Star Trek: Picard - Season 2 Review, Part 3

This week on Sci-Fi Adventures, it's the dramatic conclusion of Star Trek: Picard's second season! I've written about three stories this time:

• 2-08 - Mercy
• 2-09 - Hide and Seek
• 2-10 - Farewell

Plus I wrote a little bit about the season overall at the end. I'm using the past tense here because I put my thoughts down right after watching each episode, which was something like a year ago now. I admit, I could've been quicker getting this published. Still, I'm doing better with this than I did with my Babylon 5 reviews, which were about 24 years late.

There are going to be SPOILERS here for the whole season and earlier Treks as well, but nothing that was released past 5th May 2022. So Strange New Worlds season 1 will be entirely unspoiled. For now.

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Note: I rate episodes on a 1-9 scale, with 5 being where my attention starts to fail.

Star Trek: Picard - Season 2
2-08	Mercy		7
Episode: 018 | Writer: Cindy Appel & Kirsten Beyer | Director: Joe Menendez | Air Date: 21-Apr-2022 Guinan and Picard are questioned in an FBI basement by an agent holding evidence that they're aliens. Q arrives due to Guinan's call and clearly isn't happy to see her, but she at least learns that he's dying. Then she sends a psychic message to Picard to give him the clue he needs to figure out why the agent is so driven. This allows him to help the guy understand his traumatic childhood memory of Vulcans, and he repays the favour by letting them go. Also he got fired. Meanwhile Raffi and Seven go after Borg Jurati and find her munching on car batteries. She kicks their asses and then goes off to visit Soong to make an evil alliance. Also Rios and Teresa have chat back on La Sirena, and Kore leaves home. Overall I thought this episode was a bit of a step up from the last few episodes, but it's definitely a mixed bag. On the positive side it feels like the plot has taken a step forward and we learned a whole bunch of stuff! We learned that Q is dying, though not why, we learned why the Europa Mission fixes the future (something they bring back apparently fixes the climate), and we learned why Soong gets a statue. But then there's a whole bunch of negatives too, like Guinan's weird psychic message to Picard, giving him the crucial clue needed to talk the FBI guy around. That was just weird. Plus there's Raffi's unnecessary flashback to give Elnor's actor some work, there's the Vulcans doing a survey mission in the woods right next to where people live, and perhaps worst of all, Soong can borrow an elite special forces combat squad any time he wants! Or is that a thing rich people can do and I'm just naïve? Also the interrogation does pay off how sloppy they've been as time travellers but doesn't seem to serve any purpose of its own. FBI guy has an epiphany, gets fired and then lets them out. It's yet another irrelevant complication to pad out the season even more. If the series had a little more of an episodic format this interruption would've been fine, if this was DS9 or Babylon 5 or even The Mandalorian, but it has no business being in a 10 hour movie. Having Picard help someone else work through their childhood issues did fit the season's themes to be fair, though it's a bit weird that the FBI guy just let him put his hand on his face like that. I guess his need to know the truth about his X-Files adventure as a kid was greater than his fear of aliens. On the plus side I was grateful for the opportunity to see more of Young Guinan as the actress has really won me over now, and seeing Picard and Guinan working together is always great. We never got enough of that in Next Gen. Also it did amuse me when I realised they'd actually recorded what Rios said when he was detained by ICE, as this has to be the first time I've seen a series where a frustrated time traveller tells the whole truth knowing that no one will believe him... and then someone believes him. Oops. Overall I have to give this crew a very low score for their mission so far. I mean Raffi and Seven had the element of surprise and ranged weapons, and the two of them still couldn't take down one unarmed woman. To be fair she does have super strength now. I did like the scenes of the two characters just talking though, which is good because that's mostly all they did. I'm not sure where Raffi's issue with being manipulative came from, I must have missed her demonstrating that trait, but it's nice that Seven's arc hasn't been lost under all the other threads that are going on. Like Rios and Teresa just hanging out on La Sirena and chatting for the whole episode for example. Everyone's being locked away from the main plot again, presumably due to COVID reasons, but the actors definitely put in the work here. Plus Allison Pill is killing it as the Borg Queen, playing a confident villain with none of Jurati's goofy neurotic energy. She's not the first blonde cyborg in a red dress I've seen conspire with a famous scientist in order to destroy humanity, but she's pretty good. The Borg Queen's playing a bit of a dangerous game here, deliberately setting up the future