Major spoilers for the third season of Star Trek: Picard are below.
Among the many sins of the 2002 movie Star Trek nemesis is the fact that the box office bombing destroyed the still nascent plans for a fifth and final The next generation outing, one that would have been designed similarly to a finale Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Land was for the original cast.
I have no reason to believe this movie is a great lost jewel Star Trek canon; it was written by the same people who wrote the horrible Nemesisand it was set up like sort of Look for Spock retreading about breathing new life into Data and restoring the status quo. But its absence meant a lack of closure for the TNG crew – a story that was not allowed to end on its own terms.
So when Patrick Stewart took the 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 until now.
The first two seasons of Star Trek: Picard failed to keep that promise. They were wildly uneven, and though their best moments were almost always involving others TNG characters, the show actively resisted becoming one TNG Restart. But the third season, also pre-emptively announced as his last season, finally every member of the TNG crew for one last ride (and Raffi would also be there).
I still had doubts about the first half of the season and criticism I support. Paramount sent screeners from the first six episodes and while those six episodes were in progress some things I liked Picard still struggled 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 of the other characters.
But in the final four episodes of the season, something unexpected happened: the show finally delivered on its original promise.
It was Data and Geordi who won me over, looking back. In both Nemesis And PicardIn the first season, we experience the loss of Data 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 eighth episode of the season finally thought to ask how Data is doing best friend would have experienced his loss, instead of focusing on how Data’s boss would have felt. LeVar Burton sells 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 Picard‘s first two seasons as various obnoxious Soong relatives, and the slimy registry Spiner uses to play those characters just isn’t very fun to watch.)
It is symbolic of something that last few Picard episodes do well where the movies never really caught on – every character has something to do. Gates McFadden is extremely underused in every single TNG movie, but there are times in all of them where the non-Picard, non-Data characters are present simply to add some body to a scene or to rattle off some Treknobabble. Picard is still first among his peers – after all, the show has his name on it – but ever the old one TNG characters are finally back on the board, Stewart and Picard both feel like more players in an ensemble again.
