The penultimate (so far) Trek was never supposed to happen. I say penultimate because, chronologically, Discovery jumped forward 900 years from 6 years before Kirk to the thirty-second century. More on that when I finish Discovery seasons 3-5. But after Nemesis, Patrick Stewart said never again. While it wasn’t the best entry in Trek (I rate it as the worst of the movies), it did seem like a good place to leave the crew of the Enterprises D and E.
But Akiva Goldsmith and Michael Chabon approached Stewart with a novel idea. Picard is the great man in twilight. While he’s still looked upon with reverence, no one wants him around in today’s Starfleet. Presently, the Federation is reeling. The Synth Uprising (which Prodigy retrofitted nicely.) The Romulan exodus. The ever-looming threat of the Borg and even a faction of the Dominion? This is not the boldly going Starfleet. This is a scared Starfleet.
However, each season is almost a completely different show. Seasons 1 & 2 have the same core characters, but about half of them will leave after season 2. Season 3 is really the ending for Star Trek: The Next Generation we really wanted, something to vindicate the disaster that was Nemesis. For all its faults, Nemesis gave us the Kelvin Timeline, altered the playing field for Lower Decks, and provided a jumping off point for Prodigy.
It also marks the end of Jean-Luc Picard’s career.
Season 1
Season 1 sees Picard in retirement making wine at his family’s vineyard. Many Romulan refugees work for him, including Laris (Orla Brady) and Zhaban, a Romulan couple who look after the old man and help him keep the vineyard on even keel. Beyond a disastrous news interview that annoys Starfleet, life is quiet for Picard. Too quiet. He tells Zhaban he feels like he’s waiting to die. Then a woman named Daj shows up, pleading for protection. Someone killed her boyfriend and tried to capture her. Instinctively, she knew to come to Picard for help. She is in a painting done by the late Data entitled “Daughter.” Before Picard can investigate further, she is murdered before his eyes and all evidence covered up. Laris, a former Tal Shiar operative, uses some toys form her old job to find traces of her former employers’ involvement, but something’s not right. The Tal Shiar is still paranoid. It’s in their charter. But it’s not their typical operation. Picard checks out the Data connection by visiting the Daystrom Institute and Dr. Agnes Jurati. Somehow, Bruce Maddox is involved. Also, if Daj (Isa Briones) is Data’s offspring, the method of reproduction always results in twins. Find Maddox, find the sister, find out what’s happening.
After an argument with Raffi Musiker (Michelle Hurd), Admiral Picard’s second in the Romulan evacuation effort (See? That supernova did happen in the Prime Timeline.), he manages to recruit a ship and a captain, the La Sirena owned and operated by Cristobal Rios (Santiago Cabrera). Raffi comes along, supposedly to catch a lift, and Agnes Jurati is looking for Maddox, her former lover. On their way to Star City, a sort of Trek version of Mos Eisley that makes the Star Wars town look like a dull Midwestern suburb, Picard wants to make a stop at a Romulan Free State world to recruit a member of the Qowat Milat, a Romulan sect of warrior nuns. He discovers a grown Elnor, a boy he met during the evacuation, now a trainee of the Qowan Milat. Elnor binds his sword to Picard’s quest and warns their enemies, “Choose to live, my friends.” Can’t help but feel Worf would approve.
