Thing That Cannot Be Denied: Picard season three was a huge hit. It got the best viewership of any Trek show on Paramount+, actually rivalling network offerings. It is being talked about all over the place, with lots of people hailing it as the finest season of Trek in ages, lots more simply expressing their joy at seeing Picard, Riker, La Forge, Worf, Crusher, Troi, and Data together again—and on the bridge of the Enterprise-D, no less!
Thing That Can Be Argued: whether or not this season was actually any good…
It’s a constant struggle, and a constant argument: what is popular versus what is great art. The Venn diagrams of the two often overlap, but not always. And it’s easy to forget that some of what we now consider classics of great art were also beloved by many in their time. Probably the best example is William Shakespeare, these days revered in the hallowed halls of Great Literature, but the reason why he wrote 37 plays (as opposed to sonnets, which is what he wanted to do) is because they were hugely popular and the public wanted more and more of them.
The reasons for Picard’s final season being so popular are obvious: it brings back a bunch of characters who haven’t all been seen together since Nemesis in 2002, and haven’t been together in a production that was generally well-liked since First Contact in 1996.
And while that’s enough to satisfy the popularity end of things, is it enough to satisfy the quality part? Because, while this season was definitely an improvement on the wholesale disaster that was Picard season two, calling it the best season of Trek in decades (as many have done) doesn’t feel right to me at all.
That season two disaster is a big part of the problem, and I’m guilty of recency bias, because I’ve been thinking of the first two seasons as being awful, and they really aren’t. In fact, one of the (many) problems with season two is that it mangled bits of season one in order to make the plot (such as it was) work.
But season one was actually promising and had lots of really good features, and set up a fascinating series. And then season two kind of screwed it up, and then season three pretty much threw all of it away to service the TNG reunion.
Except for one problem, and it took me until a couple days ago to figure out what it is: There was no need to toss out prior seasons! And, in fact, a lot of what happened in this season might’ve worked better with elements of prior seasons. (Thanks to fellow Tor.com contributor Jaime Babb, whose comments on my reviews of this season helped crystallize those thoughts. And hey, check out Jaime’s excellent piece on Section 31 and its problematic place in Trek…)
Let’s start with Picard needing a ship to track down Crusher in “The Next Generation.” Crusher specifically told him not to trust anyone, in particular not to trust Starfleet. So here’s a crazy idea—why not use La Sirena, which is what he did the last time he needed a ship to do his bidding? (Of course, that would require bringing Santiago Cabrera back—if not necessarily as Rios, as the various holograms that could operate the ship in his absence.)
One of the best things about this season of Picard is the fate of Data. They create a new gestalt being that’s a mix of Data, Lore, and Altan Soong. But given how much of season one was given over to the rights and the evolution of synthetic lifeforms, wouldn’t it have made sense to use Data’s metaphorical daughters—the various synths played by Isa Briones—and the planet full of synths as part of the storyline?
And finally, each season of Picard has involved the Borg in some form or another: the Artifact in season one and the general theme of dealing with ex-Borg from Hugh to Seven to Picard himself; in season two, the creation of a new strain of Borg by the merging of Agnes Jurati and the Borg Queen from an alternate timeline; and, of course, the return of the tattered remains of the Borg Queen in season three. Yet no effort was made to tie these threads together, beyond the general thing-ness of Picard being a former Borg. (Indeed, the fact that Seven is ex-Borg doesn’t even hardly come up this season, which is just weird…)
As has far too often been the case with all three seasons, the story barely holds together, and if you blow on it, it falls to pieces. The timeline of events is head-scratchingly confusing. The changeling infiltration of Starfleet and the theft at the Daystrom Institute and its fallout all seem to have happened in an absurdly compressed timeframe. Elements are introduced and then ignored. For example, the changeling infiltration of Starfleet is a major thing, yet it’s cast aside as soon as the changelings’ alliance with the Borg is revealed, resolved unconvincingly quickly in a log entry by Riker. The portal weapon is a major threat that’s completely forgotten once Titan escapes the nebula. Jack’s telepathy is never properly explained—the Borg have never been telepathic except with each other, so his ability to take over other people doesn’t track. Laris says she’ll wait to meet Picard at a bar after the mission is done, and then Laris is utterly forgotten and not mentioned or seen again. We’re told that Vadic and her gaggle of renegade changelings were tortured by the Federation (presumably by Section 31, though that’s not stated outright), but we get no examination of that, no pursuit of justice for what is truly an appalling crime. What has caused the Borg to collapse into their pathetic state is unclear—was it Janeway’s destruction of the transwarp hub in Voyager’s “Endgame”? If so, why were the Borg seen as still active elsewhere like in Prodigy’s “Let Sleeping Borg Lie”? And also if so, why is it Picard that the Queen has focused her animus on (she blames him by name for what has happened to them)? Was the Big Giant Head that was giving Vadic instructions every time she cut off her hand supposed to be the Queen? If not, who was it?
And, of course, there’s the active inconsistencies with prior seasons, from little things like reversing Data’s going from mostly dead to all dead in “Et in Arcadia Ego, Part 2” for the sake of the season’s stunt casting, to big things like a flashback to five years earlier showing Picard saying that Starfleet is his family, even though five years earlier he was a guy running a vineyard who’d quit Starfleet in a huff a decade earlier. And there’s the networking of the fleet using Borg tech, something that was already seen on the Stargazer in season two and which was established there to be a terrible idea that might endanger the fleet, yet no one in the fleet (aside from La Forge, who apparently wrote a memo) thought this might not be the hottest idea? Plus, the scripts this season barely remember that Riker and Troi have another child, and her welfare is hardly considered or mentioned. (This wouldn’t be so bad if Kestra wasn’t, like, the best character ever, and her absence was a crime.)
Still, as has become abundantly clear from most of the commentary on the show, what people love about it is the reunion. A friend, who had lost interest in the show, had heard enough good that she decided to watch this season. She asked on Facebook what the season was about, and I said, “Getting the band back together.” She said, yes, but what’s the story? I said, “Irrelevant. It’s about getting the band back together.”
That’s what everyone is responding to, and it’s for a very good reason: for seven years on television and in four movies, these seven were the heart and soul of what is arguably the most popular iteration of Star Trek. And some of the absolute best moments this season come from these characters just being these characters.
La Forge passionately telling Picard that he needs to turn himself in, and just as passionately trying to convince the amalgam of Data and Lore to help them. The Picard and Riker double act. Troi whupping people upside the head when necessary. The Riker and Worf double act. Picard’s impassioned speech to his son about how he needs his found family back. The Picard and Crusher double act. Picard and Ro coming to an understanding, following the most emotionally fraught conversations. The La Forge and Data double act. Worf showing how he has mellowed with age, but is still one badass motherfucker. Riker and Troi being a glorious married couple, something we still haven’t seen nearly enough of in detail (pretty much just in this season and in “Nepenthe,” one of the highlights of Picard’s first season).
And most of all, Data and Lore’s merging in “Surrender,” which happens, not because one overpowers the other (which is how Lore attempts to take over the gestalt), but because Data shows compassion and gives Lore the one thing he has over on his older brother: lots and lots of memories. Lore has only been alive for a couple of years, truly, while Data has decades of experiences, which he gives to Lore. He “defeats” Lore by showing him love and accepting him.
It’s one of two great Star Trek moments this season; the other is the birth of the cosmozoan life form in the nebula in “No Win Scenario.” In fact, they’re the only Star Trek moments in the entire season, which is another reason why I cringe when people talk about this as one of the best seasons of Trek ever, because this season is not about the human condition, it’s not about seeking out new life and new civilizations, it’s not about exploring the unknown, it’s about, well, getting the band back together. Hell, it isn’t even the best Trek season in the Paramount+ era, as I’d comfortably put the first season of Strange New Worlds, the fourth season of Discovery, and the first season of Prodigy way ahead of it without a moment’s hesitation.
At least the characters are shown to be, not just older, but different. La Forge has settled into his role as a bureaucrat, the head of the Fleet Museum, and a guy with a family, who has long since decided to follow Bilbo Baggins’ advice about adventures. Riker and Troi have settled in as a married couple, and their banter in Vadic’s cell in “Surrender” are some of the best bits in the season. Riker has also become the type of captain that Picard was when we first met him in “Encounter at Farpoint”: a Starfleet veteran who knows his shit and is absolutely the right guy to lead in a crisis.
Data, of course, is the most different, as he’s not just resurrected, but is a fascinating amalgam of three of Brent Spiner’s characters. I really hope that whatever the next twenty-fifth-century show is that Secret Hideout does will make use of Data (and maybe of Isa Briones, too?) to explore this nifty new person he’s become.
Worf is my favorite, though. I mean, Worf has been one of my three favorite Trek characters of all-time, alongside Kira Nerys and the aforementioned Kestra. In addition, I’ve been fortunate enough to write many of Worf’s stories that took place during his time as a diplomat between DS9’s finale and Nemesis, and also one that took place after Nemesis with him as first officer of the Enterprise-E under Picard.
And I simply adore what was done with him this season. A more philosophical and calm Worf, one who prefers pacifism where possible, but also knows how to apply violence when necessary. One who is more at peace with the universe than he’s ever been. Worf’s life has been one of tumult and strife, from the death of his biological parents to the difficulties he had raising his son to the deaths of the two great loves of his life—not to mention the loss of the Enterprise-E, which we’re told in “Vox” he was at least partly responsible for.* His response has been to become calmer, more centered, and with more of a sense of humor. It’s a beautiful thing, and Michael Dorn plays it beautifully.
* Assumptions have been made, particularly in the tie-in fiction, that Worf took over command of the Big E when Picard was promoted to admiral. It is my hope that we will see some of those adventures, whether onscreen or in the tie-in fiction…
Worf also has some of the best scenes with Musiker, a character whom I have seen maligned in some circles, for reasons that have never been clear to me. (Though I can’t help but wonder if a character with the same backstory and difficulties and story arc would be better received if played by a white male. Mind you, I don’t have to wonder all that hard…) I, however, adore the character, and Michelle Hurd and Dorn have superlative master/student chemistry that I would also love to see more of. Some of the season’s best scenes were the two of them in their search for who stole the portal weapon, and it’s great stuff. (It also gave us two excellent guest stars in Aaron Stanford’s Ferengi gangster Sneed and especially Kirk Acevedo’s Vulcan crimelord Krinn.)
Two characters I haven’t really discussed much are Picard and Crusher, and here’s where I feel the season particularly fell down. On the one hand, I’m thrilled to see that Picard and Crusher did finally get together. (Riker’s line to Jack in “Seventeen Seconds” about how he saw Jack cooking for years was particularly poignant, as the inability of TNG’s writers to do right by the chemistry between these two characters was a point of great frustration, particularly the wholly unsatisfying conclusion of it in “Attached.”) But then Crusher accidentally gets pregnant—a state of affairs that strains credulity beyond the breaking point, given twenty-fourth-century medicine—and then runs away and hides with her kid for twenty years.
Of all the WTF plot points in this season, that’s the WTFiest. When we see Crusher mère et fils, they’re on the Eleos, working for Mariposas, a Doctors-Without-Borders-style service that provide medical aid to places that don’t always have it. (In a nice touch that I missed, it’s named after the organization founded by Rios and Ramirez in the twenty-first century following season two.) When we find out that Jack is Picard’s kid, Crusher explains that she ran away because Picard’s life was too dangerous.
Except—and I know I’ve said this before, but it bears repeating—this makes nothing like sense. Crusher wanted to keep her son safe, so she leads a life of sufficient danger that her son has multiple identities and warrants out on him. She wants to keep him safe from the danger of being Picard’s kid—except for the vast majority of Jack’s lifetime, Picard was sitting on his ass in Labarre growing grapes and making wine, having, as I said before, left Starfleet in a huff. In fact, he left in a minute-and-a-huff, and nobody gave a rat’s ass about him enough to try to attack him or anything like that.
Crusher has a few nice bits in the season—she’s the one who figures out about the cosmozoan, for one thing—but she mostly just gets to be Jack’s mother, which is tiresome. Her entire storyline is in relation to the men in her life, and I don’t get why she can’t be a character on her own.
