Even as Lewton Bus’s resident Star Trek dweeb, I’ve loathed about 95% of Star Trek: Picard to this point. My feelings over the past few years are well documented. The first season was a mishmash of terrible storytelling, a plot stolen straight from the Mass Effect game series – right down to minor details like the prophetic vision being in the same color – and a cast of immensely forgettable side characters with minimal, if any, distinct qualities. It also involved a doomsday plot involving sky portals and sentient robots who were brought to our galaxy by Data’s daughter or something. It makes less sense the more you try to think about it.
The second season is somehow even worse, merging First Contact with The Voyage Home in a story involving Q using the last of his powers to help Picard get over his dead mommy issues – something never mentioned once in seven seasons of The Next Generation and four subsequent movies – in order to get laid. When in doubt, smash the “Mommy/Daddy Issues” glass for Instant Character Depth. It was a waste of likely our final John de Lancie appearance as Q (his performance is the one redeeming part of that season) in service of a story involving alternate timelines where Picard is a mass murderer slaveholder with a trophy room of skulls, Borg Queen-related time travel, and a second doomsday plot where the Borg join the Federation in order to do… something to prevent a massive trans-warp space thing from swallowing the galaxy.
Oh and Wesley Crusher shows up to meet the clone daughter of Adam Soong (ancestor of Data’s creator played by Brent Spiner) and kidnap her in his windowless van recruit her to be a Traveler like him. Out of context, it’s an abysmally written, directed and performed scene. In context it’s all of that, but also complete and utter nonsense with no connection to any overarching story outside of “seeing things I recognize.” Sometimes I feel bad for how much Trekkies hated Wesley Crusher’s role on The Next Generation and the bullying of Wil Wheaton it inspired. This performance removes much of that regretfulness and continues my belief that Wil Wheaton, the adult, should be bullied as hard as Wil Wheaton the child was.
All this to say I had little hope from a writing standpoint that season three of this show would somehow turn it all around. I did, however, have some hope that the promised Next Generation reunion would give Picard a little bit of desperately needed juice. My dreams of a marginally tolerable hour of television were almost instantaneously crushed when the opening sequence of “The Next Generation” involves Beverly Crusher, now a loner on the outskirts of Federation space, killing two aliens with a pump action phaser shotgun. If there’s one thing I needed more of from the Star Trek franchise, it’s brutality and cold blooded murder from the kind doctor from Next Generation. At least this time the writers gave Beverly Crusher something to do instead of being a glorified extra like she was in the Next Generation film series, I guess.
Things don’t get much better from there on, with Crusher sending an emergency signal to Picard via his old Enterprise-D era ComBadge and Picard recruiting Will Riker to help translate the cryptic message. If there’s one element of this episode that sings, it’s Jonathan Frakes’ return as Riker. He appeared in a few episodes of the first season and his effortless charm and instant “pop” on a character level were a stark contrast to every one of the new characters from that season. Here he fits back into that role like a glove, bringing that genial, mischievous energy his character had that played off Picard’s aloof, stolid demeanor so well for fifteen years.
After translating the message – involving some nonsense code breaking methodology developed during Picard’s time as Locutus (remember “Best of Both Worlds”? The writers of Star Trek: Picard sure do) – Riker and Picard plot to use their status as veteran Starfleet officers to hijack a starship (remember Search for Spock?) and shuttle off to find Crusher. The target is the latest version of the USS Titan, the ship with the same namesake as the ship Riker captained during Star Trek Nemesis. The introduction of the Titan might be one of the most confusing sequences of the episode, as the shot selection and staging are clearly riffing on the introduction of the USS Enterprise in Star Trek: The Motion Picture and Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. The score even chimes in with Jerry Goldsmith’s iconic theme for the Enterprise from Motion Picture.1 We’re then told it’s the Titan, which makes me wonder if the people making this show know how visual references and leitmotifs work.
