"Star Trek: Picard," Season 3: review

The old crew's looking mighty... old.

[WARNING: there are definitely gonna be spoilers here.]

I didn't have the misfortune of watching the first two seasons of "Star Trek: Picard," a series created by Akiva Goldsman, Michael Chabon, Kirsten Beyer, and Alex Kurtzman. I remember wondering, when I first heard about the proposed series, why anyone would want to watch the further adventures of Starfleet captain Jean-Luc Picard. And since I hadn't been keeping close tabs on the career of actor Patrick Stewart, who played Picard in "Star Trek: The Next Generation" and several movies, I didn't consider just how old Stewart had become (he's currently 82). In theory, with Picard having always been a much more cerebral captain than James T. Kirk, an older Admiral Picard might work in a new series, or so I thought. I shrugged and waited to see what the showrunners would give us.

From the early bad reviews through two painful seasons of more bad reviews, the news about "Picard" was grim. Everyone hated the storylines, and most critics complained that the tone of the new series was somehow off, i.e., not reflective of the original Star Trek mythos and ethos. One clip, shown over and over on YouTube, depicts a gray-haired female admiral looking at Picard, who was apparently asking for a big favor, and saying, "Sheer fucking hubris!" to his face—an example of the series's "off" tone. Why would Trek need to stoop to vulgarity? Critics like the Critical Drinker bitterly noted that Picard was being portrayed as a broken down, shambling, feeble old man, more an impotent guest on his own show than a heroic legend still filled with agency. Storylines involving (1) Picard's bodily death (he gets resurrected as a positronic android that has been "aged up" to let his downloaded consciousness feel as if it were still in its old body—and I mean old in both senses: "aged" and "former"), (2) Data's death (again—Data died in 2002's "Star Trek: Nemesis"), (3) enhanced girl-bosses (a female android named Soji and a Borg-assimilated Dr. Jurati), (4) woke storylines (including one about the mishandling of illegal immigrants in the early 21st century), (5) a dying Q (with the delightful John de Lancie still mispronouncing Capitaine), (6) time travel, and (7) alternate universes all added up to a collective "meh" from viewers and critics. The series was floundering, and given the age of its principal star, it was never meant to go beyond more than a couple of seasons. What to do with the little time the show had left?

By the looks of it, a miracle happened, and the producers and showrunners decided to respect the wishes of the fans to give us some good old-fashioned Trek. After two seasons of not knowing what it wanted to be, "Star Trek: Picard" suddenly found itself. I'm a latecomer to watching Season 3, but I heard from my go-to critics (yes, we critics listen to other critics) that Season 3 was fundamentally different from the other two seasons. It brought back the old crew for a final rollicking adventure; it gave us characters who were good at what they did, and who contributed importantly to the plot without acting like temperamental teenagers; it was well paced, tense, and propulsive in its narrative, and the story, which heavily recycled a bunch of old tropes, nevertheless brimmed with novelty and gave us characters and events to care about. This is the scuttlebutt I was hearing as Season 3 rolled on, so last week, I finally gave in, signed up for the Paramount+ streaming service since it's having a week-long free promo right now (I used the same strategy with Disney+ to watch "The Mandalorian" for two seasons), and watched the series in a weekend marathon that got me up to Episode 9 of ten episodes. This past Friday, I watched Episode 10, and now, I'm all caught up.

Just to save you the suspense: I thoroughly enjoyed Season 3. I saw some online complaints that parts of the series dragged a bit, and that may be true, but I found every episode more than watchable, and seeing the old cast reunited brought a smile to my face more than once. As a second sendoff for the crew of the old Enterprise-D, this season had the proper look and feel. Arguably, there was a little too much fan service: almost every episode was loaded with sly references and/or cameos harking back to classic Trek. The very last episode even gave us a voiceover cameo by Walter Koenig, the original Chekov from the 60s-era series, in the role of Chekov's son Anton (as one critic astutely noted, the name "Anton" was a probable nod to Anton Yelchin, who played Chekov in the JJ Abrams Trek series of movies, a.k.a., the "Kelvin timeline" films). Still, despite the nearly slavish level of fan service, the end result was a season of episodes that ultimately told a touching story, the center of which was Picard's relationship with his long-lost son Jack.

I got the impression, at times, that it would have helped to know what happened in the two previous seasons of "Picard," as well as what happened in other series like "Voyager" (a show I never watched faithfully). But my ignorance didn't prevent me from understanding or enjoying Season 3's basic plot, which I shall endeavor to sketch out now.