As for the title character, it’s funny, but I have less of an impression of him than of any of the others. He does have that one great speech to Jack when he’s trying to rescue his son from the Borg Queen, but aside from that, he’s the person I least remember from this season.
I will say this: the show leaves us in a good place. Seven is now the captain of the Enterprise-G (the rechristened Titan), which is a joy to see. It’s now firmly established in the canon of Star Trek that a queer woman is a captain of the Enterprise. It’s especially heartening to see Seven, who started out as an aggressively male-gazed character, put in a catsuit and high heels to make Voyager appeal to a tiresomely specific demographic, first become the most compelling character on the show (due in part to Ryan’s superlative acting skills), and now join one of the most hallowed pantheons in popular culture.
And her first officer of a woman of color. Aside from Discovery’s pilot episode, we haven’t had a captain/first officer pairing that’s both women, and if the spinoff everyone wants of Seven as captain of the Enterprise-G really does happen, it’ll be a great day for the future. Because Star Trek is at its best when it shows all of humanity united for a common goal.
Plus, all these beloved characters are still around to make periodic guest shots. I’d especially like to see more of Worf, please and thank you…
Ultimately, this season of Picard was a really good snack. Not very filling, not a satisfyingly full meal, but still quite yummy. Even if it ultimately doesn’t entirely sate your hunger, it tastes really good. And hey, snacks, like swords, are fun, and this season was definitely that.
Keith R.A. DeCandido will be an author guest at HELIOsphere 2023 this coming weekend in Piscataway, New Jersey, alongside guests of honor Sharon Lee, Steve Miller, Charles Gannon, and David Mattingly. He’ll be doing panels and readings and signings and stuff. Check out his full schedule here.
Thank you for the shout out, Keith! I had no idea that my persistent commenting habit would actually influence your opinion, but your reviews certainly have influenced mine, so it’s only fair.
Jaime: You’re very welcome. :)
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, this season massively benefits from a 20 year hiatius from the crew. It’s all nostalgia bait and while I enjoyed it because they hadn’t been together in my primary viewing lifetime (nemesis came out when I was 14) I enjoyed it.
But this will absolutely suffer in the long run. Imagine any new fans who have just binge watched tng, while they’ll have suffered the movies and the first two seasons, and this is an improvement, the nostalgia will not be there. The best they’ll be saying is that this was mediocre at best. And that’s unfortunate, I wish new fans could finish the tng journey with something to be proud of, not a nostalgia fest that only seems good because we missed these characters so dang much.
Someone on Tumblr asked why people loved this season so much when it was just “nostalgia porn.” I replied that, for me, nostalgia played a large role in it. That may have been why I felt so emotionally invested in this season–the characters and the story. I didn’t feel that way about Season 1 or 2 of Picard. Season 1, I appreciated the arc, Season 2, I liked the individual episodes better. But, emotionally, I wasn’t invested at all. This year I was.
In the previous season, so many viewers talked about how they loved Elnor, Laris, Agnes. I found the characters interesting but I didn’t care about them at all. I wondered if the problem was me–maybe I was so attached to old Trek, that I couldn’t fall in love with new characters.(but I knew that couldn’t quite be it, because I am emotionally invested in the characters of SNW, Lower Decks & Prodigy)
Then this season came along, and OMG, I fell in love with Shaw (RIP) and Jack and Sidney. I also wanted to see more of the Titan crew. Who are these people–Ohk,Mura, Esmar?
I think the nostalgia really helped me become emotionally invested in a way that I wasn’t the previous two seasons. True, the plot wasn’t perfect, but at least this time I actually cared about what was going on and the people involved.
Excellent overview as always, one that I agree 100% with, KRAD!
“Jack’s telepathy is never properly explained—the Borg have never been telepathic except with each other, so his ability to take over other people doesn’t track.”
I understood it as the other people Jack controls had already been covertly assimilated via the transporters, hence why he, slowly growing into his role as Vox, could command them. But yes, this is probably conjecture and I don’t think I recall it ever being explained in the episodes
I kept trying to find somewhere to talk about Shaw some more, but this piece was 3000 words and I couldn’t find a place to squeeze it in that wasn’t awkward, but Liam Shaw was a classic case of the triumph of acting over writing. Shaw was a terrible terrible person, a crappy captain — and also a tragic figure, yes, but that doesn’t excuse his awful behavior. Todd Stashwick did spectacular work, but Shaw was still a shit, and I’m not sorry we won’t be seeing more of him.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
An excellent summary and analysis.
Shaw was a dick, but I loved him. But I’m glad that he won’t be headlining a spinoff. But I’m upset that they killed him. But I’m annoyed that Terry Matalas keeps robbing death of its potency by resurrecting characters.
I have complicated feelings about Shaw.
jaimebabb: “…I’m annoyed that Terry Matalas keeps robbing death of its potency by resurrecting characters”
Yep–
Matalas: “We knew from minute one there is a way for Shaw to return in the most wonderful way,” he said in a roundtable discussion in April 2023 after the finale aired.
https://reactormag.com/star-trek-picards-terry-matalas-shares-alternate-version-of-captain-shaws-last-scene/
@3 / Zuriel:
That’s an excellent point about nostalgia and generational POV/experience with this Season.
It’s not unlike me, someone who grew up with TNG, experiencing the TOS films for the first time in the 90s.
We grew up in the post-TOS world — one where the franchise had become iconic and ubiquitous.The idea of there not being Trek on TV seemed absurd.
So the impact of the TOS films — and how emotional they were to fans who’d lobbied to bring Trek back for a decade — didn’t really register with me.
I like the TOS films. I’ll read TOS-era novels (like David Mack’s Vanguard — which incidentally I loved)…but I’m ultimately not emotionally invested or attached to the TOS-era characters.
So, same thing here for people who didn’t grow up with the 24th Century era.
I can make it clear why I’ve never liked Raffi. It’s the same reason I didn’t like Shaw. Their characters don’t fit in the Star Trek universe. Rather they seem to be lifted from a cliched cop show about angst-ridden undercover detectives who trade quips and drink and try to keep their traumatic pasts hidden until they bubble up in destructive ways. (Is there a shortage of counselors in the Federation?) However, if it’s revealed that Raffi was a time traveler who ended up in the 24th century from the 21st, then I’m back on board. Then she makes sense.
Anyway, this goes to the broader problem why I felt Star Trek: Picard was unsatisfying across all three seasons. Very little of it seemed like the future world of TNG or Voyager, or even DS9 for that matter, and what did feel like Trek was mostly shallow.
I agree the best parts were the character interactions of this crew. Just a shame they had to be awkwardly grafted onto this… this… whatever Picard was trying to be. I doubt I’ll ever rewatch this series. It’ll probably be placed in the dusty folder in my mind marked “reunion specials” along with A Brady Bunch Christmas, Return to Mayberry, and I Dream of Jeannie: 15 Years Later. But I will try to fondly remember the few things it did right.
The season was fun for allthe reasons you mentioned. The family reunion. Nostalgia was this season’s biggest guest star. I loved reuniting with these characters. The story was weak though. Had this story been told with new characters instead of old favorites, I suspect fan reaction would have been quite different.
It was fun to take one last ride with the crew of the USS Enterprise-D. If it happens, and I hope it does, I’m on board for more adventures with the USS Enterprise-G.
Bobby
I agree with your conclusion that this was a delicious snack, and was fun, while the plot really…didn’t hold together well. I grew up watching the TNG cast, so seeing them together again definitely hit me in all the feels. Does the season make sense (especially as a third season)? No. But I’m ok accepting it as it is. It’s a TNG reunion.
One thing I really appreciated about the legacy characters is the sense that time really has passed for these people and they’ve lived full lives since the days they were together on the Enterprise D (or on Voyager). Often in reunion shows they just pick up the characters as if it’s been 2 years when clearly for the actors it’s been 20, and the characterizations feel flat. Credit to Terry Matalas and the writing crew for really letting the characters grow and change over time. That is difficult to do, and I did love that.
Especially Worf. Worf has always been such a great character with a wonderful arc, and I loved seeing the continued growth here. Worf and Raffi together were really something special.
Generally agree with the overview. The only caveats regarding the characterizations would be that Riker’s character did ultimately settle into the “Starfleet veteran who knows his shit and is absolutely the right guy to lead in a crisis.” But that was after making him run around with the idiot ball and scream at Picard for an episode or two early in the season. Also, despite his claims to pacifism, Worf never actually showed any inclination to it. Calmer and more philosophical, sure. More disciplined and less likely to lash out or advise violence as the first, last, and only resort, but still more than happy to inflict deadly violence on multiple occasions without any hesitation or even consideration after the fact about his employment of it. Whatever his actual philosophy is, it is not pacifism, at least by any definition I have ever seen.
And the near complete lack of connection to the previous seasons was annoying, despite the mess of the second season in particular. Raffi being the only new character brought over outside the cameo by Laris in the first episode was not great. And while I also wonder if the reception to the character would be different if the race and gender of the actor was different, I have to be honest in that I have never really warmed to Raffi myself, though I mostly blame that on the writers. (I did think when we saw Raffi connect with her granddaughter, we might finally also get a reminder that Kestra exists, as it seemed appropriate to give us a quick scene of Riker and Troi reconnecting right after that, but no joy.) And it didn’t help that Raffi and Seven and all the other new characters introduced this season got shunted aside once they got the old band back together. As another reviewer stated, the show became Star Trek: OK Boomer.The old crew on the old ship, saving the day again. Never mind the kids who have become borgified or even the older Starfleet personnel that weren’t taken over. They were just props to get our old gang back in place. (And never mind dealing with what should be a rather enormous aftermath of the ultimate crisis of the season, just fast forward a year and pretend nothing of major significance actually happened.)
Shorter version, this season had its moments, but it also has many, many issues that makes me think I will not be that interested in rewatching it very often, if at all.
Anyways, I know that I’ve complained vociferously about this season, particularly as the back-half was airing; but in the final analysis, it was good to see the old crew again, and I suppose it’s okay to have one (1) season that’s just a pure nostalgia hit (even if I think that it rather missed the point of TNG). However, this “Greatest Hits from the 80s and 90s” format is unsustainable and absolutely cannot be what Star Trek becomes going forwards. The fact that the proposed spin-off is called “Legacy” is decidedly not reassuring.
….calling it the best season of Trek in decades (as many have done) doesn’t feel right to me at all.
I stopped reading the review to agree with your statement and hesitancy, and put up Season 1 (or is it Season 1A and Season 1B?) of Prodigy as better.
“There was no need to toss out prior seasons!” This even more of a headscratcher considering how much precious runtime was spent on establishing the new cast. Ignoring the TNG folks for a moment, the new supporting characters and the few returning characters, like Seven and Raffi, would have sufficed to populate a season of Trek all by themselves.
The reason I think people tuned in in significant numbers was to see the TNG cast. Given the choice between reusing characters with back stories that had already been broadcast, or writing a season around the TNG cast exclusively, the decision was made to start from scratch with a mostly new cast. It seemed like an incredibly inefficient use of time.
I also often felt the TNG were guest stars on what should have been their show. The scenes focused on the TNG cast were generally strong, but the show kept cutting away to what the new cast was up to. It’s not to say I didn’t like the new cast particularly, I just feel they should have picked a lane. It was like they were trying to produce both a TNG reunion show and a standalone Trek show at the same time.
Jaimebabb’s recent essay on Section 31 really got me thinking about whether the recent live action Treks share underlying theses, and if so what they are. Roddenberry clearly did and the shows that came after TOS hewed close—even if DS9 occasionally reexamined Roddenberry’s theses it never really strayed from them.
I’m not sure if I’ve answered the question for myself. I think the new shows lean hard into intense emotion and interpersonal relationships in a way earlier shows didn’t. The context often seems to matter less than what’s happening to the characters on the screen right now, and how they feel about it. Honestly that’s a perfectly valid approach to storytelling. There’s not an absolute right or wrong way to do a Trek show. And to give season three its fair due, there were consistently good scenes in every episode. For me they just never really hung together into a coherent whole.
I think my frustration with Picard from the beginning was that it wanted to have it both ways. It wanted to tell a story in a different format than earlier shows, more of a character drama, but also mine the earlier shows for content to make it look familiar.
