In the long run, Picard grew to become the fan-service TNG reunion it at all times ought to have been

Main spoilers for the third season of Star Trek: Picard are under.

Among the many many sins of the 2002 movie Star Trek Nemesis is the truth that its box-office bombing killed the still-nascent plans for a fifth and last The Subsequent Technology outing, one that might have been designed as a finale in the identical means that Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Nation was for the unique solid.

I’ve no cause to imagine that this movie is a few nice misplaced gem of Star Trek canon; it was being written by the identical individuals who wrote the terrible Nemesis, and it was set as much as be a form of Seek for Spock retread about reviving Knowledge and restoring the established order. However its absence meant an absence of closure for the TNG crew—a narrative that wasn’t allowed to finish by itself phrases.

So when Patrick Stewart obtained on a stage in 2018 to announce that “Jean-Luc Picard is again,” it was thrilling! Closure finally. And, hopefully, a present that felt extra assured and tonally constant than Discovery had up to now.

The primary two seasons of Star Trek: Picard didn’t make good on that promise. They have been wildly uneven, and whereas their greatest moments nearly at all times concerned different TNG characters, the present actively resisted turning into a TNG reboot. However its third season, additionally preemptively introduced as its last season, would lastly reunite each member of the TNG crew for one final experience (and likewise Raffi can be there).

I nonetheless had misgivings for the primary half of the season, and criticism I stand by. Paramount despatched out screeners of the primary six episodes, and whereas these six episodes have been doing some issues I appreciated, Picard was nonetheless scuffling with among the issues it had at all times struggled with: not-quite-right characterization, an obsession with plot twists and bombast, and a give attention to Picard to the exclusion of most different characters.

However within the season’s final 4 episodes, one thing sudden occurred: the present lastly delivered on its unique promise.

It was Knowledge and Geordi that tipped me over the sting, wanting again. In each Nemesis and Picard‘s first season, we expertise Knowledge’s loss nearly completely from Picard’s perspective. Picard was Knowledge’s buddy, and Picard was a mentor to Knowledge as he explored his humanity. However the season’s eighth episode lastly thought to ask how Knowledge’s greatest buddy would have skilled his loss, fairly than specializing in how Knowledge’s boss would have felt. LeVar Burton sells the hell out of the Geordi efficiency he lastly will get to present.

(It is also good to have Brent Spiner again in his Knowledge mode; Spiner was in each of Picard‘s first two seasons as completely different disagreeable Soong relations, and the slimy register that Spiner makes use of to play these characters is simply not very enjoyable to observe.)

It is emblematic of one thing these previous couple of Picard episodes do properly that the flicks by no means actually discovered—each character has one thing to do. Gates McFadden is especially underutilized in each single TNG movie, however there are moments in all of them the place the non-Picard, non-Knowledge characters are current merely to supply an additional physique in a scene or rattle off some Treknobabble. Picard remains to be first amongst equals—the present has his title on it, in any case—however as soon as all of the previous TNG characters are lastly again on the board, Stewart and Picard each really feel extra like gamers in an ensemble once more.