Star Trek: Picard - Season 3 Review

This week on Sci-Fi Adventures, I'm finally crossing Star Trek: Picard off my list of things I need to get done. It's over, I've reviewed every episode and now I'm covering season 3 overall.

That makes this the third series I've covered in its entirety, after Babylon 5 and Star Trek: Discovery, though in this case it wasn't that much of a challenge considering it only has 30 episodes in total. That's less than half of Discovery's episode count, and that wasn't particularly long for a Star Trek series either.

Anyway, I'm reviewing season 3 in particular, though there will be SPOILERS here for the rest of the series.

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I saw a quote from Terry Matalas recently, about the other things he considered doing for the season, and one idea that got quite far was the idea of bringing back Naomi Wildman as a Fenris Ranger badass who was even more jaded than Seven. That just says it all about season 3 of Picard really. We actually could've had a 'renegade vigilante Naomi Wildman is going to far' story, if they'd had enough episodes to fit in another familiar legacy character, and enough money left over after building that familiar bridge set.

Star Trek: Picard could been about all kinds of things. It could've been about Picard's love of archaeology sending him on a fun science fiction adventure, with ancient temples and dune buggies. But what we got was a series about people dealing with the worst parts of their past in all the darkest and most vile places in the universe. Freecloud, M'Talas Prime, 2024 Los Angeles, the USS Titan-A, etc.

In season one Picard recruited a team of damaged killers and they discovered conspiracies corrupting everything they loved. Allies and acquaintances fell along the way and those who survived were changed by the horrors they'd endured.

So I can't say that season three is a massive departure in tone from what's come before in the series. It hasn't pulled a Star Trek: Discovery and radically reinvented itself. But new showrunner Terry Matalas has
clearly put his own stamp on it, which is obvious right from the start, when "IN THE 25TH CENTURY..." appears on screen in the Wrath of Khan font.

I didn't need to examine the season too carefully to detect that they'd taken a bit of inspiration from the movies this time, I mean every episode ends with the theme from First Contact. It seems like a sensible approach for a more cinematic series, even if the Star Trek: The Next Generation movies generally weren't the highlight of the franchise.

Each of the four movies are reflected here to a degree. Generations was about Picard dealing with being the last of his line while Data struggled with emotions. First Contact introduced the Borg Queen. Insurrection had the crew turning against Starfleet. And Nemesis was just kind of dark and miserable.

But to be fair, if season 3 does have aspects of Nemesis, they're from the version of the movie that existed before all the actual character scenes ended up on the cutting room floor. The writers were very aware that if they were giving all their money to the returning Next Generation cast they should also give them some decent dialogue. The season is as much about Picard connecting with his son as it is about Changeling infiltrators. It's about Riker dealing with the loss of his son and getting back into the world. It's about Geordi being reunited with Data. It's about Soji and Elnor coming to terms with... oh no, hang on, they weren't in this season.

Matalas wanted to include everyone, go full Infinity War, but the realities of time and budget meant that bringing back the entire Next Gen cast meant losing most of Picard's cast. Well, except for Raffi, who... did not get the best plot, and Laris, who appeared for a couple of minutes at the start. They didn't even film a scene of Picard being reunited with the love of his life at the end, I guess because they wanted to keep it vague whether the love of his life was Laris or Dr Crusher. Keeping it vague doesn't make anyone happy but at least it doesn't piss people off!

In the end season three was all about love, and not just Terry Matalas's obvious love for the characters. We saw Picard's love for Jack defeating Borg assimilation, Deanna's love for Riker leading her to him, and Beverly's love for her son motivating her to unleash the Enterprise's arsenal to surgically remove the cause of his infection. No peaceful coexistence or rehabilitation for these Borg, this time they're all dead.

I've seen too much Doctor Who to believe the Federation's greatest threat is defeated forever, plus we know that there are other Borg factions and dormant cubes out there, but this gave me some closure. It was confirmation that Voyager's Endgame really was the end of the Borg collective; their gigantic space empire reduced to a vengeful Queen who's forced to use Changelings as henchmen. (Because she apparently didn't have that thing the season two Borg Queen had that let her transfer her mind to Jurati and start a new collective from scratch.)

One of Star Trek's biggest questions was "Who would win, the Changelings or the Borg?", and after decades this episode finally provided the answer: they'd work together to defeat the Federation! We got an actual villain team-up this season and that is very rare for Star Trek. Though they mostly just take turns really. And they both want revenge, which is not rare for Star Trek. It's funny how the timeline just about works out for the Borg Queen to be getting vengeance on the era of Starfleet that her nemesis Admiral Janeway time-travelled back from.