Good summary, Keith. I’m even more disappointed in this superficial mess of a season now that I can compare it to what it could’ve been if the writers had had any respect at all for what the series built in the first two seasons. But then, this season couldn’t even bother to be coherent within itself, forgetting its own plot points and characters as soon as they’d served their purpose. Who needs object permanence?
That’s what I really resent about this season. Yes, there was some cool character stuff, but otherwise this was completely nonsensical and aimed at the lowest common denominator, and that is a gross failure for a Star Trek series. TOS and TNG succeeded because they were smarter than the lowbrow stuff that science fiction fans had to settle for in 1960s-80s television, with only a few other, shorter-lived exceptions like The Twilight Zone (both versions), Max Headroom, and Starman. They respected the audience’s intelligence and gave us something the rest of SFTV at the time didn’t provide. But this season did not respect our intelligence. It asked us to turn our brains off, and that is the opposite of what Star Trek should do.
I hated season 2, which was a self-indulgent and implausible exercise in continuity porn as much as season 3 was, but at least season 2 was about something. It had a theme and a message and a focus, however problematical. This season doesn’t even have that.
After reading (and seeing that Prodigy S1 was included in the short list of Best Recent Trek Seasons) and finishing, I have a theory that the lack of Season 1 and Season 2 references were due to the Nick Locarno Syndrome. Tom Paris was supposed to be Nick, until TPTB realized they would have to pay another writer for rights, so for budgetary reasons, they created a new character for Voyager to use.
That’s why (IMHO) no Freecloud, no Santiago, no Borgati, et-a cetera, et-a cetera,….
There’s also Terry Matalas handed the keys to the house known as Picard, looking what was inside, and doing a major reconstruction to get to the ultimate end: giving the TNG an “Undiscovered Country” sendoff to make up for “Nemesis”.
It was accomplished and nice…. looks around at Seasons 1 and Season 2 in the dumpster, along with all the post-DS9/Nemesis Beta Canon books that was Coda’d for the launch of Picard…. but it was severe.
To be honest I feel that – in three seasons of PICARD – there was enough good stuff to fill a single season.
It’s been good to catch up with old friends, make a few new friends and let time pass relatively* painlessly but I’m perfectly happy to classify this show as non-essential and either go back to something more interesting (or, let us live in hope, go ON to something more interesting**).
*MORE Borg? Again? More Borg AGAIN? DO NOT WANT!
**I’m delighted to see Captain Seven get her due, but would have been perfectly happy to see her handed command of a brand-new Enterprise and let USS Titan keep it’s own distinguished name.
Anyway, all grumping aside I don’t regret following PICARD – Kestra Troi Riker, Doctor Jurati and the continuing adventures of Mr Worf, Sensei, are only a few of the enjoyable elements shared with us by this show*** – I just hope other STAR TREK shows will do something better with the Final Frontier.
***God help me, I even like Jack Crusher.
I generally agree with Keith, but, damn…this was soooo much in tune with what I was thinking, particularly on the use of Doc Crusher (I think her motivation for running actually ruined the season for me).
Many of the issues you mention with this season, and of the series as a whole, comes down to the difference between simply following pop culture trends, and examining and reformulating them into a structure that harnesses those movements in the zeitgeist and offers social commentary – the latter being what Trek and sci-fi in general is perfectly suited for. Picard’s writers successfully identified the writing hooks inherent in pop culture (framing your entire season on a slowly unraveling mystery, for example), but failed to do much of anything besides emulate those trends while shoehorning familiar characters into them. The result was poorly plotted and paper thin “mysteries” that were often painfully slow to deliver, and largely weightless character development sandwiched in between points a and b. That approach to writing suffers from exactly the kind of internal continuity issues we saw here – what was built in previous seasons wasn’t discarded, they simply didn’t see that it could serve to strengthen the central “mystery” of the current season, I assume because they feared it would have made each new core “mystery” too predictable to be referential in that way. There’s a real sense of trying too hard to be opaque about plot points throughout this series, as if protecting the “reveal” moments was the only thing they were concerned with – that directive led them to shy away from following novel ideas that may have tipped the poor cards they were holding close to the vest, which leaves most of the series feeling like flavorless padding. I’m thankful for the few great ideas and moments of character development we got, but I can’t help but think how much better it could have been.
Consider how different this season could have been, if it was revealed in the first few episodes who Jack was, and why he was wanted, and if instead of an endless chase, we could’ve seen what that meant to him, to others around him, how it changed him, and perhaps even have seen some stand alone episodes aboard the enterprise D in the middle of the season – episodes which could have delivered more poignant and natural feeling ways of discovering what was going on in the galaxy at large. Alas, they held his identity and the nature of the mystery back again and again until the second to last episode. So regrettable.
Each season took 10 trudging episodes to follow the course of a mystery that TNG could’ve done perfectly in a two part episode. It also suffered greatly from another current trope – vilifying and chastising your protagonist (and the Federation) to inject moral ambiguity and invoke ideas of civil responsibility, ideas which can just as easily be shown as virtues of a character – which is evident in much of the wonky plot points you identified. TNG was a show about personal growth attained through challenging experiences, it showcased the virtues of its characters – this felt more focused on toying with cancelling characters because they were imperfect.
If nothing else, I think this Season had the strongest music for TV Trek in a long time.
Jeff Russo’s work on the first two Seasons was…good in its way, but ultimately, I definitely liked Stephen Barton and Frederik Wiedmann’s work more.
@19/Tom Restivo: “I have a theory that the lack of Season 1 and Season 2 references were due to the Nick Locarno Syndrome. Tom Paris was supposed to be Nick, until TPTB realized they would have to pay another writer for rights, so for budgetary reasons, they created a new character for Voyager to use.
That’s why (IMHO) no Freecloud, no Santiago, no Borgati, et-a cetera, et-a cetera,….”
I doubt that very much, because season 3 still credits Akiva Goldsman, Michael Chabon, Kirsten Beyer, and Alex Kurtzman as the creators of the series, which means they’re getting paid for it anyway. And the season did include Raffi and La Sirena, and Laris however briefly, and 10 Forward Avenue from season 2.
Besides, if that were a consideration, what about the creators of Seven of Nine, Ro Laren, Elizabeth Shelby, Tuvok, etc.? This season used a ton of characters created by people other than its writing staff. Heck, even Sidney and Alandra La Forge were technically created by Ron Moore & Brannon Braga in “All Good Things…”, though they were only namedropped rather than seen.
I don’t think it’s anything so deep as copyright. I think, frankly, that the showrunner just straight-up didn’t like or care about the original characters. Which is his prerogative, of course, but there’s something that just feels so disrespectful about coming on board a series that is very pointedly not a TNG reunion special, and that centres, for the first time in Star Trek history, a bunch of non-Starfleet characters, and thinking “these are problems to be fixed” rather than “these are opportunities for telling new stories.” Rather like taking over Voyager in the mid-90s and bringing the ship back to the Alpha Quadrant offscreen between seasons and replacing the characters with the cast of TNG. Exactly like that, in fact.
#25.
DS9 already focused on quite a few non-Starfleet characters. I think the problem with Picard is that those new characters, aside from maybe Rios, weren’t very well fleshed out, weren’t interesting, or didn’t seem anything like people from Trek’s universe. I know that’s why I didn’t connect with any of them.
That’s not to say that Matalas and crew couldn’t have improved them, though. But the marketing took over the writing this season. Reunion!
#26. Sorry: how do two ex-Starfleet officers, a cyberneticist, an android, and a Romulan not feel like they belong in the Star Trek universe? And if your universe is only big enough for a few, very specific types of characters, than it’s not much of a universe, is it?
As for not being fleshed out, the first season had ten episodes, and I would argue that, by the end of them, every single one of Rios, Soji, Agnes, Raffi, and Elnor were at least as well fleshed-out as Chakotay, Kim, or Tom Paris after seven seasons of Voyager.
@26/Dingo: “DS9 already focused on quite a few non-Starfleet characters.”
But they were also non-Federation characters. I think Jaime meant that this was the first show to feature mostly Federation civilians in the core cast.
I found myself underwhelmed for many of the same reasons as those outlined above, and the few good points didn’t save it.
I do think the series deserves credit for running counter to the ageism we see too much of.
My other very big gripe lies with the fact that the Picard with no friends is not the Picard I remember from TNG. He wasn’t that distant from the people he worked with – and yet having had all three seasons of this spoil it for me, I find myself reluctant to rewatch either this or TNG. To add insult to injury, he finds love with Laris, who could have been a major asset in all three seasons, and she is just dropped when Beverly (who walked out on him) wanders back into his life.
Mostly, I am annoyed at having my intelligence insulted.
I certainly want more Trek. I am looking forward to more SNW, and only to a slightly lesser degree Discovery. I want to see more of Captain Seven. I even, and I would not have said this at the end of Season One, after she had blamed Picard for the actions of his superiors, which was uncalled for, would like to see more of Raffi.
I hope Seven can use her authority to have Lieutenant Commander Wildman assigned to her ship.
The grossly miscast Jack can have an airlock accident for all I care. Q is dead, and should stay that way. That story really has run its course.
Certainly, I want more Trek, but in my mind Matalas has gone the way of J. J. Abrams. I want someone who can tell me a decent story without scraping the bottom of the intellectual barrel.
@25 – If they were problems to be fixed, they would have at least got a mention. Instead, they were all but retconned into oblivion. It was pretty much the ultimate insult to those characters and anyone who liked them
What saddens me most about Picard is that it started out with the goal “Let’s do something new and challenging with the character instead of just pandering to cozy expectations,” but then its replacement showrunners’ mentality was “Nahh, let’s tear all that down, pandering to cozy expectations is fine.” They just gave up.
#27.
On paper, yes, those all sound like they could be good Star Trek characters. However, for whatever reason, the makers of current day Trek see fit to involve these people in conspiracies and save-the-universe plots, which don’t give them as much time to flesh them out as real people. What we did get was, in my opinion, mostly a lot of bland archetypal characters animated by quips, trauma, and melodrama.
Granted, the TNG characters all started out similarly, but again, they had time to flesh them out with quirks and hobbies. Did we get to see any of these new characters hang out on the holodeck? Did they have any fun? All I remember is a lot of angst and violence from the first two seasons.
@30/ I entirely agree, but they also took care to move Rios and Raffi back into Starfleet beforehand. After rewatching the first season, I honestly can’t imagine any eventuality by which those two would come back into the fold after how they were treated.
@31 / CLB:
Yeah, that’s why I liked Season One and it’s still my favorite of the three Seasons.
As much as I wanted to see the TNG cast reunite, there was value in exploring Picard at that stage of his life: Gone from Starfleet, in his twilight, and without his support network or the usual, expected safety nets.
I still wish we’d have gotten to see Elnor meeting Worf. That would’ve opened up so many possibilities for both Elnor’s development and showing how far Worf had come since Nemesis.
Ultimately, for me, Season Two is the ‘true’ finale of PIC. Like The Godfather Trilogy, that’s the main conclusion of the narrative whereas Season Three, like Godfather Part III, is the coda for the overall 24th Century era.
@34/Mr. Magin
Season Three, like Godfather Part III, is the coda for the overall 24th Century era.
Me, I don’t have a problem with that. That’s also why I hope we get Star Trek: Legacy because I want to know how the world we knew in the 24th century has changed over the past 25 years.
I want to know what happened to Tom Paris? what happened to Dax? Naomi Wildman? What happened to Cardassia after the Dominion War? How are things on Ferenginar? I understand wanting to see new stories and I agree, that’s important. But there are so many questions about the world and people we left behind in the 24th century. So many loose threads that I’d like to see revisited.
#35.
Come on, leave something for tie-in authors like Krad and CLB to work with. It can’t all be on screen. ;-)
@35 / Mary,
I get that. And PIC’s scratched some of that post-24th Century itch (as has Lower Decks and Prodigy). And there are aspects of a Seven-led sequel show that would be fun.
But…more and more, I feel this era needs to gone on a long hiatus or a moratorium once those animated shows end their runs — and I say all this as some who grew up with TNG, DS9, and VOY and loves this Trek.
