I should start by noting that I am probably, in the opinion of most fans, a Star Trek Casual. I grew up in a time when there was a lot of of Star Trek on TV – three shows at once! – and absorbed a lot of the stuff by both osmosis and having family members who were super into the various adventures chronicled in The next generation, Deep Space NineAnd Traveler. Personally, I had a great time watching these shows, but I was mostly just along for the ride. That’s how I would describe my level of investment in Star Trek: along for the ride and happy to be here.
From this point of view, the third and final season of Star Trek: Picard was a wild success. As we reshape the floundering series to be a full one The next generation reunion read as an obvious Hail Mary play to go out with a bang (and maybe an apology for Star Trek: Nemesis), it managed to do so while remaining serious throughout and turning things around by not only bringing back the cast of The next generationbut by doing so in what turned out to be an ode to all of ’90s Trek.
Personally I had a great time. My Trek knowledge is largely built around key touchpoints; the big fan-favorite things everyone knows about Trek in general and The next generation in particular. Q, The Borg, “make it so”, all that stuff. Picard plays a tune just for me. It also sadly ends a lot of things in a narrative dead end: sending away not just the characters, but much of what they represented.
[Ed. note: This post contains spoilers for the end of Picard.]
Picard ended up making a mistake that big franchises often make when their stewards’ main interest is playing the hits: it shrinks its world by linking everything back to its legacy heroes. The endgame literally makes nostalgia both the weapon that threatens to destroy the galaxy and the only thing that can save it: the Borg, through Picard’s son Jack Crusher (Ed Speleers), have found a way to splice themselves into the genome of every Starfleet member who is using a teleporter. The few immune? Elderly. Namely, The next generation form.
Photo: Trae Patton/Paramount Plus
This is the widest and funniest way Picard has traded The next generation‘s legacy as a thought-provoking show that laid the foundations for an entire era of spectacle and sentimental science fiction, the former spectacularly airheaded, and the latter just real enough to appeal to those not in favor of narrative cohesion. Picard is everywhere, brandishing Star Trek’s most iconic enemies of the 90s in the Changelings and The Borg, while completely eschewing what made them interesting ideological foils for Jean-Luc Picard and the Federation he represents.
If Picard digs into his initial adversaries, the changeling Vadic (Amanda Plummer) and her ship’s crew The shrikethe series reveals that she and her cohort are different from the Changelings of the Deep Space Nine era, enhanced by brutal experiments by Federation scientists that Picard was unaware of. It’s a huge moral crisis, especially for a character positioned as the moral center of Starfleet, and it’s all dropped rather quickly to shed Vadic in favor of the real threat: a resurgent Borg, this time represented almost entirely by the Borg Queen, because drones are few and far between.
Not only is this much less complex than the Changeling Dilemma, it is – to briefly make a claim in a senseless war that has been waged ever since Star Trek: First Contact was released – even more contrary to the entirety of the Borg raison d’être than they’ve ever been. The main reason I can keep this up is simply due to the fact that Picard nothing stops. It’s a pretty ill-considered show when it comes to thoughts that aren’t about the Next generation cast members say nice things to each other and save everyone from certain disaster one last time.
In “The Last Generation” Picard set up a new crew that could carry on the legacy of The next generation further – a curious idea, given that Star Trek: Discovery apparently exists for that purpose, Strange new worlds is here to put a modern spin on Roddenberry’s scoop Star TrekAnd Prodigy And Lower decks break up Star Trek’s mission statement for younger audiences and comedy, respectively.
If the speculative “Star Trek: Legacy” – which may only exist in Picard‘s coda – if it were to be realized, it’s hard to feel particularly inspired about where it could go. Finally, Picard took us on a great ride, but it also definitively asserted that Jean-Luc Picard and friends were the most important thing in this era of Trek. They played the hits big and loud, and even I, a Trek casual, could smile and sing along. I’m just wondering if anyone remembers what brought us here to begin with.
Picard now streaming on Paramount Plus.