beverly crusher – Trekking with Dennis

Star Trek: Picard Episode Review – Season 3, Episode 6: The Bounty

Spoiler Warning: There are spoilers ahead for Star Trek: Picard Seasons 1-3. Spoilers are also present for the following Star Trek productions: The Wrath of Khan, The Search for Spock, The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, Voyager, and Discovery.

The Bounty feels like an episode that was made for fans. More than any other episode of Picard – at least since Season 1’s Nepenthe – I felt that the writers were leaning as heavily as they could into the lore and history of the Star Trek franchise, plucking some of those nostalgic chords for no other reason than to harken back to classic episodes, films, and stories that Trekkies will remember with fondness. There were some incredibly powerful emotional moments as a result, and I will never tire of seeing close-up shots of some of the franchise’s most beautiful starships!

Despite that, however, The Bounty was an imperfect outing overall – an episode with a couple of story beats that felt incomplete or just abrupt, and that resurrected a character who I felt had been appropriately and perfectly laid to rest. Moments of nostalgia spread throughout The Bounty felt absolutely magical… for the most part. But I fear this side of things was overdone and may have tried to carry the episode just a little too far. There will be repercussions for the story as a whole as the second half of the season – and the final act of Picard – gets underway.

Let’s talk first about something that had been teased in pre-season trailers and had got a lot of Trekkies chattering excitedly: the “return” of Professor Moriarty. For me, the way this ultimately came across in The Bounty was a let-down; a textbook example of how not to over-hype a character. Moriarty, in my view, should never have appeared in trailers and marketing material for two reasons. Firstly, his cameo here was incredibly brief, with Moriarty getting only a couple of lines and one very short moment of action. Secondly, and perhaps most significantly, this isn’t actually Moriarty.

This version of Moriarty was revealed to be a projection; an illusion created from the decaying remnants of Data’s memories. And that’s totally fine in the context of the story. Had I gone into the episode not expecting to see Moriarty nor knowing he was going to be included in the season, I’d have almost certainly been surprised and impressed. But the build-up to Moriarty’s return had been a significant moment in pre-season trailers going back several months… and seen through that lens, I felt more than a little let down – as if the promised return was nothing more than a bait-and-switch.

Moriarty’s cameo in *The Bounty* was minor.

Ro Laren’s surprise return to Star Trek last week had been kept secret – and it worked phenomenally well as a result. I can’t help but feel that Daniel Davis’ return as Moriarty should have been treated the same way, as keeping Moriarty out of pre-season trailers would have made his return feel impactful rather than underwhelming. There was scope to do more with Moriarty – and having wondered for months why he might be involved and what kind of a role he could play… I just feel like this cameo was over-hyped. Partly that’s my own fault… but partly it’s Paramount’s marketing, which deliberately over-inflated Moriarty’s role in pre-season trailers.

Trying to assess this inclusion on its own merit, though, I think it would’ve been a lot of fun were it not for being basically spoiled ahead of time. Visiting a black site like Daystrom Station only to encounter a dangerous foe from the past, having to figure out what was going on and how to defeat him, while at the same time he’s unable to be harmed… it was a setup that should have been tense and exciting, while at the same time being a great deal of fun to welcome back a character that I don’t think anyone could’ve truly expected. But unfortunately it didn’t stick the landing – and that’s all because this surprise was spoiled by pre-season trailers.

Moriarty’s return had been spoiled by pre-season trailers.

Let’s get all of the disappointments out of the way up front and look at another let-down! I always like to caveat these particular kinds of criticisms by noting that Paramount doesn’t have unlimited financial resources, and that it isn’t fair to compare Star Trek to productions from the likes of Disney or HBO that have significantly more money to play with. But even with that caveat… I felt that there was a scene or sequence that was sorely missing from The Bounty.

Jack Crusher and Sidney La Forge teamed up to “borrow” a cloaking device from the titular Bounty – the Klingon Bird-of-Prey used by Captain Kirk and co. during the events of The Voyage Home. But this daring heist took place entirely off-screen… and I just feel disappointed by that.

Even with the caveat that Paramount doesn’t have unlimited money, let’s consider this story beat and see how it could’ve played out. First up, there are only two characters involved, which obviously makes it a lot more manageable from a practical point of view. Secondly, it wouldn’t necessarily have required the construction of multiple sets. Between the AR wall (which I know is in Toronto, not California where Picard is produced) and pre-existing sets, surely it must’ve been possible to recreate a small portion of a Bird-of-Prey – even if it wasn’t the bridge. Just a corridor or something where we could’ve seen Jack and Sidney beaming aboard. Alternatively, the episode could’ve seen Jack and Sidney take the USS Defiant’s cloaking device, and a small part of that ship could’ve been created.

Although some creative(ish) storytelling and writing tried to present this aspect of the story as a bit of a surprise, it was actually pretty clear what Jack hoped to do, and even though I know we don’t always need to see every moment unfold in order for a story to be entertaining… we absolutely could have in this instance. In an episode that was already leaning heavily on the crutch of nostalgia, think how much fun it could have been if we’d actually been able to visit one of the ships at the museum instead of just seeing their recreated CGI husks.

So I’m afraid to say that this aspect of The Bounty feels like it has a pretty glaring omission.

Jack formulated a plan… but his plan took place entirely off-screen.

I can’t wait any longer to talk about Data! This is a huge point, not just for Season 3 and potentially not only for Picard, either, but for Star Trek as a whole. The resurrection of seemingly-dead characters is something the franchise has done before – and done quite well, at least in some instances. Technobabble can be used to excuse and justify these things in a sci-fi setting, so from a technical standpoint there really isn’t much to say about the whole “Data, Lore, B4, and other androids are all stuck inside the same ‘golem’ body” idea that The Bounty introduced. I think it clears the bar from that point of view.

But I can’t forgive it as a narrative point.

One of the few highlights of the two-part Season 1 finale was how poignant and beautiful the scenes between Picard and Data were. Eighteen years after Data’s death in Nemesis hadn’t really been given a sufficiently emotional payoff, Et in Arcadia Ego righted that wrong, and Data was finally laid to rest as Picard entered the digital afterlife. Those scenes did so much to elevate what was an otherwise disappointing finale – but more than that, they felt final and conclusive; a definitive but also appropriate end for a character we first met way back in 1987.

Data’s resurrection is a difficult storyline to get behind.

By allowing Data to permanently die, Picard helped him achieve his lifelong goal of becoming more human – because what could possibly be more human, for an artificial life-form who doesn’t age, than dying? This was one of the most impactful moments in all of Season 1 for me, and seeing Data come to the definitive end of his life, even as Picard was being reborn in a new body, went a long way to making the journey feel worthwhile.

The Bounty has now undermined and even overwritten that powerful emotional moment – and I fear that it has no reason for doing so other than the selfish desire of some of the show’s producers to play with the character of Data once more. I feel like I’m watching children playing with action figures; sure, Data was “dead,” but that doesn’t matter now. Pretend it didn’t happen, pick up the doll, and start playing a new game.

He even kind of resembles an action figure in a box…

One of my biggest concerns going into Season 3 – and really going back a whole year to the announcement of these actors returning – is that the story would end up feeling not only tacked-on and unnecessary, but like a childish mess. Bringing back these characters has to serve a purpose, but it also has to make narrative sense within a long-established world. More than that, it has to feel like it’s being done for more than just nakedly commercialised nostalgia – and the resurrection of Data, who had been permanently killed off twice, has crossed that line for me.

As we saw in both Seasons 1 and 2, there are ways to include Brent Spiner – if that had been deemed necessary – without resurrecting the character of Data. Pre-season trailers seemed to indicate that Spiner would be playing Lore, and while I wasn’t wild about that as I’ve never been a huge Lore fan, it seemed like a passable compromise if the show’s producers wanted to get as close as possible to a TNG reunion.

I have no doubt that there will be some kind of narrative payoff to Data being “back,” and I’m crossing my fingers and hoping that it will be something I find at least bearable. But based on what we got in The Bounty, I’m sceptical. This resurrection feels like it serves two purposes: the desire of the showrunner and writers to play with their favourite action figures, and the commercial wishes of Paramount as it hopes to offset some of its huge losses by nakedly playing the nostalgia card. Neither excuse, quite frankly, is good enough – and neither comes close to justifying a pretty clunky technobabble explanation for resurrecting this long-dead character.

I keep thinking back to The Wrath of Khan and The Search for Spock as a point of comparison, because I think that may be another factor in Data’s resurrection here; it’s intended to mirror Spock’s. But in that story, Spock’s resurrection had been teed up at the end of The Wrath of Khan in a scene that showed Spock’s coffin lying, undamaged, on the surface of the Genesis Planet. Not only that, but these two stories were told one after the other. Data’s death happened back in 2002 – and his supposedly final end came more than a full season ago. While there are echoes of the Spock story here… that one feels a lot stronger, and seems to have been written with more of a sense of purpose. Data’s story, in contrast, feels muddled and disjointed; the consequence of different writers and writing teams having fundamentally contradictory ideas for where to take the character – and how and even whether to end his life.

