David Blass noted that he designed the sets with the edge of the production’s capabilities in mind, wanting to push right up against the boundaries and take advantage of every opportunity. When asked if there was anything he was proud of that got cut from “Picard,” however, he responded with an air of weary acceptance, acknowledging that “it happens,” and went on to share one of his set regrets:
“One of the things that made me pull my hair out was in Picard’s library, it was a two-story set with a whole walkway up above with all this detail and bookshelves and history knickknacks, and you never saw it. Initially, Picard was looking for a book in the first scene, and my idea is we see him up top and he’s walking around trying to find the book and then he comes down the spiral staircase and we reveal the whole room.”
Personally, this author is a fan of large libraries in general. There might even be many readers who share this author’s frustrations when a film or TV scene passes through a library without pausing for an extended period to look at all the books. A brief library scene in “Picard” would not only add a lot of intellectual and rustic charm to the series, but it would have reestablished Jean-Luc as a wise collector of knowledge.
Sadly, it was nixed. Blass said:
“[I]t was like, ‘too much shoe leather.’ It takes too much time out of the episode to shoot all that so he’s just on the ground floor and does the thing. And so in the end, I think there was just one shot where you could kind of see there was a second floor.”
Blass noted this happens on every show he works on, sadly. R.I.P. library scene. C’est la vie.