The season presents us with several mysteries and coalescing plot lines. Admiral Beverly Crusher (Gates McFadden) and her son Jack (Ed Speleers) are on the run from mysterious pursuers who want Jack for some reason. Beverly sends a distress signal to Admiral Picard (Stewart). On Earth, Raffaela "Raffi" Musiker (Michelle Hurd) is an intelligence officer tracking down evidence of a terrorist plot that, as we learn, involves the disastrous use of a portal weapon, killing hundreds. Picard and his friend Will Riker (Jonathan Frakes) contrive to get aboard the USS Titan, Riker's old command, now captained by the dour, irascible Liam Shaw (Todd Stashwick, whose Shaw became a fan favorite). With help from Shaw's first officer, Seven of Nine (Jeri Ryan), Picard and Riker are able to rendezvous with Beverly and Jack at the edge of Federation space. Once there, Beverly's pursuer makes herself visible: Captain Vadic (scenery-chewing Amanda Plummer) of the Shrike, a ship armed with the same sort of portal weapon that killed so many on Earth. Vadic turns out to be a Changeling who has taken the form of the scientist who performed painful genetic experiments on her, an inadvertent result of those experiments being that some of the new generation of Changelings can mimic alien life down to the level of internal organs. But the Changelings aren't the puppet masters, and the clue to this resides in the genomes of Jean-Luc Picard and his son Jack: Jean-Luc's long-ago assimilation into the Borg collective left him with latent genetic markers that the remaining Borg can now exploit to assimilate Earth. Clues to the genetic side of the mystery reside at the Daystrom Institute, a top-secret facility guarded by a super-advanced AI that turns out to be none other than the downloaded consciousness of Data (Brent Spiner), but not merely Data: the consciousness fuses Data with his "brothers" Lore and B-4, with a dash of robotics engineer Altan Soong (also Spiner). Picard recruits Commodore Geordi La Forge (Levar Burton) to help break into the Daystrom Institute for clues, and they are assisted by the impressively gray-haired Worf (Michael Dorn), who claims now to be a pacifist but still takes heads when he needs to. Worf also turns out to be Raffi's handler; he, too, was pursuing the mystery of the terrorist activity on Earth. Jack Crusher, meanwhile, works with Deanna Troi (Marina Sirtis) to understand the voices in his head and the unsettling visions he's having of red vines and a mysterious door in his mind that he is afraid to open. Troi and Jack discover what's beyond the door: the vision of a huge Borg cube that is calling Jack home. Jack has inherited altered Borg DNA from his father, Jean-Luc Picard—DNA that works at the nano-level to make Jack into a kind of transmitter that is part of the Borg project to assimilate Earth. Jean-Luc had originally thought he'd been dying of a terminal disease, but it was the Borg DNA—not "irumodic syndrome"—all along.

The plot, over ten episodes, is wonderfully set up and paid off, with all of the legacy characters being allowed to have moments of humor, gravitas, and pathos. Jean-Luc and Jack have an awkward start at first: Admiral Picard is Starfleet through and through while Jack is a freedom-loving wild card who has been on the run with his mother Beverly for some time. Over the next few days, though, father and son begin to bond. Riker and Troi, who were once married, grew emotionally distant after the death of their son, and one plot arc is about how the two find peace in the midst of their grief and get back together. Geordi has two daughters in Starfleet; Sidney (Ashlei Sharpe Chestnut) is a helmsman aboard the USS Titan, and this makes Geordi reluctant, at first, to help Picard. Geordi also gets a special plot arc with his friend Data, who needs to be unplugged from his job as AI defender of the Daystrom Institute, then somehow purged of the toxic Lore personality—a feat that Data manages by himself, resulting in a new, very emotional Data that we've never seen before, one that has intuitive insights and knows to trust his "gut." Captain Liam Shaw starts off as a by-the-book asshole uninterested in gallivanting and adventuring, but by the end, he has learned to respect the rash impulses of Seven, his first officer. Shaw also turns out to have history with Admiral Picard: Shaw was a young engineer who survived the battle of Wolf 359, i.e., the battle in which the Borg used an assimilated Jean-Luc Picard and his Starfleet knowledge to decimate an armada, killing over 11,000 people. Intellectually, Shaw knows that the human Picard would never have massacred his own people willingly, but emotionally, Shaw can't help hating the admiral. For my money, though, the most interesting subplot is the relationship between the now-meditative warrior Worf and his charge Raffi, for whom Worf becomes something like a mentor, a father figure, or—as Raffi puts it in the final episode—a dear friend.