where the Borg are made extinct in order to get a 'head start' on assimilating the galaxy. If I were her I'd probably stay well clear of anything that could create a Confederation future. Also the Borg are already well established in the 21st century so she's not getting much of a head start on anything. And Soong is just a dick! Q gets his daughter to walk out on him so now he's knowingly screwing over the whole planet just to have a legacy? Wow, and I thought running over an old man was bad. He's the worst Soong ever. Overall, this is another episode where the slick production, character scenes and a bit of good dialogue managed to keep it entertaining for me despite its flaws. I'm really disappointed that I'm still seeing scenes from the trailer though. I figured it had given me a glimpse at all the crazy things happening during the first three or four episodes, but I'm eight episodes in now - which means I've known that Jurati was going to run across cars in a red dress for months! It's not just the lack of surprises that's bothering me, it's how little has actually happened in the series. The biggest problem with the storytelling this season is their lack of a story to tell. I've been putting Picard season 2 up against Star Trek: The Next Generation season 2 one episode at a time, which means Mercy is up against fan favourite A Matter of Honor (the one where Riker serves as first officer on Klingon ship). A Matter of Honor is one of those episodes that everyone likes and Mercy really isn't, so surely this has to be a win for Next Gen? Honestly though... I think I like the Picard episode just a little bit more. Maybe it's just because it has the unfair advantage of being something that's brand new to me, I don't know.
2-09	Hide and Seek		7
Episode: 019 | Writer: Matt Okumura & Chris Derrick | Director: Michael Weaver | Air Date: 28-Apr-2022 Château Picard comes under siege by Borg-enhanced mercenaries hired by Soong and the crew have to survive and retake La Sirena from the Borg Queen. Rios is injured so he's beamed to safety along with Teresa, while Picard and Tallinn escape into the tunnels and Seven and Raffi fight in the house. Raffi and Seven make it to the ship and team up with an emergency combat hologram that resembles Elnor, but Seven is wounded. Jurati is able to use the opportunity to wrestle some control back from the Borg Queen and convinces her that malevolence is futile, so she restores Seven's Borg implants and flies off with their ship. Meanwhile Picard remembers his mother's suicide and is saved by Rios beaming back at the last moment. This episode was a real step up from the last few I thought, mostly because the characters had a goal more interesting than 'get everyone into a party so one person can talk to an astronaut for a bit' and achieving their goal took some work. Everyone splits up again, so the story features three or four threads: Rios ends up back in his own storyline again after getting shot and being benched, which means he gets to repeat his signature move of no-selling a shoulder wound. Just like he did when Picard first met him! He's back with Teresa for most of the episode, but the two of them don't get much to do here. She basically just tries to convince him to stay before he beams away to rescue Picard. But he does get to make responsible choices and be a big damn hero in the end so the plot worked for me. Their story could go either way at this point. Maybe he decides that he was always meant to stay in the past with her, or maybe Teresa will travel to the future with him to live in a world of miracles. All I know is that it just got significantly more difficult for them to escape this time period now that their time machine's flown off. Maybe this is one of those stories where they all stay behind and live out their lives in the past, while also changing the future so that they never left. It happens sometimes. Seven and Raffi's mission to retake La Sirena involved a lot of fighting in the dark, but it wasn't hard to spot the brutal knife murder! Picard's got a weird tone for a Star Trek series. The two of them ultimately decide that this is a 'desperate last stand' kind of situation and then attack a squad of semi-assimilated special forces operatives by rushing right at them in the open. Armed with just a corkscrew and an ice pick. Did the guys they killed not drop weapons?  Both of them surviving their suicide run was kind of absurd, but what happened next was worse. I was fine with Seven being mortally wounded and saved by the Borg Queen after a change of heart, that all worked for me. The trouble I have is that healing her gut wound apparently required putting implants into her head and hand that look exactly like what was left after the Voyager crew took away the worst of her previous implants. I mean c'mon. Seriously? Seriously? I get that the point was for Seven to accept her Borg implants as being part of who she is, so if she looked different it wouldn't work, but the way the series chose to do it doesn't work either. It killed the whole scene for me, I don't buy it at all. Oh also Jurati managed to wirelessly hack into La Sirena with her