Anyway, season three finishes the job of completing Picard's arc. Season one got an isolated and defeated Picard back into action, season two had him resolving the trauma that prevented him getting close to people, and now season three gives the man who once hated children a son. It's funny how much this season takes the sting out of the miserable Generations. The Enterprise-D wasn't a total loss after all, Picard's not the last of his line, Data does get real emotions, and Section 31 has taken Kirk's body for 'Project Phoenix'. Actually that last one is kind of weird, I'm not sure I like that at all.

There were also some other things I didn't like about season 3.


THE BAD

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I can't fault Picard for its visual continuity, which is strange because I'm usually pretty good at that and I've had a ton of practice lately on the other shows.

Picard's art department was filled with absolute heroes who imbued the sets with an authenticity that tied the series to the rest of the franchise. This is by far the most faithful of the live action series when it comes to designs and details, and it's very impressive. The Ferengi makeup especially stood out as being really good and the Enterprise-D bridge was so accurate that they even got the wood grain on the arch correct. That's just incredible attention to detail. The trouble is you can't bloody see any of it, the show's too dark!

I've never had reason to complain about the lighting in a Star Trek series before, so this is something new I get to do.

The Conscience of the King

The Original Series used a dramatic lighting style and wasn't afraid of putting an unmotivated light exactly across an actor's eyes or let parts of the set fall into shadow. Other TV shows were cautious about lighting the walls in bright colours, but not Star Trek! You could never tell if a room was actually painted blue, or if they'd just lit it that way to make the actors stand out. Though one thing was always certain: the actors did stand out.

Relics

20 years later, Star Trek: The Next Generation was a little less brave and a little more beige, and it settled on lighting scenes on the ship as brightly as an 80s episode of Doctor Who. Especially on the bridge.

But it had a comfortable look that made the Enterprise seem warm and inviting. This looks like a place that people would actually live and work in, which enhances both the sense of reality and the appeal of the fantasy. Also, you can still see the actors!

Picard, on the other hand, takes the increasingly darker lighting of the movies to their logical conclusion by turning the lights off and letting the characters stumble around in the dark. In fact, I found it implausible that any of them made it to their chairs without a flashlight.

It's a mystery to me why the season is so dark. Maybe it was made for people with better TVs than mine, maybe they were trying to avoid the glare from those ridiculously reflective floors, I don't know. But it just adds to the Titan-A's weirdly oppressive atmosphere.

Moving the action back to a traditional Star Trek setting was a good idea I reckon but it's also brought the series into the uncanny valley. I've spent enough time on Starfleet vessels to know that the vibe is wrong, no matter what the Jerry Goldsmith themes insist. They got new composers in this season and they worked their asses off on it, but you can't have adventurous majestic themes in an edgy story or else it comes across as ironic.

Though it's not just the huge shiny sets and the dim lighting that's throwing off the vibe. The crew have escaped the Roddenberry Box forbidding interpersonal conflict, which makes tomorrow's Enterprise feel more like Yesterday's Enterprise. I miss the competence, the discipline and the feeling that the crew belong to an organisation they can believe in and has their back. They're also very unprofessional in how they all keep screaming and dying episode after episode.

Plus one of them in particular is a bit of a dipshit.

Everyone loves Todd Stashwick as the grumpy Captain Liam Shaw, the dude gave one of the best performances of the series and turned a minor role into a memorable character. But I don't buy for a moment that this guy was promoted to first officer, never mind captain. If he'd been the engineer in charge of the refit who got dragged along and asserted his authority, I would've bought that in a heartbeat, but I can't imagine this guy ever boldly going where no one has gone before. At least not without his crew mutinying on him.

His presence on the Titan-A just added to the confusion of what kind of ship it is, because they wouldn't put him in command of one of Starfleet's best. In fact, he doesn't even expect his new Titan-A has the weaponry to take on a bounty hunter vessel, it's a real underdog. But it's also a 'Neo-Constitution' class, which implies it's a successor to the apex-tier Federation flagship Enterprise. In fact they even paint the name Enterprise on it at the end.

Plus visually the Titan-A is a kitbash made out of the 23rd century Enterprise refit saucer and the warp nacelles of the 25th century Stargazer, and it just looks bizarre. There's no explanation given in the series for why it's so blatantly anachronistic, or for why it came out of the garage looking like a completely different ship it's supposedly a refit of.

Plus the different elements aren't visually harmonious. It has a beautiful clean geometric saucer section with sharp angular bits welded to it haphazardly, and this clashes with an organically curvy engineering hull. It's lacking the sleekness and refinement you'd expect from a Star Trek hero ship, which only became more obvious when they cheekily parked it in the museum next to them.

In retrospect I think they should've just given the original Titan a bit of a makeover so it looks pretty and then used that. And then not called it the Enterprise at the end.

I know I've been whining a lot about the visuals so far... and I'm going to keep doing that, as another thing that bothered me this season was M'talas Prime.

