I want to be curmudgeonly, but I can’t. They did, so far, pull it off.
Most of the hype leading up to season 3 of Star Trek: Picard has been various forms of, “Oh thank God, they decided to stop fucking around trying something new and just do the TNG reunion nostalgia-fest we wanted the whole time.” If you have been reading my blog’s evolution into a “How is there this much Star Trek for me to talk about?” blog, and I hope you are, you might suspect that this is a marketing tactic that would not work on me so well as on, y’know, the people who keep posting questions on Quora that are thinly veiled rephrases of, “Please help me justify the fact that I can’t stand all the women, gay men, and people of color in Star Trek by making it sound like there’s actually something objectively wrong with it.”
So where are we at the beginning of Picard’s valedictory season? Well, the new Borg and the mysterious transwarp MacGuffin are nowhere to be seen. Rios has been dead for hundreds of years. Soji and Elnor are nowhere to be seen, Jurati is, I assume, off being the Borg Queen. I think Raffi’s got La Sirena for some reason (I didn’t get a good enough look to be sure they aren’t just using the La Sirena sets as a stand-in for “generic civilian ship of the sort a shady ex-starfleet type might use as a private operator”). Stargazer and Excelsior are nowhere to be seen, and we’ll get to Seven in due time.
We actually open on Bevery Crusher, who has become a cool action lady aboard a ship which Memory Alpha tells me is called the “Eleos XII”, though I thought she was saying “Helios” or maybe “Delios”. They’re being attacked by… Let’s go with “Bad Guys”, and she does a lot of murdering them while she waits for the engines to warm up. Her phaser rifle is pump-action, and has both “maim” and “sploosh” modes, switching between them haphazardly. Remember when phasers just had “stun”, “kill” and “disappear”? Okay, I know that they occasionally had to set their phasers to “Extremely nasty death” mode, like when they fought the parasite queen in Starfleet Headquarters’s Inexplicable Boss Fight Room (Seriously, why did they even HAVE a room which was just one big open room with a large throne-like chair and a map and nothing else? The chair had a Starfleet barcode on the back, so this was a normal thing for them to have there, not something specially built for the alien queen). Still. Pump. Action. Phaser. Rifle.
She takes one in the shoulder – fortunately, her attackers have phasers set to “Emulate small caliber gunfire” rather than “Sploosh” – a wound she is unable to treat despite being a doctor, and has to have herself put in stasis. But first, she sends a secret message to Old Man Picard, in the most roundabout and cryptic way she can think of, encrypted with a codec from an unseen adventure (To Rigel VII – the same planet where Pike had recently lost some crew in the original pilot) from the TNG era and obfuscated based on a Borg computer virus that happened off-screen in “The Best of Both Worlds”, transmitted directly to Picard’s old commbadge. I started out thinking it was a little too heavy on the memberberries by having Bev listening to Picard’s old logs when we join her, but I guess it’s actually meant to link back to her invoking the Hellbird virus when reaching out.
But let us pause a moment to contemplate that offscreen during the events of “The Best of Both Worlds”, the Borg infected the Enterprise computer with a virus that… Randomly added 3 to numbers? What, just to dick with them? And they named this virus “Hellfire”? Also, we have an actual canonical example of something mysteriously injecting the actual number 3 into Enterprise systems – that time they got stuck in a time loop with Kelsey Grammer.
Contrary to my fears, Laris has not been quietly killed off-screen; she and Old Man Picard are still very much a thing, and we greet them in the process of packing up the house because she’s got a gig doing security off-world, and her boyfriend is hungry enough for adventure that he looks forward to going with her to… Drink. This scene felt a little clumsy. Also, her job description sounds like a short-term thing, so why is he having the house packed up like he’s moving out? He wants to give Geordi the painting of the D (hee hee. I plan to make “the D” jokes a lot) that’s been hanging over his desk and which is identical to the poster that I think is still hanging in my childhood bedroom unless my mom finally moved it. She stops him.