A chance encounter brings a freelancing Seven of Nine (Jeri Ryan) into the fold. They find Maddox, but Seven takes the opportunity to kill the woman who brutally murdered Icheb, the former Borg turned Starfleet (and briefly returning character from Voyager.) But Jurarti kills Maddox, masking it as heart failure, but not before he’s able to tell Picard the sister, Soji, is working as a Borg reclamation specialist on the Relic, an inactive cube captured by the Romulans. This cannot but help Picard as the director of the project is Hugh (Jonathan Del Arco), who is thrilled his liberator, Locutus, has arrived. Yes, Hugh is the Borg given a name by Geordi back during the TNG days. Now Hugh tries to liberate his fellow former drones. They meet Soji and discover what even the Tal Shiar suspects. A group within the secretive organization, a cult called the Zhat Vazh, was behind the Synth Uprising that destroyed Mars and Utopia Planitia. Which confuses both Picard and the Tal Shiar because it crippled the effort to evacuate Romulus before its
sun went supernova. The Zhat Vazh are terrified of an invasion by highly advanced synths and will do anything, even risk the extinction of their own species, to prevent it. And Soji is the key to that. Picard grabs Soji and escapes to a remote world where he finds help from some old friends, Riker (Jonathan Frakes) and Troi (Marina Sirtis) (and their daughter Kestra.) Eventually, the La Sirena catches up and they find Soji’s forgotten homeworld. There, they confront the synth threat, liberate the exiled synths, and meet Altan Soong (Brent Spiner), Data and Lore’s organic brother. (Seems Noonien and Juliana also built a child the old-fashioned way.) But the Zhat Vazh is coming. But so is Seven, who has hijacked the compromised cube and crashes it not far from Soong’s compound. A last-minute plea by Picard summons Starfleet (with the fleet admiral shouting “Jean-Luc, will you shut the fuck up?” before informing him the cavalry is coming.) Between a revived (and droneless) Borg cube and a fleet led by Riker, the Zhat Vazh backs down, presumably to be taken out to the woodshed by the Romulan government.
Season 1 is a quest story, but it’s not really the hero’s journey. It’s great seeing Data, even if in dream sequences or within a virtual environment. We’re told Data dies for good, but it’s a less-satisfying fate for the character than Nemesis, even with the call-back of Data in his virtual home settling in for the end listening to “Blue Skies.” Additionally, the consequences of Picard’s irumodic syndrome, hinted at in “All Good Things,” come to fore. However, there’s no last-second cure. Picard dies fighting off the Zhat Vazh. Soong puts Picard in a golem body. It looks like a story cheat, but in reality, it was a plot device to give Data his long-overdue end. While it didn’t bother me, I could see where it would be taken as a cheat.
Many complained this was not the Picard they knew. Really, Nu Trek initially wanted to get away from repeating the same formula to reach new viewers and take advantage of the ten-episode streaming format. Plus, with Michael Chabon as Season 1’s showrunner, one could not expect the pulp-based formula of even Discovery.
The new characters are quite good. Jurarti is mousey and nervous, made worse by Admiral/General Oh’s duplicity. Rios is dealing with his own demons, having killed his captain on Starfleet orders only to have the incident erased, as in even the ship’s existence is stricken from the record. Raffi is suffering from substance abuse and failure to find a life outside of Starfleet after being fired in the wake of the failure to evacuate the Romulan people in time. Elnor is one of the few idealists. It was also good seeing Hugh return, but tragically, we lose him.
The greatest asset of Picard is Seven of Nine. This is not the monotone Borg struggling to become human. This is an angry woman whose past is held against her, but very much human now. She becomes a Fenris Ranger, a group dedicated to helping those the Federation has failed. Seven is now cynical and wise. Jeri Ryan said she had trouble adapting to this older Seven, who has socialized nicely to the point of asking for bourbon when Picard offers wine.
Season 2
Season 2 marks a return to traditional storytelling. There’s an arc, but it’s more a ten-part movie. We find Picard pondering a romance with the newly widowed Laris and assuming duties as chancellor of Starfleet Academy. Raffi is back to work as an instructor, shepherding Elnore, the first full-blooded Romulan cadet ever. (“The Drumhead” featured a half-Romulan who, out of fear, passed himself off as half-Vulcan.) And Rios and Jurarti are aboard the new USS Stargazer. Someone summons Picard to the Stargazer. The Borg are back and apparently trying to close up a vague subspace anomaly. Picard demands an explanation, but the Queen ain’t got no time for that and attempts to partially assimilate the Stargazer. He orders self-destruct. Yet Q picks that moment to intervene. Picard finds himself in an alternate timeline that makes the Mirror Universe merely look like the one where Xanax was never invented. Picard is a murderous general. Rios is a Vulcan-killing commander. Raffi hunts down non-human scum (and manages to save Elnore from a purge.) Jurarti is torturing Borg, and you feel sorry for the Borg Queen. Worse, the Confederacy has risen in place of the Federation. And the president of the Confederacy is Anika Hansen, aka Seven of Nine, who wakes up after Q snaps his fingers to find her Borg implants missing. Our heroes meet aboard the evil La Sirena, bringing the Borg Queen’s severed head. Queenie, scheming to begin reassimilating the universe, calculates the point where the timeline went off the rails. It’s 2024, and Rios manages to pull a Captain Kirk by slingshotting around the sun. How well did that work? Kirk Thatcher appears as the Punk on the Bus, relocated to LA blaring a rebooted “I Hate You!” He’s also in mortal fear of Seven giving him another nerve pinch and shuts off the music. “Sorry. I just like the song.” (BTW, I’ve talked with Kirk Thatcher. He is hilarious and gracious and very much the pirate he plays in the Muppet productions.)
