Star Trek: Picard Deleted Scene: Worf Reveals the Heartbreaking Reason for His Newly Zen Attitude — Watch

Next Generation fans were shocked when Worf returned as a blissed-out pacifist in Star Trek: Picard‘s third and final season — but it turns out there was a good reason for that.

The newly released DVD set for Picard Season 3 (available now from Paramount Home Entertainment) contains two and a half hours of special features, including deleted scenes like the one posted above. In it, Worf explains to his old crewmate Riker why he dropped the bloodthirsty aggression that characterized his time on Next Generation. Worf says he’s been hunting shape-shifting changelings for decades, “slaying with certainty villains with innocent faces.” He worked alone and was plagued by paranoia and suspicion… until he ended up killing an innocent woman who wasn’t a changeling.

“I was wrong,” he tells Riker, adding that “I have killed many… but never an innocent.” After that tragedy, “I swore to temper myself: my rage, my suspicion” in an effort to pay off a karmic debt that “I could not repay.”

Michael Dorn, who plays Worf, told TVLine before Season 3 premiered that Worf has “discovered a lot from The Next Generation to Deep Space [Nine]. There’s been a huge shift in who he is… He’s discovered that life isn’t about a goal or reaching a particular place. It’s about the journey… and part of his journey now is pacifism. There’s another outlet besides slicing people up.”

Check out the deleted scene above, and then beam down to the comments to give us your thoughts on Picard‘s final season.