Star Trek: Picard 3-01: The Next Generation (Quick Review)

Episode:

21

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Writer:

Terry Matalas

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Director:

Doug Aarniokoski

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Air Date:

16-Feb-2023

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This week on Sci-Fi Adventures, I'm starting Star Trek: Picard season 3 with the episode The Next Generation.

There's nothing weird about Star Trek shows switching showrunners, but it's funny how every season of Picard is clearly a new creator's story. The first season was helmed by novelist Michael Chabon, the second was by Akiva Goldsman, and the third was by Terry Matalas. Okay, that's an oversimplification, as Goldsman also worked on season 1 and Matalas worked on season 2, and the episodes themselves were by a bunch of different writers, but this was definitely Matalas' turn to steer the ship.

I'm one of the people who enjoyed season 2 but I have to concede that it was a bit of a mess. In fact, a lot of Trek fans consider it to be a complete train wreck, an embarrassing disaster, perhaps the worst season of Star Trek ever made. The trouble is, it's hard to tell how much of that was due to Terry Matalas' presence and how much was due to his absence. There was some overlap with the production of the second and third seasons, and Matalas switched his attention to season 3 after just a few episodes. So it could be that season 2 collapsed without him or it could be that his decisions set the season on a course for catastrophe.

Anyway, at the time I'm writing this intro I already know how season 3 went, but my episode reviews were written back when they were coming out so they're all full of authentic ignorance. It just took me a year to publish them because, I dunno, it seemed more important to write about The Trouble with Tribbles and Doctor Who's 60th anniversary, and Picard got pushed to the back burner.

There will be SPOILERS in this review for the whole episode, and things like Star Trek: Discovery, but it won't give away anything that happens later as I didn't actually know what happens later.

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RECAP

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Picard is ready to go on a trip with Laris when he receives a coded distress call from Dr Crusher. He teams up with Riker, who arranges a visit to the USS Titan-A on the pretence of an inspection tour. They have an awkward dinner with the Titan's asshole captain, Liam Shaw, where he shuts down all their hopes of taking the Titan to save Crusher. But first officer Seven does a bit of a mutiny to help them out, bringing the Titan to Crusher's location without Shaw's permission. Picard and Riker slip out in a shuttle and dock with the SS Eleos to find Crusher in stasis and a mysterious stranger holding a gun at them... her son! Unfortunately the bad guys followed the Titan there.

Meanwhile, Raffi's on M'talas Prime trying to track down a stolen super weapon before it can be used for terrorism, but she's too late to stop a Federation building being destroyed.


REVIEW

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Right from the start it's obvious that Star Trek: Picard has changed a lot in its final season. They've inverted the logo's colour scheme and changed the 'Star Trek' text to the Original Series font. The opening credits sequence has been pushed to the end credits, and most of the characters from the credits are gone now. Plus it's got on-screen episode titles now, which I definitely approve of. It all gives the impression that this is going to be a bit of a fresh start for the series.

I'm less sure about the way they've changed the music to the Star Trek: First Contact theme. I know it's Star Trek: The Next Generation tradition to steal music from the movies and First Contact's theme is far too beautiful for a film about cyborg zombies, but this series already has its own tune! A pretty good one as well.

It's funny they went with a Next Gen film for the theme, as the episode seems to be more inspired by the Original Series movies, with the "IN THE 25TH CENTURY" text at the beginning having a very familiar font. Sometimes I found a song familiar because it's strongly attached to the Fallout franchise, but generally this is trying to be Picard: The Motion Picture.

The trouble I've got is that the more it tries to remind me of classic Star Trek, the more obvious it becomes that the vibe is very different.

The episode features a scene of the characters gathering on the bridge of the Titan as the ship leaves dock, which has happened in plenty of the Original Series movies. The bridge was lit darker in those films than it was during TV series and the tone was more militaristic, but the heroic soundtrack still felt very appropriate. Even in the one where they're stealing the Enterprise!

These are heroes sailing off to adventure together on a mighty and majestic hero ship, so it would've felt weird if their vessel's launch didn't get a bit of fanfare.

And here's Picard's version of the scene, with the heroes depicted as indistinct shapes in the distance, disappearing into the haze and the darkness. The Titan-A isn't depicted as a welcoming hero ship the characters can feel at home on, it's an unfamiliar location ruled by an unfriendly captain that they're trying to trick because they can't trust Starfleet. But the episode still tries to play the scene of the ship leaving spacedock like it's a heroic moment and it's kind of jarring and weird.

I get that there's a bit of a 'It's been ages since we've commanded a ship and we miss this' aspect to the scene, but this isn't the time for a rousing nautical adventure theme.

We got first officer Seven of Nine though, so that's cool. I guess her time spent on Voyager and with the Fenris Rangers let her just skip over the years of training and experience every other command officer needs to have. The episode probably could've used a bit of a time skip, but whatever, I'm just happy to see that she finally got the five promotions in one year she deserved.

The episode is called The Next Generation, so I have a feeling that helmsman Sidney La Forge and Captain Liam Shaw are also being set up to play a bigger role as the season goes on. Sidney was mentioned in All Good Things... as being one of La Forge's three children, so that's another part of that possible future that's come true. I thought she might have been the character played by Mica Burton, LeVar Burton's real-life daughter, but I guess she'll be showing up later. I already like Sidney though, she's made a good first impression.

And then there's Captain Shaw, the most menacing and villainous character in the episode.

