Star Trek: Picard - Season 3

Admiral Picard receives a cry for help from a very old friend: Dr. Beverly Crusher, his former chief medical officer. Warned not to trust Starfleet with the distress call, Picard joins forces with old allies Will Riker and Seven of Nine to surreptitiously guide Seven's new ship, the USS Titan, to a rendezvous with Beverly. The information she shares reveals a danger to the very heart of the Federation, and the returning threat of two of Starfleet's greatest foes.

The old maxim that a Star Trek spin-off show doesn't really start getting good until its third season is, once again, proven correct. Picard's first two seasons had good ideas, solid supporting casts and, naturally, an iconic lead in Sir Patrick Stewart's Jean-Luc Picard, but they were also awash with poor and muddied characterisation, vaguely-defined enemies and variable, at best, writing.

The third and final season of Picard doesn't magically solve all of these problems, but it does make one huge commitment to draw in fans of The Next Generation: bringing back the entire cast of that show. Leaving the underwhelming film Nemesis as their last hurrah always felt a bit disappointing, so giving them another final adventure is a good idea...provided it's good, of course.

In some respects, the season makes some of the same mistakes as earlier ones. There's a lot of faffing around pursuing false leads before the real extent of the enemy threat becomes clear, and the show once again suffers from being built around mysteries. Mysteries are a fine, single genre of storytelling, but it feels like modern shows have drawn too many bad lessons from the likes of Lost in hyping up big mysteries and bigger reveals that almost never land, and Picard's final season spends a bit too long on setting up mysterious events, red herrings and false leads rather than engaging in proper storytelling. Particularly problematic is keeping the true scale of the enemy threat under wraps until the last couple of episodes of the series, meaning we get a bit too much wheel-spinning before that revelation and then we have to wrap up that story with almost indecent (if spectacular) haste.

But this season also makes some very good choices. There are distinct character arcs here, and Gates McFadden gets more to do in her first few episodes in this season then she arguably did in the entire seven years of TNG and four subsequent feature films. It's not just limited to the old regulars, with Voyager and Picard vet Jeri Ryan getting a nice arc as Seven of Nine, and Michelle Hurd getting a small but solid storyline as Raffi, the last actor surviving from Picard's completely original cast (the wonderful Orla Brady gets a couple of scenes in the first episode and is then unceremoniously ejected from the story). Newcomers Todd Stashwick, Ashlei Sharpe Chestnut and Ed Speleers also get some solid material as Captain Liam Shaw, Ensign Sidney La Forge and Jack respectively.

Arguably the MVP of the season goes to Jonathan Frakes as Captain Riker. Frakes was very good as Riker but had to grow into it (arguably not starting to really nail the character until TNG's second year and episodes like A Matter of Honor), and since TNG ended he has focused on directing and reportedly suffered anxiety before returning to the role since he had not acted for so long. However, he is outstanding, giving a warm and witty performance whether he's bouncing jokes off Worf, arguing with Picard over the correct course of action or engaging in romantic banter with his wife.

The season has been both praised and criticised for its evocation of nostalgia. In one sequence the crew visit the Starfleet Museum and get to see all of the surviving "hero ships" from previous Star Trek shows: the NX-01 from Enterprise, the USS Voyager from the titular show, Kirk's Enterprise-A from three of the original films, and even the time-travelling Klingon Bird-of-Prey from "the whale thing." Professor Moriarty from TNG shows up as a hologram sentry. The show tactically deploys the theme music from every previous Star Trek incarnation like weaponised emotions. The "good old days" are evoked, a lot. This risks being sappy, but the writing also finds actual reasons in the plot for this stuff. Rather than just saying, "hey, remember that Klingon Bird-of-Prey from San Francisco Harbor, that was cool, right?", its antiquated technology actually plays a key role in the plot. Rummaging through a ton of old artifacts in the Daystrom Institute Archive isn't just an excuse to wink at William Shatner's terrible Star Trek novels, but also provides the crew with an important piece of the puzzle.

