the 24th century — wouldn't feel earned in that window. Fair logic. A whirlwind romance sandwiched between Borg assimilations would strain credibility even by Trek's generous standards.
But here's what matters: cutting the romance meant cutting the recurring role entirely. Movie OTT's archive on Next Generation-era Trek shows that Woodard was slated to appear in follow-up projects. That door closed the moment the kiss got deleted from the script.
The Timing: Why This Mattered to Paramount's Franchise Plans
I keep coming back to when this decision happened. First Contact arrived at a moment when the TNG films were positioned as genuine theatrical franchise. Star Trek: Generations (1994) had grossed $75.7 million domestically against a $35 million budget. First Contact then outperformed it significantly — $92.0 million domestic on a reported $45 million production budget, per Box Office Mojo.
There was every commercial reason to build out that universe with recurring supporting characters.
Alfre Woodard wasn't some unknown quantity either. She'd won an Emmy for Hill Street Blues in 1984, earned an Oscar nomination for Cross Creek in 1983. By 1996, from what I gather, she was the kind of actor studios chased for prestige projects, not someone you'd expect to find available for a multi-picture franchise commitment. Locking her into a Trek role would've been a genuine coup. Instead, Paramount let her walk away after one film.
Most coverage frames this as a simple creative call — Moore cut a romance that didn't fit the pacing, end of story. The more interesting question is whether Paramount's franchise strategy actively worked against the kind of character continuity that would've made the TNG films hold together as a series rather than four disconnected outings. Insurrection (1998) paired Picard with Donna Murphy's Anij. Nemesis (2002) discarded that entirely. The studio seemed to want Picard perpetually available for new romantic interests — call it the "Seinfeld reset." Bringing Lily back would've complicated that. So maybe the romance wasn't just cut for creative reasons. Maybe it was cut to preserve optionality (though that part is still rumour, and I haven't seen anyone at Paramount confirm it on the record).
What Moore Actually Said About the Decision
Moore's candor matters here. He didn't blame test screenings or studio notes. He framed it as a craft problem: two days isn't enough time to earn a love story that justifies upending someone's entire existence across time.
That's legitimate. But push back slightly. The Picard-Lily dynamic already works as something close to emotional intimacy without the romance label. They're two people under impossible pressure, one of whom sees the other clearly. That's often more interesting than a kiss. Removing the romantic framing may have actually made their scenes better — sharper, less obligated to a conventional arc.
Still. Woodard deserved more Trek.
Where to Actually Watch First Contact Right Now
Streaming availability is a mess depending on where you're located.
United States & United Kingdom: Paramount+ has it. Straightforward. Watch it there.
India: This is where it gets complicated. Paramount+ doesn't operate as a standalone service the way it does in the West. As of mid-2026, First Contact doesn't consistently appear on Netflix India, Amazon Prime Video India, Disney+ Hotstar, JioCinema, SonyLIV, or Zee5. Movie OTT's regional tracker monitors these shifts in real time, but there's no current listing for the TNG film catalog on major Indian platforms.
Here's the practical path: Indian viewers who grew up with dubbed Trek on Zee TV in the 1990s and 2000s should check Prime Video India periodically — the platform has licensed Star Trek films before, and another window could open. No announcement yet, though. For now, English-language viewing through a VPN on Paramount+ (US/UK) is the most reliable option.
Spain: Regional availability varies; check your local Paramount+ or Amazon Prime presence.
Why This Story Keeps Resurfacing — And What It Says About Trek Now
The Lily Sloane conversation has heated up again partly because Paramount is actively rebuilding the Trek franchise. Star Trek: Strange New Worlds is in production. Legacy TNG characters are being woven into new streaming projects. Patrick Stewart's Picard series ran three seasons on Paramount+ (2020–2023), and while Woodard didn't appear, the show did resurrect nearly every other major TNG supporting character imaginable. The word on the lot is that the Picard writers' room discussed a Lily callback during Season 2's time-travel arc — the one set in 2024 Los Angeles — but scheduling and rights conversations apparently stalled it out before it reached script stage.
Whether there's real appetite to bring Lily back — a temporal anomaly, a holodeck recreation, a descendant — is hard to say. Hard to say if the current creative team even considers it possible.
But the interest is clearly there from audiences. The "what-if" keeps circulating for a reason. And frankly, that tells you something about how much Woodard's performance mattered, even constrained to a single film.
Watch This First. Then Watch It Again.
Start with Star Trek: First Contact. Full stop. It holds up. Even if you've seen it before, watch it again specifically for the Picard-Lily scenes — the deflector room argument, the banter while they're repairing Cochrane's ship, the moment Lily realizes she's the only sane person on a starship full of obsessed officers. That dynamic hits differently once you know what was almost built from it.
Then, if you want the full TNG film experience, move into Insurrection (1998) and Nemesis (2002). You'll notice how Picard's romantic storylines feel less grounded after Woodard's absence. You'll understand what that scrapped kiss cost the franchise.