I mentioned earlier that knowledge of Trek events from outside this series could have been helpful. Not having followed "Star Trek: Voyager," I think I missed some Borg-related events that figured into the plot of "Picard." In the past, Captain Janeway managed some sort of "defeat" of the Borg that left the entire Borg race weak and gasping, hence their current desperation and desire to both assimilate and destroy. Season 3 of "Picard" obliquely mentions something about Janeway's achievement, leaving me wanting to know more. Suffice it to say that, whatever Janeway did, it left the Borg in a sorry state.

As mentioned, nostalgia bait, "memberberries," and fan service were strewn all across the season. In Daystrom Institute, we get a glimpse of a Genesis device (harking back to "Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan"), as well as a look at a screen indicating that James T. Kirk's body, apparently rescued from its mountain cairn on Veridian III ("Star Trek: Generations," in which Kirk dies), is in storage, perhaps awaiting cloning. Other memberberries include cameo appearances by Elizabeth Dennehy (Brian Dennehy's daughter!) as Admiral Shelby, Michelle Forbes as Commander Ro Laren, Tim Russ as (Admiral?) Tuvok, the voice of Alice Krige as the horrifically mangled-looking Borg Queen (the Queen is played by a different actress, but the voice is Krige's). The final two episodes of the season present us with what might be the biggest bit of fan service ever: the Enterprise D itself. Mothballed and stored at the Fleet Museum after being salvaged from Veridian III and repaired by Geordi (who manages and maintains the museum), the Enterprise D is key to solving the Borg problem because, as a much older vessel, it isn't networked the way all other Starfleet vessels now are. This idea felt a bit ripped off from "Battlestar Galactica": in that show, the Cylons destroy most of the networked colonial fleet without firing a shot simply by uploading a virus to take the fleet out; the Galactica survives because it's an older vessel, and Commander Adama has insisted that the ship should remain un-networked—a decision that proves to be the ship's saving grace. Another memberberry in "Picard" that doesn't evoke Trek—but rather Star Wars—is the Enterprise D's final flight through the guts of the huge Borg cube sitting in the high atmosphere of Jupiter and coordinating the attack on Earth. Data is the one flying the Enterprise through this obstacle course, and any viewer old enough will automatically remember the final assault on the second Death Star in "Return of the Jedi," which prominently featured a fly-through-the-guts scene. Then there's the season's musical score, brought to you mostly by Stephen Barton, who gives us some original music but also brings back Jerry Goldsmith's iconic themes woven in with those of James Horner. The effect—for us older folks, anyway—is enchanting.

Did Season 3 of "Picard" have problems? Yes. There were several for me, in fact. Let's start with the very notion of Frontier Day. The show states, several times, that all Starfleet ships were to assemble at Earth on Frontier Day in a proud display of military might—as well as to show off a new, network-coordinated maneuvering system that is supposed to allow for a better-orchestrated defense (Picard notes the irony of how a coordinated, synchronized defense sounds very Borg-like). But how does it make sense to pull back your entire fleet from your borders just to celebrate Frontier Day? This struck me as a plot hole that could have been patched with a few lines of dialogue about how the ships patrolling Federation borders would still be in deep space but able to enjoy the festivities remotely. And here's one pointed out by many viewers: the lighting level inside the starships' bridges is too low. If I worked in such an environment, I'd fall asleep. Another major problem: with Patrick Stewart in his 80s, the plot had to be designed in such a way that an old, weak, shuffling hero could do his hero thing, i.e., the plot had to be tailored around Patrick Stewart's physical limitations. So there's no dramatic duel with the Borg Queen (who, in this case, seems to be welded into the structure of her Borg cube) or any other strenuous physical challenge. Jonathan Frakes and Michael Dorn are both still young enough to engage in some brawling when the story calls for it, but Stewart looks, at this point, as if a strong wind might snap him in two. A third problem, pointed out by fans, is that Seasons 1 and 2 of Picard both had major Borg subplots, so the late-term reveal, in Season 3, that Jack's nightmare visions were leading him to the Borg, and that the Borg were behind the plot to harvest and weaponize Jean-Luc and Jack's genomes, wasn't much of a surprise, and may have been exasperating for some. A related problem is that Season 3 follows, on the whole, the basic arc of "Star Trek: First Contact," with the Borg attacking Earth in an attempt to assimilate it. Perhaps worst of all, the final victory of the good guys depends on that hoary old trope found in so many sci-fi and horror movies: destroy the nerve center, and the whole army of drones is instantly defeated. I like this trope less and less as I get older because it's both lazy and unrealistic. It's lazy because it's so simplistic. It's unrealistic because, if it's originally based on the behavior of bees, I can guarantee that, if a beehive's queen is killed, the worker bees and drones don't all instantly fall dead. They might die eventually, but taking out the hub of a beehive still leaves you with a lot of angry bees. If Season 3 had gone on for another couple episodes, the show could have chronicled the cleanup operation after the Borg queen's defeat. A problematic mid-credits scene at the end of Episode 10 brought back a huge character who, significantly, had died the previous season, thus cheapening that death. Lastly: whatever became of Picard's Romulan love interest Laris (the hot-for-62 Dubliner Orla Brady, who gifts her Laris with a charming Irish accent)?