Apparently, this season is set a few years after last season? (Or maybe not? There’s a ton of inconsistency in the dates of things) Which is a fair way to excuse the status quo being so different, but at the same time, it doesn’t seem to quite mesh with the sense that Laris and Picard’s relationship has a certain newness to it, or that Picard seems not to have kept up with Seven. Or the age of Raffi’s granddaughter.
Still worried they’re gonna fridge Laris in favor of shipping Jean-Luc with Bev, and after last season’s arc, it’s real rough to have him ditch her to go off on another adventure with the old gang, no matter how good a job the universe did at not giving him a choice.
No one from the old gang has heard from Bev in 20 years, and Picard says they parted under a cloud. 20 years would put it around the time of the Mars attack (More or less. I think the Mars attack is more like 17 years ago at this point? Rounding 17 to 20 is fair game in my book, but I bet the nerds are going to insist that they must be different), and I hope they remember that Beverly is from Mars, and probably has feelings about that.
So Picard meets up with Riker at Guinan’s bar because they’re both in town for Frontier Day. Guinan is not present at the moment, but has a lucrative side-line in selling Eaglemoss collectibles, a promotion that has aged like fine wine, what with Eaglemoss going bankrupt between the filming of this episode and the airing of it. She can’t shift the D (hee hee), because no one wants “the fat one”.
Let me tell you, no scene in Star Trek ever gave me tingles the way the reveal of the D (hee hee. Reveal of the D) did back in ’87, but I can totally see Kids These Days not being impressed by the smooth curves and Okudapunk aesthetic in our modern age of harder lines, dimmer lighting, and lens flare.
And… We get to the second Thing From Previous Seasons They Discarded And Made Me Angry: Riker alludes to things not being all fun and happy on Nepenthe, suggesting that Kestra and Deanna are happy to be rid of him. Fuck. Let Riker have his happy retirement, please? If they have it turn out that him taking command of the Zheng He at the end of season 1 reawakened the Starfleet Bug and he’s been neglecting his family, I will be Displeased.
This pretty much brings us to the centerpiece of the episode: the reveal of the Titan-A. Riker describes this as a “refit” of his old ship, but it’s blatantly a completely new ship, a “Neo-Constitution Class”. It looks way more like a Strange New Worlds design than a 24th century design; apparently the actual logic of its design was “What if Starfleet went through a “retro” period at the turn of the century?”
The Titan-A (Letter designators for ships other than Enterprise are a thing now. We had previously seen that in 32nd century on Discovery, but never in the TNG era. I choose to believe that Voyager was the second ship to have its successor get a letter, and once they’d done that, they decided to just make it policy) is not, in my opinion, an especially beautiful ship. Its secondary hull is kind of weird and Grissom-y, and it’s got way too many impulse engines. It’s got a very TOS-movie-era design sensibility, but in NuTrek colors, and while it evokes the original Constitution Class, it doesn’t do so overtly enough to justify selling it as a “New Constitution”.
But the approach scene? Letting the camera slowly make love to the ship as Picard and Riker get a good look at it on the way in? Best “Starship Porn” scene that the modern era has done. It’s everything a Starship Reveal should be, letting us get a good look at the ship and not being too busy or crowded or turning the camera upside-down.
As an aside, I have heard that there’s an explanation for Riker describing the Titan-A as a refit: that it’s essentially a mild sort of con, with the new Titan being built with a few parts salvaged from her predecessor. There’s a popular claim here in the real world – a probably apocryphal one, but one with a chance of being truth-adjacent – that the USS Constellation – a 19th century Sloop-of-War currently on display as a tourist attraction in Baltimore’s inner harbor, was built using timbers salvaged from the 18th century frigate of the same name, and that this might have been done as a legal maneuver to work around congress refusing to authorize a new ship, so the Navy did some creative accounting to “refit” a recently scuttled vessel. Like I said, this is probably complete bullshit, born out of wishful thinking by folks who wanted Baltimore’s tourist attraction to have the same provenance as Boston’s – the older Constellation was a contemporary of the USS Constitution, famously the oldest US Navy vessel in operation.
And then we meet the Titan’s first officer, Commander Seven of-
record needle scratch.