Don't get me wrong, it was a great looking set, but it got kind of absurd when Raffi spent the first half of the season walking back and forth from La Sirena to the same street. Everyone she needed to see, from crime bosses to her ex-husband were all here. Of course they could've been on opposite sides of the city, maybe the set had been dramatically redressed each time, I couldn't tell. All I saw was the same set.

Though I don't think more locations would've saved Raffi's double-secret undercover adventure as the only part of it that came close to getting my interest was her banter with Worf. To be fair there was quite a bit of that, and their scenes show that the actors were not the problem here.

In fact, part of the problem might be me, as I was rolling my eyes at the screen from the start. Don't get me wrong, I love series like Alias, 24 and Agents of SHIELD, but here it felt like childish fan fiction or a William Shatner novel. The kind of stories I daydreamed about when I was 13 and bored.

And what the hell was that line about Section 31 being a critical part of Starfleet Intelligence, Worf?

Every season of Picard is about the heroes fixing a subverted Starfleet. In season one they uncover the Zhat Vash infiltrators and end the synth ban. In season two they avert Q's evil Confederation. But in season three they fail, because Section 31 is still there, doing their thing.

Section 31 can't be stopped because they're a fun band of misfits with their own movie, so they get to carry on genociding alien races with engineered viruses, and torturing prisoners (including Riker I guess!) as an actual department of Starfleet. Also, when Picard and Crusher learn what Section 31 Starfleet did to Vadic to turn her into a radical terrorist, they decide that the best thing to do is murder her in captivity.

I think future Star Trek showrunners should be strapped to a chair and forced to watch a bunch of important episodes before they're allowed to write for the show, starting with The Corbomite Maneuver. That's the one where we learn that the Federation has actual ideals and tries to stick to them. Though honestly you can get that from most episodes, it's not exactly a secret. The franchise is kind of famous for its morality plays and messages.

Okay I'm bored of complaining, here are some of the things I liked about season 3.


THE GOOD

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I've mentioned how much I dislike some of the series' modern designs, but I was so happy to see the return of ships I recognised.

Not in a 'Hey, it's a thing I know!' kind of way, more of a 'Hey, the thing I know is still recognisable!' kind of way. I've been burned so many times by Discovery and Strange New Worlds that it was such a genuine relief to find that the VFX team just left things alone... for the most part. The Constitution-class ship at the museum was altered a tiny bit, but it's not actually the Enterprise so I'm fine with that.

Though I was legitimately scared the series was going to blow some of them up. I mean this season killed off Ro and Shelby so why not Voyager as well?

Despite all the edginess in the live-action footage, I think this season has done a better job than Discovery and Strange New Worlds of recapturing the feel of Star Trek's space scenes. Sure the Enterprise-D of all ships swooped around inside a Borg Cube, but the starships generally looked great and had some real weight to them. Which is good as there's a lot more cat-and-mouse spaceship action here than in previous seasons. Proper space battles where each strike changes the course of battle. In addition to all the other violence the series always had.

I also felt that the series got more use out of Guinan's 10 Forward bar set this season, even though the character herself never showed up. Episode often slowed down to let the characters talk. Not just about tactics and conspiracies but about their relationships and philosophies. Okay maybe not that last one, it's way more about emotions than ideas, but I can't complain.

I did complain about Discovery's fourth season pulling the same thing, but that's because it did a really awkward job of it by comparison. It was the execution I had a problem with and this has much more engaging dialogue. It never loses sight of the fact that it's supposed to be about Picard connecting with a son he never knew he had, and even though the reason Jack was hidden from him and raised to be a gun-running conman is extremely Picard (his dad has too many enemies), it generally handled the storyline well I thought.

Even the 'love conquers all' resolution where Picard talks Jack out of being assimilated is satisfying if you look at it as paying off his evolution in season 1 (Picard is reborn as a Borg-proof machine) and season 2 (Picard gets over his issues that stopped him getting close to people).

The series might have forgotten about Narek and Soji and Jurati and that big hole in space, but in the end it remembered what was truly important to it...

...the carpets. And the Star Trek: The Next Generation crew.

The third season was building up to getting to original crew back together on the original bridge of their original ship and I was hyped for it. Just as importantly, they were hyped for it too. Sure I would've liked to have the original lighting back as well, this looks incredibly washed out and dim, but they spent so much money on making this set perfect that I'm not surprised they didn't have the money left over for light bulbs.

It likely also saved a lot of money to introduce the Next Gen characters gradually over the season instead of having them all in every episode, but it was also the wise thing to do. And the series generally handled all of them with respect, giving each of them some time in the spotlight. Sure Picard and Crusher were about to execute a prisoner and Riker admits to betraying Starfleet and his friends to save his wife, but those scenes went by so quick who can even remember them! The conflict between characters fades away as the season goes on until it's basically just a team of competent heroes doing their thing, just like back in the olden days.