The 24th Century era has now 28 combined Seasons of TV (24 live-action and 4 animated) and a quartet of feature films. Compare this to the pre-Federation (ENT’s 4 Seasons) and Classic era (8 between TOS, TAS, DSC Seasons 1-2, and SNW).
There’s more to Trek beyond just the 24th Century and it’s gotten its time in the sun. I don’t want the franchise suffering creative stagnation like it did by the twilight years of the Berman era (I mean, it’s coming eventually, yeah, but hopefully not for a long while).
We’ve got DSC pushing the bleeding edge in the 32nd Century (and which SFA will continue). And we’ve over half a millennia between PIC and DSC Season Three.
There’s plenty of new, fertile ground to explore than just going back to the 24th Century again.
I see we are still pretty much saying that people who enjoyed this season are not on the same level intellectually as those who didn’t. No one is going to convince anyone here, but let me just say that Trek comes in many different flavors and with a fan base this diverse someone is always going to be on the outside. While the overwhelming popularity of this season doesn’t have to matter to anyone, it certainly is a useful data point to consider. For example, The Mandalorian is hugely popular, but to me it is just “ok.” But I’ve listened to others who have loved it, and that’s informative to me.
@23: Yes, the music has been fantastic. While I love Russo’s main title themes from Seasons 1 and 2, nothing much else from the soundtracks has really grabbed me. This is also true if I include Discovery- great main title, not much else. This season’s score is fantastic in every way, and we got two great themes in the “Titan Theme” and “Family Theme.” Matalas certainly knows the power of music, and it is still a shame that Rick Berman was ridiculously wrong in his approach to music. It would have been great to get a continuing, devolved theme for the Dominion, for example.
Moving forward, in live action, we’re getting a S31 movie, an Academy show in the Discovery era, and more SNW. There’s no reason why we can’t have Legacy as well. Hopefully it happens.
@37 / Me, heh:
I forgot to add 6 feature films for TOS to the tally.
@38 / M:
There’s a reason the Soundtrack was trending on iTunes and was in the Top 10 last Thursday. I’ve been grabbing tracks to the LA Library’s Freegal service (and unsurprisingly “Make it So” and “Legacies” were the first two downloads, LOL).
@38/M
I see we are still pretty much saying that people who enjoyed this season are not on the same level intellectually as those who didn’t.
I don’t know if I’d put it like that and I don’t see that anyone else is either. I don’t think it’s a matter of intelligence; it’s a matter of taste. The people who didn’t enjoy this season were looking for a more, sophisticated?, stimulating??, story. Whereas, we who liked it enjoyed it for the fun factor.
I don’t think intelligence plays into it.
#35 Mary: I completely agree with you in regards to 24th century world building and characters. Star Trek Legacy would be one of three different time periods, so I don’t buy into the stagnation argument.
One thing to consider is the precedent that the TOS movies established. When they ended, we had a completed arc for Kirk. We later got a completed arc for Spock. We saw McCoy into old age. The rest of the crew, while not exactly fully developed, rode off into the sunset as old men and women.
It wasn’t until this season where we got word on what happened to all the TNG main characters. It was obviously a lot of fans needed and wanted. There’s nothing wrong with similar treatment to DS9 and Voyager’s entire cast. Prodigy is filling in the gaps on Janeway and will give us an update on Chakotay soon enough. The only cast that appears to be out of luck is Enterprise.
I can’t tell you how much I want it to be canon that Sisko didn’t abandon his daughter…
#14 Northman
In partial defence of Worf, I think there is a distinction to be made between pacifism and what might be called the nonviolentism of people like Mohandas Gandhi, and it may be that such a distinction should have been made clearer.
Nonviolentism often works well in the face of an opponent who can be shamed into understanding that their actions are reprehensible – that goes even for such a vile institution as the British Empire in India. It works much less well in the face of a Hitler, or someone whose actions can remain under the radar. In such cases it may be accepted that protective or violence may be the last, if not the only, resort.
I would need to look at Worf’s use of violence throughout the season to work out whether I think this applies. One can certainly question his killing of the unarmed Sneed. Without rewatching the scene I’m not sure of my position on this.
It’s also possible that Worf’s supposed pacifism is a work in progress.
All that having been said, strict nonviolentism in the face of a violent enemy does require acts of bravery that a Klingon might respect as deeply honourable.
Great review Keith. I thoroughly enjoyed this season of Picard (despite the lack of a firm foundation for the morphogenic plot!)
I’d watch more!
CDA
@25, I think it also sets a terrible precedent across all the shows. It wasn’t always a strength, but the TNG to ENT shows had a pretty firm hand on the producer side. The bad side of this was the risk of a sameness across shows. The good side was that it was unlikely for any particular episode, season or show to rewrite the book in a way that could badly disrupt current or future shows.
For the current crop of shows, allowing soft resets between seasons means any season’s creative team can go nuts without consequences. There’s no obligation to leave the show in good order for the next creative team to pick up.
So in addition to your recast a better parallel might be to not have Voyager make it back but to pretend they were never in the Delta Quadrant to begin with. “Delta? Alpha? Only rubes care about that! More Borg!”
Picard wasn’t so awful that I would sacrifice Lower Decks, Prodigy, or SNW, and I doubt Berman & Co would have greenlit any of those. But if this show really did pull in the numbers it could signal to other shows that there’s no obligation to make it all cohesive, even within one show, or even one season. And regardless of the cast I’d be really leery of a spinoff—we’d likely be getting the spinoff because the suits felt the formula for Picard worked. I’d dread a Picard season 4.
I think that the soundtrack is a decent microcosm for the season as a whole; it perfectly reproduces the style and feel of composers like Jerry Goldsmith and James Horner, and so a lot of (most?) fans love it for this. I, however, think that it leans so hard into pastiche that it forgets to be its own thing; and that it shoves aside what I consider to be a much more unique sound by Jeff Russo.
Before I prognosticate I don’t know if I’ve ever thanked KRAD for what he does. I realized that I joined the TNG rewatch over a decade ago and the analysis and discussion has made me think more about story in general and Trek specifically than any other source
The problem with season 3 is the existence of seasons 1 and 2. It was inconsistent with its own recent history which just lead to frustration when consuming it. As was pointed out even if 5 Isa Brones droids had hopped on the Ent-D to run the engines and a Juratiborg cavalry to help delay the fleet while there was the Death Star 2 trench run occurring would’ve tied things up nicely. Instead we’re basically told to ignore what’s been done because it’s in the way of what we want to do.
Beverly made the least sense of any of the characters and was perhaps least served by this season. Her motivations make zero sense either in context if the 24th century or just in context of what she ended up doing. You can’t say you’re trying to keep your son safe while simultaneously charging into war zones and plague planets. (Btw credit to Wil Wheaton who head canoned one of Crushers lines about losing him by saying that Wesley was barred from seeing the people in his prior life).
And so so many loose threads and pacing that we’re stuffed into a box by Rikers log entry.
Still if this ends the 24th century Trek it’s appropriate it was done with the group that opened it u
@41 / M:
It wasn’t until this season where we got word on what happened to all the TNG main characters. It was obviously a lot of fans needed and wanted. There’s nothing wrong with similar treatment to DS9 and Voyager’s entire cast. Prodigy is filling in the gaps on Janeway and will give us an update on Chakotay soon enough. The only cast that appears to be out of luck is Enterprise.
DS9 and VOY don’t have the economic cache that TNG does.That’s part of why the 1701-D/E guys got the movies (or at least they tried in the hopes they’d match the TOS cinematic success).
Prodigy at least is a compromise as a partial VOY sequel (and the benefit of Mulgrew’s cache), but balancing it with telling a new story. Avery Brooks is done with Trek, so the best revival DS9 could hope for might bet he potential limited series initiative Kurtzman’s discussed.
I agree, though, ENT is dead indefinitely — which is too bad. It’s my least favorite of the Berman-era shows, but as CLB’s Rise of the Federation novels showed, there is narrative potential of exploring the early years of the UFP.
@32/Dingo: “Granted, the TNG characters all started out similarly, but again, they had time to flesh them out with quirks and hobbies. Did we get to see any of these new characters hang out on the holodeck? Did they have any fun? All I remember is a lot of angst and violence from the first two seasons.”
Rios had his vintage record collection, for one thing, and his collection of emergency holograms was very quirky. Jurati had her cartoon-cat AI voiced by Patton Oswalt.
There was a lot of good. There was also a lot of wasted potential. Star Trek, at its best, has always shown the Federation turning its enemies into its allies. I can’t imagine a better way for the 24th Century era to show this than to have arguably* the greatest enemy of its time shown to make that journey. Picture the Enterprise-D flying into final battle alongside a Borg cube, or for the Borg to come to Sector 001 as its savior.
*– There’s definitely a case to be made for the Dominion, particularly the Changelings.
They brought back Ro for an episode, only to kill her (Yes, I know the intent was for the finale to reveal that she survived, but that didn’t happen). They brought back Shelby for a couple of scenes, only to kill her. In retrospect, I suppose I’m glad we didn’t see Barclay or O’Brien. That said… since the focus was on the original cast, we should have had cameos from Sela and Dr. Pulaski. We also should have had a Wesley for at least a cameo. An appearance from a DS9 original would have been nice. Probably Dr. Bashir, since the two other most obvious candidates are played by the late Rene Auberjonois and the late Aron Eisenberg.
As for Shaw, I think he was done dirty by the writers. If you take away his appalling treatment of Seven and Picard, you’re left with a character who strongly disagrees with the show’s lead and is basically right based on what could have reasonably been known. They either had to make him a jackass, or else lean into that. A Decker-Kirk dynamic could have been very interesting, but they went with the former instead.
Most of what problems I had with the season could have been solved if they didn’t hold onto Jack’s mystery for so long, and if there were maybe another two episodes. Oh well. I hope to see Star Trek: Legacy announced.
So gratifying to see others in this community seem to have liked Season 1 as much as I, who loved almost everything – the synths and lifeform-rights issues, the Romulan warrior nuns and their adoptive baby-monk, the challenges of reintegrating XBs into their native cultures, the new main characters, the return of old characters, the potential for a new big bad in future seasons after the finale thwarted them – heck, even the theme song and score. (The only things I hated were Hugh’s pointless death and those Space Lannister Siblings with their oddly incestuous vibe.) And Season 2, for all its flaws, ended up with an interesting iteration of the Borg. I was stoked to see how Next Generation’s Magnificent 7 would interact with the newbies, and how the past seasons’ stories would be woven into theirs.
That’s where Season 3 disappoints. Instead of completing the, uh, collective of Star Trek: Picard stories, it was a bonus season of TNG. Which wouldn’t be such a bad thing if that was how it was presented – the character development and cast’s acting both exceeded expectations, enough to make nostalgia alone satisfying to most viewers, even myself to a certain extent. But it wasted some great opportunities for both compelling scenes and cohesion among all seasons.
The synths, who I don’t believe can be assimilated, could have been called in to help the Enterprise-D. This could’ve beautifully set up a meeting between daddy Data and daughter Soji that’s also part of the plot, justifying the time and expense that Matalas said prevented such a moment. I’m sad we didn’t get to see Brent Spiner stretch his acting chops even further.
The Jurati Borg could have been contacted to offer insider advice on how to defeat Original Recipe Borg Queen. Like, just a video call if you don’t have the budget or much time to film a face to face meeting. Maybe hilariously show shock on Dr. Crusher’s face, since she apparently didn’t think the Borg had been encountered in a decade or so.
And as others have said, imagine a meeting – or even mini sparring session – between warrior monks Worf and Elnor, with Raffi looking on as both Elnor’s foster mom and Worf’s acolyte. “Please, friend, choose to live!” “It is a good day to die!”
Just a reminder to keep the tone of this discussion civil and constructive, and avoid making disagreements overly personal. In handling differences of opinion, it might helpful to consult our commenting guidelines.
Err we never talk about the fact Chabon left in a hurry because the Scott Rudin storm was coming and threatening to engulf him and presumably Paramount didn’t want that taint on Picard. But they couldn’t extricate themselves entirely and so S2 suffered as a consequence, featuring some of Chabon’s work. S3 was the chance to start afresh with all that behind them.