I have not been shy about the fact that I think of “Annika Hansen” as essentially Seven’s deadname. Everyone who uses it in the first two seasons dies. Seven does not want to go back to being the little girl whose parents stranded her in the Delta Quadrant and got her abducted by robot space zombies. She wants to be “Seven”, the identity she forged for herself after her liberation from the collective. So it was upsetting to me when she introduces herself as “Commander Hansen”.
But, again, they pulled it off. Because it’s not just a name; it’s the first hint we get about a man we haven’t met yet: Captain Shaw. And Captain Shaw? Is a dick. He calls Seven by her deadname. He also accuses Seven of siding against him with Picard as a “fellow Ex-Borg”, which is kinda racist? And he hates jazz. And he couldn’t be arsed to greet Picard and Riker. And he couldn’t be arsed to take the chair when they left spacedock. And he doesn’t like bordeaux. And, of course, when Riker and Picard set up a plan to get themselves out to the hinterlands to look for Bev, he just turns them down flat, refusing an order from an Admiral (Picard is retired again? Last year he was running Starfleet Academy. Riker was active reserve last time we saw him, but he doesn’t outrank Shaw).
Seriously, give this man a swagger stick, because he’s got strong Styles energy. I wonder where his arc is going? I assume he will be the person to tell Jean-Luc to go fuck himself this season, but what else? Will he come to see the value of the older generation’s cowboy ways (It’s so strange now to see Shaw dismiss Picard and Riker as being into action and explosions and crash landings, when The Next Generation was for the most part so much more of a regimented, cerebral, thinky sort of Star Trek, and it’s really only the movies where they got to be Big Damn Action Heroes)? Will he be part of the conspiracy? Not actually saying there is a conspiracy, but Bev sure seems to think Starfleet can’t be trusted. All I ask is that there comes a critical moment where Seven gets to say, “I’m not Borg. I’m Ex-Borg, and it’s not Hansen, it’s Seven, you son of a bitch,” then kick him in the face.
I do, though, love how Seven sees right through the subterfuge, and is instantly on-board to steal her own ship as soon as Picard lets her in on the secret.
Here, we pause a second to reflect on the interior of the Titan. It’s… Okay. Too dark, like most starships in this era of “Hey when you use a modern digital camera instead of an old fashioned analogue TV camera, you don’t need to light everything up as bright as the sun.”
I note that like the Stargazer, the bridge of the Titan is set into the middle of a flight of stairs, because there is no OSHA in the 25th century. I am fascinated by the workstations, too, because they have these huge curving screens that are consistent in style as an evolution of the TNG-era LCARS. The scale of them is a little weird though. I find myself imagining the crew constantly damaging their rotator cuffs to reach way up to hit a button all the time.
I think I mentioned that I bought a new car not long ago. Well, new to me; it’s a 2018. It’s my first car with a touchscreen, and its touchscreen is about twice the size of the one in Leah’s car. I test drove a more recent version of the same model, with an even larger touchscreen – basically the whole center console on the 2020 is a touchscreen, and it reminds me a lot of the big workstations on the Titan.
While all this is going on, we check in with our other returning character, Raffi. Who I guess was not the Excelsior’s captain last season, but just the Operations Officer? Because she’s a commander now, same as Seven. She’s also with Starfleet Intelligence, under cover with a secret handler who won’t meet with her in person and is evasive about his true identity and is definitely Worf. Raffi is under cover on M’Talas Prime. Seems early in his showrunning career for Terry Matalas to name planets after himself.
I have no complaints about Raffi’s scenes, unless it turns out that she really did break up with Seven. In particular, I love Raffi’s cover story. Normally, they’d do this thing where they try to sell that she’s gone all piratey and no longer cares about anything but money and her next hit and that she was out for evil. But instead, Raffi’s cover story is, “She fell off the wagon when Seven dumped her, got kicked out of Starfleet over her drug problem, but she’s desperate to get back in, so the reason she’s doing these shady things is that she hopes that a big score will get her back in Starfleet’s good graces.” This is a much more believable cover story than your usual “Nah she just went mercenary,” even if the audience themselves isn’t going to buy it – and they do not ask us to.