brain, lock out the systems, and create an ECH of Elnor, which is kind of convenient... especially as he's apparently using a mobile emitter from the future. But I like Elnor slashing people up with a sword so I'll let them off. Finally Raffi sees an Elnor ghost that's some use to them! I really hope we get the real Elnor back after all this though. Jurati too! Though obviously it'd have to be Stargazer Jurati not Borg Queen Jurati, because her condition seems pretty permanent at this point. Seven and Raffi betting the galaxy on the Borg Queen's word that she's changed is kind of a risk, in fact it's pretty ridiculous, but its Star Trek levels are off the charts. Though I suppose they already know it won't break the future at least, assuming they've put 2 and 2 together and realised that this is the Borg Queen they met on the Stargazer (the one that Seven was adamant they shouldn't trust). The presence of the Jurati Queen in the future means that whatever happens here always happened. So it was totally fine to kill all those Borg special forces and everyone can relax! There won't be any butterflies. Fans had suspected Jurati was the mysterious Queen from the moment she appeared, as the trailer kept drawing a link between them, but it was resolved in a satisfying way here I reckon. A Borg collective that saves people and loses no fights because it makes no enemies is a great idea, and I love that Picard is actually on its way to giving us peace between them and the Federation. That's the kind of development I wanted to see in a sequel to the Berman era. We're seeing things change and old enemies becoming friends. And we already know from Lower Decks that teaching the Borg Queen empathy is how you 100% the test. Does it make sense that a Borg Queen who has assimilated billions of minds over thousands of years would be swayed by just one person after a single conversation? Personally I think it does, because she's disconnected from those billion minds and in a collective of two right now. Well, more like a collective of one by the end, as the two consciousnesses merge to become someone new. A Borg Tuvix. Finally there's the Picard and Tallinn plot, which is kind of a retread of the flashbacks we got in Monsters. In fact the episode made me wait half a hour before I got to see anything new, and the end of the story is pretty much what you'd expect. Really this didn't deserve to be stretched over two episodes like this. I did like how they made it work with Picard's vision of his mother in Where No One Has Gone Before though, which is kind of important seeing how that's the only time we've ever seen her before!   The good thing about this plot is how Picard's memories are being jogged by the tunnels they're running through, so it feels natural that he'd be thinking back to his mother now, even though they're busy with a battle to save the future. The bad thing is that Picard achieves nothing and the revelation serves no purpose in this episode. They'd given away 90% of the secret already in earlier episodes, which had the effect of making something that should've been devastating feel obvious and redundant. I watched a certain superhero show recently that also had a character go back into their childhood memories and revisit a traumatic event they'd blocked out. But in that the cause of the trauma wasn't the big reveal of the episode, because that's just morbid curiosity being indulged. The big reveal was what the character did because of that trauma, and it completely flipped my understanding of who they were in a satisfying and emotional way. Picard didn't come close to matching that. But hey at least it's another mystery I can tick off the list. Though it turns out that the memory he blocked out as a kid should've been finding Borg mercenaries beamed into the wall! Picard grew up in a house with Borg skeletons in the basement, that's... a pretty dumb retcon. Unless they spend the next episode digging them out. Overall I found the episode to be a bit underwhelming, but it was interesting enough. Plus I liked how it contained an entire story pretty much. The ship's under attack, they try to take it back, they decide to let it go. It gave the episode a sense of closure and resolution that previous episodes have been missing. It also promises that a lot's going to happen in the next story as one Reneé must live and another must die to save the future. Whatever that means. Episode 9 of Next Gen's second season is the legendary The Measure of a Man so can Hide and Seek really defeat it and continue Picard's winning streak? The victor this time is... Next Gen! Sorry Picard, but when Next Gen brings out the big guns it's a little tougher to beat than a Borg special forces squad.
2-10	Farewell		7