@52 / ELEC – Literally the only thing that I have wanted from this series since the moment the original cast was announced was for Elnor to cross blades with Worf and then bond over their mutual fanatical loyalty to Picard. It’s an easy, crowd-pleasing plot beat. And yet…
KRAD, I owe you some thanks for listing off so many of the good bits in this season in one place and reminding me that there actually were a lot of them. Especially after the last two episodes, which were the worst from the nostalgia-porn front (I would have traded seeing the 7 TNG characters around a table for a plot line that made sense any day), I was just ready to put the whole season down the memory hole. I needed a reminder of how many individual things there were that were really good, even if they were sprinkled through a disappointing structure. Good on ya.
Season 1 is still my favorite season of Picard, even given their spectacular failure to stick the landing, just because it was doing new things and establishing new characters that I really cared about. In retrospect (and nobody tell me the dozens of reasons this couldn’t ever have happpened, I’m aware), I wonder if the series wouldn’t have come together better if they did a season like this one *first*, got all the “get the band back together” fun stuff out of their system when they didn’t have to tear down two seasons of character work to do it, THEN (maybe after a bit of time jump) put together something like Chabon’s original vision of an aging Picard facing mortality and what his lifetime of choices meant. That season could end either exactly like S1 did, with the crew of La Sirena jetting off for further adventures, or (maybe better) with Picard actually staying dead, to tie a really satisfying resolution on the character. Road not taken, I guess, but a boy can dream.
If “Legacy” happens I really really hope the showrunners and writers are willing to do something truly new with this collection of interesting characters, instead of overlearning the lesson of this season’s popular success and deciding that what we really need is another greatest-hits album. Fingers crossed. (And I’m still hoping for the “Worf and Raffi: Agents of Starfleet Intelligence” series that somebody suggested a few weeks back).
Agree with you on Shaw. I have trans colleagues at my work and a nonbinary child, and if somebody had been refusing to use any of their chosen names/pronouns for *years*, in a *professional setting*, I wouldn’t have regarded a deathbed change as some sort of satisfying emotional arc. If you come to realize too late that you should have had different priorities, that sort of thing can work; but you don’t get to be an overt and obvious a–hole and then say “jk” as the clock runs out. Uh-uh. I see what they were trying to do, but no.
Thanks for your thoughtful commentary over the season KRAD (and everybody).
S
@@@@@ Mary
I have an extreme dislike for almost all the S 1&2 non legacy characters (Raffi, Elnor and Agnes are near the bottom)I also did not like Picard, Data or Q when it came to legacy characters the same with Seven, but she is not really a legacy character to me as I was never a Voyager fan. I don’t like Disco or Picard S1/2 but everything else Nu-Trek I am now on board with. Furthermore, I enjoy the new characters, including this seasons’ version of Raffi.
-Kefka
#50.
Well, that’s something, I guess.
I think the point I was trying to make is that one of the drawbacks of the “ten-hour movie” season of serialized TV is that it’s typically a ten-hour action movie they’re making, and that doesn’t give as many opportunities to explore the characters as the old episodic Treks.
Something about the way Picard was produced, too, made me feel as though I was watching an accelerated cut or a trailer for the episode that had yet to start, if that makes sense. Maybe it was the music, that constant ‘duh-duh-daduh-duh-duh-daduh-duh-duh-daduh-duh-duh-daduh…’ even while people were talking sometimes. Every season seemed rushed.
The charges of spitefully ignoring the plots of Seasons 1 and 2 seem overblown. Yes, the tone is different. However, those seasons were hardly tossed out like trash.
Picard’s body is a major plot point for Season 3. It would seem odd that if the writers “hated” seasons one and two, they would use that as an important piece of the villain’s plan. Riker and Troi’s loss of their son was taken from Season 1. Most importantly, many of the season 3 writers also wrote season 2 episodes as well.
There are legit reasons why certain characters are not in the season. I would argue that the story has enough characters to focus on already.
For example, Elnor (who wasn’t even really used in S2) was on the Excelsior, so I don’t see any logical story reasons for him to be palling around with Worf. Besides, I’m sure someone would have called it “small universe syndrome” if he was all of a sudden on the Titan. Raffi was already established as having an intelligence background, so she becomes the obvious person to pair with Worf. Rios stayed behind in the 21st century.
As for the Jurati Borg, their absence comes down to the most basic of Star Trek tropes: *only the heroes can save us all.* It is also the reason it is just the ENT-D versus the Borg cube and not some Avengers: Endgame team-up featuring every 24th century Starfleet hero. It would have felt a little deus ex machina if all of a sudden in episode 10 Jurati comes in to save the day.
The most conspicuous absence is Soji. She is really the only character that wasn’t used that fit with the theme of the season of family and the next generation. Matalas has said his plan for her was cut, so it isn’t an oversight or a deliberate shot at earlier seasons. But, that story potential is there for someone to use it.
@38 M
I have gotten really into reaction videos to understand the “normies” better, I have tended in my life to almost always side with the critical consensus. But more and more I am seeing things less as Critics vs Normie perspective but critic, fan and normie each have valid and useful things to add to the discussion. In the case of Picard we get a pretty positive response across the board.
Rotten Tomatoes:
Picard S1 Critics 86%, Audience: 52%
Picard S2 85/30
Season 3: 98/91
IMDB final two episodes of Picard season 3, both rated 9.5, easily the best of the show’s entire run on that site, with the 3rd season overall the highest rated as well.
Major fan channels and audiences (comment sections) like Red Letter Media, Jessie Gender, Angry Joe, Trekyards, Robert Meyer Burnett,etc seem pretty thrilled about the show.
I have heard the response on twitter was very positive (though can’t say for sure myself).
Kieth is the 2nd place I have heard this from, so I will tentatively believe this is true. That Picard season 3 got better rating/viewership numbers than other Trek shows.
If I was Terry Matalas I would be all “yup I crushed it, the majority of fans, casuals and critics like it.”
There are plenty of major blockbusters and hit shows I don’t like, that to me seem terrible. But different shows are made for different audiences. Matalas seems to be a Star Trek super fan, and for him it’s because of the lovable cast of characters going on varied adventures. I love TNG for many reasons, but in the end it’s about this wonderful crew of people who go on adventures in space.
That wonderful crew of people then get on another space adventure where they all contribute and are total badasses. Great!**
** “All Good Things” is still the end to my TNG, the episodic, hopeful, bright show that it was.
-Kefka
@32/ Rios had his records, his existential philosophy books, his soccer, his taste for aguardiente, and his chorus of amusing holograms. Jurati had Kaseelian opera, old science fiction novels, her love of cats real and synthetic, her taste for cake and chocolate milk; we got to see her baking cookies with Maddox in a video, and we got to see her making awkward conversation because she was bored on a long space voyage. Elnor loved The Three Musketeers, wanted to see a real cat, and was disappointed by the lack of a holo-advert for him when they got to Free Cloud. Soji is harder to pin down, because her entire life was a lie, but from what we see, she keeps journals, is genuinely fascinated by other cultures and languags, and loves comparative religion and mythology. And Raffi really doesn’t have any healthy coping mechanisms, which is kind of the point of her character. All of them had such depth and deserved so much better than being shunted aside and completely forgotten.
It’s funny that the text of the season is about a Borg-induced youth rebellion, with the young rising up to kill the old; whereas on a metatextual level, the season is quite clearly about the old shouldering out the young and taking one more victory lap.
@52 / ELEC:
I can’t agree more on season one, while I’m glad it seems generally well received here I think it is probably worthy of even more appreciation. It’s pretty much everything I had hoped for from “Picard”. Not that I was expecting that exact storyline, I didn’t know what I wanted except for it to be something original. A show that could stand on its own as a worthy successor and equal to TNG, not just live in the shadow of prior greatness.
Season one will be on the list of Star Trek seasons and episodes I continue to rewatch over and over. Unfortunately I can’t say the same for seasons two or three.
What’s so odd about this season to me is that it’s concerned with nostalgia, but only on a visual level – they have hired the TNG actors and recreated the TNG sets, but they’ve all been placed in a context and story that essentially bears no resemblance to TNG.
The Borg and the Changelings are there simply because they were in TNG and DS9 – both are stripped of their original contexts. Alright, well, the Changelings are at least placed within the context of DS9’s Section 31 plot, but the show is wholly uninterested in engaging with this other than as an excuse to have Bad Changelings who can offer really scary moving targets for our heroes to shoot at, and a devious villain who can be shot into space before we blow up her ship with all hands lost (and thus never have to think about the moral awkwardness of Section 31 ever again). The less said about the Borg the better, their appearance here was absolute farce and the Queen, already a grave misstep of a character in First Contact IMO, is reduced to a cackling super-villain who is also crap and can be defeated by flying the Enterprise through the Death Star.
I’d agree that Data’s story was the high point of the series, as it was more or less the only one where it felt as though the writers had a genuine interest in resolving the character’s arc. I disagree with Worf’s story being a strong point. I think Dorn was superb as always and I love the idea of Worf becoming some kind of pacifist monk with age, but they reintroduce the character by having him disembowel and decaptitate a bunch of nameless goons. This is a higher kill count than he got in any given season of TNG that I can think of – I have no idea how he’s meant to be a pacifist when he is more violent than he was during his time on the Enterprise-D. This is in a setting where stun phasers are easily acquired, and non-lethal methods have been rendered utterly trivial through technology. But Worf, now a pacifist, carries a bat’leth which he whips out at a moment’s notice to eviscerate people from behind, the reasoning presumably being that Terry Matalas thinks bat’leths are cool, and that Picard Season 3 thinks it’ll lose your interest if someone isn’t reduced to gore or ashes on the screen at least once an episode. And when Worf does use a phaser, it’s set to vaporise, and he’s firing at fallen opponents. I don’t think TNG-era Worf would have ever done that.
I’m not immune from a bit of nostalgia but this season didn’t give me nostalgia, it gave me almost the opposite – the dispiriting feeling of seeing iconography and concepts lifted from series that I do like, interpreted at a skin-deep level (or just reinterpreted entirely), and repurposed in ways that are thematically odd and don’t successfully evoke what made these ideas and characters interesting in the first place. I don’t get TNG/VOY nostalgia from this because it doesn’t resemble TNG/VOY at all. It’s like putting engine oil in a Coca-Cola bottle and trying to make yourself believe it’s Coca-Cola – on first glance you can see a vague similarity, but the instant you engage with it, it becomes clear it’s wildly different from what it’s trying to be.
I agree that Legacy is hopefully in a good starting position, and I think Seven, Raffi and Jack represent an incredibly strong “big three” for a new Star Trek series, but it’s a Charlie Brown trying to kick the football situation at this point. I don’t have faith in these writers, which sucks, but there it is.
Quoth MikeKelm: “Before I prognosticate I don’t know if I’ve ever thanked KRAD for what he does. I realized that I joined the TNG rewatch over a decade ago and the analysis and discussion has made me think more about story in general and Trek specifically than any other source”
Wow. You’re very welcome, and thank you for the kind words! *blush*
Making people think and sparking interesting conversations is what I’m trying to do here, both with the rewatches of the older shows and the reviews of the newer ones, so I’m glad that’s happening. :)
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@59/ M – There is no reason not to even mention a character when they’re entirely relevant to the plot. One line of dialogue could explain why Jurati can’t intervene, or why her collective apparently don’t count as “the Borg.” A minute-long exchange would be all that’s needed to tell Data about his daughter, and about the existence of a planet of androids like him. One line of dialogue to establish what happened to Laris, or to mention that Raffi might have some prior experience in swordfighting because her adopted son is a warrior-monk. If the writers gave a damn.
@64/Descent: I have to admit, I can’t disagree with you about Worf. I liked the way he’s been shown to grow in his personality, but you’re right that his actual actions were far too bloodthirsty to be consistent with his reputed personal maturation. That’s in sharp contrast to how, say, David Mack wrote Worf in the novel Collateral Damage (the last “Novelverse” TNG novel before the Coda trilogy that brought the continuity to an end), where Worf faced a threat from Nausicaan pirates and wisely negotiated a peaceful resolution. There, his actions demonstrated his growth; here, they undermine it. (And so did some of his dialogue, like the line where he casually mentioned wanting to send the heads of his “slaughtered” enemies to his friends — a disgusting thing for anyone to say, let alone a “pacifist.”)
