"Picard," Season 2: review

L to R (character names): Elnor, Dr. Agnes Jurati, Chris Rios, the Borg Queen, Seven of Nine (blonde), Laris/Tallinn (brunette), Jean-Luc Picard (airbrushed to look younger!), Q, Raffi Musiker, Kore Soong

[WARNING: spoilers. And see my Season 1 review here.]

As I embarked on watching Season 2 of "Star Trek: Picard," I continued to read about the series, which is how I discovered something that I'm sure Mr. Spock would have styled as "fascinating": Season 3 showrunner Terry Matalas, the man credited with saving the series from itself and giving Jean-Luc Picard the awesome swan song he deserves, was also a producer and showrunner for Season 2. Many critics, for various reasons depending on everything from political leanings to personal aesthetics, agreed that "Picard," both Seasons 1 and 2, was a shit-show. Because the show was the co-creation of Alex Kurtzman, it has been derisively labeled "Kurtzman Trek," with an implied invisible boundary both separating and defining Seasons 1 and 2 on one side and Season 3 on the other. Was Season 2, in fact, a shit-show? I'll save you the suspense: it was. I could see that the show was earnest and meant well, but the writing was awful, and so was some of the acting. Not even the presence of the great John de Lancie as a supposedly dying Q could rescue the season. This left me thinking that, if Terry Matalas was responsible for the eleventh-hour saving of the series, he was also largely responsible for the awfulness that was Season 2. Many critics seem to be ignoring this point: Terry Matalas is a two-edged sword who both damned Trek and saved it.

The story picks up sometime after the bizarre ending of the first season. Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart) is now a cybernetic organism, his human body having died at the end of Season 1. His synthetic self has human traits and was "aged up" to allow his mind to feel comfortable in the new body, but he is now free of his brain anomaly and his artificial heart. He is back at Château Picard, tending to his vineyard. His assistant Laris (Orla Brady) has lost her husband Zhaban (Jamie McShane), and she is now falling for Picard himself, per the Romulan custom/tradition in which one honors one's previous love by carrying one's own love forward to another. Picard, though, has always been a private person who has gone through life with no lasting, rooted romantic relationships, and this causes a rift between him and Laris. Picard later gives a speech as chancellor of Starfleet Academy, and he congratulates the young Romulan warrior Elnor (Evan Evagora) on joining Starfleet and being assigned to the Excelsior, where the reinstated Raffaela "Raffi" Musiker (Michelle Hurd) is also serving. Picard visits his friend Guinan (Whoopi Goldberg) at her bar Ten on Forward Avenue in Los Angeles (get it? Ten Forward?), where they talk about Picard's commitment issues. Meanwhile, Captain Chris Rios (Santiago Cabrera) has rejoined Starfleet as well; he commands the Stargazer, which was also the name of the first ship that Picard had served on, deepening the karmic link between Rios and Picard. The Stargazer is responding to a spatial anomaly transmitting what turns out to be a request to meet and negotiate with Picard. Dr. Agnes Jurati (Alison Pill) is on board as a science adviser. Other ships from Starfleet also appear in the area, including Excelsior and Rios's old ship La Sirena, now captained by Seven of Nine (Jeri Ryan), who still does vigilante work with the Fenris Rangers.

The anomaly turns out to be a huge transwarp conduit created by a massive Borg vessel, and what appears to be a Borg Queen requests Picard's presence to negotiate membership in the Federation. With mistrust building on the Starfleet side and Picard having traveled to the Stargazer, the situation escalates into a potential conflict as the Borg Queen beams herself aboard the Stargazer and begins to take over the entire fleet. In desperation, Picard commands the Stargazer to self-destruct, and as the timer counts down the final seconds, the Borg Queen tells Picard, "Look up"—something Picard's mother used to say to him when he was a little boy enchanted by the stars. As the Stargazer explodes, Picard suddenly finds himself at Château Picard, but in a radically altered 25th century: in this new, alternative timeline, Picard has a reputation as a ruthless warrior working for the Confederation, a chauvinistic and totalitarian interplanetary organization biased toward humanity and rejecting notions of interspecies equality. The Confederation conquers, enslaves, and destroys the other races it finds. 