In this way, Picard's final season manages to keep things balanced between fuzzy-nostalgia and the dramatic stakes of the unfolding story. It even manages to round off a bunch of story and character arcs left hanging from the original series in a relatively organic and interesting way (even if Picard's tendency to reintroduce a beloved side-character only to brutally murder them five minutes later remains fully intact). But it has to be said that the main storyline is a bit on the vague side. The enemy's plot feels uncharacteristically over-complicated and too reliant on Starfleet personnel holding the idiot ball en masse to really work, and there are canon and continuity plot holes you could comfortably steer the new Odyssey-class Enterprise-F through. For a show that's simultaneously making such a huge deal of continuity, there are some curious choices being made here on what old ideas to invoke and which to blatantly ignore.

Ultimately, this season ended up reminding me a lot of The Force Awakens. The plot is often held together with duct tape and clothes pegs. But a promising, young new cast and the steady hand of experienced veterans help paper over a lot of the problems, and effective use of nostalgia and returning characters makes you forgive a lot. The final season of Star Trek: Picard is not the smartest slice of Trek, but it also has a lot of heart, and it is fun in a way the previous two seasons very much were not. For parking your brain in neutral, chuckling at gag callbacks all the way to the start of TNG and cooing over some great action sequences, this is fairly solid entertainment, and it also makes a reasonable case for itself as a backdoor pilot for a new show focusing on the younger characters introduced in this season.

The third and final season of Star Trek: Picard (****) is streaming globally on Paramount+, and also in some territories on Amazon Prime, right now.

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Star Trek: Picard - Season 2

Admiral Picard joins the crew of the brand-new USS Stargazer when a strange signal heralds the arrival of the new Borg Queen. A tense stand-off with Starfleet results in hostilities...and the changing of the timeline. Picard discovers the involvement of his old sparring partner Q, and embarks on a journey into the distant past to reset the timeline and find out what is going on.

The first season of Picard was highly reminiscent of the first two seasons of its label-mate Star Trek: Discovery: a highly promising start, a great cast, some solid opening episodes and lots of good ideas which were slowly compressed through the meatgrinder of confused writing, questionable attention to detail and sloppy pacing until the whole thing kind of fell over at the end in a confused mess. The most recent season of Discovery managed to just about avoid this fate and there were hopes that Picard's sophomore season might follow suit and deliver a more coherent and consistent experience.

The show certainly tries. The opening episode sees some great shots of numerous Federation starships of different types (addressing the complaint of the first season Picard finale which had a whole fleet of cloned ships) and some fun times on the brand-new Stargazer, a successor to the ship that Picard commanded before the Enterprise-D. The way the crew from Season 1 is reassembled is a little contrived, but that's been an issue with Star Trek for a long time (I remember the various stretches they had to do to get Worf involved with the TNG movies when he was also supposed to be a regular on Deep Space Nine). The show does put together its mystery for the season with some skill, resulting in a pretty strong opening episode.

However, by a few episodes in the show is starting to creak under the weight of what feels like an overload of too many ideas. Shoehorning the Borg, Guinan and Q into a Voyage Home-influenced time jump to the same time period as a Deep Space Nine episode already feels unwieldy, which is even before an ancestor of Dr. Soong shows up (so Brent Spiner can have something to do). The show also feels somewhat unkind to its own first season cast: Isa Briones and Evan Evagora are reduced to barely having cameos and the season ends with several more characters being written out.

The show does service other characters better. Santiago Cabrera has a lot more to do as Chris Rios and his storyline has a bit more emotional weight to it than others. Alison Pill and Annie Wersching also have a nice two-hander relationship going on as Jurati has to work with the Borg Queen for most of the season, and Jurati gets more development than she ever did in the first season. Seven (Jeri Ryan) and Raffi (Michelle Hurd) also get a bit more time in the sun.