“I’m not immune from a bit of nostalgia but this season didn’t give me nostalgia, it gave me almost the opposite – the dispiriting feeling of seeing iconography and concepts lifted from series that I do like, interpreted at a skin-deep level (or just reinterpreted entirely), and repurposed in ways that are thematically odd and don’t successfully evoke what made these ideas and characters interesting in the first place. I don’t get TNG/VOY nostalgia from this because it doesn’t resemble TNG/VOY at all.”
This is very close to my reaction. It didn’t feel to me like an homage to TNG, but a mockery of it, replicating the surface with no understanding of the substance.
A large part of the problem, really, was that it was trying to homage the TNG movies (as well as one or two of the TOS movies), and the movies have always been the shallowest part of Star Trek.
One problem I have with season 3 is the resolution with Jack joining Starfleet at the end defies the external history of his character. Setting aside his actions on behalf of the Borg against Starfleet (which we discussed in the episode 10 summary), Jack was described as a wanted criminal in multiple jurisdictions *before* the Changelings even started chasing him. And at the end of the season, a year later, we find he’s been admitted, made a speed-run through the Academy, and assigned to a cushy job?
Where other Starfleet members — Kirk, McCoy, Scott, etc. — were eventually forgiven for stealing starships and violating regulations, their forgiveness came because they wound up saving Spock, or Earth or the Federation. Jack had outstanding charges *and* exhibited poor judgment even before flying off to single-handedly confront the Borg Queen. What did he do to earn forgiveness other than half-ass the annihilation of Earth? (To my recall, there wasn’t even a suggestion that he secretly helped Titan and Enterprise survive the Borg onslaught, since he seemed all-in on being a Borg and being disgusted with humanity until Picard melded with him.)
TNG began with our heroes defending themselves against a charge of savagery by solving a problem with compassion and understanding rather than violence.
TNG has now ended with our heroes rationalizing war crimes and winning by blowing shit up.
It’s depressing.
I actually liked Worf’s extremely Klingon take on “pacifism.” He doesn’t actually have any ethical problem with killing people; he just doesn’t like how combat harshes his mellow. Not human morality, certainly, but I think it fits with his character.
That said, one of the things that I was hoping to talk about in my article but which didn’t really fit was this season’s extremely blasé attitude towards violence when perpetrated against anyone who isn’t a named hero character. I mentioned Picard & Crusher’s infamous “war crime” scene, but it goes far beyond that. I think that Worf probably kills more people on screen in the seven episodes in which he appears than he did in seven seasons of TNG plus four of DS9 plus four TNG movies (not counting lives lost in space battles, obviously), and almost all of them are completely unnecessary (phasers on stun, anyone?). The Worf-Raffi leg of the plot is literally delayed by about three episodes just because Worf can’t stop chopping up their would-be informants (I loved the Vulcan crime boss, but they could have just gotten that information out of Sneed). Worf and Beverly(!) both execute Changelings as they’re lying wounded on the floor, the latter without even knowing that they’re Changelings. Raffi and Worf kidnap a civilian off of the street and interrogate him by threatening him with torture and leaving him to go through withdrawal (the fact that he turned out to be a Changeling doesn’t exonerate them). Jack assaults two Starfleet security officers so badly that they’re left unconscious, and the very real criminal charges against him apparently include weapons smuggling, but he gets a pass because of protagonist-centred morality. Geordi and Picard calmly discuss just deleting Lore, extrajudicially executing a sentient lifeform. And on, and on, and on.
All of these things are just passively accepted and never discussed again. None of these things are remarkable for an action movie. But this is Star Trek! More to the point, this is the Star Trek that people keep telling me is a return-to-form restoration of the tone and ideals that made the franchise great.
@60, I believe common practice is for professional critics to get a handful of early episodes ahead of broadcast and base their reviews upon that. So the professional/audience dichotomy may be due to the former giving us a review of episodes 1-3 and the audience reacting to the whole season.
I don’t personally give a lot of weight to Youtuber reactions—it’s a business and strongly positive or strongly negative reactions are going to get more views than a ‘meh.’ I don’t think it’s to the point of fabricating an opinion (hating it and posting you love it) but there is an incentive to intensify a response.
In a streaming world I doubt that reviews and online opinions will factor in much at the corporate level. They’ll be looking at subscription numbers, retention numbers, and how much Picard cost compared to other shows to bring in those numbers. If corporate thinks Picard’s showrunners can deliver more subscribers at less cost than the other shows they’ll send more work the creators’ way.
Three thoughts on the series as a whole;
1. I preferred watching it as a 10 hour binge rather than weekly episodes – it was one of the biggest comments/criticisms I noticed for the first two series, so as it was coming out during a busy time at work, I saved it up and binged it in one go after episode 10 dropped. The pacing worked well – in fact it wouldn’t surprise me if at some point episodes 9 & 10 were edited together into a single season/series finale.
2. As a random idea, and even without knowing they were filmed back to back, to a certain extent I could see seasons 2 & 3 being swapped over… season 2 explaining how the Borg returned following their final destruction in Jupiter’s Red Spot – setting up ST:Legacy on the ENT-G with Seven et al. to explore the new relationship between the Borg and the Federation and exploring the other end of the Wormhole created by the natural death of a Q….
3. Turning up the brightness on my computer certainly made the bridges etc. look more TNG-y in terms of the lighting levels!
On a less random note, as with others, I loved the musical score (although I do agree at times it was a little too telling-me-what-to-feel), and I did like the way the different members of the TNG family were brought into the story rather than all just being there from the start – that pacing, I did enjoy.
With the mechanism whereby Jack was controlling younger members of the crew (25 yrs old was only specified as Humans, presumably other races would’ve stopped whenever their parietal lobes finished forming) – the changelings had overwritten a bit of transporter code replacing dormant genetic code common to all humans, with the version from Picard which was mutated/modified by his assimilation and led to the Irumodic Syndrome in later life. Jack produces a protein in his brain which – presumably through the fluorescing of his eyes (did he make eye contact each time – he does with Sidney I think) activates a protein in the brains of those who have had the code placed into them to make that protein thus overriding their control. Of course that falls down (if it is line of sight transmitted) when they turn away etc…and also the time when he took over Mura on the bridge…so probably not line of sight transmitted – therefore why the red eyes…if not as the TV trope to show mental powers as either coloured lights in your eyes or fingers to the temple! Maddeningly lots of hints as always in the credits to the story once you’ve seen it! Next time I need to watch the credits more – which is annoying when streaming services minimise them to advertise some other programme!
Overall I enjoyed it, sorry!
That final poker scene was fine, but the best final scene for Picard would’ve been Larris and Vash at a different bar commiserating.
I’m impressed with the way you listed down all of the plot inconsistencies. I would need a spreadsheet to keep track of all that myself. Needless to say, season 3 had problems. Deep strucutral plot problems. A season that was essentially a quasi-sequel to DS9 with the Changeling plot swept aside for yet another Borg showdown at the last minute, to name a few. The biggest one for me though was the way it completely ignored Jurati and the Borg offshoot from last season. Not even a mention.
I’ll handwave the issue of Beverly Crusher getting pregnant at that age post-Nemesis because we already know 24th century Trek medicine was able to extended human lifespan to 150 or so. But as pointed out, none of her actions make any sense. Picard being a target made sense before the Mars synth invasion and his subsequent retirement. Afterwards, not so much (same with that Jack meets a cheerful Picard at the bar claiming Starfleet is his family).
And I can’t say any of the inconsistencies were accidental either. That would make sense if the season had different writers. But no, seasons 2 and 3 were both led by Matalas and employed mostly the same people: Chris Monfetti, Jane Maggs, Cindy Appel and the rest*.
*It’s worth noting though, co-creator Kirsten Beyer seemingly left production halfway through the season. I wonder if she had issues with the plotting choices, or if she’s just that busy with Discovery and Strange New Worlds.
I could end my rant right here and declare this season a disaster. But I just can’t. And I think Matalas knew of the plot problems when he decided to bring the band back together anyway, no matter the pitfalls and inconsistencies. I just can’t ignore the way the story grabbed me in an emotional sense every single episode, but especially the last two. To me, it wasn’t even just seeing the seven of them together again in a conference room at first. No, it was seeing the Enterprise D rebuilt and reinhabited on episode 9.
I recently found out that Matalas invested quite a bit of time and money on obtaining and preserving a refurbished DeLorean replica from Back to the Future. It goes to show just how much he truly cares about legacy and nostalgia in a way that doesn’t feel like glorified pandering made by some executive committee. This season of Picard doesn’t feel perfunctory nostalgia the way the last Star Wars trilogy did, for example. So you see why he made the choice to bring back the D. Generally, when people criticize Generations, they usually discuss Kirk’s death. The D saucer crashing is usually brought up as a joke about Troi’s driving skills. The truth is losing that ship had a major impact back in 1994. It certainly did for me, even more so than losing the original Enterprise on Search for Spock. Getting that back made the season for me. The lighting, the carpet, the old friend* (*now there’s a line Matalas could have borrowed from TNG’s “The Battle”).
Getting Data back the way we did. It pretty much washes away most of my issues with the season, because in this case my analytical brain just can’t compete with my heart. There is however one thing I would have changed in an otherwise perfect poker finale: have Data successfully bluff Riker with a hand. It would pay off yet another moment from Nemesis and also years of Data being bluffed by Riker on poker games.
Also needless to say, this season was a MASSIVE improvement over season 2 (even if Picard himself yet again feels like a secondary character in his own show). I wouldn’t place it above season 1. That one had flaws, but it was by far the most original and focused of the three. If I were to place this season of Picard, it would likely come behind Strange New Worlds and the last several seasons of both animated shows (I hate it when people ignore the animation side of things).
If anything, I wish this season had more than 10 episodes. Too many memorable moments, but too brief a runtime. Blink and it’s over. I wish we’d get an episodic spinoff of sorts with these characters. It goes to show just how tired I am of serialized by this point, especially when the plot blurs and becomes this messy. But I’m also ready to let these characters rest and let them have their deserved good ending. Who would have thought we’d get this 20 years after the downer ending of Nemesis? Overall, I’m fulfilled and satisfied with what we got.
Thank you for all the great reviews, Keith!
I have to admit I’m in the camp of absolutely enjoying this season. I didn’t find the inconsistencies to be glaring enough to impact my enjoyment of the new characters, the visual design, the story overall, and especially getting the TNG crew again. I think part of it may be judging it on movie standards – this feels like an immensely more satisfying finale for everyone than Nemesis did, with a lot of familiar “Star Trek” elements and room for a lot of great character moments as well, even if not all the more cerebral stories I liked about episodic TNG. I felt like the story behind Beverly’s return (while it could have been done in many ways, of course) was partly driven by the fact that she was completely and entirely absent from S1 and S2, which made NO SENSE given how important she had always been to Picard. “The Last Best Hope” wrote her offscreen too. So it was kind of like a “why would Luke have gone missing for so many years” question that JJ Abrams set up for Rian Johnson to answer in The Last Jedi. It wasn’t going to be the most satisfying answer (and honestly, the Litverse remains my personal canon for the post-Nemesis stories for all of the TNG characters), but given the setup, I was impressed by how well they managed to sell it. Beverly got far more to do than in the rest of the movies combined, and there was a lot doctoring and sciencing in addition to being a mother (which I liked her being as well). I only wish there had been more meaningful bookending of the “Seventeen Seconds” conversation with Picard and Crusher directly, as Picard got more meaningful moments with everyone else but her (including Ro) after that episode.
I loved seeing Geordi as a dad, meeting Alandra and Sidney, seeing Riker and Troi together (they’re the best), the Data/Lore final resolution, and Worf — and I even liked Raffi after not ever warming to her character the past two seasons. (I would have kept Rios and Soji going forward over anyone else from the first two seasons, but some ridiculous reason Rios got dropped in the past and died in a barfight. Sigh.) I will agree that Picard was actually one of the least memorable characters of the season, but overall he was much stronger than I thought in S2, when all the conflicting plotlines and strange personal retcons made very little sense to me. I hope we do get a few novels set in this timeline now.