A glimpse behind-the-scenes during *The Bounty’*s production.

Star Trek can successfully pull off a death-and-rebirth narrative, so I don’t think that is a problem in and of itself. We got one such example involving Jean-Luc Picard in the Season 1 finale of Picard – and another even more recently with Book at the end of Discovery’s fourth season. But here, with Data, having seen him so beautifully and sensitively laid to rest in Season 1, and with his death in Nemesis having come more than twenty years ago… it doesn’t work, at least not for me.

Rather than feeling like Spock’s rebirth, or even Picard’s in Season 1, Data’s resurrection reminds me a lot more of Elnor’s, which came at the very end of Season 2. Elnor was, like Data, definitively dead. And like Data, his death had a significant emotional impact. Raffi’s entire Season 2 storyline saw her grieving and coming to terms with his death – and that storyline was, for much of the season, one of the few that seemed to be working. Elnor’s last-second resurrection undid all of that, damaged the overall narrative of the season, felt unearned, unnecessary, and just plain stupid. And many of those same points – particularly those about undermining an emotional storyline and feeling ultimately unnecessary – are present here as well.

As much fun as it could be to have Data back and to get reunions with Geordi, Picard, and the rest of the crew, I’m struggling with this storyline.

Though it may have been intended to echo Spock’s rebirth from *The Search for Spock*… Data’s resurrection didn’t work anywhere near as well.

Data did tell us something very interesting, though: the “real” theft from Daystrom Station that the rogue changelings wanted to cover up was that of Jean-Luc Picard’s corpse. Precisely why Section 31 wanted to keep Picard’s body, and what they might’ve done with it for the past couple of years, wasn’t made clear… and that’s already kind of odd, when you think about it. Could there be a reason why Picard’s and Kirk’s bodies were both kept at Daystrom Station? Perhaps something connected to the Nexus or the events of Generations?

One thing that we learned from The Bounty that Picard and Jack have in common is a diagnosis of Irumodic syndrome. Given that the rogue changelings are also chasing after him, perhaps that has something to do with it – but we’ll save the speculation for my next theory post. Suffice to say it was an interesting development, and one that brings the conspiracy several steps closer to Picard himself.

Apparently the rogue changelings have absconded with Picard’s corpse.

But all of that came at the end of the episode, and there were plenty of fun or at least interesting moments before we reached those revelations. As I said, The Bounty really feels like an episode that was made for fans – or at least that had moments of pure fan-service that I absolutely lapped up.

Visiting the Fleet Museum was an opportunity to show off some beautiful CGI recreations of some of Star Trek’s most well-known ships. The USS Defiant, the Enterprise-A, and of course the titular Bounty were all present. Seven of Nine and Jack taking a closer look at the USS Voyager was an especially sweet moment, and several familiar musical stings accompanied these ships as they were shown on screen. I adore much of the music of Star Trek – especially the films from the ’80s and the shows of the ’90s – so hearing these short clips was enough, as Scotty once said, to bring a tear to my eye.

This sequence was a perfect “made for the fans” moment. It was a total nostalgia overload, but one that made sense in the context of the story and that was just the right length. Given what we’ve just been talking about, there must’ve been a temptation to drag this out and perhaps go overboard with the nostalgia plays, talking about each ship in more detail. But here, less was more – and the sequence, which only lasted about three minutes, came across beautifully as a result.

Since reappearing as the Titan’s second-in-command, I hadn’t really been blown away by Seven of Nine’s inclusion in the story of Season 3 so far. She served a narrative function on a couple of occasions – by rerouting the Titan against Captain Shaw’s orders and by identifying the first changeling infiltrator by using her real name – but she hadn’t had that much to say, nor many scenes in which she took centre-stage. Pairing her up with Jack on this occasion was fun – and we got to see how two individuals who are very different from one another, yet have a connection as Starfleet “outsiders,” were able to find some common ground.

Seven became emotional when thinking back to her time aboard the USS Voyager.

Seven’s line to Jack about the USS Voyager having been her home was incredibly touching, and it’s great to see Picard embracing the legacy of Voyager in such an overt way. I’ve said this before going all the way back to Season 1, but Seven’s transformation has been wonderful to see and more than a little cathartic. Seeing her in uniform, geeking out about starship designs with Jack, was another example of this.

Sticking with Jack, I spoke last week about how his hallucinatory experiences were something that hit close to home for me, and I don’t really want to get into all of that again; it isn’t an easy thing to think about or talk too much about! But suffice to say that I’m convinced that there must be more to what’s going on with Jack than simply “Irumodic syndrome” – though the connection between Jack’s hallucinations and the genetic disease that affected Picard was handled well in the story.

Jack’s glowing red eyes from a couple of episodes ago would seem to serve as the best argument for there being more to this story than an illness, as would Jack’s out-of-nowhere combat prowess last week. And that’s before we account for the changelings’ desire to capture him… for some reason. We’ll go into specific ideas about where Jack’s story could go in my next theory update, but for now I think it’s enough to say that there’s more going on here than we’re aware of at this juncture.

I actually really liked Jack in The Bounty. His conversations with both Picard and Seven were great, but for me his standout scenes actually came with Sidney La Forge, who was also excellent in this episode. Like their parents before them, they make a great team – and who knows, maybe romance could be in their future!

Sticking with the La Forge family, I think we’ll briefly talk about Geordi’s other daughter. And “briefly” is all we’ll need, because unfortunately Alandra La Forge didn’t get much to say or do in this episode. There’s potential in the “sibling rivalry” idea that Sidney and Alandra seemed, at first, to embody – but if that’s going to be basically dumped now that the girls are both firmly on the same team… without wanting to be unkind, I just don’t see where Alandra is going to fit.

Sidney La Forge got a genuinely great storyline this week as she confronted her father for both his unwillingness to help with the mission at hand and, by extension, for favouring her sister as she was more inclined toward engineering. Ashlei Sharpe Chestnut, who plays Sidney, absolutely excelled in the scene with the far more experienced LeVar Burton, and genuinely sold me on this family argument. Most of us can relate, in some way I daresay, to having this kind of conversation with a parent or relative, and I was beyond impressed with the performance that she gave.

For the first time in the season so far, Sidney got a lot to do.

As for Geordi himself, I can see some fans potentially taking umbrage with the idea that he’d be unwilling to help Picard, or that he’d be so fearful of repercussions that he’d put his family first. It isn’t necessarily a fun story for Geordi, nor is it one that presents him in the best or most heroic, selfless way. But what I’d say in defence of this story is that it’s very human, and is again something that feels incredibly relatable.

One of the themes of Season 3 that we’ve seen through Picard’s conversations with Dr Crusher and Captain Shaw in particular is the idea that Picard himself is a kind of maelstrom; a figure around whom danger, disaster, war, and even death have a tendency to swirl and coalesce. Geordi’s initial reluctance to throw himself and his family into another Picard adventure is a continuation of this theme – and it fits not only with what’s been established before, but with what we’ve seen of Picard over the course of some thirty-five years.

Geordi was initially reluctant to join Picard’s mission.

Because past iterations of Star Trek were primarily episodic affairs, the franchise hasn’t always been able to take a look at some of the longer-term consequences of the adventures and misadventures that some of its key characters have had. There have been attempts to do so: episodes like Family in The Next Generation, for example, or Worf’s scenes with Ezri Dax in Deep Space Nine’s seventh season. But until Discovery and Picard came along, these were limited to a few episodes or character arcs, and didn’t get to go into as much detail.

Parts of Picard haven’t gotten this quite right, particularly in the show’s lacklustre second season. But here, the idea that even some of Picard’s closest friends would struggle to rejoin his cause because of the danger they know it’ll put them in feels surprisingly natural. Having worked with Jean-Luc Picard for fifteen years or more, Geordi saw first-hand the danger many of Picard’s missions posed, and wanting to keep his children away from that is a perfectly valid and understandable reaction – even if we may not like or agree with it on the surface!

Geordi felt that teaming up with Picard would endanger his family.

There was a danger that this part of the story could’ve felt like an artificial speedbump; a delay to slow down the Titan’s progress so other storylines could unfold at Daystrom Station or with the heist at the Fleet Museum. And part of me wants to call it that – to say that Geordi’s rather abrupt turnaround after an entire episode of dragging his feet makes the whole thing redundant. But actually, having had some time to think about it, the positives outweigh the negatives and Geordi’s storyline not only made narrative sense, but played into key themes that have been running for the duration of the season so far.

It isn’t always fun to see an heroic character behaving in a more rational, self-preserving, and more human way. And I get that – Geordi doesn’t feel like the selfless hero for much of The Bounty. But if every main character was totally virtuous, selfless, and pure of heart… well, that would make for a pretty bland and one-dimensional story, wouldn’t it? Geordi has family considerations here, and the idea of wanting to keep one’s children safe – even if that means risking some big, nefarious scheme being able to unfold… it’s relatable and understandable.