In fact the season was pretty good at leading to satisfying resolutions, especially compared to the mess we got last time. Instead of dragging the story out, the writers split it into smaller arcs, each with a dramatic payoff that was often more satisfying than the setup.

Speaking of conclusions...


CONCLUSION

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While the rest of Star Trek was trapped in a reimagined past, Picard promised to be the first series in 20 years to push the timeline forward and tell a story about what happens next. What happens after the Dominion war, after Voyager comes back, after Data dies, after the Romulan star explodes. In a lot of ways this is exactly what I wanted. A series actually dealing with the events of Deep Space Nine and Next Gen! A continuation of threads!

Though the thing I really want from Star Trek, from anything actually, is the feeling that the people making it understand the universe better than I do. They know its lore, they know its soul, they know its ideals. I want each series to hit a baseline of consistency and believability that allows me to properly buy into the fantasy.

Well, this season definitely scores highly on the 'lore' side. In fact it flaunts its references, filling rooms full of familiar objects, and shipyards full of familiar ships. I don't like all the choices Terry Matalas made, but he definitely comes across as someone who has bookmarked Memory Alpha. The 'soul' part on the other hand, I'm not so sure about. This season's less Star Trek: Titan and more Star Trek: Titans; it's got that "Fuck Batman!" energy of the gritty DC TV show. It's like someone took all the darkest episodes of TNG and DS9 and boiled them down to their nasty core.

In fact, I was surprised when I looked up the response to the season and found that fans really liked it.

Though you know what, I think I'd recommend it too. Not because I think people will love the shocking deaths of characters they like, or because Trek has finally grown up to the point where the heroes can decapitate people in public and get away with it. I'd recommend it because it gives the heroes a much better ending than they got in Nemesis.

Back when Picard first started I was worried that the series was going to be about the final days of a defeated hero whose life had fallen apart since the optimistic ending of the last movie. It's kind of a tradition for legacy characters. However, Picard went in a different direction. Actually I'm lying, the dude isolated himself in a vineyard for years after a tragedy and then died. But then Picard went in a different direction, with the character even getting a son!

Retelling the TNG episode Bloodlines except this time the 23-year-old criminal actually is his son could've gone badly, but after all this time I'm just happy for the guy. Picard finally got what he didn't know he wanted. Plus Data got to finish his journey and become human, kind of, which I like a lot better than his death in season 1. In fact, Data and Picard kind of met halfway as they were both reincarnated as human synths. Oh and the Enterprise-D got resurrected as well, and Seven became captain of the Enterprise-G!

Everything about the ending is reassuring you that the Next Gen crew (and some of the Voyager crew) are doing alright and they're happy. You'd think that would make it seem too saccharine and fairy tale, but their lives haven't dramatically changed for the most part. They're just back in touch and playing cards together. This is where you'd want these characters to be at the end of their arcs and it's really satisfying, because it feels earned.

The series sticks the landing emotionally and that's enough for me to give Picard a thumbs up overall.


My top three episodes:

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1. Surrender (9)
2. The Last Generation (8)
3. The Bounty (8)

Personally, I thought seasons 1 and 2 both started incredibly strong before slipping considerably in the middle. This time though the season was better at endings, with each of the arcs having a strong resolution. It's a real relief to be able to put the show's finale so high in the ranking, considering it replaces Nemesis as the final send off for the Next Generation crew.


Bottom three episodes:

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8. Disengage (7)
9. The Next Generation (7)
10. Dominion (6)

My least favourite episodes tended to be the ones that put Raffi on M'talas Prime, because I really can't stress enough how little I cared about that plot. Raffi and Worf hanging out on La Sirena was fine, but the rest of it didn't work for me.


Next time on Star Trek:

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Do I want Terry Matalas' Star Trek: Legacy? Not really, not if it's going to be more of this. I'd love a Captain Seven series with Sydney, Raffi and Jack, but not if it's going to be a dark cinematic action thriller where Naomi Wildman is the Punisher. Matalas was the right person to give the Next Gen crew their send off, but I don't think it's in him to give us the next generation Star Trek: The Next Generation.

Here's something else I don't want from the new shows: a big dramatic moment where an entire fleet's systems get taken over. I know it's only fair if every series gets a turn, but it's really played out at this point. I mean Picard even did it twice.

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Next on Sci-Fi Adventures, I'm going to be taking a bit of a break. I've got a lot of stuff to do at the moment, so I'm going to have to leave my TV reviews paused until I have fewer demands on my time.

I'll be back though. I may have ran out of Disco and Picard, but I'm sure I can find something to write about.