Once there, the mission is to make sure Picard’s many greats aunt goes ahead with a manned mission to Saturn. (Oh, science fiction! Even acknowledging what a shit show today is, you have such high hopes for us!) However, Jurarti ends up infected by the Queen and is slowly taken over by her. Picard meets a supervisor (as in Gary Seven) who is a dead ringer for Laris. Meanwhile Raffi and Seven dance around their barely mentioned relationship for last season. And then there’s Adam Soong and his sun-allergic daughter Kore. Like all the Soongs not named Noonien or Inigo, Adam is an asshole. Turns out, he was involved in creating Khan. Kore is identical to Soji, who briefly appears in episode one charming Deltans at a diplomatic event.
This season gets back to more action-oriented story-telling, but it’s disjointed. Rios ends up staying in the twenty-first century. (Why? It sucks here!) Jurarti becomes the Queen (and we get nice Borg to replace the dying evil Borg whom Janeway fatally poisoned.) And Kore turns out to be the latest in a long line of clones who continually fail. Q cures her, but now she has no idea what to do. In what is a high point in this season, Wesley Crusher appears, revealing the Travelers are, in fact, the aliens who trained Gary Seven and Laris. He recruits Kore.
Season 3
Picard Season 3 is a completely different show. Gone are Jurarti (now the nice Borg Queen, asking if you’d like to be assimilated. They have cookies!), Elnor (somewhere in Starfleet), and Rios (literally living in the past.) Instead, this is TNG Season 8. Also, it’s a backdoor pilot for Star Trek: Legacy, which has not been greenlit. Yet. (Yeah. Right. Terry Matalas already said he’s sharing scenes with Jeri Ryan and Ed Speleers.)
Picard is ready to run off with Laris (finally!) when he gets a distress call from Beverly Crusher, their first contact in twenty years. Laris’s inner Tal Shiar operative is awakened and tells Jean-Luc he needs to check it out, especially since Beverly warned him to trust no one. (Obviously, the cute Romulan ex-spy is an exception.) So Picard seeks out Riker, who finesses an excuse to take over the USS Titan, the successor to Riker’s old ship. Seven of Nine, now First Officer Anika Hansen, is game, but Captain Liam Shaw isn’t. Seven disobeys orders, and they travel to the Riton System, where they find Dr. Crusher.
And her son by Jean-Luc, Jack. Meanwhile, Raffi is chasing stolen weapons. Court-martialed from Starfleet and on the outs again with Seven, she now works as a freelance contractor for Starfleet Intelligence. Someone’s stealing weapons, and all clues point to Sneed, a Ferengi associate of Quark’s, as the middle man. But her controller turns up and slices off Sneed’s head before he can kill Raffi. He is that famous pacifist philosopher, Worf. And together, they chase down what the real culprits are really after.
Meanwhile, the Titan runs afoul of Vadic (played deliciously by Amanda Plummer, whose father Christopher had a similar take on Star Trek VI‘s General Chang.), a renegade Changeling on the hunt for Jack Crusher. Her employer wants him alive. She chases the Titan into a nebula where the ship nearly falls into a gravity well at the center.
Eventually, they learn Starfleet is compromised. By the end of it, they will have retrieved a golem containing another iteration of Data (and unfortunately, Lore) and reunite with Geordi LaForge. The final three episodes is the TNG cast altogether while Seven goes off and fights the reemerging Borg (not the nice ones led by Jurarti, who only assimilates the willing.) Turns out Vadic is working for them. Seven and Raffi are armed with the cloaking device from the Bounty, which was in the fleet museum. Meanwhile, Picard and crew return to the Fleet Museum and find Geordi has spent a decade restoring the Enterprise-D. They go after a much-diminished Borg Queen, who has Jack as a pawn in her game of revenge against humans. (I’m guessing at some point, Janeway stepped out of her office at Starfleet, gazed up at Jupiter, and raised a middle finger to the late Queen.)