Geordi was very relatable in *The Bounty*.

Although we’ve had some wonderful adventures and powerful emotional moments with all of these characters over the years, here in Picard is where we’re seeing them at the most human and relatable that they’ve ever been – and Geordi encapsulated that feeling for me in The Bounty. I’d defend his characterisation here as not straying from his presentation in The Next Generation – but rather being an evolution of it, showing how conflicted he feels between the fear he has for his family’s safety and his loyalty to Picard and desire to help.

It almost goes without saying that LeVar Burton nailed this complex presentation. It was always going to be wonderful to welcome him back to Star Trek after such a long absence – but to see such a masterful and nuanced performance from the veteran actor was truly astonishing. The character of Geordi La Forge was cast perfectly in 1987 – and as one of the stars of Roots, LeVar Burton was one of the best-known actors in the cast as The Next Generation entered production on its first season. Geordi got some great spotlight episodes across The Next Generation’s run – The Enemy, I Borg, The Next Phase, and Relics all being examples that jump to mind. But here, in The Bounty, we really got to see what LeVar Burton can do with this wonderful character. And it was riveting.

LeVar Burton gave an outstanding performance and was a joy to watch.

Geordi’s inclusion in the story was also an opportunity for the rather superfluous Captain Shaw to have a fun and light-hearted scene. Having set up Shaw as a former engineer a couple of episodes back, that backstory got a truly cute payoff in The Bounty as the Titan’s captain found himself tongue-tied and starstruck when coming face to face with one of his engineering heroes. I felt echoes of Lower Decks’ protagonist Boimler in the way Shaw reacted to Geordi – and it was a nice change of pace for a character who’s been standoffish.

However, I maintain that the story of Season 3 is not well-served by having so many senior officers concentrated aboard the Titan. Riker’s (surely temporary) absence may have alleviated that for now, but the Titan is still blessed with an Admiral, at least one Captain, and now a Commodore as well. Captain Shaw repeatedly draws the short straw – understandably, perhaps. But as we saw yet again this week, big decisions aboard his ship are taken without much input from him.

Here’s a question to ponder: are there too many changelings in the plot?

That might sound silly given that the rogue changelings are our main adversaries, but hear me out. Changelings are, if you think about it, kind of overpowered from a narrative standpoint – and their new ability to mimic humanoids in far more detail than ever before has only increased their relative power. We’re at a point in the story where it’s difficult to know who is and isn’t a changeling – and that could make for an exciting and tense mystery… or a frustrating experience!

Past stories involving changeling infiltrators were more cautious, and I mentioned last time that the Deep Space Nine duology Homefront and Paradise Lost made sure to include the detail that there were only four active changeling infiltrators. If, as Ro Laren told us, Starfleet is compromised and there may be multiple changelings aboard many ships in the fleet, it risks making the story hard to follow, and throwing an uncomfortable cloud of suspicion over practically every character arc and plot point. I don’t think we’re at a stage yet where it’s a huge problem… but it could make the story difficult to follow and needs to be handled with a degree of care.

We aren’t always going to be able to know who is and isn’t a changeling in a story like this one…

That only leaves us with the away mission to Daystrom Station. It was fantastic to see Riker and Worf teaming up for an away mission once again! Worf was often one of Riker’s go-to officers when putting together an away team during their adventures aboard the Enterprise-D, so it felt incredibly appropriate and fitting for them to work together again on this occasion.

Raffi was an interesting inclusion here, and after she and Worf had worked over the past few episodes to uncover the Daystrom connection, it made sense for her to join the mission along with them. But after they accessed the chamber where Data was being held, Raffi kind of felt like a bit of an unnecessary addition. She didn’t have the connection to Data, nor the history with him that Riker and Worf had, to give her much to say, and the few lines she got at this point felt more like exposition than anything else.

Raffi’s reunion with Seven of Nine was also cut short, and I hope it’s something we’ll see more of before the season ends. As disappointing as Season 2 was, and in spite of the problems Raffi’s storyline ran into in the final episode, the developing relationship between Seven and Raffi was one of the season’s stronger storylines. It humanises both characters, gives each of them something to fight for and reach for, and if there is to be any kind of “Captain Seven” show in Star Trek’s future, this relationship, one way or another, will be part of it. With both characters aboard the Titan, I hope there’ll be time in the remaining episodes to reunite Seven and Raffi for a scene or two.

There are already breakdowns and lists of all of the miscellaneous objects and items that were being stored at Daystrom Station that fans have compiled, so I won’t just list all of them here! But some of these little easter eggs were great fun, and in an episode that was all about callbacks to past iterations of Star Trek, this kind of storage facility was a great way to include many smaller references. I doubt very much that any of the stored items at Daystrom Station will prove to be important to the plot, but it was a cute way for Picard to pay homage to characters and stories from across the franchise’s 850+ episodes and films.

Captain Kirk’s body is apparently stored at Daystrom Station too.

The away mission to Daystrom Station felt tense and exciting – but the sets used for the station were, once again, seriously under-lit and far too dark. This has been a problem that’s been running all season long, but the especially dark corridors of Daystrom Station were perhaps the worst example so far. It wasn’t easy to follow all of the action as Worf, Raffi, and Riker were sneaking around and battling their way into and out of the station’s central chamber.

The fight sequences themselves, despite the aforementioned lighting problem, were decent, though. I genuinely felt that Riker was in danger as he raced off to buy time for the others to escape – and that’s really the first time so far this season that Picard has managed to give me that feeling. After Ro’s death the stakes have been raised significantly, and as I said before the season aired, it’s possible that not all of our heroes will make it to the end in one piece! Riker escaped… this time. But it was touch-and-go for a minute there in an incredibly tense and well-performed fight sequence.

I confess that Vadic being a changeling is still something I’m getting to grips with. I said last time that I interpreted her scene with Floaty McFloatface as Vadic being a humanoid who had some kind of symbiotic relationship with a changeling… but it seems, instead, that she’s somehow two changelings in one body? The mechanics of it bug me, at least from an in-universe perspective. We know that changelings can communicate by linking, and we’ve seen in Picard that they also seem to have developed a clicking language of their own – so why does Vadic physically cut Floaty McFloatface off of herself and have a chat with them in English? Obviously the answer is “to make it a more interesting story.” But that isn’t always a satisfying explanation!

But still, we got absolute, indisputable proof this week that Vadic is a changeling. I’m excited to see her finally being able to interact with someone other than her silent crew and Floaty McFloatface, and there’s definitely potential in her interrogations of Riker and Troi – assuming it is the real Troi! I’m a tad disappointed, however, that Vadic now doesn’t seem to have any personal connection to Picard. Something may yet be revealed in that regard, but if she’s a changeling it would seem to rule it out.

Vadic is clearly based on characters like Khan, and that kind of villain can be truly delicious to watch. But so far, Vadic hasn’t managed to capture much of that feeling for me. Her over-the-top performance actually feels out of place right now, and while I still want to see her defeated and her plan stopped, on a personal level I think there’s a disconnect between Vadic and the audience. Six episodes in and we’ve only had a few short moments with her, we’ve already seen her defeated once, and her over-the-top characterisation feels more like it’s treading water than going anywhere.

But now that she’s captured and assaulted Riker, perhaps we’ll finally start to get some of that burning, passionate dislike that Vadic hasn’t managed to garner so far. I certainly hope so! A villain so maniacal should be able to drum up that sort of a reaction – and now that she’s captured not just one but perhaps two of our heroes… there’s the potential, at least, for an improvement on the villainous side of the season.

So I think I’ve touched on all of the points I had in my notes for this outing. The Bounty was a beautiful, nostalgic romp through Star Trek’s past in more ways than one… but an episode that didn’t stick the landing on a couple of key points. It can be difficult to fairly judge these mid-season episodes, though, until we know how character arcs and storylines that have been set up will ultimately be paid off – something I’m especially aware of in Picard, given the way Seasons 1 and 2 both ended. So perhaps we’ll be able to look back at some elements of The Bounty a little more kindly in retrospect.

With Troi, Geordi, and the Data-Lore-Soong-B4 golem now in the picture, the cast is complete and the reunion has finally happened. Was the tail end of the sixth part of a ten-episode season the right moment… or should most of the rest of the characters have gotten back together sooner? I guess that’s another point where only time will tell!

There are four episodes left for this story to come to an explosive and exciting conclusion – and it feels as if most of the pieces are now in play. In spite of The Bounty’s shortcomings, I’m keeping my fingers crossed!