Episode: 020 | Writer: Christopher Monfette and Akiva Goldsman | Director: Michael Weaver | Air Date: 05-May-2022 Picard and Tallinn go to the Europa Mission launch to save Reneé from Soong while the others go to his house to stop his drones. Rios is able to crash one drone into the others and Tallinn saves Reneé by using a disguise and dying in her place. Q then uses the last of his strength to bring them back to their time, with Rios staying behind and Elnor getting resurrected. Picard finds himself back on the Stargazer, moments before the explosion, except he knows he can trust the Borg Queen this time. He puts Seven in command as they work together with the Borg to stop a mysterious anomaly from causing massive destruction. Afterwards they visit Guinan's bar for a drink, and then Picard goes home and doesn't kiss Laris. Okay this is a really fast paced episode so I'll get straight on with this. I could split the episode into four parts, and the first part manages to wrap up the threat to the future in just 20 minutes, with the crew handling Soong's drone plan while Tallinn becomes a replacement victim for his poison plan. The trouble is that both plans happen simultaneously, and it's hard to really get invested in Rios racing to take out the other drones when it looks like Reneé is already dead. Though I would've found it hard to care regardless, as you can't tell me that Seven of Nine can't figure out how to stop some 21st century drones sitting right in front of her. Just shove a stick in the rotors and you've saved the future. Meanwhile Picard's role was to witness Tallinn's death and accept a loved one dying, which we know from the episode Lessons is something he doesn't do well. But then who does? This plot has a few problems, like how the people with a teleporter are in a race against time to stop a guy who should still be waiting for a taxi in France at this point. And how the folks at the Europa Mission barely tried to stop Soong meeting with Reneé in quarantine. And how the scheme Tallinn has been thinking about for years fell apart instantly. But the scene where she was finally able to meet the woman she's been watching over her whole life kind of made up for it. Plus I'm really glad that the hint we got last episode about there being two Reneés, one living and one dying, wasn't foreshadowing a split in the timeline that allows both futures to exist. They're supposed to be saving everyone, not just giving themselves a more comfortable future to live in while everyone in the Confederation timeline carries on suffering. So yeah, I'm sad that Tallinn died, but I'm happy that she got them the ideal outcome. Though telling Picard that he doesn't have to be responsible for saving people's lives so that he'll let her go off and sacrifice herself to save someone's life was a bit hypocritical. The second part of the episode gives the characters 15 minutes of drama-free screen time to wrap things up before leaving the past. It turns out that Kore's apparently doing okay out on her own, as she's found some shoes, avoided getting thrown into a Sanctuary District and she's even managed to delete all of Soong's files! He really is a mad scientist if he never thought to keep backups. We get two fairly major continuity bombs dropped here, starting with Soong pulling out a folder with 'Project Khan' written on it! Personally I'd be happier if Picard left Khan alone, but at least it doesn't get too specific with anything. The document he's holding says 'funding report 1996', which would imply that Khan hadn't started conquering nations in the Eugenics Wars by that point, but it doesn't state it outright. In fact there's no evidence that this has anything to do with Khan Noonien Singh at all! The second continuity bomb is that Wesley Crusher is part of the group that sends out agents like Gary Seven and Tallinn! So the episode's just gone answered a mystery that's been around since Assignment: Earth. Who's responsible for Gary Seven? Wesley Crusher. Fair enough! Weird that he didn't beam out with the smoky teleporter effect that Tallinn's transporter has though. I liked that the crew used this time to remove any traces of their presence from the past (presumably the Borg bodies as well, and Tallinn's corpse). Though all the evidence points towards this being a 'whatever happened happened' kind of situation for the most part, so it was totally okay to kill all those mercenaries and free the people on the bus. In fact every time they screwed up or completely ignored the warning about stepping on butterflies, they were actually putting history back on track. Though the episode was missing a scene were Young Guinan tells Picard that she knows that they've fixed the future, as she remembers Time's Arrow now. The crew were a bit stuck without La Sirena, so it's fortunate that Q finally made an appearance to help them out (because Wesley Crusher couldn't be bothered). His finger clicking hasn't been all that reliable in recent episodes, but he's suddenly 100% certain here that he can get them back into their own bodies and their own time, and that this is exactly enough effort to kill him. In fact it turns out that he's been helping Picard out all along! Wiping out the Federation and throwing the Alpha Quadrant into chaos was all for Picard's benefit. It's unclear how getting angry with him, hitting him and calling this "penance" in episode 2 was part of the plan, and a lot of people had to die for the sake of Picard's therapy, but hey it was a predestination paradox so what can you do? Can't have a friendly Borg