This is, of course, an utter nightmare for our Jean-Luc, who walks into the château's solarium and finds Q there waiting for him. Q cryptically tells Picard that this alternate form of the present wasn't Q's own doing: humanity did this to itself. It turns out that Picard is not alone in this hellish version of the 25th century: Rios, Seven of Nine, Raffi, and Elnor are also there but scattered. The group members have to find each other while navigating this bizarre present, and when they do manage to meet up, they discover that they've been thrust into very different roles from the ones they had in their "proper" present. Seven of Nine is married, and she's the president of the Confederation. Raffi is a Confederation agent, and Elnor, being non-human, is being hunted down. Jurati works as a Confederation scientist; Seven—who normally has Borg implants—is fully human and implant-free in this timeline and goes by her original name of Annika. As the group comes together and tries to understand the situation they're in, they realize that the Confederation is holding a Borg Queen (Annie Wersching in her final role) who is to be publicly executed. They also conclude that, when Q said humanity itself was responsible for this alternate history, there was an event in the past, in the year 2024, where the timeline experienced a major divergence. The team would therefore have to travel back in time in La Sirena and stop the divergence. The group decides their best hope for time travel is to use the same sun-slingshot method used by James Kirk and his crew. Because they don't have the ultra-precise Spock to help them complete the maneuver, the team has little choice but to bring the captured Borg Queen along with them. Her intelligence makes her more than sufficient for the maneuver's complex calculations, but because she is Borg, the Queen also represents untold danger for both the team and its mission.

Once in 2024, the team crash-lands in France near Château Picard. Right before the ship jumped into the past, though, a team of Confederation members, including Annika's husband, beamed aboard and tried to execute our heroes for treason. They were all killed, but Elnor was shot and, as it turned out, mortally wounded: he dies in front of Raffi. Raffi, who had had maternal feelings for Elnor, is devastated and vows to do what she can to repair history so that Elnor won't have died. The team splits up, with Raffi, Seven/Annika, and Rios transporting to Los Angeles while Picard and Jurati stay behind both to repair La Sirena and contend with the always-scheming Borg Queen. The Queen had told the team that the location of the temporal divergence would be Los Angeles, and that they were looking for someone called a Watcher. Through trickery, Jurati is able to extract a set of coordinates, presumably for the Watcher, from the Queen's mind. Picard leaves Jurati behind to go there, and he finds himself at Ten Forward again, four centuries in the past, where he meets a young Guinan (Ito Aghayere), a long-lived El-Aurian who doesn't recognize Picard. Chris Rios, meanwhile, suffers a transporter-beam mishap when he materializes two stories above the ground, falls, and is taken to a clinic that helps illegal immigrants and the poor. There, he meets Dr. Teresa Ramirez (Sol Rodríguez) and her son Ricardo (Steve Gutierrez) and finds himself charmed by the "bumpy" twenty-first century despite its obvious social problems, ranging from how people deal with illegal immigrants to rampant global pollution. When Picard meets with Guinan, she is disgusted with Earth and getting ready to leave it, partly because of the pollution issue. The team from La Sirena eventually figures out that the temporal divergence focuses on one of Picard's ancestors who, in 2024, is a young astronaut named Renée Picard (Penelope Mitchell). Renée has been fighting mental illness her whole life, but she is a talented and capable astronaut who is slated to launch on "the Europa mission," where she will discover sentient life and revolutionize human history... or she will fail to be aboard when the mission launches, thus plunging the world into the nightmarish alternate timeline of what will eventually be the Confederation. The launch is only days away; Picard and his team must make sure Renée is on board her spacecraft to steer history in the right direction (i.e., toward the eventual Federation). Dr. Jurati, alone on La Sirena, must contend with the captive Borg Queen, who wants to assimilate Jurati, then use the doctor's endorphins to rebuild the population of nanoprobes in her blood so she can actively assimilate more and more Earthlings, thus taking over 21st-century Earth, which is totally unprepared for a Borg assault. Picard and Guinan have to contend with a zealous FBI agent named Martin Wells (Jay Karnes) who had experienced an alien encounter in his own past (with Vulcans*), and who possesses video evidence of Picard beaming in at the location of the Ten Forward bar. Also: Guinan turns out not to be the Watcher in question—we discover the real Watcher is a probable ancestor of Laris named Tallinn (Orla Brady again), who is posing as human and watching over Renée Picard while keeping herself as invisible as possible. Will Picard save history one more time?

Season 2 of "Picard" is a sprawling mess. As with Season 1, there are some good ideas at play, but unlike the previous season, Season 2 is far, far preachier, with a message about illegal immigration that, ironically, was poorly timed. While Season 2 came out in March of 2022 and was written around 2019 or 2020, during the Trump era, the 2024 setting of the story—not to mention the 2022 release—puts the action, ironically, during the Biden presidency, garbling whatever anti-Trump message was being attempted. 