We've seen that culture on a starship differs depending on the crew, especially the captain. Equinox under Captain Ransom was very different to Voyager under Captain Janeway, Discovery was different under Lorca than it was under subsequent captains, etc. But somehow neither of those ships felt as oppressive as the Titan feels under Captain Shaw. His own first officer does a mutiny on him before the end of the first episode, and the way he treats her I can actually buy it! The least he could do would be use her preferred name, but he's apparently too traumatised by some past experience with the Borg to show her that respect.

This raises the question: how the hell did he end up a captain of a Starfleet vessel? I'm sure he's had plenty of experience and he certainly insightful enough to see through Picard's ploy, but he's a terrible boss and doesn't display any of the qualities you'd expect from someone who has earned the right to command a ship.

The guy has managed to complete 36 missions over a five year period and he thinks that this is an achievement worth mentioning. That's 7 missions a year. The crew of the USS Cerritos do better than that. I think the kids that borrowed the USS Protostar managed better than that!

Part of the problem I've got with recent live-action Trek is that some of the people running these series clearly have a different understanding of how things work in this universe than I do.

Like here's the USS Titan-A. Up to this point in the Star Trek timeline only new Enterprises have gotten a letter added to their registry like this, because it's a tradition specific to that one lineage of ships. But now the new Titan is special enough to get a letter as well.

Okay, they've changed the tradition, that's fine. No one said it had to be set in stone forever...

...but it's not actually a new Titan! It's a refit of this ship, the USS Titan that we saw in Lower Decks. The ship got an overhaul so extensive that it's entirely unrecognisable, but it's apparently still the same vessel. So it should just be the USS Titan, NCC-80102, no bloody -A.

You could point out that the USS Discovery became the Discovery-A when it got a refit, but that was a special case as they didn't want people to know it was the same ship.

The other problem I have with the ship is that it's the kind of rushed anachronistic kitbash that should be flying around in the distant background, not filling up the screen. That's basically the saucer from the 130-years-old refit Enterprise, it's even got the same window pattern, but it's also got the nacelles from the brand new Stargazer seen last season.

And this is never commented on, it's just considered to be perfectly normal that their brand new refit looks a century out of date. Why should the characters waste episode time commenting on it? Because it's interesting! The ship's appearance means something. Starfleet has gone from making 'the toughest, fastest, most powerful ship' to reviving classic designs from their golden age of exploration.

I guess the fact I've wasted so much time writing about registry suffixes and starship refits is probably a hint that the story didn't exactly grab me. I thought season 1 and 2 started off really great, so I was actually pretty disappointed. It feels like Picard has dropped the pretence of being a serious and intelligent exploration of its lead character, and just gone straight to the schlock this time.

And I couldn't give even a single damn about Raffi's spy thriller plot. I'm glad that at least one character from the season 1 cast has made it to season 3 and it was a nice surprise to see that she's inherited La Sirena (I figured it'd been swiped by the Borg Queen), but this storyline was trying too hard to be serious for me to take seriously.

Speaking of the characters, the highlight of the episode for me was Picard and Riker being bros and fortunately that got most of the screen time.

It was like the returning Next Generation characters brought a little bubble of the old series around with them wherever they went. They were a real contrast to the rude Captain Shaw, not to mention the Starfleet officers we saw disintegrating enemies who were already down and punching people who had already given up! Oh wait, hang on, that was Crusher and Riker doing that. Picard either turns your childhood heroes into stone cold killers or it stone cold kills them.

Plus Raffi's also somehow ended up with 13 court martial offences, because this is Picard and you have to disobey Starfleet to get anything done. In fact, the episode does the same thing as the Original Series movies, in how it paints the heroes as rebels with a history of insubordination. I mean yeah, Picard did a bit of an insurrection that one time, and he flew back to save Earth from the Borg against orders, but c'mon!

The thing about Star Trek is that the characters actually do follow the rules whenever they can because they believe those rules are right. And when Picard couldn't protect Data within the rules in The Measure of a Man he went and got new rules made!

I have to admit, I felt like a real idiot when all the Star Trek II and Star Trek III references didn't clue me in on the fact that the mysterious stranger on Dr Crusher's ship is Picard's son! It took me until the bit where Riker punched him to finally figure it out, as it reminded me of Kirk fighting his son in Star Trek II.

Okay, he might not be Picard's son, we don't know yet. But at this point the father being anyone else would be the biggest twist of the season. He's definitely Beverly Crusher's son (and Wesley's brother), though why she hid him away for 20 years and didn't tell anyone is a mystery.

Picard was so gutted in Generations when his brother and nephew died that he got over his dislike of kids and started fantasising about having a family of his own, so I'm actually really glad he's getting a chance of that here, years after it became a biological impossibility due to his death. They'd better not kill him off.


RATING

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I've been putting every episode of Picard up against its counterpart from Star Trek: The Next Generation, which means that now I have to decide whether I enjoyed this more than Next Gen season 3 episode 1: Evolution. That's the one where Wesley's nanite experiment causes malfunctions on the ship. Personally, judging them purely on how much they entertained me, I've got to go with Picard this time. Though both episodes have their problems.

I've already mentioned that the tone was way off and the Raffi scenes were tedious etc., but I'm also deducting points for how long Picard and Riker spent slowly piecing together what happened on Crusher's ship. Because a: we saw it happen and b: Crusher needed urgent medical assistance! I wanted to just skip the cutscene and move on. But I think overall I actually enjoyed the episode.

So I'm going to give Picard's third season premiere a rating of 7/10 and then I'm going to stop thinking about it before I change my mind and knock it down to a 6.

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COMING SOON

Star Trek: Picard is a very serialised series so I won't leave you waiting long for the second episode, Disengage. But next on Sci-Fi Adventures, it's the third episode of Star Trek: Discovery's final season, Jinaal.

If you want to share your own thoughts on the episode, you can type them below.