A few scattered final thoughts:

For such an important facility, it’s kind of silly that Daystrom Station isn’t fully staffed and well-guarded – especially considering it’s already been attacked and robbed once.
What could Section 31 possibly want with Kirk’s dead body? And what is “Project Phoenix?”
This is the first mention of Section 31 in Picard – could that be a hint at a resurrection of the Section 31 series that’s been languishing in development hell?
I’d have given anything to see Picard and the crew beam aboard the Enterprise-A…
Geordi was very concerned about his kids… but was perfectly fine with ditching his wife!
Including a sequence from Encounter at Farpoint – and finding a way to make it relevant to the story – was incredibly sweet.

Star Trek: Picard Seasons 1-3 are available to stream now on Paramount+ in the United States and other countries and territories where the service is available, and on Amazon Prime Video in the UK and around the world. The Star Trek franchise – including Picard and all other properties discussed above – is the copyright of Paramount Global. This article contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.

Star Trek: Picard Episode Review – Season 3, Episode 3: Seventeen Seconds

Mon 06.03.23Mon 06.03.23Dennis

Spoiler Warning: There are spoilers ahead for Star Trek: Picard Seasons 1-3. Spoilers are also present for the following Star Trek productions: The Wrath of Khan, The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, and Discovery.

For the first time since the beginning of Season 2, I had a genuinely wonderful time with Star Trek: Picard. This week’s episode, Seventeen Seconds, had none of the pacing concerns that were present earlier in the season, and practically every moment was tense, exciting, and thoroughly enjoyable. Season 3 is finally hitting its stride, and if the next seven episodes reach the high bar set by Seventeen Seconds, we’ll be able to consider it a rousing success by the time the curtain falls.

But as the dust settles on Seventeen Seconds, there’s a question burning at the back of my mind that I can’t seem to shake. And here it is: did Picard blow its big reveal too early? I mean, we’re only three episodes into a ten-episode season, and it now feels like we know who the “real” big bad of the season is going to be: the rogue changelings. Should this have been dragged out for another episode or two, perhaps with Worf and Raffi taking longer to figure things out?

Worf was instrumental in finding out what was going on.

So let’s talk about this big revelation, because it’s something that a lot of fans had been wondering about. Pre-season interviews with members of the cast and crew had promised a connection with Deep Space Nine – the one Star Trek show from the ’90s that hasn’t gotten as much attention or love from the modern franchise. This connection came with the inclusion of the changelings, seemingly a rogue faction; an offshoot of the Founders who are bent on causing havoc for Starfleet and the Federation.

This angle is a genuinely interesting one to explore – but it has to be handled delicately in more ways than one! Similar to the Borg, the Founders can be completely overpowered as a faction if the story isn’t well-balanced – and we saw how, in Deep Space Nine, the idea of changeling infiltrators was used sparingly. Too many changelings in too many positions of power will completely throw the story off-balance, and risks making a win for our heroes feel like a bit of a deus ex machina!

Also, a story bringing back the Dominion and the Founders has to be careful not to tread on the toes of the truly wonderful ending to Deep Space Nine. It was incredibly touching to hear Worf speaking so highly of Odo – his friend in the Great Link – especially in light of the sad passing of René Auberjonois in 2019. But a huge part of Odo’s story in that final chapter involved communicating to his people that peace was an option and that the Federation didn’t pose a threat, so undoing that would obviously not be my preference.

And I think that’s where the real genius of this “rogue” faction of Founders could come into play! Rather than saying the Dominion are on the march, what Worf and Raffi have uncovered seems to suggest that only some members of the changeling race are involved – that a schism has been created in the Great Link between followers of Odo’s peaceful path and those who disagreed.

In short, the line to walk here is a tricky one. It requires the story to keep Odo’s reputation intact, with the touching end to his story not being in any way damaged, undone, or overwritten. But at the same time, it has to find ways to make the rogue Founders engaging and menacing – and to give them motivation for their actions that doesn’t merely boil down to “we’re evil for the sake of it.” On the evidence presented in Seventeen Seconds, there’s reason to hope that the writers and producers have struck the right balance.

Having changelings on the loose also raises the stakes in terms of mystery! We know that Picard isn’t a changeling, and it seems safe to assume that Jack and Dr Crusher aren’t, either. But practically everyone else should fall under some degree of suspicion – and perhaps that could explain why Picard will turn to synthetic beings like Lore and Professor Moriarty: they may be the only ones he can be certain haven’t been replaced by changelings! But we’ll save the speculation for my next theory update.

I’m a huge Deep Space Nine fan – it could well be my favourite Star Trek series, all things considered. So bringing back a major faction from that series is fantastic, and it feels like Picard is leaning into Deep Space Nine in a way that modern Star Trek really hasn’t until now. Sure, there have been appearances in Lower Decks and a couple of obscure references in Discovery… but this feels like our first real opportunity to add some kind of epilogue to the Deep Space Nine story. The inclusion of Worf – who was, of course, a main character in the second half of DS9′s run – means that Picard can make these connections in a way that the series really wouldn’t have been able to before, and I guess my only real concern is that this clear fan-service won’t be too offputting or confusing for people who enjoyed The Next Generation but either haven’t seen Deep Space Nine in a while or who may have skipped it during its original run!

Making content “for fans” always carries this kind of risk. As Trekkies, you and I have almost certainly seen every episode of Deep Space Nine multiple times – even the irredeemably crap ones like Move Along Home. But Picard is trying to appeal not only to Trekkies like us, but to a more casual audience, including people who may not have liked Deep Space Nine or who didn’t stick with it for its entire run. I know several people in my personal life who are in that category – fans of The Next Generation and even of Voyager, but who for whatever reason didn’t stick with Deep Space Nine.

*Seventeen Seconds* provided just enough of a recap of the events of *Deep Space Nine* to inform viewers without getting in the way of the story.

In Seventeen Seconds, we got enough exposition and backstory to cover the basics. The show can’t spend all of its runtime bringing viewers up to speed on what happened in 175 episodes of Deep Space Nine, but what it has to do now is convey the basic points so that the story will be understandable for folks who didn’t watch or don’t remember those narrative arcs. Seventeen Seconds got this right, providing enough of an explanation without wasting too much time getting bogged down in it.

Again, Worf was well-used here. He didn’t simply drop heavy-handed exposition, he explained who the Founders were and who this rogue group may be in a brief but informative sequence. This older version of Worf, having had many off-screen experiences over the past thirty-plus years of in-universe time since we last saw him, feels like a mentor or elder statesman – precisely the kind of character to provide this kind of exposition in a way that feels natural. And natural is exactly how it felt!

We got an older, calmer presentation of Worf this week.

Sticking with returning classic characters, pre-season marketing focused on the return of the Enterprise-D’s crew for almost a year… so it’s odd, in a way, that three episodes in we still haven’t seen all of them, and that those we have seen aren’t all working together. Seventeen Seconds gave us Dr Crusher’s first significant on-screen interaction with Picard, and of course we’ve had Picard and Riker teamed up for three episodes now. But Worf is still off in his own little narrative box with Raffi, and there’s no sign of Geordi or Lore. Deanna Troi was briefly seen via a flashback, but again, that was hardly a major appearance.

One of the criticisms fans have made in the years since The Next Generation and its films were on the air is that not every character got enough to do. Everyone got spotlight episodes, of course, but genuine ensemble pieces where everyone made a significant contribution to the story were relatively uncommon, and in some episodes, characters like Dr Crusher would only get a handful of lines. Picard Season 3 was an opportunity to fix that – or at least to give these characters a final mission in which they could all collaborate and work together across a single, ten-episode-long narrative. I’m acutely aware that this is Picard’s final outing, and with basically one-third of the season already over, time is running out to make good on those pre-season promises of major roles for all of the returning characters. I’m hopeful that there will be enough time to have an enjoyable reunion with everyone – but it’s at least worth noting that it hasn’t happened yet!

Geordi still hasn’t made an appearance this season.

Another character who played a big role in pre-season marketing was Amanda Plummer’s Vadic. I said last week that I was a little concerned about Vadic, and how her claim to only be interested in Jack Crusher for the sake of money didn’t really justify her over-the-top presentation. As we learned in Seventeen Seconds, Vadic has at least one changeling ally: the spy embedded aboard the Titan. That ties her in some way to the rogue changelings and their conspiracy – and the portal-weapon that she used was similar (or identical?) to that used against the Federation base at the beginning of the season. But the extent of Vadic’s involvement is still up in the air – and I don’t think we have enough evidence at this stage to say that she is definitely a changeling herself!

In fact, I was struck by Vadic’s absence in Seventeen Seconds. She had a couple of moments in which we saw her happily deploying her portal-weapon, but we didn’t get to spend much time with her at all, which is certainly an interesting decision. As the main named villain of the season so far, I think it’s important to get to see her side of the story – and not merely to hear it second-hand via Worf or some other character. Obviously that doesn’t mean we need to have a lot of scenes with her in every episode, nor that her side of the story needs to be told at such an early stage… but it should happen some time!

Captain Vadic didn’t get much screen time this week.

