Star Trek: Picard is something of a curious show. While it’s always great to see Patrick Stewart in, well, anything, this particular series seems designed to connect Picard more broadly to the Star Trek universe in ways that Star Trek: The Next Generation never did. It could be namedropping or just popping characters or concepts from different Trek series into Picard‘s overall narrative. At the same time, the series is working for the most part with new characters. Picard is not above bringing back characters from past series as nostalgic reminders to longtime fans, but it also seems intent on keeping those character appearances to a minimum, the one big exception being a character from a completely different Trek series.
Still, Picard does have a longtime nemesis in the form of the godlike entity Q. And yes, the second season would bring back John de Lancie’s Q for one last test of the man he calls mon capitaine.
It is now some time after the end of season one. Picard (Stewart) seems to have regained his standing in Starfleet. The rest of his season one crew is scattered around. Raffi (Michelle Hurd) is back in uniform while the young Romulan she took under her wing, Elnor (Evan Evagora), is a newly graduated Cadet from Starfleet Academy. Dr. Jurati (Alison Pill) is finishing up some work with the androids the crew dealt with in season one. Chris Rios (Santiago Cabrera) is a Starfleet captain himself again, and he and Jurati are looking into a subspace anomaly. Seven of Nine (Jeri Ryan) is doing freelance good guy work on Rios’s old ship. After a visit Picard makes to his old friend Guinan (Whoopi Goldberg), he learns that something in the anomaly is calling him by name. He joins a massive fleet there with the other characters only to find something odd emerge from the anomaly: a Borg vessel that seems to be requesting permission to join the Federation. As the Borg Queen, face covered, beams aboard Picard’s ship and seems to be assimilating the entire fleet while deflecting every attack sent her way, Picard orders the ship to self-destruct.
But then something happens. Instead of the ship exploding, Picard finds himself back on his family chateau and confronted by longtime pain-in-the-ass Q (de Lancie). It would seem Picard is now in an alternate timeline, one where the Federation never existed but was instead a xenophobic Confederation where Picard has a trophy room full of alien skulls, many of them established Trek alien characters. Picard remembers the way the world used to be, and so too do Seven (here as the president of the Confederation), Raffi, Elnor, Rios, and Jurati. The group can fix the timeline, but they’ll need to do some time traveling to do it. And the only being with the computational skills necessary to pull that off is the Borg Queen, and she’s not only the last of her kind but due to be publicly executed within 24 hours. Something went wrong in the past. Can Picard and his friends fix it?
I will say, as I watched this season, it struck me that there was and there wasn’t a lot going on. Much of the drama for Picard is an inward journey, incidents that connect to his childhood with a seemingly cold father and a mentally ill mother. He’s also someone who, perhaps, could find love if he allowed himself to. But the real issue is Q. Why did he do what he did? He seems different this time. His powers seem lessened, and he was actually physically aggressive with Picard in ways that seem uncharacteristic, even to the other characters. As for the others, Raffi is mourning a loss, Seven is dealing with a life where she was never a Borg drone, Rios finds possible love with a doctor in the 21st century, and Jurati has to confront her own loneliness while dealing with a Borg Queen that herself is lonely without a collective’s voice in her head.
Ultimately, the ending makes this a story that only Picard can deal with as it is more about his own traumas than anything else, and loneliness is a theme running throughout the season. There are still connections to the wider world of Star Trek, including Brent Spiner as yet another member of the Soong family, though with a clever way to integrate season one castmember Isa Briones into the story when her Soji leaves the narrative after the first episode of the season. If anything, the season actually expands a bit on the people Gary Seven from the Original Series represented in ways I was not expecting, and Picard ends the season in a better place than where he began it, and he began it in a pretty decent place all things being equal. Q’s final motivation seems to be a bit of a left turn compared to what he was up to for most of the season, but he ended up feeling more like the “classic” Q that de Lancie plays so well. That said, Q’s the sort of character whose tone and tenor doesn’t seem to match the sort of storytelling that Picard is going for. I wasn’t surprised by much of what was happening here, but I was still mostly pleased by it, and there is still a massive threat on the horizon, one that it would seem will require Picard to at least consult his original crew as they’re already all promised to be making a return appearance for what may be the series’s third and final season. As for this one, it was fun, but it probably could have been cut down by an episode or two.
Grade: B
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