In the end, Picard became the fan-service TNG reunion it always should have been

[Karlston]

Final season finally gives the TNG crew a better send-off than 2002's Nemesis.

The Enterprise-D rides again.

Memory Alpha

Major spoilers for the third season of Star Trek: Picard are below.

Among the many sins of the 2002 film Star Trek Nemesis is the fact that its box-office bombing killed the still-nascent plans for a fifth and final The Next Generation outing, one that would have been designed as a finale in the same way that Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country was for the original cast.

 

I have no reason to believe that this film is some great lost gem of Star Trek canon; it was being written by the same people who wrote the awful Nemesis, and it was set up to be a kind of Search for Spock retread about reviving Data and restoring the status quo. But its absence meant a lack of closure for the TNG crew—a story that wasn't allowed to end on its own terms.

 

So when Patrick Stewart got on a stage in 2018 to announce that "Jean-Luc Picard is back," it was exciting! Closure at last. And, hopefully, a show that felt more confident and tonally consistent than Discovery had so far.

 

The first two seasons of Star Trek: Picard failed to make good on that promise. They were wildly uneven, and while their best moments almost always involved other TNG characters, the show actively resisted becoming a TNG reboot. But its third season, also preemptively announced as its final season, would finally reunite every member of the TNG crew for one last ride (and also Raffi would be there).

 

I still had misgivings for the first half of the season, and criticism I stand by. Paramount sent out screeners of the first six episodes, and while those six episodes were doing some things I liked, Picard was still struggling with some of the things it had always struggled with: not-quite-right characterization, an obsession with plot twists and bombast, and a focus on Picard to the exclusion of most other characters.

 

But in the season's last four episodes, something unexpected happened: the show finally delivered on its original promise.

 

It was Data and Geordi that tipped me over the edge, looking back. In both Nemesis and Picard's first season, we experience Data's loss almost exclusively from Picard's perspective. Picard was Data's friend, and Picard was a mentor to Data as he explored his humanity. But the season's eighth episode finally thought to ask how Data's best friend would have experienced his loss, rather than focusing on how Data's boss would have felt. LeVar Burton sells the hell out of the Geordi performance he finally gets to give.

 

(It's also nice to have Brent Spiner back in his Data mode; Spiner was in both of Picard's first two seasons as different unpleasant Soong family members, and the slimy register that Spiner uses to play those characters is just not very fun to watch.)

 

It's emblematic of something those last few Picard episodes do well that the movies never really figured out—every character has something to do. Gates McFadden is particularly underutilized in every single TNG film, but there are moments in all of them where the non-Picard, non-Data characters are present simply to provide an extra body in a scene or rattle off some Treknobabble. Picard is still first among equals—the show has his name on it, after all—but once all the old TNG characters are finally back on the board, Stewart and Picard both feel more like players in an ensemble again.

 

It was all building to these people standing on this set one last (?) time.

Trae Patton/Paramount+

The season isn't flawless. Getting the old crew back on the bridge of the Enterprise-D for one last adventure is the stuff of fan fiction, even if it did pretty much totally have the intended effect on me. The resolution to the Great Mystery of Jack Crusher—it's the Borg! Again!—prompts eye-rolling rather than terror or surprise. (Beverly says that Starfleet hadn't heard from the Borg in over a decade, as though parts of Picard season 1 and all of season 2 hadn't hinged on Borg nonsense).

 

I do think the Borg are deployed well here, for once, drawing on their history with Picard and the events of late-run Voyager. Teaming up the Borg with Changeling dissidents is a smart way to take advantage of the franchise's long and complex continuity and the number of overlapping existential threats that Starfleet had to deal with semi-regularly. And everything happening to Picard and Jack had its roots in First Contact and The Best of Both Worlds.

 

It doesn't change the fact that every season of Picard had a dramatic Borg reveal that lessened the impact of this particular Borg reveal, one that would have hit a lot harder if the Borg had been completely absent from the first two seasons. (Although, hey, maybe it played better for the considerable number of people who tuned in to watch this season but skipped the first two.)

 

That said, I went into this season with pretty low expectations. I was sure there would be fun moments. But I wasn't convinced that Picard's creative team could craft a reasonably coherent season arc that drew on the past of Picard-the-character and the TNG universe satisfyingly because the first two seasons have both mostly failed to do it. I was pleasantly surprised.

 

Although this was the final season of Picard, the show has left the door open to a continuing mission set in the 25th century (and yes, Raffi would still be there). Picard season 3 showrunner Terry Matalas is excited about an (as of now, not-picked-up) idea he calls Star Trek: Legacy, which continues the adventures of the Enterprise-G and other characters old and new. If that show could continue to strike the delicate balance that Picard finally found in its closing episodes, beam me up.

 

 

In the end, Picard became the fan-service TNG reunion it always should have been