There's one plot element I haven't talked about yet, and as I type this, I'm wondering whether I should reveal it because, despite all the complaints I lodged in the above paragraph, I thought this was a damn clever bit of writing. Okay, I'll spill it—you've now been warned that this is a major spoiler. The question arises: What, exactly, did the Borg want with the older Picard's body? Young Jack's Borg DNA allowed him to be a transmitter, so the object was to get Jack to the Borg cube, then let him broadcast a signal and coordinate the attack on Earth (although this raises plot-logic questions*). With Jean-Luc, the good guys initially assume that the Borg wanted to clone the admiral and use that clone, in some way, to disrupt Frontier Day, a celebration during which Starfleet's entire complement of ships was to be assembled. As it turns out, the Borg wanted Picard's genome to give to the Changelings, who then reprogrammed Starfleet ships' transporters to encode the Borg parts of Picard's genome into the transporter architecture to make Picard's tainted DNA part of the "common biology" of all transporters.** In essence, everyone using a transporter would become Borgified, ripe for Jack's signal to activate and attack Starfleet from within. The one flaw in the plan was that this gene-activation could only occur in beings whose brains had not reached full maturity. Admiral Beverly Crusher explains that, for humans, maturity occurs at around age 25, so older crew would be unaffected, but younger ones would be susceptible to Borg manipulation. I thought all of this was very clever writing indeed, including the head-fake of making us think, at first, that the object was to make a Picard clone (which was done before in "Star Trek: Nemesis," with Tom Hardy's villain Shinzon being a young Picard clone).

The heart of Season 3 is arguably Jean-Luc's developing relationship with his newfound son. We go through why Beverly Crusher never told Picard about the boy: she knew that, as the son of Jean-Luc Picard, Jack would forever have a target on his back. We get plenty of awkward moments in the ship's holodeck bar as Jean-Luc and Jack try to figure each other out, discovering plenty of differences but also, surprisingly, many commonalities. As Jack and Jean-Luc face death together several times, the bond between them grows, and Picard's words about seeking connection gain significance. Jack's weird vision of vines turns out to be a creepy manifestation of his desire for connection despite his initially stand-offish demeanor. But the emotional crescendo of this relationship happens at the very end, in the final episode, with Jack plugged into the Borg's hive mind and Jean-Luc risking it all to plug in alongside him as a way to reach his son. Jack is on the cusp of either refusing to come back to his human family or relenting, and in a moment that won't leave a dry eye in the house, Jean-Luc tells his son that, if Jack won't leave the hive mind, then Jean-Luc will stay with him until the end—a father's dedication, unto death, to his flesh and blood. In a season with several tear-jerking moments, this one may have been the most powerful.

I did feel a bit sorry for Ed Speleers in the role of Jack, though (he gives off a strong Taron Egerton vibe): he has to cry several times over the course of ten episodes. Other characters do, too: Raffi, whose checkered past includes a bout with drugs, wants to reconnect with the family that has rejected her, leaving her torn. Geordi has to deal with the potential loss of two daughters as well as the possible loss—again—of his good friend Data. Deanna and Will Riker have a daughter, but they've lost a son, which leaves them desolate and in need of each other to make sense of the universe. This season demanded a lot of its actors, and it's easily one of the most emotionally compelling iterations of Trek I've seen.