Let’s get this out of the way right now. The biggest complaint I’ve heard about Season 3 is that it’s fan service. Frankly, that’s a lazy, pretentious critique I’m finding annoying as hell. Season 3 not only stands alone as a one-off Trek series, but it was enough to get fans pushing very hard for a Seven/Raffi-led Star Trek: Legacy (with everyone fully aware that’s also the name of a video game.)
First off, Terry Matalas pulled off convincing Patrick Stewart to relent on one of his demands for doing Picard: No TNG reunions beyond the need for Data and the Rikers. Second, Liam Shaw is the greatest Starfleet antagonist ever. Jessie Gender calls him “my favorite asshole.” Shaw is in the Jellico mold (and I like Admiral Jellico, who is not beloved in-universe, but also clearly is not in a happy position at Starfleet.), by the book and by God, the book is boring. Every cameo, every reference to earlier Treks, services the story. And we come to understand Shaw, played by an avid Trek fan, Todd Stashwick, himself an uber-nerd who makes Wil Wheaton look almost like a boring suburban white guy. (Wil is a suburban white guy, but hardly boring.) And everyone is where you might expect them 30 years on from Generations. Worf as a pacifist (who only cuts off heads peacefully) is probably the smartest change to the original cast, plus it lets him seamlessly provide comic relief before pivoting to one dangerous Klingon Mr. Miyagi. Most of all, the TNG cast are more or less all equals in this. Picard, despite his admiral’s rank, takes on the role of Riker’s number one when Shaw is disabled and passes command to the latter. Picard is not “captain” to them. He’s “Jean-Luc,” except maybe to Data, who has some catching up to do.
But Matalas also takes the remaining new cast from Picard, Jeri Ryan as Seven and Michelle Hurd as Raffi, and builds out a new crew. The LaForge sisters Sydney (Ashley Sharpe Chestnut) and Alandra (Mica Burton, daughter of Levar Burton) are two prominent characters, both revealing Geordi to be both a loving father and a grumpy old man.
Sydney is also something of a surrogate daughter to Seven. Ed Speleers is Jack Crusher, the offspring of a failed affair between Beverly and Picard. Despite what the Borg did to him (in utero, no less, proving the original Borg Queen is more of a bitch than we suspected.), Jack is the rogue, and Seven is going to guide him into Starfleet once the dust settles. There are a number of other bridge crew who don’t get much attention, but we already have a core cast of a new crew and the TNG cast, plus guest roles by Tim Russ as Tuvok and Michelle Forbes as Ro Laren, restored to Starfleet after the Dominion War.
Even Janeway is present, if off-camera. Several references are made to her, and a Captain Seven in a potential Legacy series reveals our favorite xB to be very much a protege of the Voyager captain. Props have to go to the writers room on Prodigy for retrofitting Janeway’s story to create a path from “Endgame” through her cameo in Nemesis and into Picard.
The one sour note is Laris, who is such a formidable character. It seems as though the writers simply cast her aside after one episode. Do her and Picard get a happily ever-after? Stewart himself said they had planned a final scene of Jean-Luc at the vineyard watching the sunset. A woman, most likely Laris, calls to him from off-camera, and he goes inside to his quiet life, content and no longer restless (no doubt with those famous eight notes from the Original Series and TNG cueing up the closing credits.) But Stewart returned to Los Angeles to film it when the studio decided, “Nah! Too expensive.” Really? It’s some civilian clothes, Stewart’s pit bull, and some stock footage against an AR wall. Really? That’s, like, the cheapest Planet Hell scene ever filmed.
But we do end the way “All Good Things” ended: The poker game. Matalas, who directed, let the cast play an actual game for forty-five minutes, staying in character but clearly enjoying themselves. They’re all moving onto new lives and not sad about endings. Maybe that’s the best place to leave them.