The score she’s chasing is a stolen Quantum Tunneling device. That is, a portal gun. I really like the scenes of her trying to interpret the “red lady” clue. I will leave aside how weird it is that her contact sold her the words “the red lady” with no context. I mean, where did he get that? It’s not quite as good as her tracking down Maddox in Season 1, but it’s nice to be reminded that Raffi is a savant at interpreting fragmentary data. That’s the positive side of her (probably neurodivergent) mental configuration that also led to her being a conspiracy theorist (The service record that flashes on-screen for a bit reveals that she stalked Janeway for a while!).
The fact that the Red Lady is a reference to Rachel Garrett is an interesting one, and I can’t help but wonder if our villains’ beef has something to do with defunct timelines – maybe Amanda Plummer is angry about the sheer fucking hubris involved in the Enterprise crew aborting the Klingon War timeline? Though my leading theory at the moment is that the bad guys have a beef over Starfleet allying with the Borg at the end of last season – the references to “The Best of Both Worlds” plus Shaw mentioning the Ex-Borg thing make me think it would be very satisfying for this to be revenge by people who were hurt by the Borg and now feel betrayed that Starfleet has made peace with them.
So the Red Lady is a statue of Rachel Garrett in front of a Starfleet recruiting center, which Raffi figures out just slightly too late to stop it getting Quantum Tunneled into a big hole in the ground, which then politely dumps it from the other end of the hole, way up in the air above. It is a pretty cool visual.
Seven derailing her career to do a solid for Picard and Riker feels nice – we get a very abbreviated sense that she’s chafing as Starfleet – the balance between following orders and following her heart is something that pretty much everyone in NuTrek struggles with. As I’ve said many times, I wish more characters would reach the conclusion that Starfleet wasn’t for them. But I think the arc we’re probably going for here is going to be another rehash of Seven ultimately finding her way while wearing the uniform. I dunno.
We end for this week with Picard and Riker having made it to the Eleos (wasn’t that a toaster pizza?) but under siege from the bad guys, who have returned in a giant sort of scorpion-like ship of a design I feel like I’ve seen before. Kinda like the Shadows from Babylon 5, but more straightforward. Almost thinking there’s a Transformer that turns into it. But our real shock twist is the new character who accosts them and identifies himself as Jack – Beverly’s son. (See? Get it? We called the episode “The Next Generation” and here is the literal son of the previous generation? I mean, actually, it’s pretty cool how the title seems at first to be fan-service reminding us that this season we are just gonna do full-on TNG Reuinion, but it turns out that it connects on multiple levels, with Raffi’s grandkid, and Bev’s son, and Riker’s replacement, and Geordi’s daughter, who is also there, but so far she’s just been a Demora Sulu-style wave and nod; maybe we’ll see more of her later).
Wow. This was a fun, zippy episode, and I really do lament that Picard’s final season has discarded trying to do something new and different in favor of “Let’s just do a proper TNG movie with the same feeling of get-the-band-back-together-after-years-apart that the TOS movies had”. But man, they do such a good job. This episode is so much more focused than the previous seasons of Picard were. And it just feels right. Like, they wham you up front with a title card reading “In the 25th Century…” that evokes the opening of The Wrath of Khan (down to the use of Corporate URW font, which appears only here and in the Star Trek II title cards). The music, which I think is based on the suite from Generations, has a very movie-era feel to it as well, along with a lot of the cinematographic choices. We dispense with the Picard-centric title sequence in favor of a simple title card, and episode titles are on-screen again. Also, along with Corporate URW, we get the return of the Crillee font for the credits. Where seasons 1 and 2 made a point to remind us that this is part of the New Generation of Star Trek – not simply a return to The Next Generation – every little thing they can cram in here seems to scream the message, “The Next Generation is back.” I don’t want to love it, but I kind of do.
Let’s see where they go from here…
PS: The end titles are chock full of little easter eggs on the display panels, revealing that the original Voyager (There’s a “C” now) and the Enterprise-A are both in the fleet museum. Is it too much to hope, I wonder, whether they might get a cameo for Frontier Day?
Yeah, it probably is. But still, would that not be fucking epic?