Since I’ve already mentioned Vadic’s portal-weapon, let’s talk about that for a moment. I… was not blown away by this new piece of tech, to be honest. Don’t get me wrong, it’s far from the worst macguffin that Star Trek has thrown at us, but I felt that there was a considerable disconnect between its visual appearance and the way in which the narrative presented it.

In brief: the way the portals appeared on screen made it look like they should be relatively easy to avoid, even for a starship like the Titan. In this specific case, where Vadic’s goal appeared to be to force the Titan to remain inside the nebula, it makes sense to use a portal in this fashion… but that’s a very niche use case, and the military applications of such a device, especially in three-dimensional battles in outer space, don’t seem readily apparent – which also calls into question parts of Worf and Raffi’s story. It’s a powerful weapon, as we’ve seen, but one that I’d argue has some pretty big limitations.

The portal-weapon is also kind of unoriginal, with similar designs having appeared in everything from hard sci-fi all the way through to the likes of Who Framed Roger Rabbit. The most readily apparent point of comparison is to the video game Portal, which shares a name with this device. Again, I don’t necessarily hate it – and I concede that my criticisms are rather nitpicky – but I really feel a disconnect between the relatively small portals that appeared on screen and the way in which the crew of the Titan seemed to respond to them!

But there may be more to the portal-weapon that is yet to be revealed, and it may have additional uses later in the season. I can certainly see it being a useful tool… perhaps it could be used at the last second to transport characters away from danger, for example. I also suspect that Captain Vadic may meet her end by being spliced through her own portal-weapon! But maybe we should save that for my theory update.

After a couple of weeks in which Picard looked faded, washed-out, and far too dark, I was pleased to note that this week, Seventeen Seconds only looked far too dark! The problems with colour temperature that had been present in the first two episodes of the season appear to have been fixed, at least on Amazon Prime Video, and I hope that particular issue won’t reoccur. It was a shame that it happened in the first place – and it makes Paramount look pretty unprofessional and incapable, let’s be honest – but at least it has been belatedly repaired.

The darkness issue is still ongoing, though, and this one feels much more like a creative choice. The lights on the Shrike, the Titan, the Eleos, La Sirena and in flashbacks in Guinan’s bar too, were all turned down, and the low brightness is noticeable even when compared to Seasons 1 and 2. With the colour temperature being corrected, there weren’t any scenes this week that I felt were unwatchably dark, or where main events couldn’t be perceived, but there are details in the periphery that I’m sure are functionally invisible as a result of this very deliberate choice of cinematography.

*Picard* Season 3 is still very dark – even now that the faded, washed-out look has been corrected.

CGI and visual effects were good in Seventeen Seconds, though, and I felt none of the dreaded “uncanny valley” that I flagged up in the season premiere. Whether that’s because there’s been any kind of change in the visual fidelity of Picard or whether I’m just getting reacclimated to the way Paramount and the Star Trek franchise handle their animation and visual effects… well, who can say, really? I’m just satisfied that I’m not being pulled out of the immersion every time the action cuts to the ships in space!

One particular sequence that I’d like to draw your attention to came right at the end of Seventeen Seconds. The moment where the disabled Titan appeared to “fall” – i.e. be dragged – into the nebula’s gravity well was spectacular, and successfully conveyed a sense of helplessness as the ship appears to be headed to its destruction. The effect was akin to a watercraft “sinking” under the surface – and that point of comparison feels apt. It was incredibly well done, and the perfect way to set up a cliffhanger ending.

One visual effect that could have been difficult to pull off was that of the changelings in their liquid form. In the 1990s, when Deep Space Nine was on the air, the effect used for Odo and other changelings looked good – by the standards of the time. In 2023, however, that “smooth and shiny” CGI effect is outdated, and the way in which it was brought up to modern spec was solid. The new “changeling goo” feels like a natural progression, and the kind of look that a remastered Deep Space Nine might want to adopt!

There are subtle changes, though. The Deep Space Nine effect was an amber, almost honey colour, whereas the new animation created for Seventeen Seconds had a duller, slightly greyer tone, perhaps closer to an organic compound than anything we’d seen in Deep Space Nine. In addition, the new visual effect feels much more substantial and textured, seeming to flow or ooze in a natural way. I like it, and I think it’s a great update to a classic visual effect!

The updated visual for a changeling in their liquid form.

As mentioned, I feel that the visual effect created for the Shrike’s portal-weapon may have clashed somewhat with the way the weapon was talked about and presented on-screen. But despite that, the effect itself was a clever one, and the way it seemed to unnaturally “bend” the light around it was really neat to see. It reminded me a little of Discovery’s black hole effects in Seasons 1 and 2 – a visual style influenced by the film Interstellar.

The battle sequences between the Shrike and the Titan were great, too, and the technobabble of the nebula “blinding” the Titan’s sensors really amped up the tension. Seventeen Seconds channeled the Battle of the Mutara Nebula from The Wrath of Khan in some of these sequences – but with the addition of forty years’ worth of improvements in visual effects!

The Titan’s crew had to be on lookout duty!

The only thing I’d say about the battle as a negative point is that – to quote Mr Spock from that same film – it “indicates two-dimensional thinking.” The Shrike and the Titan seemed, for the most part, to operate on a two-dimensional plane, not a three-dimensional space, and that was apparent particularly toward the end of the episode as the Shrike was able to “block” the Titan’s escape from the nebula by basically getting in the way. A line or two explaining how the Shrike could accelerate faster than the Titan, or some similar technobabble, could have negated part of this, perhaps.

This was also apparent in the operation of the portal-weapon, at least as presented visually. The relatively small portals opened in front of the Titan, but the ship had multiple routes to avoid it: up, down, left, right, or even simply coming to a halt. Again, this seems to clash with the way the weapon was emphasised in dialogue. Are these nitpicks? Absolutely!

It would have been more impactful had we met the Titan’s changeling infiltrator before he was revealed. This anonymous character may go on to be a bigger part of subsequent episodes, but the revelation that there was a spy aboard the ship was blunted, at least a little, by the fact that it was an anonymous “extra” in that role. Had the officer been someone we’d met, even briefly, it would have been more exciting – especially if we’d never suspected that there was anything unusual about him!

This is, I suspect, a consequence of the relatively short ten-episode season. However, I really do believe it would have been worth doing – it’s something that would have turned up the surprise factor in the episode if it had been done well. A short scene or two featuring this character in his role as a Starfleet impostor would have been good enough to achieve this effect.

Star Trek has told stories that deal with impostors within Starfleet on many occasions, from episodes like Conspiracy and films like The Undiscovered Country through to the changeling stories in Deep Space Nine like Homefront – and, of course, Discovery’s first season. These stories usually work well and manage to be tense and exciting – but a common hallmark is that we’ve gotten to know the impostor or impostors, at least a little, before the truth of who they are is revealed. In fact, I’d argue that this is a big part of the way this narrative framework is intended to operate; it’s nowhere near as satisfying to say “there’s a spy in our midst!” and then reveal that the spy is just some anonymous background character that we’ve never met.

Look at how well the Michael Eddington story worked in Deep Space Nine, because that’s probably the best example of this kind of storyline in the Star Trek franchise. We got to know Eddington over the course of half a dozen episodes prior to his big reveal, so when he turned out to be a Maquis operative, it was a heck of a shock! The way the changeling infiltration storyline unfolded in Seventeen Seconds worked well, and there was some clever direction and editing to have Worf and Raffi’s uncovering of the plot followed up immediately by Jack’s confrontation with the changeling… but the sequence overall could have been improved, in my view anyway, if we’d met this spy ahead of time.

Michael Eddington was a Maquis infiltrator/rogue Starfleet officer in *Deep Space Nine*.

When the Titan’s science officer repeated multiple times that the nebula the ship was trapped in was behaving abnormally, my first thought was simply this: I sincerely hope that the story isn’t going to say that this whole thing is one elaborate trap! It’s too much of a contrivance to say that Vadic was purposefully trying to trap Picard and the Titan in the Rykon system given the difficulty involved in getting there and the seemingly obscure location of this nebula.

On the other hand, the fact that this isn’t a normal nebula – and could even be “life, Jim, but not as we know it” – could open up some genuinely interesting story ideas! I feel certain that the “organic” elements of the nebula wouldn’t have been emphasised so prominently were they not going to be significant to the plot later on – but how, exactly, is shrouded in mystery right now.

There were two conflicts central to the character stories present in Seventeen Seconds: one between Picard and Dr Crusher and a second between Picard and Riker. We’ll talk about each in turn, but I think that both worked well in the context of the story.

It was interesting to see Picard and Dr Crusher having this deep and intense conversation about their son – and before we get into specifics, there’s one thing that jumped out at me. Here we have two older characters engaged in what is typically a storyline we’d associate with younger characters: pregnancy, paternity, and raising a child. It wasn’t lost on me that Sir Patrick Stewart is now in his 80s and that Gates McFadden is in her 70s, yet here they were having a discussion that would suit characters a generation younger!

Picard and Dr Crusher had a difficult conversation.