Thanks to the many commentors for bringing up the music. I love the soundtrack throughout season 3. To me in any given scene it always felt in sync with and often amplifying what was happening. Some examples I liked: Lore helping the changelings gain control of the U.S.S Titan, Jack having a conversation with Seven on the bridge about various ships at the museum, Ro and Picard coming to an understanding in the Ten-Foward set, plus all those great classic/remixed-classics from TNG and the franchise more generally.
-Kefka
Thanks, as always, for doing the rewatch, Keith. It would have been hard to imagine 12-13 years ago reading the TNG rewatch that we’d be here now.
We finally got a chance to catch up on this season. I think we are mostly in agreement on the points of s3. And yes, there were parts of this season where I had a lot of fun and felt more intrigued than s2, but that’s mainly because season 2 was spinning its wheels and the plot twist was guessed 7 episodes before it was revealed. The thing is, I actually liked season 1 for the most part, though there were things I didn’t like about it– those being it felt like a wrong direction for Trek and Roddenberry’s vision. The thing about season 3 was, it didn’t actually fix any of those problems. Things like our heroes casting aside their morality in difficult moments, needlessly killing off guest stars of the old shows, and being dark both in terms of tone and lighting–those problems are still there. They just went and removed the good parts of season 1 (such as the new characters and ideas) in favor of hitting us over the head with a nostalgia balloon.
And it’s very obvious that nostalgia served the fans more than the story–we went back to the E-D because that’s what the show was on–but in universe they actually spent 8 years on the E before the gang broke up, as opposed to the 7 on the D. It’s actually a thing that bothers me a tad, that people tend to forget that the characters had lives outside the bounds of the show.
The ironic thing is that for as much as Trek likes to continue to drop Kobayashi Maru references, it seems to not always understand the point of it–that how we deal with death is at least as important as how we deal with life. And by that I mean, showrunners won’t let things die. Even the movie that introduced the Kobayashi Maru and the meditation on death ended in such a way as to allow the return of Spock in the very next film. Here, character-wise it’s things like: watch Data die, ope! he’s back again just to die again (which admittedly was a better send off than Nemesis), but WAIT! he’s kind of back again (and while admittedly he’s different, neither the characters or the audience will see him that way).
But it’s not really characters I’m talking about, it’s the show. The show was on for seven years and was great, but it’s over now. And it’s great to get occasional stories to see where the characters are now…but we don’t necessarily need to grow them out of that too relive the glory days. Maybe we can let them simply retire. At some point, the characters will have to die and stay dead as well, but no one seems to want to accept that. It’s just as important to show new characters and new stories and try and attract a new audience. Not everything needs to be in service of trying to desperately cling onto a past that will never come again. Reminiscing can be beautiful…as long as it’s reminiscing and not necromancy.
Anyway, I really dislike the season-long arc format. Occasionally you do just want some standalone episodes, and the other thing is that when story arcs are tied up in a bow at the end of the season and then a new one conveniently starts up at the beginning of the next season, it starts to feel a little forced. I’m finding I like the format of a show like SG-1 the best, where it is mostly episodic but you have background arcs that are allowed to span seasons and progress periodically throughout. Another problem I think that occurs is when you have an arc-driven season like this that has a specific number of episodes. It’s like when the teacher says your paper should be exactly this many pages long. You may find you’re cutting important stuff, but you also will inevitably find papers that are padded with some extra fluff to needlessly draw them out. Not that ordering a specific number of episodes of episodic television didn’t produce some duds, but there tended to be about 2.5 times as many episodes per season in those days. I feel like a story is best served by being a story, and it’s long as it is.
A final departing thought: Shaw’s comment about violating the Prime Directive in order to snog villagers on Ba’ku…that’s actually the opposite of what happened in that movie. Picard was the one trying to uphold the PD by not moving the villagers, with Dogherty handwaving that it didn’t apply. You can knock Picard with disobeying orders in that incident, but not violating the PD.
Spot was the best thing about this season for me, as I mentioned previously :)
I also thought Season 1 had some really interesting potential (ROMULAN SPACE NUNS) and even Season 2 had its moments.
Reading the different reactions here, some of this feels a little analogous to the Star Wars sequel trilogy. An incohesive trilogy of movies/seasons that banked on nostalgia but still in some ways felt like an empty copy (and had some great music). Definitely had some great character beats and moments, but doesn’t totally hang together. And too many mystery boxes.
I think one of my biggest gripes with this season is that I kept thinking I really missed episodic Trek. Some of these arcs felt like they went on soooo long, and I miss some of those wacky Trek episodes that were just weird (peptide cake with mint frosting. Riker trapped in his own mind) or character focused ones.
Other than that I feel like this article pretty much sums up my feelings pretty well as have most of the comments. I definitely enjoyed myself, loved a lot of the legacy character beats but it still felt kind of shallow/empty at times.
The only thing I might push back on (and kind of wanted to in some of the earlier posts but comments were locked) was some of the discussion on Crusher as ‘just a mother’. I don’t disagree about the whole rationale behind her actions not making sense! But – as a mother and a woman in a professional field that tends to be male dominated – sometimes the comments rubbed me the wrong way even though they had good intentions. Crusher did do a lot of other science/medical related things, and even some ass kicking (although if that is consistent with her character could also be debated) and is promoted to Admiral by the end. Yes, many of her actions were in part influenced by and motivated by motherhood but that’s generally what happens when you have kids as it’s a pretty massively influential thing to happen in our life. I didn’t really see it any different from how Geordi’s fatherhood clearly influenced some of his own decisions and character changes. So just writing that off as ‘just a mother’ (when she does do a lot of other things in the show) kept leaving a bad taste in my mouth. I didn’t really see her as a character that is just defined by her relationships to the men in her life, but also given the themes of the show (family/legacy)…I don’t know how you wouldn’t have a character where those relationships don’t matter and aren’t part of the arc. Aren’t we all defined by our relationships to others?
That said I actually hated the ‘Picard has a secret son’ arc from the jump. Wasn’t there already a TNG episode about Picard having a son with a criminal history but it turned out to be faked somehow? I kept hoping that would happen here, haha. So I wouldn’t have complained if they had just left that part out. Beverly could still be a ‘doctors without borders’ type which is why she’s never around the past 20 years, who perhaps stumbles on the changeling plot, and would still contribute her various scientific insights. I get the impression the Jack Crusher character is more about Picard’s legacy and this idea that Picard actually wanted a son all along. But, since that’s what they did, I guess I didn’t see Beverly as reduced or diminished by it (unless you count the aforementioned ‘runaway’ plot stupidity, I guess) or like it became the only aspect of her character that mattered.
@74 – “I’ll handwave the issue of Beverly Crusher getting pregnant at that age post-Nemesis because we already know 24th century Trek medicine was able to extended human lifespan to 150 or so.”
The issue isn’t that she got pregnant at her age, the issue is that it’s completely unrealistic that two adults in the 24th century, given what we know of medical science, who weren’t actively attempting to have a child, accidently got pregnant. Beverly was the chief medical officer on the Enterprise, I seriously doubt she forgot to give herself her injection that month (unlike Sisko and Yates, who were in the middle of a war, and neither one were a medical professional who spent their entire time in sick bay).
I’ve seen a lot of comments here that people wish there were more episodes this season, but I honestly have the opposite opinion. There was an endless stream of spinning wheels, because we can’t have the crew all get back together until the last minute, and we can’t reveal what’s up with Jack until the last minute (and long past the point of my caring anymore), we can’t show the bridge of the Enterprise D until the very end, that’s our big twist! If they’re so determined to not show any of their (frankly, not very interesting and remarkably predictable) cards until the last moment, then just make a two hour movie. I know all the business reasons for doing a ten hour series instead of a two hour movie, but given that, maybe actually adapt to the new format, and don’t just spin wheels for eight hours?
This is the exact same problem season 2 had. They didn’t actually have one, whole, cohesive plot that filled ten hours, so they threw ten half finished plots at the problem, spun wheels for eight episodes, then finally started the series in episodes nine and ten. Except, at least season 2 was trying to do something interesting with the Borg, where this season didn’t even have that. So yeah, if you came to watch your old faves bonding on the E-D bridge, that’s fine, but even that crowd was done a disservice by having to sit through eight hours of irrelevance to get there. Put me solidly in the “extremely disappointed” category, for a wide range of reasons which have already been articulated by others.
That said, I would like to second the thanks to Keith for these wonderful, thoughtful reviews, and the entire Star Trek rewatch series that he’s done. I eagerly await each new one, and holidays are a bit dimmer knowing that we’ll be missing out on a rewatch.
So we saw some very strong character and acting work from our cast of OGs, and honestly the new and supporting cast too, on a plot that was…played wrong.
I mean the pitch sounds great, “the Borg Remnant and Renegade Changelings that were tortured and experimented on by Section 31 team up to tear down the Federation once and for all and only the crew of the Enterprise-D can save us” is pretty good.
I think the mystery of Jack Crusher is the worst part. Not even on the content. As Transceiver and Wizard72 said, holding that mystery up for so long dragged the story down and didn’t give us (or Jack) any time to actually sit with the revelation and deal with it. Because the endgame only works if Jack makes the ridiculous and impulsive decision to go to the Borg Queen on time for Frontier Day. Nor for him to discuss with Seven what it means to be a Borg. I can get why Jurati isn’t intervening, she’s taken up a watch on a mysterious Transwarp conduit (that really should’ve been old Queen’s method of getting into this plot), but the smarter decision would’ve been for Jack to just go to Queen Agnes, an established benevolent Borg Queen.
I appreciate Beverly coming up with a way to find the Changelings since Section 31’s alterations made them harder to detect conventionally, but gave them a critical exploitable weakness that could be detected, but it would’ve been better is if with some time she was able to revert them back to normal changelings. Or we have Salome Jens show up at the end to welcome her wayward children back home to the Link, with superior Dominion genetic engineering providing a cure.
A lot of latter day Trek is getting mileage out of making Starfleet the antagonist force in one way or another. Lower Decks gives Starfleet a critical lack of follow through for the characters to deal with, Prodigy made Communication Kills a key plot point robbing Starfleet of its most powerful trait, the ability to talk through problems, while Picard created a great failure around the Supernova that destroyed Romulus with the Federation giving in to years of antagonism with the Romulans and doing as Kirk once said about the Klingons, “Let them die”. It then made Picard a pariah to Starfleet for rejecting that decision, taking his ball and going home. In this season Starfleet starts out infiltrated and making really dumb decisions. Starfleet and the Federation are not supposed to be the tools for reflecting the failures of our present day for examination, The Federation is supposed to be the we’ve learned our lessons and are genuinely doing better that we aspire to. They’re not infallible, but they take the high road. I hope Picard closes that chapter and our benevolent organizations can get back to being the unambiguous good guys.
Part of the problem, for me at least, is that the Jack Crusher never actually became interesting as a character. In fact, quite the opposite, the longer the plot with him dragged, the less interested I became in him (and I was pretty dubious about whether such a character should even exist in the first place).
I also think that it was a mistake to bring in the Borg for a lot of reasons: (1) Where–and I cannot stress this enough–is Queen Agnes Jurati during all of this? (2) How were the Borg able to make an alliance with the Changelings? (3) If the Collective is on its last legs after Janeway, then what was up with all of those fully crewed and operational Borg Cubes that we’ve seen on Prodigy and Lower Decks (and the Artifact as well, come to think of it)? (4) The Queen’s evil plan makes nothing like sense. If she needs a transmitter, why doesn’t she just make one? Why does she need to plug magic nepo-boy into the Hive? (5) What’s with the ridiculously elaborate plan in general? Why not just go to some primitive planet far from the Federation’s prying eyes, assimilate the local population, harvest their resources, and regenerate the Collective like the Borg have always done for thousands of years? (6) This ship has probably sailed, but the Queen isn’t the Borg’s “Leader;” she’s the personification of their emergent consciousness. Reducing the Borg to an actual cackling supervillain and her army of zombie slaves makes them so much more boring.