On the Titan they meet up with the ship’s first officer Seven of Nine, now going by her human name Annika Hansen because the captain is a meanie pants and is racist against the Borg. Picard and Riker have dinner with Captain Shaw in order to try and convince him to take them to the edge of Federation space, under the guise of a field test of the new ship, so they can hatch their shuttle theft plan. Shaw refuses, insulting Picard and Riker for being old and weak, all without skipping a beat of his dinner enjoyment. Shaw even makes sure to mock Picard’s wine business. Of all the minor and secondary characters Picard has introduced, Shaw is one of the first to have any sort of notable personality that lingers in my mind in any way. He’s also an unrepentant asshole with a clear moral code, which is something I always enjoy from a Star Trek antagonist.
If there’s one thing I’ll grant “The Next Generation,” it’s that the humor lands far more often than your average episode of Picard. Shaw’s final insult is providing quarters to Jean-Luc and Riker that is merely a crew room with a bunk bed for them to share. The smash cut to these two old men lying on their bunks like children is probably the best joke this show has pulled off in twenty-one episodes. Similarly, a joke where Picard insults the speeches at an upcoming Starfleet event only for Riker to reveal he’s one of the speakers was at least chuckle inspiring. Last season the jokes were almost all just winky references to The Voyage Home, a funnier, better written piece of Star Trek in every possible way.
Long story short, Seven does a quiet coup of the Titan to take Picard and Riker to their coordinates, likely facing discipline and court-martial for disobeying orders from Captain Shaw. Before Shaw can take back over command, Picard and Riker have stolen a shuttle and made it to Crusher’s location. It’s starting to become weird how often these new Star Trek shows have relied on mutiny as a narrative device given how rarely that was ever part of any of the preceding series. Continued evidence that none of these writers have good ideas.
The primary thing that frustrates me about Picard is the artistic cowardice of it all. The first season involves Picard dying, but then his consciousness is transferred to a robot body that is also an old man with no cybernetic enhancements. The second season does nothing with that concept, instead redirecting to a time travel plot where none of the characters build on the prior season. This season appears to be doing the same, seemingly ignoring Seven of Nine’s arc from last season where she came to terms with her humanity, opened herself up to Raffi so they could become lovers, and joined Starfleet. Now she’s immediately throwing it all away because she doesn’t feel like she fits in, her girlfriend dumped her and she doesn’t feel comfortable as a former Borg in Starfleet. It’s all slapdash and pointless, hitting the big red reset button each season because they don’t know how to develop characters. Even Picard himself suffers from this, as last season’s arc about moving on from the past and accepting love from his Romulan girlfriend is cast aside in order to go on one last adventure down nostalgia lane.
Speaking of Raffi, there’s a subplot involving her now working as an undercover spy in the dregs of society to try and find information about a rumored superweapon stolen from Starfleet laboratories. Again, the writers of Picard are fundamentally incapable of creating personal stakes for the characters or political or societal stakes that don’t involve doomsday scenarios. It’s becoming increasingly annoying because there are close to a thousand episodes of Star Trek where the stakes seem small, but are compelling and substantial nonetheless because they’re rooted in their importance to the character. This episode even gives us a “Death Star firing on Alderaan” moment where the superweapon is tested, revealing that it’s basically just a massive version of the gun from Portal right down to the orange and blue color of the two pathways, sucking an arena-like structure right down into the earth and pouring it out of a nearby hole in the sky.
I was perfectly ready to write “The Next Generation” off as yet another bad episode of Star Trek: Picard. I’d been burned before, so touching this stove was my own fault and I should have known better than to expect something good at this point. Nothing prepared me for the final scene of the episode, however, involving the reveal of Beverly Crusher’s 20 or so year old son from about the same time as her abandonment of society. Jack Crusher is strongly hinted as being Picard’s son. The episode was already riffing2 on Wrath of Khan and Search for Spock, but if this show’s idea of character building is just doing the “Captain has a secret son with a former flame” thing we’ve already seen before they’ll have somehow surpassed my low expectations for this show.