One of the themes that we’ve started to see in Picard’s third season is that of age – something that was also present in The Wrath of Khan, which serves as part of the season’s inspiration. Entering retirement, leaving friends and colleagues behind, and coming to terms with changes to both oneself and the wider world have all been touched upon – though not to quite the extent I’d been expecting, perhaps.

But this storyline – and especially Picard’s conversation with Dr Crusher – felt like it rolled back the years for both of them significantly. The intense discussion of whether Dr Crusher should have told Picard about her pregnancy is something we might’ve expected from far younger characters, so to see it handled – and handled so well – in Seventeen Seconds was great. It completely twisted the expected theme of age, and arguably also reinforces the notion that, in Star Trek’s advanced and optimistic future, humans can live longer, healthier, and more active lives.

There was also a moment in the turbolift after Jack’s injury – the titular “seventeen-second” ride that Riker had talked about in a flashback sequence – in which Picard felt very much the new father, which again gives his story a far more youthful edge than I’d been expecting. Although the focus was on Jack’s injury and survival, those seconds with Picard in the turbolift felt akin to watching an anxious soon-to-be dad in the delivery room, waiting on the birth of his son.

There was deliberate symmetry to the turbolift ride that cut through the Picard-Riker fight, and perhaps has set the stage for their potential reconciliation next week. It’s also noteworthy that Riker was hardly youthful when he became a father – and as someone whose parents were older when I was a child, I appreciate that Star Trek is putting older characters into this position. Not every child is born to young parents – increasingly so, in some communities and cultures – and while many television shows and films do a wonderful job of highlighting the particular problems and issues facing teen parents, for example, it’s actually really nice – and dare I say a little cathartic, personally speaking – to see Star Trek acknowledging that some people become parents later in life. That wasn’t the main focus of Seventeen Seconds in any way, but it’s something that I personally can take away from the story.

Before we get into the weeds too much, let me just say this: I suspect that the decision to pit Picard against both Dr Crusher and Riker in the same episode may not go down well with every fan! Part of the appeal of Picard Season 3 was in reuniting the cast of The Next Generation, and while the characters had disagreements during that show’s run, by and large they were on great terms. Some might say their friendships were a little too perfect, which is why Deep Space Nine and Voyager tried to insert more disputes between characters, and created characters from different backgrounds who had conflicting motivations.

But if the draw of an Enterprise-D reunion was bringing people back together for one last adventure, there’s a danger that these kinds of conflicts – especially if they drag on for multiple episodes – could detract from that, and I understand that argument even if I’m not personally fully signed-up with it. I hope that both conflicts will come to a satisfying conclusion, and that in fairly short order we can see Picard and his crew back on friendly terms – after all, that is a big part of what made this season interesting as a concept in the first place!

Picard and Riker on the bridge of the Titan.

My take on the first conflict is this: Dr Crusher is both correct in her belief that the son of Jean-Luc Picard would be in danger, while also being horribly inept when it comes to keep him “safe.” By leaving Starfleet and the Federation behind to go on a twenty-year unsanctioned medical mission, Dr Crusher has placed Jack in at least as much danger – if not more – than she ever would have if she’d remained in Starfleet. And that’s where this argument and this whole storyline could come unstuck.

Based on everything we know about Starfleet and the Federation, it’s generally a very safe environment. I could absolutely entertain the idea that Dr Crusher would feel a need to resign her commission in order to dedicate herself to raising Jack full-time… but the idea that she felt she had to do so beyond the borders of the Federation, in what is clearly a very complex and dangerous galaxy, risks undermining this aspect of the story. At best I guess we’ll have to call it a contrivance, something necessary to drive this part of the plot forward. At worst… well, it makes Dr Crusher look like a bit of an idiot. A dangerous idiot.

Did Dr Crusher get it wrong? Or are her reasons understandable?

This side of the story also feels as if it’s chafing uncomfortably against a massive part of the main plot from Season 2 – which was on our screens less than a year ago. The entire reason for the Confederation timeline, the mission back in time, and Q’s scheme was, at least as Q explained it, because Picard himself had been unable to let go of childhood trauma enough to settle down in a relationship. We’ve learned in Seventeen Seconds that he and Dr Crusher were once again pursuing a romantic relationship in the months or years after Nemesis, and Picard even stated that he would have been willing to be a husband and father, and that his reasons for not fully committing to Beverly were more to do with Jack Crusher Senior – his deceased best friend.

The story of Season 2 was already a terribly convoluted one that was on shaky ground, so anything that undermines it is a problem. And unfortunately, there’s no escaping the fact that parts of this storyline, as presented in Seventeen Seconds at least, are in that position. The writers tried to throw a bone to this, with Picard making an oblique reference to last season’s events, but that didn’t really go far enough and certainly hasn’t saved this aspect of the story.

Picard’s complicated romantic history with Dr Crusher treads on the toes of last season’s story.

We’ll have to go into more detail about this on another occasion – perhaps after having seen the entirety of Season 3 – but there are actually quite a few areas where these two productions seem to grate against one another. What’s so surprising about that, of course, is that Seasons 2 and 3 went into production back-to-back, with the same production team and showrunner present for both. I’m not saying I wanted or expected Seasons 2 and 3 to form a single ongoing story – though they certainly could have if a suitable story had been written – but it feels odd to see so many small and large points of conflict.

But we’re drifting off-topic! Picard’s second conflict was with Riker, and while the two men seemed to work together seamlessly at first, a radical difference in approach became apparent as the episode wore on.

Picard and Riker had different ideas about how to tackle Vadic and the Shrike.

So there’s a dichotomy here for me. On the one hand, I don’t particularly dislike this idea, and I feel that Seventeen Seconds handled it well. The conflict felt organic and natural, and it was presented as exactly what it was: a genuine difference of opinion and approach. The episode didn’t frame either Picard or Riker as being right or wrong, and there are interpretations as to how to approach a battle of this nature.

But on the other hand… the more I think about it, I can’t escape a simple reality: pitting Picard and Riker against one another would not be my choice, if for no other reason than the story, at least at this point, doesn’t seem to need it. I’ve spoken about this before, particularly in relation to Discovery, but it feels as if this extra element of drama has been concocted and then forced into a story that was already so tense and dramatic that it didn’t need it. Picard, Riker, and the rest of the crew of the Titan were already in a life-or-death, impossibly high-stakes confrontation, so throwing in a personal spat between two main characters didn’t really ramp that up; the tension and drama were already turned all the way up to eleven.

I think a lot of people were surprised by this conflict…

That being said, I have a theory about Riker that, were it to pan out, would completely explain this and basically negate all of those points of criticism. Even if my theory is wrong, the disagreement may end up resolved within the next episode, and that would set the season back on what feels like the “right” path: the path where these characters get back together for one final mission.

Just because I wouldn’t have chosen to tell a story in which Picard and Riker find themselves at loggerheads doesn’t mean that it didn’t work well in Seventeen Seconds, and the way in which their disagreement was built up and then spilled over into argument was well handled. By the time Riker banished Picard from the bridge, we had a solid understanding of both men’s positions and perspectives – and under the circumstances, that’s the most we could have asked from this storyline!

So let’s wrap things up!

Seventeen Seconds was a tense, exciting, and thoroughly enjoyable ride from start to finish, and probably the best episode of Picard since the Season 2 premiere last year. There are nitpicks, as there almost always are, but they melt away when confronted with such an outstanding episode of television.

I’d felt that Season 3 had gotten off to a slow start, but the pacing this week felt perfect. There were no truncated or cut-down moments, and practically everyone got something significant to do. All in all, a great episode!

A few scattered final thoughts:

I liked the interaction between Seven and Ensign La Forge, showing how Seven has won respect and friendship from her colleagues, even if she doesn’t get it from Captain Shaw. After the “deadnaming” over the past couple of episodes, it was great to see La Forge call her “Seven!”
Captain Shaw is injured – but not dead! Will he remain in sickbay for the next few episodes… or will he come roaring back, take command of the ship back from Riker, and find a way out of the nebula?
Surely we’ve gotta see Geordi and Troi next week, right?
Worf and Raffi were able to track their target pretty easily… is that because of Worf’s skill, or because the story has its focus elsewhere?
With the Titan disabled, why did Vadic abandon her pursuit? Is capturing Jack no longer her objective?
Time is a bit of an issue: Dr Crusher says she found out about her pregnancy shortly after she last saw Picard – circa twenty years ago. And I don’t mean to be unkind, but actor Ed Speleers, who plays Jack, is clearly not twenty. A poor casting choice, or are we okay with giving a bit of “soap opera ageing” flexibility here?

Star Trek: Picard Episode Review – Season 3, Episode 2: Disengage

Sun 26.02.23Sun 26.02.23Dennis

Spoiler Warning: There are spoilers ahead for Star Trek: Picard Seasons 1-3. Spoilers are also present for the following Star Trek productions: The Wrath of Khan, The Search for Spock, The Undiscovered Country, The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, and Voyager.