If they were going to give Picard and Crusher an adult son (which they shouldn’t have done, imo, but whatever) and if they were going to go the “Borg semen” mystery-box route with him (which they very much should not have done, but whatever), then there’s still no reason why they needed to bring the actual Borg into the story. Maybe the Changelings want him for their own purposes? Maybe their mutations prevent them from linking with one another, and they crave that collective consciousness. Maybe they want to want to inflict the suffering that they endured at Section 31 hands upon the entirety of Starfleet at once. Then at least the series would be about something, as opposed to just killing the bad guys and passively accepting the morally rancid state of the Federation.
@80/ mr_d:
I wish I had more faith that the current writers even notice the moral ambiguity.
#80.
I agree about the Jack mystery box (Jack in the box?) being the worst part. I wish those who use this strategy for hooking an audience would realize that if you’re going to build up a great mystery it needs to have a great, surprising payoff. The Borg…? That’s it? You’re going to spend all this time teasing us, Mr. Magician, about what’s in your hat, and… it’s a rabbit! Wow! I had no idea!
Remember when J.J. Abrams gave that famous TED Talk about the mystery box? He appeared on stage with a box about the size of a breadbox painted with a big question mark on it. In practice, however, as with this season, that box would be about the size of a house and threaten to roll over onto the audience.
“Do you remember what that talk was even about?”
“Not sure. I do remember the box, though.”
I don’t understand why we are blaming Picard Season 3 for the “morally rancid state of the Federation.”
The events that turned the changelings into a rogue terrorist cell happened during the Dominion War and is partly based on the S31 created virus introduced in DS9.
As for Jack Crusher, the mystery of his secret never bothered me because there were so much to love in this season not related to his reveal. The first clue that he was more than a regular person didn’t even occur until the end of Episode 3.
@81/jaimebabb: “Part of the problem, for me at least, is that the Jack Crusher never actually became interesting as a character.”
Not just as a character, but as a concept. Even aside from what Keith and others have mentioned — that an unplanned pregnancy between responsible adults is an outdated trope in the present and preposterously unlikely in the 25th century — but as an answer to “What other important stage in Picard’s later life is worth exploring?”, the unsuspected son with an old flame has got to be the most cliched, soap-opera-y answer possible, even if it hadn’t been a rehash of The Wrath of Khan. After facing Picard with his mortality in season 1 and revealing his abusive childhood in season 2, building season 3 around “By the way, you’re a dad” is a major anticlimax.
I mean, it’s not like the idea of Picard becoming a father after resisting parenting for so long isn’t worth exploring. I mean, I’m the guy who wrote the novel where he and Beverly decided to start a family, in the prose continuity that was superseded by PIC. But that’s why I find it so implausible that he’s still so opposed to the idea decades later, even though we saw in Generations that being the father of multiple children was literally his vision of paradise. At that point, after experiencing 50 years of Kamin’s memories as a father and grandfather, he should’ve overcome his fear of family, so PIC retconning it back into place feels regressive. And introducing him to an adult son that he never knew while the mother did all the hard work of raising him… frankly that feels like a rather shallow way to approach a story of fatherhood.
But you’re right — those problems could’ve been overcome if Jack had been a strong enough character, and he wasn’t. He was just a Han Solo wannabe with an angsty secret, and ultimately he was little more than a plot device to advance the mystery box with the Borg Queen inside.
@80 – oh yeah, I like that idea about the Changelings. Maybe Beverly can help detect them, but then what? We know that Worf is in contact with Odo, and while he can no longer appear (or maybe they could theoretically recast him and say he just has a new form)…it would be interesting to see what they do after that, and perhaps just hand them back over to them to be healed or dealt with however they feel is appropriate, perhaps partially as a gesture of good will/atonement.
I had a great time watching it, mostly for the wonderful interactions between these legendary characters, but I cannot deny that its plot was eventually as ridiculous as any of the TNG movies. That’s really what it felt like, a TNG movie reunion, rather than a continuation of the series. I can count on one hand the number of TNG episodes that were less interesting than this whole season. But hey, I had a great time watching it.
@83/ M – I don’t blame this season for the state of the Federation; I would say that the rot set in in the latter seasons of Deep Space Nine and Insurrection, and that the Federation had clearly lost its way by Picard season 1. What I blame this season for is that it is the first to just passively accept this rot as part of the setting. In DS9, Bashir tried to bring down Section 31, and they gave the cure to the Founders over Starfleet’s objections. In Insurrection, Picard and company take up arms to defend a planetary population against a cynical power play by the Federation Council. The backstory for Season 1 is that Picard resigned his commission in protest of Starfleet’s indifference to the Romulan situation, and all of the original characters were framed in some way in opposition to the Federation’s reactionary turn. Here, though, everyone’s happily back in Starfleet, even though the Federation’s presented as being as amoral as it has ever been depicted. Section 31 is entirely out in the open as “a critical division of Starfleet intelligence”; Picard learns about the extent of its war crimes, looks pained about it for all of half a minute, and then resolves with Beverly to execute Vadic anyways; and then it’s never discussed again. Literally, the happy ending of the season is for Jack to join Starfleet, an organisation that had just been established 3 episodes earlier as being entirely willing to tolerate war crimes. It’s maddening to me.
Thinking back, when Star Trek: Picard was announced, I was excited. I thought it would be great to see this character get a proper sendoff. Admittedly though, my excitement was due to the assumption that the older Patrick Stewart would be playing Picard as a man living a simpler, gentler life and how he might struggle with aging. Which is plenty of material to work with for an actor. Of course, there is some of that in the series, mainly in the first season, but I think all this world-saving mishegoss and conspiracies to uncover–and boy howdy there was quite a lot–did it no favors.
I mean, I thought one of the main selling points of doing different Star Trek series was to tell different kinds of stories. Really, would there have been anything so terrible about watching an old man traveling around in a shuttle and catching up with old friends? Maybe then ending with the restored Enterprise-D leading a parade? I dunno, seems to me David Lynch’s The Straight Story might have been a good inspiration. Something simple, sweet, and contemplative. (I know, I know, boring…)
Anyway, it was nice chatting with you folks. Have a great one.
I should add that in that scenario Picard would’ve been better off as a movie and not a series.
For me, the season mostly works when it’s setting up little thriller/action set pieces, or when it’s delivering comedy. It’s gripping on those lines.
Other than that, the writing’s pretty hacky, generic, there’s a emptiness to it, and a messiness in which plot points are discarded.
I agree the plot didn’t hold well together, they basically retconned out the first two seasons and the story and themes weren’t particularly notable (something about family?). Jammer had a good quote about this season how it was structured like a movie, “including the mainstream dramatic concessions of a movie.”
But emotionally it was so, so satisfying. I’ve watched the last episode multiple times, something I can’t say for any Star Trek episode made in the last 20 years. They did all the characters right and the happy ending was the sendoff I wanted for everyone.
Having said that…in theory I’m against member berries, fan service and small universe syndrome and I expect the overwhelmingly positive reaction to this season means that Paramount will double down on those things, whether they make the Star Trek: Legacy show or not.
For example, I logged onto Steam the other day and saw an ad for Star Trek Online. The current story is that Wesley Crusher is emperor of the mirror universe and Beverly Crusher and mirror V’Ger are there too. I just chuckled at how silly all that seems. They say the road to hell is paved with good intentions so I just hope that this season of Picard doesn’t lead to the franchise turning into that a few years from now.
Yes, the fact that that it was explicitly based on the TNG movies, rather than the TNG series, strikes me as odd. Star Trek fandom is a fractious bunch, but one opinion I thought almost universal was that the series was much, much better.
@87 jaimebabb Your comment about this Dark Federation tolerating war crimes and being indifferent to the suffering of the Romulans may help rationlize my complaint about its acceptance of the sociopathic Jack Crusher.
“He’s a killer, perhaps the greatest in human history.”
“That’s just what Starfleet needs these days.”
@81 jaimebabb: That’s honestly where I thought the plot was going to go with any leftover Borg stuff in Picard’s body and Jack’s telepathy– these new changelings were trying to re-establish their own Great Link. They were maybe going to make a telepathic version in lieu of a liquid one. Maybe they even had some nefarious plot to take over the solids by bringing them into this new Link. But no, they revealed the Borg Collective was actually involved, and then just dumped the Changelings.
92. jaimebabb
They used the D from the show, furthermore Picard felt like TNG the show Picard not action hero TNG movie Picard. With that said everything else: it was the TNG cast in a Star Trek style film/DS9 style show. My ideal would be a 16-20 episode show of TNG season 8 that was episodic, hopeful, and followed a lot of “All Good Things” but with the bad stuff changed.
Based on the TOS films, I just assumed/accepted you are not going to do episodic style story telling in the end for TNG. Also, big action film tropes, creeps in as well. Picard season 3 has all the classic TNG characters giving classic TNG performances but in a space opera action sci-fi venue that is not the reality of the TNG universe as a whole.
-Kefka
I think this might be the only season of Picard that I would actively rewatch, even if it’s just for the nostalgia so kudos to Matalas and company for that. I liked how most of the characters have progressed since the TNG days and generally better written as well. Yeah, the story was the least compelling part of the season and was pretty weak. The concept of the Changeling infiltration of Starfleet was actually a compelling idea and created a nice paranoia feeling so it really sucked that it was all dropped for the Borg angle. And the whole mystery and angst thing with Jack never did anything for me either so that could have been safely dropped. Sure, introduce Beverly and Picard’s love child but it doesn’t have to be a son that is super powered and all important to the fate of the universal. Just have him be a target simply for being Picard’s son. And make him some ambitious kid that wants to make it through Starfleet on his own merits and not as the son of Beverly and Picard, not this guy who gets some kind of special counselor role on the bridge of the Enterprise because of nepotism. Oh, and let’s not forget and absolve him of being directly responsible for the assimilation if thousands of Starfleet officers and the deaths of thousand more in the resulting battle.
Also weird that we never found out who Geordi’s wife is. I’m sure that will finally be revealed in the spin-off with Sydney and Alandra but this season was also about who the TNG characters are 20+ years later and surely Geordi’s wife and the mother of his children helps fill in who he has grown into. Maybe we’ll get some more insight into the Next Gen characters when we get deleted scenes on the Blu-Ray release.
The other good thing about this season aside from the nostalgia, is that it essentially served as one long back door pilot for the inevitable Enterprise-G series.
Did I like this season of Picard? Sure. Right or wrong, it felt more like the Trek of my (comparative) youth but there was absolutely nothing that challenged my perceptions in the same ways that season one managed – without leaning as hard on the nostalgia button. Sure, Jack is an interesting new addition. Seven as captain of the Enterprise with at least one of Geordi’s daughters on board? Yup, I’m on board.
It’s the Data resurrection and the Enterprise-D showing up that really were the moments where the show went completely overboard with the sprinkles on the nostalgia sundae.
@96/garreth: “it essentially served as one long back door pilot for the inevitable Enterprise-G series.”
I propose that the Enterprise-G series be a cartoon for children. It can be paired with an older-skewing show about the Enterprise-PG and a mature-audiences show about the Enterprise-R.
@98 CLB
Ha! I think I would be down for that
-Kefka
Enterprise-NC-17. True to Gene’s vision.
@88/Dingo
Yes, exactly, this is what i was hoping for. a bit of adventure maybe here and there, but mostly – meeting friends, family, getting to know who is doing how, giving them time to TALK etc. I did not want this series to be action packed, every season with yet another huuuuge danger (i hate this idea in Discovery as well, the stakes are constantly so high, that it just deflates it and makes it seem like daily routine to save the bloody galaxy or universe)…
All in all, in retrospect, Season 1 was the best, with an interesting, though flawed story and then it was a constant downhill. If i ever rewatch Season 3, it will be just the parts on the Enterprise bridge and the closing scene, which is actually nice. :)
Having just rewatched the entire series, I’d put this season pretty much exactly on par with the first season of the show, though for entirely different reasons. The first season is far more interesting (at least until the end, when it goes a bit off the rails) but this season gets high marks for sheer entertainment value (at least until the end, when it goes a bit off the rails). Of course, a lot of that entertainment comes from just enjoying the interactions of the older versions of these characters, as well as an olympic-sized swimming pool of nostalgia, as opposed to the actual story, which I still think is pants.