There are many other problems as well, all having to do with story and characterization. It felt, toward the end of the season, as if the writers had no idea what to do with some of the characters, resulting in weird fates for some of them: Chris Rios turns out to love the 21st century so much that he elects to stay there despite all sorts of warnings about perturbing the timestream (the chaotic "butterfly effect" is mentioned several times). Agnes Jurati gets assimilated by the Borg Queen, resulting in her character doing any number of crazy things from belting out show tunes as a distraction to breaking large glass windows to eventually becoming a new type of Borg Queen herself—one that recognizes and affirms individuality. Jurati was all over the place, but I suppose actress Alison Pill had a chance to show off how diverse her acting chops were. To me, the character came off as more of a plot device than a real person. It was also hard to understand Q's role: as the season progresses, we discover that Q is dying, and that he's putting Picard through this one last trial not for Picard's or humanity's benefit, but more to allow Q to extract some final bit of meaning for himself. The alternate-history 25th century presents its own "Quantum Leap" problem: if the Picard, et al., from our "proper" timeline has been inserted into this new, nightmarish timeline, where did the original Picard, et al., go? Are they being held in stasis somewhere? The season never answers this painfully obvious question. And how does it make sense for Q to blame humanity for the timeline divergence when Q is the real cause? (We see him actively trying to influence Renée Picard!) So Q is written rather poorly as well: unclear motives and hypocrisy mar any attempts to show that he really loves Picard ("Even gods have favorites," he reassures Picard near the season's end). Also, the ensuing Season 3 undoes whatever drama was involved in the prospect of Q's death: at the end of Season 3, Q is quite alive and healthy. The character of Renée Picard is also something of a psychological mess, always on the verge of falling apart. A bit like Jurati in Season 1, Renée is the annoying opposite of a girl boss, and despite wearing a French flag on her flight suit, she speaks not a lick of French (actress Penelope Mitchell is Australian). Raffi and Seven's romance also feels somewhat shoehorned in, and when Raffi grieves over Elnor, I had to wonder why Picard wasn't grieving even more intensely since Season 1 established that Picard had known the lad since he was a little tyke. Oh, and I'd mentioned some poor acting earlier: the boy who played the very young Jean-Luc Picard in flashbacks, Dylan Von Halle, was one of the worst child actors I've seen in a while. I'm sure the kid meant well, but he wasn't up to playing a young version of the great Picard at all; it felt a bit like watching the equally miscast Jake Lloyd playing Anakin Skywalker. And the kid, whenever he cried out for his mum (Madeline Wise as the unstable and suicidal Yvette), used the French term Maman, but his pronunciation was off: it sounded as if he were saying Méman! That became grating after a while, but it did reinforce the idea that the Picard family hadn't been speaking proper French for generations: as some lines of dialogue point out, the family had spent a long time in England, hence the Earl Grey tea and the mannerisms. There was a lot more to dislike about Season 2, including the ridiculous number of Dickensian coincidences from Episode 1 onward, but I'd be going on all day if I listed everything.

Season 1 had a few moments of conceptual brilliance; Season 2 came along and quickly wore out its welcome. It was a woke disaster for sure, with the poor timing of the anti-Trump message not helping the show one whit. The lazy coincidences, the poor characterizations of principal characters, the story's overly slow buildup to get all the chess pieces in place (I didn't even mention Brent Spiner's role as a 21st-century Dr. Adam Soong, or Isa Briones as his clone "daughter" Kore Soong), and the overall sloppy writing made Season 2 a slog. I didn't like Season 1 that much, but I liked it far better than Season 2. Thank God the show ended with the Season 3 we got. And I'm still nonplussed at Terry Matalas's negative and positive roles, respectively, in both Season 2 and Season 3.

Season 2 left me shaking my head. And I'm upset that this was Annie Wersching's final role. I think Wersching was one of the best things about Season 2: her Borg Queen was a dead-eyed, calculating menace, very much in contrast to Alice Krige's portrayal of a slinky, sexually predatory Queen. Season 2's Borg Queen spends most of her screen time without the lower half of her body, an effect that is creepy at the subconscious level the longer you're exposed to her. Wersching died of cancer, having not revealed her diagnosis to her castmates for a long time. I wish Season 2 of "Picard" had been a better monument to Wersching's acting talents, and I freely admit one reason why I'm so sad about her death is that I've had a bit of a crush on her since her time on "24," where she played Agent Renée Walker (done in by a sniper). I'm so sorry, Annie. I really am. You deserved way better.

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*This would, however, seem to violate the continuity established in "Star Trek: First Contact."