If you read my review of the season premiere last week, there’s almost no need to read this! In short, many of the points I made last time are the same this time: Disengage was an episode with the same contradictory feel as The Next Generation, one in which the main storyline seemed to edge along at a very slow pace while several story beats rushed past too quickly, or else didn’t get enough time dedicated to them.

And those story beats are more or less the same ones as last time, too: Raffi’s undercover mission seemed to race by, some of the scenes between Picard and Jack could have been extended, Riker didn’t get a lot of time to shine, and even the intrigue on the Titan with Captain Shaw and Seven didn’t get a lot of time in the spotlight. As I said last week, it’s a story with a contradictory feel.

Let’s talk visuals. Both last week and this week, Picard looked incredibly washed-out and faded on my 4K HDR display. I tried adjusting my screen manually, but I could either get the default faded, washed-out look or I could get a horribly over-corrected, over-saturated look. Neither is right or natural, and the colour temperature of the season so far feels off. I hope this is something that Paramount can fix – but I doubt it.

In addition to the colour temperature issue, both episodes of the season so far have been incredibly dark. In multiple scenes and sequences – particularly those set in Raffi’s underworld city, but it wasn’t entirely restricted to that setting – it hasn’t always been easy to see what’s going on. Areas that should be in focus are poorly illuminated, and the washed-out effect doesn’t help here either. Again, this is something I’d hope Paramount would have been able to correct behind-the-scenes when it became apparent… but so far, no luck. I did manage to, shall we say, “source” a second copy of Disengage, but this was also plagued by the same issues.

*Picard* Season 3 has a dark, faded look in many scenes.

There are really two parts to this complaint. The first is that this is a deliberate choice of cinematography, presenting scenes in a dark, under-illuminated way to try to achieve a certain visual effect. The limitations of this are apparent, and one need only look at similar complaints in other television shows to see why turning the brightness down isn’t a good idea.

Secondly we have the way episodes are compiled and compressed for streaming, and I think there’s a technical issue here that Paramount has yet to get to grips with. Because the episodes were dark to begin with, compressing them down for streaming may have contributed to this faded, washed-out look. My screen isn’t a cheap model by any means, but it’s a problem if the only time Picard can look reasonable is when it’s seen on an expensive, high-end OLED television set.

For illustrative purposes, here’s a promo photo for *Disengage* featuring Seven of Nine and Captain Shaw…

…and here’s the photographed scene as it appeared in the episode. Note the radical difference in brightness, colour temperature, and tone.

So let’s take a step back. Where are we in terms of story? After two complete episodes – a full 20% of the season – it still feels like we’re at the beginning. The main events of both The Next Generation and Disengage appear to have taken place, for the most part, over the span of a few hours; the exception being Raffi’s sequences, which, despite being rushed, actually seem to take place over a longer spell of time.

This episode focused on Jack Crusher, the character who many of us had guessed was the son – somehow – of Jean-Luc Picard and Beverly Crusher. This focus on Jack’s identity and backstory was worth doing, and although some moments didn’t quite stick the landing, it’s an interesting and engaging story – one that has me wanting to learn more. But again, in terms of the overall narrative arc of the season, it feels as though Disengage crawled along at a pretty slow pace.

Is the main story progressing at the right pace? Or am I overthinking things?

Two episodes in and we’ve barely gotten off the starting line. Dr Crusher’s plea for help and Picard and Riker’s off-the-books rescue was the starting point for this story, yet after two entire episodes have passed, we haven’t moved much beyond that yet. It makes me feel as though some of the moments in Disengage could and perhaps should have been included last week.

The ten-episode seasons of modern television shows are a double-edged sword. On the one hand, Picard would almost certainly never have been made if Paramount insisted on twenty episodes or more per season! And the serialised nature of these stories makes a ten-episode season akin to a ten-part movie, which is a great thing in many ways. But on the other hand, these truncated seasons don’t have as much room for manoeuvre, so getting bogged down at the starting line – or spending too long on side-quests – can end up having a serious knock-on impact. We saw this with Picard in both its first and second seasons… and I can’t shake the feeling, even at this relatively early stage, that the same problem is about to reoccur.

Captain Vadic and her crew on the Shrike.

Now for the contradiction! At several points, I felt that all we were getting of Riker were clips; cut-down snippets of what should’ve been longer scenes. There was scope to spend a lot more time with Riker as he tried to convince Picard of what he already knew: that Jack is his son. Having Riker realise that first was a genuinely great story point – one that showed just how close these two old friends are, and how Riker has a perceptiveness, even years later, that Picard can rely on. But it was blitzed through so quickly that there wasn’t enough time to really showcase this angle, and that’s a shame.

Re-establishing and evolving the relationship between Riker and Picard has been one of the best things about Star Trek: Picard, and feels like a real, solid justification for providing these characters with new storylines after such a long time. But it’s only really when the action slowed down in Season 1’s Nepenthe that the show truly excelled in terms of this kind of character-focused storytelling.

Picard and Riker had an all-too-brief chat about Jack.

I’d have wanted to spend a bit more time with Riker this week, and the moments we got with him felt somehow cut-down. The problem, as I’ve said before in Picard, isn’t that the core idea is in any way bad, it’s that it needed more screen time to properly unfold. There was merit in Riker seeing the obvious, and using him as the point-of-view character to convey the truth of Jack’s parentage; revealing to us as the audience something Picard couldn’t – or wouldn’t – see. But that got lost because of how short most of Riker’s scenes were, unfortunately.

We continue to rush through Raffi’s story to such an extent that certain elements, such as the inclusion of her ex-husband, felt almost gratuitous; the story clearly doesn’t have time to delve into this relationship in a big way. I wouldn’t be surprised if this is the last we see – or even hear – of Raffi’s ex, and as I’ve said about narrative elements in Picard more than once: good idea, not enough time to do anything meaningful with it.

Once again, Michelle Hurd excelled – but she did so in spite of the way the season has been scripted and/or edited. And despite jumping from point to point as she tried to chase down the terrorist or terrorists responsible for the attack, her storyline again feels like it hasn’t made a lot of progress from its start point.

Last week, Raffi was desperately trying to hunt down the person who stole “experimental weapons,” and this week she continued to do that. She found the broker who arranged the sale – but that’s all. Again, all of this could turn out to be okay… but I’m just worried about the pacing of the story in light of what happened in Seasons 1 and 2.

Parts of Raffi’s story continue to feel rushed.

All that being said, the moments we got with Raffi this week were among my favourites in the episode – and are probably among Raffi’s most interesting scenes, from a narrative point of view, that we’ve gotten in the entire series to date. It’s absolutely true that Raffi’s underworld planet borrows a lot both visually and thematically from Star Wars and dystopian sci-fi, but I think there’s more than enough room in the Star Trek galaxy for places like this to exist. We’ve caught glimpses of such worlds in past iterations of the franchise, too, so I think it works well.

The scenes with Sneed – the Ferengi broker – were fantastic. At first, I wondered if there might be some kind of connection to Quark or perhaps DaiMon Bok with the introduction of a Ferengi character, but Sneed was perfectly interesting on his own. And the last-minute arrival of Worf to save the day – revealing himself as Raffi’s “handler” – capped off this story in pitch-perfect fashion. There are nitpicks here, sure, but overall I felt it worked well.

Let’s talk about Vadic, who made her first appearance of the season. I’m convinced that there’s more to Vadic than has been revealed so far – though it was noteworthy in Disengage that no one recognised her, or had even heard of her. That certainly calls into question some of the ideas that I and others may have had for who she could be and how she may be connected to Picard and the crew… but I don’t think it totally destroys all but the most outlandish of fan theories, so we’ll come back to that perhaps in my next theory update.

My concern about Vadic’s presentation in Disengage comes down to a single factor: her motivation. A villain this over-the-top (and Vadic was, for better or worse, certainly over-the-top in Disengage) needs to have a reason for being so. Khan – the character I and others compared Vadic with after her initial appearance in pre-season trailers – had a single-minded quest for vengeance. Like Captain Ahab in Moby-Dick, he was willing to do anything and sacrifice anything to get his revenge on Kirk for years of being abandoned in a desolate wasteland, and that came across in his on-screen presentation.

If Vadic is motivated solely by money – as she claims – that seriously undermines her characterisation. Sure, Jack Crusher may be a valuable target – but does that justify the kind of “Khan meets the Wicked Witch of the West mixed with Dr Doofenshmirtz” presentation? Amanda Plummer really dialled it up to eleven with her villainous performance, letting every word, every syllable, drip with malice, and throwing in a wonderful cackle for good measure. But if Vadic only cares about money… I just feel there’s a disconnect between the character and the performance if that’s the case.