Queen in the future without leaving a pile of corpses to dispose of in the past. We never learn why Q is dying, only that he wanted to save Picard from dying alone, which also saves himself from dying alone. I thought it was a nice ending for the character to be honest, and one I never expected him to get (I guess his girlfriend and son aren't talking to him anymore). And Q goes out the same way he arrived back in Encounter at Farpoint, in a flash of light. Man, first Data died at the end of season 1, now Q. I feel like I should be getting worried about the season 3 finale. The third part of the episode jumps to the future to spend 7 minutes or so resolving the Borg situation. It turns out that Rios staying behind gave Q enough power to save Elnor, so that's good. Even if he won't be back for season 3. It looks like Seven's ship is gone for good as well, but that's fine as Picard apparently has the authority to make anyone he feels like a Starfleet captain and he gives her the Stargazer instead! Uh... okay, sure, let's go with that. She suits the chair and she's got the memories of countless assimilated captains, so I'm sure she'll do fine. We never learn why the Jurati Borg Queen didn't just communicate with them in the first place, instead of doing everything she could to make them shoot her and self-destruct their ships. But I suppose it makes sense that she has to repeat the events she remembered witnessing in order to complete the time loop, regardless of whether they make sense. Once Picard changes the outcome by cancelling the self-destruct they're able to talk normally and together they're able to save the sector/quadrant from a beam shooting out of a mysterious anomaly that's presumably going to play a role in season 3. So that worked out. I'm glad Picard and Seven didn't have to learn a lesson here about trusting Borg Queens, as the situation was basically rigged to make them blow up the ship first time around. The key difference between episode one and now is that now they know who the intruder is and have a reason to trust her. This time we know that she's the queen of a separate friendly collective that has apparently been keeping off the radar until now and it seems likely that they're going to join the Federation! That would mean a lot more if they weren't just doing it so they could park in front of a transwarp conduit, but still it's a pretty nice change to the status quo. It took Picard a while but he was finally able to make peace with the Borg. And so this becomes the second season to end with a mysterious portal in space that's closed after characters talk to their enemies and work something out. Finally, the fourth part of the episode takes 5 minutes to check in with Guinan and finally wrap up Picard's relationship with Laris with a kiss. Though they don't actually kiss, just stand there in a weird-looking CGI hallway as the camera pulls back. So that was a bit bizarre. Maybe the ending is implying that therapy is an ongoing process and a godlike being can't 'fix' a person by simply altering the timeline in order to force them to go back in time and get knocked down with a car to experience a dream that reveals the truth about their part in their mother's suicide. Or maybe this tragic event in Picard's past didn't actually have a huge effect on his personality and he's always avoided commitment and children because that's just who he is. That'd be a twist. The chat with Guinan gives us the final fate of Rios, who decided that maybe he was supposed to stay behind in the past and it turns out he was. Rios is one of the few Star Trek regulars to die, and it's revealed that he died in a bar fight! It's presented like a fitting ending for the guy, which is weird because it actually kind of isn't. And it's an inadvertent middle finger to all the people who got their hopes up about a Rios-led Stargazer spin-off. The actor's left too so we won't even be getting the Rios holograms anymore, which were a highlight of season 1! We also learned that Rios' son was the one who helped save the planet with Reneé's microorganism, so he's an important historical figure like Picard's ancestor! It was Laris' familiar-looking ancestor who saved time though. And Data and Soji's familiar-looking ancestor was apparently fairly important too. Man, sometimes it feels like everyone in this series has a famous ancestor except for Guinan, who's in that time period herself and yet doesn't look like someone we know! I should deduct points for that, but the episode left me feeling generous so I'll leave it at seven out of nine. It didn't really earn its emotional moments, but it resolved things well enough and you couldn't call it slow paced. The final battle between Picard and Next Gen's second seasons is Farewell vs The Dauphin. Wesley Crusher's final appearance going up against his first romance. The contest is closer than it should be considering this is an epic season finale, I actually liked The Dauphin more than I expected to, but I'm giving it to Farewell. Final score Picard: 9, Next Gen: 1. I guess I'm learning here that Next Gen's second season isn't really the best that series has to offer.