For the other castmembers, it's great to see Orla Brady (a highlight of the first season) having a lot more to do this time around, but Patrick Stewart feels ill-serviced. The first season, for all its problems, gave Picard a believable reason for emotional turmoil and regret. The second season advances the idea that he is lonely and regretting the fact that he never got married or had a family, which is fine as far as it goes (although it seems to go against the Star Trek ethos of people also finding happiness and fulfilment in non-standard living arrangements), but it never really seems to find a way of marrying that to what's actually going on in the plot, some mumblings about legacy and an ancestor in 21st Century LA aside. The major retconning of his family history over what was established on TNG is also decidedly sloppy. It's also a shame he has such little material with a returning and on-fine-form John de Lancie as Q, especially given how hard their reunion was pushed in the marketing.

The season is also stretched at 10 episodes and would have been better-served as a pacier 6-episode mini-series. Although the show never dips as much into filler as the first season did, there's the definite feeling of wheel-spinning in side-stories that don't add much to the central narrative.

Against that there's some very good visual effects, some of the character arcs are decent and there's a promising story lurking around here. The second season of Star Trek: Picard (***½) is watchable and, at times, genuinely fun with a great cast, but it also overstays its welcome, doesn't seem entirely sure what story it wants to tell and sometimes over-relies on fanservice in favour of compelling storylines. The season is available now on Paramount+ in the United States and on Amazon Prime Video in most of the rest of the world.

Star Trek: Picard - Season 1

2399 AD. Fourteen years ago, Admiral Jean-Luc Picard failed in his mission to help save the last remaining people on the planet Romulus before it was destroyed in a supernova. Riven by guilt and anger that Starfleet and the Federation (both more insular in the wake of decades of war and uncertainty) did not do more to help, Picard retires to his winery in France. The arrival of a young woman who is being targeted by Romulan assassins calls Picard back into action, especially when he learns that events are tied into the death of his friend Lt. Commander Data twenty years ago and his experiences with the Borg.

Picard represents a key moment in the Star Trek franchise. For the first time since the release of the film Nemesis in 2002, the Star Trek universe is moving forwards. Every Star Trek project since 2002 has been a prequel or set in a parallel universe (or, in the case of J.J. Abrams' movies, both). It's way past due time that we get to see what happens next.

Picard is a bit of a mixed bag and, like its CBS All Access label-mate Star Trek: Discovery, is often deeply frustrating. The ingredients are here for a compelling and enjoyable SF series reflecting on timely themes like mortality and nostalgia, but instead we get moments of excellence interspersed with terrible dialogue and moments of contrivance that will make you very briefly wish Brannon Braga was still working on the franchise (okay, never that bad, but still).

The season opens with a mystery and it is here that Picard shines, as the titular ex-admiral takes charge of the investigation which is deeply connected to his own past. Patrick Stewart is physically incapable of acting poorly, even in his elder statesmen years (Stewart turns 80 this year and is playing a 94-year-old), and when required brings gravitas and integrity to the scenes. One change is that Picard is here suffering the very earliest stages of Irumodic Syndrome (the same disease that was afflicting his future self in the Star Trek: The Next Generation finale, All Good Things...) so Stewart has to make Picard a somewhat more tremulous, feeble character than the one we remember.

This adds an interesting element of human mortality to the series. Stewart was such a commanding force of nature in The Next Generation series and movies that seeing him here as an older and less certain figure is sometimes genuinely distressing. Time is not a kind figure, but having it thrown in the viewer's face as vividly as here is startling. Thankfully, Stewart has still got the old magic in flashback scenes set years earlier and is a much more commanding and forceful figure.

The rest of the cast is a mixed bag, not for acting talent but for writing. Isa Briones as Dahj and Soji is outstanding in the first few episodes as she portrays two versions of the same character, one fleeing Romulan assassins and the other trying to unearth the secrets of the Borg. She does tremendously well in both roles, and even better in a third role a lot later in the season. Inbetween she is not always well-serviced by the scripts, and becomes too much of a passive figure in the central third of the season, first swept up in a morally dubious romance and then buffeted around by various people trying to save her.