There was no shortage of comedy, either. Sour and dour Captain Liam Shaw—who grows on you as you come to realize he's actually a good guy thrust into a bad situation—constantly vents his resentment toward Picard and Riker, highlighting their past recklessness and multiple violations of the Prime Directive, sometimes for petty reasons like romantic trysts with local females. Data is now enfleshed in a new "synth" body that is organic in many ways, thus allowing Troi finally to sense Data's emotions. As Data is crazily piloting the Enterprise D through the innards of the Borg cube, Deanna murmurs, "Why do I sense enjoyment?"—and the camera pans over to Data's gleeful face as he fighter-jockeys the Enterprise toward the cube's heart with his inhuman reflexes. In that same mission, with Worf as part of the away team inside the Borg cube, Beverly Crusher improbably mans the weapons station, and she lets off several salvoes that do severe damage to the cube, crippling its defenses. The rest of the crew turns toward her in astonishment after seeing this new, martial side of Beverly, and she merely says, "A lot's happened in the last twenty years"—a reference to the survival skills she's picked up while adventuring with Jack. Worf proves to be one of the biggest sources of comic relief. When he meets Raffi after a long time spent as her faceless handler, he loses his temper and throws a dagger into the floor of Raffi's ship. After the second such instance, Raffi demands that he stop puncturing her floor. When the old bridge crew of the Enterprise D are having a moment around a table, Worf confesses that he has taken the heads of countless enemies over the years, and he has thought of sending those heads as gifts to his old friends, but he realized the gesture might seem "passive-aggressive." Inside the Borg cube, with the situation about as dire as it can get, Worf confesses to Riker that he had worried that they might actually survive the day. Later on, with the Borg Queen defeated, and with the old crew back aboard the Enterprise D, Worf falls asleep, snoring loudly, while everyone else is congratulating each other. In that moment, Worf finally reveals that he's an old man now. The show did a magnificent job of sprinkling levity through every episode.

While some people have expressed dislike for Amanda Plummer's over-the-top performance as Captain Vadic, the vengeful Changeling helping the Borg, I thought she was a great villain, and for a few episodes, she convinced me that she was this season's Big Bad. Vadic had an interesting and gross way of communicating with her Borg superior: she would cut off one of her hands on top of a special device; the liberated protoplasm (Changelings are essentially living goo, so cutting off a hand isn't tragic as the separated biomass can be reabsorbed) would then float up and form a rippling face that spoke with a deep, booming voice. Only later in the season were we able to deduce that this constantly re-forming face was, in fact, a manifestation of the Borg Queen. In Episode 8, Vadic is finally defeated with the help of Data, and her death will remind some viewers of the T-1000's temporary "death" in "Terminator 2" after it encounters liquid nitrogen. Changelings can survive violent events that would kill regular "solids" (as the Changelings call our kind), so it could be that Vadic isn't truly dead. Dead or not, kudos to Amanda Plummer for holding my attention over several episodes. Far from overacting her part, Plummer perfectly interprets a barely sane villain who was a victim of excruciating torture and therefore had reasons for hating Starfleet.

As others have noted, Season 3 of "Picard" is essentially a ten-hour-long movie. It certainly feels more grandly cinematic than the 90s-era TV show ever did, and it doesn't hurt that the special effects are nothing short of amazing. While I've never been a fan of the Enterprise D's overall shape, even I got some warm fuzzies when Geordi led the old bridge crew to the Fleet Museum hangar where the D sat, waiting for action. Whatever problems there might have been with Seasons 1 and 2, Season 3 is simply good television, and I'm sorry—but not sorry—to have spoiled the story for you. The end of the story involves multiple codas, à la "Return of the King," but it all wraps up satisfactorily, in a way that offers some poetic symmetry for those who remember how the "Next Generation" finale "All Good Things" concluded. If this season ever becomes available as either something downloadable or as a Blu-ray, I definitely plan to buy it. Season 3 of "Star Trek: Picard" brought the nostalgia hard, but it did so while respecting the lore and the fans, which is really all that we viewers have been asking for.

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*In the battle of Wolf 359, Picard's knowledge of Starfleet was laid open to the Borg. Jack Crusher, not being Starfleet, would have no such knowledge, so how was he able to coordinate a military attack against Earth? I guess one in-universe explanation might be that the Borg still retained the older Picard's knowledge, which could have been fed instantly into Jack's brain. The series ends with Jack actually joining Starfleet, so could this mean that Jack already possesses captain-level knowledge of starships, tactics, planet and alien characteristics, etc.? That might be interesting to explore.

**This fascinating term refers to the idea that the genome of a species has many DNA "rungs of the ladder" in common—the "common biology" that makes a species a species. With this much repetition built into our genes, a transporter's workload is eased by saving and reusing common biology in the transporter's pattern buffer whenever transporting living beings. With Picard's Borg alterations being at the level of common biology, it was simply a matter of inserting those genetic patterns into the transporters' pattern buffers to taint thousands of beings at once and prime them all for later assimilation.