CONCLUSION

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Despite its problems, Picard season 2 is much much better than Galactica 1980. If you can only watch a one sci-fi sequel series where the heroes hang out on present day Earth so the producers can film it on the cheap, this is the one to go for. It's not as good as Legends of Tomorrow however, which is a shame because that's what it's trying to be this season.

Here's the biggest problem with Picard season 2 I reckon: the premise of the season is that a team of some of Starfleet's most talented and experienced officers goes back in time to put history back on track, but all this requires is for Picard to meet Tallinn and talk to Reneé, Tallinn to die in Reneé's place, and for someone to break some drones. That's it. Picard's crew is way too big and too skilled for the mission they've been given, and it takes half a season to set up a premise that was given away in the trailer. If you get a Mission: Impossible team you get hyped for a Mission: Impossible story, or at least a Voyage Home story, so the season sets up expectations that it doesn't come close to delivering on. The writers seemed to just want to tell stories about Raffi's guilt, or Picard's repressed memory, or Rios falling in love, or how much the world sucks right now.

Episode one was a great start and for a while it looked like they were getting their pacing issues sorted out, but the series soon fell back into its old pattern. Not just a pattern in fact, as it actually repeated some plot beats. It took until episode 3 before Picard got moving on La Sirena, just like season 1. He spent episode 4 trying to convince an old friend to help, just like season 1. Episode 5 had Jurati killing someone who had answers and becoming the secret traitor due to mental manipulation, just like season 1. 

Plus it really suffers from the fact that it's too fond of its mysteries. Q's agenda is a mystery, the source of the timeline divergence is a mystery, the importance of the Europa Mission is a mystery. The characters are left stumbling around blindly getting very little done and only the Borg Queen seems to know what's going on. Despite this, somehow every answer I was given felt like old news by the time I got it. 

To be fair the writers had a real challenge this season, as COVID-19 really jammed a stick in their metaphorical drone rotors. The restrictions they were working under meant that sets took a lot longer to build and actors had to be kept isolated in bubbles. They solved the set problem by bringing the characters to the near future and doing a lot of location filming (which is the opposite of how Next Gen operated), and they solved the actor problem by having them go around in pairs. Seven's always with Raffi, Rios spends a lot of time with Teresa, Picard hangs around with Jurati, Guinan or Tallinn etc. Trouble is the characters are all trying to protect the mental health of just one person, so the plot is mostly a series of complications designed to give the characters something to do.

In fact Seven and Raffi spend most of the season chasing after missing friends and Rios is too distracted by his girlfriend to be much use. It would've been a much tighter story if Picard and Jurati had been the only ones to travel back in time.

Them plus the AI cat, obviously.

They could've cut out everything to do with ICE and Rios on the bus, cut most of the gala, cut the FBI agent, cut one of the trips into Picard's memory etc. It seems like they already cut most of Elnor, which is a shame because we barely saw anything of him in season one as well. The guy's like a teaser trailer for a character we never really got.

Though you could argue that the side-plots function as a delivery system for the messages the writers wanted to share. It'd be fair to say that Star Trek's done a bit of social commentary in the past. It has, on occasion, turned the mirror back on ourselves. But it's not fucking around this time, it's skipping the layers of allegory. This is Punk Trek, and it's grabbing the audience and yelling 'Look at how terrible things are right now!' It's basically DS9's Past Tense meets The Voyage Home in its plot and its politics, except turned up to 11. Though is this actually a good thing? I mean the season has its heart in the right place and that's definitely preferable to the alternative, but people tend not to be receptive to outright preaching, especially not the converted.

I dunno, maybe the messages are going to inspire someone somewhere to do something amazing and make a difference. All I can say is that they failed to enhance my enjoyment. In fact they mostly just made me depressed. In a regular episode there's a problem and the characters have to work to resolve it. They often do a pretty decent job and we get a fairly happy resolution. In a preachy episode there's a problem and we have to fix it in the real world. So it's not just an unhappy resolution, it's an unhappy resolution that affects us in reality and isn't getting solved! That's the worst kind of bad ending.

Sure there's also a message here about how things will get better if we just keep holding on, but we apparently have to wait for the fictional Europa Mission to succeed for that to happen.

Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home

You could also accuse the story of being a collage of themes and moments taken from other Star Trek time travel stories, with Rios quoting Star Trek 4, Picard meeting a Gary Seven, Seven and Raffi running into the legendary Punk on Bus, Q messing with time to teach Picard a lesson etc.

One thing that isn't taken from a time travel story however, is Picard's trip through his memories, and this plot feels incredibly disconnected from everything else that's going on. This whole mission to the past is supposed to serve the purpose of getting Picard to remember what he did as a child and accept it, but the idea that Q had to destroy the Federation in order to contrive a situation where Adam Soong would accidentally knock Picard out with a car doesn't stand up to the slightest bit of scrutiny. Though to be fair the characters only assume it must be part of his plan. In fact the characters jump to a lot of conclusions this season.

The season has reminded me that what I really like about Star Trek is competent people working together to solve problems logically. And also spaceships. Unfortunately it's severely lacking in both.

The production design is fantastic though. They really went above and beyond with the sets and props in this story and it's a slick production in general. The series has the shiny outer shell of a good TV show and it's only when you take a good look inside that you realise there's nothing in there. It's like a Ferrari with the engine missing: you can sit in it and pretend you're driving around, but the experience is missing something crucial. But I think the series does what its doing with such confidence and slickness that it manages to coast quite a distance even without an engine.

I don't want to keep hating on Discovery's fourth season, but I found this to be a more pleasant series to look at and the dialogue is so much more entertaining. The series has some really likeable actors and I liked all of their characters too. Even Borg Queen #3, Young Guinan, and all the inexplicable identical clones of people we've already met. In fact despite what I said earlier about the crew being too big, it's a real shame that most of Picard's actors are leaving the series after this, and there's no chance we're getting a Captain Rios spin-off now. Plus Tallinn had to die so Picard could learn a lesson, so that kind of sucked. Kind of messed up how Q sent Soong after Reneé knowing that she'd be killed instead, but I guess that's just how it happened in the past. Despite all the warnings about butterflies it turns out that they weren't really changing anything. No consequences! They're totally off the hook for following their heart and letting those prisoners go.

Picard season 2 gets a lot of hate but honestly I liked it. The season started off with a pair of excellent episodes and couldn't keep the quality up, but it never got so bad that I didn't enjoy it. I was hyped to see if new showrunner Terry Matalas could do something great with it, and he didn't. But he got distracted halfway through by having to write season 3, so now I'm right back where I was last year: hoping that he can come up with something awesome for the final season. That this will finally be the return of 'my' Star Trek.

My top three episodes:

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1. Penance (8)
2. The Star Gazer (8)
3. Farewell (7)

Like with season 1 the first episode was one of my favourites, thought I liked episode 2 just a little bit more. The season started going downhill after that so I started to figure that episode 3 would end up being my #3, but then the last episode, Farewell, took its place at the last moment.


Bottom three episodes:

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8. Watcher (6)
9. Two of One (6)
10. Monsters (6)

Aka. episodes 4, 6 and 7. The season dipped a bit in the middle for me. Watcher was the point in the series where the social commentary started becoming deafening, but worse than that it was basically skippable. Move a couple of scenes that establish how Picard found Guinan and Tallinn into the next episode and you can scrap the whole thing. Two of One was doomed by its premise. An over-qualified team of Starfleet officers infiltrates a high-security gala to protect an astronaut's mental health - that's a comedy plot, what were the writers even thinking? And Monsters had Guinan summoning Q with a magic bottle. Really I should've given it a 5 for that.


Next time on Star Trek: Picard:

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What do I want from Picard's third and final season? The 25th century for one thing. The characters didn't really find anything to do in the 21st century, so I want them go play in Star Trek's present day again, where it's all happy and utopian and people have space adventures. Also I want carpets back.

Mostly though I want air-tight plots that make sense, intelligent dialogue, wit, and just damn good writing in general. If they could recapture some of the tone and a lot of the characterisation of Next Gen, that would be nice. Also having a 10 hour story that can't be given away by a 2 minute trailer would be cool too.

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NEXT EPISODE

Alright, that's season 2 of Picard done. I didn't get all my reviews posted before the third season started, but at least I got them done before the third season ended. And you can probably expect my opinions on that at some point in the future.

Next up on Sci-Fi Adventures, I'm going back to The Original Series to watch the legendary space submarine thriller Balance of Terror!