Santiago Cabrera (Heroes) is fun as ace pilot Chris Rios, especially as his narcissistic side has led to him crewing his ship with variations of the Emergency Medical Hologram Programme from Voyager, complete with ever more outrageously terrible accents. It's a fun gag, but one that feels a bit of out keeping with the tone of the rest of the series and is perhaps a bit over-used. Outside of that, Rios gets very little character development. Alison Pill, Michelle Hurd, Harry Treadway and Peyton List all do the best they can with the material they are given, but the quality is again all over the place. Particularly egregious is Alison Pill playing a character who commits an absolutely horrendous crime at one point and everyone seems to forget about it five minutes later and welcomes her back into the crew with open arms.

Particularly baffling is the character of Elnor, a Romulan swordsman prodigy whom Picard recruits for the mission for no particularly convincing reason and proceeds not to do very much for the rest of the series. Evan Evagora does the best he can with the material, but it's hard to make a character with no story purpose compelling.

More successful is the return of Jonathan Del Arco and Jeri Ryan as former Borg drones Hugh (from two episodes of The Next Generation) and Seven of Nine (from the last four seasons of Voyager). Both take care to root their characters in the way they last appeared (twenty-seven and nineteen years ago, respectively) but also layer them with two decades of off-screen character development. It's also good to see Brent Spiner back as Data (albeit in dream and flashback sequences), even if trying to accommodate for his ageing pushes both the makeup and CGI to their very limits. Jonathan Frakes and Marina Sirtis also make very welcome return appearances as Riker and Troi.

Part of the schizophrenic writing quality can be put down to the competing interests of the two showrunners: Michael Chabon, the Pulitzer and Hugo Award-winning author of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay and The Yiddish Policemen's Union, is by some margin the most feted author to ever work on a Star Trek series and you can see his influence in the musings on the ethics of creating artificial life, the moral comprising of the utopian Federation by the trauma it has undergone in previous decades (multiple Borg attacks, the absolutely devastating Dominion War, a brief war with the Klingons etc) and the intelligent consideration of themes like mortality and nostalgia. However, it feels like this has been compromised by executive producer Alex Kurtzman, a writer who wouldn't know subtlety and thematic exploration if they joined forces and ran him over with a snowplough. At every turn, Kurtzman's over-earnest need for exposition, lens flares, infodumps, incongruous humour, explosions, needless character deaths for shock value only and murky CGI drags the writing down whenever it seems to be in danger of getting interesting. A good example of this is how Chabon wanted to reference the Dominion War and how the trauma of seeing millions of Starfleet personnel killed in battle rocked the certainties of the utopian Federation and put it on a more isolationist course, but Kurtzman overruled him because he didn't think anyone had ever watched Deep Space Nine, which is a deeply stupid decision.

Picard does have plenty of good points. The production values and effects (bar some strange use of stock footage) are better than they have ever been before in Star Trek, even the movies, and the actors all do the best they can with the material. It's genuinely fun to see Picard back in action and a few character reunions do bring lumps to the throat. The setup in the first two or three episodes is genuinely compelling (plus Into the Badlands' Orla Brady as an Irish-Romulan Tal Shiar agent turned housekeeper is absolutely fantastic) and some of the moral quandaries faced by the crew are intriguing. But it does feel that for every good thing in the series that makes it worth watching, there's something else that weakens it.

Star Trek: Picard's first season (***½) is inconsistent and problematic, but anchored in Patrick Stewart's still-formidable gravitas. It's certainly a stronger first season than Discovery's and it's revelling in continuity is refreshing after Discovery played very fast and loose with it (although the laughably impractical holographic controls in both shows do need to die a death soon). Whether the promised second season can build on the good points of the first season and jettison the numerous weaker elements remains to be seen. The season is available now on CBS All-Access in the United States and on Amazon Prime in much of the rest of the world.