Just a quick one this week to praise/review the third and final season of Picard. There may be spoilers after the jump, so proceed accordingly.
Let me start by saying that this season was so good, it makes me mad that the show runners wasted our time with those first two seasons. There are two reasons for this assessment: for starters, why couldn't they just give us this story to begin with, rather than the whole "organics vs AI" plot from season 1 and the whole "traveling to the past" mess from season 2? And the more salient question is, why did they feel the need to ignore or walk back so much of what happened in the first two seasons?
OK, season 1 is actually a little more relevant, since the plot of this season revolves around the Changelings from DS9 coming back for revenge and stealing Picard's old body, which, you may recall, he moved out of because he was diagnosed with a terminal illness... only it turns out he was misdiagnosed! It was the Borg all along, who left something in his DNA that he transmitted to his son Jack (by Dr Crusher!) and then to the whole of Starfleet because of the transporters.
(Yes, it's all a bit complicated and requires some knowledge of Trek lore)
Season 2, on the other hand, completely gets the shaft here. You'll recall that S2 ended with his friend Agnes Jurati becoming the new Borg Queen and sealing a treaty or something with the Federation, but none of that gets referenced here. We get the original Borg Queen, Alice Krige, and some comment about how nobody's heard from the Borg for 10 years, but nothing else. There is some comment about the 21st century Soong ancestor, which is probably how they brought back Data after his death in S1, but it's kinda glossed over.
But on to the good stuff. The term "fan service" gets thrown around a lot these days, usually as a pejorative, but Picard's third season is a parade of fan service that mostly feels well done and appropriate. We get the whole TNG crew, minus Tasha and Wesley (although he's mentioned obliquely), and not only that, we get the old Enterprise-D bridge, too. Complete with Majel Barrett Roddenberry's voice as the Computer - I got a little chill at the end of the last episode, when Riker says, "I miss that voice". We all do, buddy.
I was also shocked and pleased to see Michelle Forbes come back as Ro Laren. She and Picard hash out their lingering resentments from the end of her arc in S7 of TNG, when she rejoined the Maquis, and then she gets a heroic death helping the main cast escape. I was just pleased to see that she'd survived the massacre of the Maquis by the Dominion back in DS9, since I've just assumed she and Thomas Riker were among those killed (Riker especially, since he was in a Cardassian jail at the time).
Thanks to Jeri Ryan's presence in all three seasons, there were also copious references to Voyager, which also moved me more than I expected. It remains my least favorite show of the three main-timeline shows from that period, but it was nice to hear the Voyager theme come up every once in a while when they mentioned the ship or characters, and it was also nice to see Tim Russ return as Tuvok. I'm just disappointed that, with all the mentions of Admiral Janeway, they didn't get Kate Mulgrew back. But then, she and Jeri Ryan probably still aren't the best of friends after Voyager...
My one complaint, in terms of fan service, was that we didn't get any characters back from DS9. That said, those were probably the most difficult ones to fit in, for various reasons. Avery Brooks hasn't returned to Trek, and his character disappeared into the Wormhole at the end of that show. Odo, on the other hand, would have been a great guest star, except that René Auberjonois passed away a couple of years ago. Still, we got our DS9 catch-up in Lower Decks, so that'll have to do for now.
As far as the story, I appreciated how all the fan service was in service of wrapping up plot threads from TNG and its associated movies. That whole business about using Picard's Borg-infused DNA to assimilate everyone in the Fleet surreptitiously, via the transporters, made sense (you know what I mean) and led to the characters revisiting some of their iconic moments. It also allowed us to walk back things like Nemesis, which is also nice, since that movie was an epic downer.
The other thing I liked is how it justified modern Trek's insistence on the serialized storytelling model. That model hasn't really worked on Discovery or previous seasons of Picard, although in fairness, that's because those weren't very well-written. It's notable that Strange New Worlds, the other modern live-action Trek show, has returned to the episodic format, because that just fits better with a TV show, rather than trying to do it as a 10-hour (or in Disco's case, 13-hour) movie.
Picard S3, on the other hand, wouldn't have worked as a traditional 2-hour movie, because there really was just too much to explain and get into place for it to work. It also wouldn't have worked as an episodic show, since it was always meant to be a farewell to the character and crew. If I had to find an equivalent from the original TOS cast, I'd compare this to Star Trek 6: The Undiscovered Country, which was intended as their swan song. Given that it's my favorite of that set of movies, I can't think of higher praise.
So we draw the veil on Captain Picard, the crew of the Enterprise-D, and presumably on that era of Trek. I'm curious to see if Paramount goes ahead with a new Enterprise-based show using the crew at the end of this season, with Seven-of-Nine as captain and Jack Crusher/Picard as a lovable rogue, but somehow a part of me doesn't mind if it doesn't develop - I'd rather imagine their adventures and get a completely new era of Trek onscreen.
Though I'd still like to see a proper, in-universe farewell to Deep Space 9. So many characters and actors have moved on, but since it's given the Trek universe so much to play with (fleshing out the Ferengi, Cardassians and Trill, Section 31, the Changelings), it'd be great to see Dr Bashir, Dax, Kira, and as many others as possible in the flesh one more time.
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