But there are still eight episodes left for Vadic’s story to unfold, and for her to become more than just a one-dimensional villain trope. I’d hoped we might’ve seen the beginnings of that in some way this week, and going into the episode I was probably more excited to meet Vadic than I was about any other character. While I wouldn’t describe her as a “let-down,” she’s definitely a character I think we need to see more of before we can really assess whether or not she’s going to work, and whether her inclusion will end up being a positive thing for the season… or might end up detracting from it.

If we’re to see Vadic as something more than a bog-standard villain trope, we need to know more about her and what’s driving her.

What we’ve heard about Vadic and her crew from Jack – as well as a couple of remarks of a rumoured ship matching the Shrike’s design from Seven of Nine – tells us that she has resources at her disposal. The Shrike was armed to the teeth, and more than outmatched the Titan – which Captain Shaw described this week as a vessel of exploration, which I thought was interesting. But that doesn’t really speak to who Vadic is or what her overall motivation might be – especially if, as the season seems to be suggesting, she’s the terrorist mastermind that Raffi and Worf have been chasing and who attacked the Federation facility last week.

So again, we need to learn more about this character. We obviously weren’t going to get her entire backstory and an explanation of her mission in a single episode, and I wasn’t expecting to. But I was expecting to at least see the beginnings of that – and so far, it feels that Vadic’s true identity and motivation is rather obscured. I don’t believe that “money” will be all there is to it… but just in case I’m wrong about that, let me say right now that it will be monumentally unsatisfying if that somehow were to be the case.

The Shrike’s tractor beam attack was neat, though.

In The Wrath of Khan, Kirk learned that he had a son: David Marcus. Continuing the theme of Season 3 being “Picard does The Wrath of Khan,” we have Jack Crusher being Picard’s own son. This revelation – that at least some fans saw coming – is an interesting one, though I hope the mechanics of how it came to be will be explained… somehow. I don’t need a detailed, no-holds-barred flashback sequence (please no) but some kind of explanation of the events surrounding Jack’s conception wouldn’t go amiss.

As I said last week: there’s a question of timing that I find particularly interesting. According to Riker, Dr Crusher has been absent from her friends’ lives for approximately twenty years, but Jack is clearly not twenty years old or younger – no offence to actor Ed Speleers! – which means he had to have been around before her unannounced departure. Could we learn that a threat against Beverly, Jack, or perhaps against Picard might’ve prompted her to take him and leave?

Why did Dr Crusher take Jack and leave everyone behind?

The question of safety is also a pertinent one. Based on one of Dr Crusher’s lines from pre-season trailers, in which she says something to Picard about “attempts on [his] life,” I’d been wondering whether Dr Crusher may have taken her son as far away as possible in order to keep him safe. But Jack’s long list of criminal offences and the huge bounty seemingly placed on his head would seem to run completely counter to that; at the very least, if this was Dr Crusher’s intention, she hasn’t done a very good job of it!

If we’re sticking with comparisons to The Wrath of Khan, will Jack Crusher end up meeting the same fate as David Marcus? And if so, will his death have the same kind of effect on Picard as David’s did on Kirk? It would be cruel to introduce this character and begin to explore his background and his relationship with both his mother and Picard only to see him killed off – but it could be poetic symmetry, too.

We’ve already seen Jack offering himself to Vadic in an attempted act of self-sacrifice – something not incomparable to how David stepped in to save Saavik’s life in The Search for Spock. Saavik’s name was seen, briefly, this week – used for the doomed shuttle that Picard and Riker piloted to the Eleos. According to background details released by Paramount, Saavik was the commanding officer of the original USS Titan in the late 23rd Century.

These references could be to honour the late Kirstie Alley, the first actress to play the role of Saavik, who passed away late last year. They could also just be coincidental references to tie Picard Season 3 into past iterations of Star Trek. But there’s also a very deliberate connection to The Wrath of Khan once again… and in light of what happened with David Marcus and Saavik, I can’t help but wonder whether the season is setting up Jack Crusher for a similarly sacrificial end.

…and Kirstie Alley as Saavik in *The Wrath of Khan*.

I hope that there will be time to explore some of what Dr Crusher and Jack have been doing. Jack’s crimes can’t and shouldn’t just be hand-waved away by the story; such an important part of his background needs to be fleshed out. It won’t be enough to say “Jack’s a criminal,” and leave it at that – we need to know some of the details of why he broke the law, whether some or all of it could be morally justifiable, and why, when he’s supposedly on a “mission of mercy,” such law-breaking was required in the first place.

As with Raffi’s criminal underworld, I think there’s scope to show off a side of the Star Trek galaxy that hasn’t always been front-and-centre, and there’s definitely a pathway to explain Jack’s criminality in a way that feels natural and even sympathetic. Saying that he “did what he had to do” in order to provide medical assistance is going to be part of that, for sure – but I hope there will be time to go into a bit more detail.

Jack has an extensive criminal record… and a list of aliases.

There’s also clearly more to Captain Shaw than meets the eye. Vadic alluded to his “psychological profile,” and I think that could potentially connect with his anti-Borg prejudice that we saw in last week’s episode. If Captain Shaw had lost someone to the Borg, such an event could have had an impact on him – and could explain why he’s so openly hostile to Picard and Seven of Nine in particular. I keep expecting Captain Shaw to be killed off – but there may be more of an arc for this character than I’d been expecting.

What I liked about Shaw’s story this week was the moral ambiguity of it. It’s tempting to portray Shaw as being cowardly; turning over Jack to Vadic in order to save himself. But there’s clearly more to it than that – he takes the responsibility of command very seriously, and his number one overriding priority seems to be to keep his crew safe. He’s outside Federation space, with no immediate hope of backup, facing an opponent that clearly outmatches him in terms of firepower… so risking the lives of everyone on his ship to save a wanted criminal is a big ask – even if we as the audience would want to see the son of Jean-Luc Picard and Beverly Crusher kept safe.

Am I warming up to Captain Shaw?! That’s certainly not something I expected! But under the rude, unpleasant, and even bigoted exterior, I think we’ve seen glimpses of a good, upstanding captain. Putting aside the anti-Borg prejudice, Shaw reminds me, as I said last time, of the likes of The Search for Spock’s Captain Stiles, Discovery’s Captain Lorca, and The Next Generation’s Captain Jellico. Shaw isn’t wrong in his read on Picard and Riker – who snuck aboard his ship and took it on an unsanctioned mission. His anti-Borg attitude may be extreme, and targeting the wrong people, but I feel we may be on the verge of finding out how it came about. And finally, when he realised the true circumstances he was faced with, Shaw did the right thing – albeit at the last possible moment.

So Captain Shaw has turned out to be more complex than I expected. What’s more, he’s different enough from Chris Rios to provide some kind of justification for the latter’s departure from the series. These storylines wouldn’t have worked with Captain Rios, and while others could have been created to get the rest of the characters to similar narrative places, it would have been a lot more friendly and less adversarial. That’s more “Star Trek” in some ways – but perhaps less interesting in others!

Picard seemed to be struggling with the idea of Jack being his son, and only really came to accept it at the end of the episode. As mentioned, I think there was scope to do a bit more with this idea – explaining why Picard felt that way, and whether he was trying to push those questions aside simply as a point of practicality given the time constraint, or whether it was because he feared the truth. The way Disengage presented Picard left it open as to which it might’ve been – I can see clear cases for both explanations, and the episode doesn’t seem to have picked a side.

The scene in which an injured Dr Crusher wordlessly conveyed the truth, though, was spectacularly well done, and the emotional high point of Disengage. The wordless scene was set to a fantastically evocative piece of music, and told us what I think most viewers already knew: that Jack is Picard’s son.

Though this story was, overall, a tad rushed, and I’d have liked to have spent more time with Picard, Riker, and Jack in the moments leading up to it, there’s no faulting the final “reveal” itself. This moment also cemented Captain Shaw as an albeit begrudging ally, and has set the stage for the next chapter of the story as the Titan fled into a dangerous nebula.

A battle in a sensor-blind nebula? That sounds like yet another story beat from The Wrath of Khan! This season really is going all-in with the Khan comparisons… and so far, I’m really into that! It isn’t a straight copy; there are enough differences that we can consider it a variation on a theme. But the overt callbacks to one of the best things Star Trek has ever done are not going unnoticed – and after two muddled, lacklustre seasons, maybe this kind of big all-action blow-out is just what the doctor ordered.

Aside from the danger of coming across as repetitive – which Season 3 has thus far avoided, I have to say – the other potential pitfall here is that this story just feels a bit… safe. Not safe for our characters – not all of whom will make it to the end alive and unscathed, I’m fairly confident of that – but in terms of how the story comes across. This narrative framework is one that Star Trek has used before, and that could mean that we’ll end the season feeling it played things a bit too safe. We’ll have to see – but it’s worth keeping in mind.

So let’s start to wrap things up! Disengage finally saw the season move beyond its starting point, and we now have some idea of how the two main narrative arcs may come together. It was a treat to see Worf again after so long – but a shame he was on screen so briefly. The same can be said for Riker, whose contributions to the episode were a little too rushed for my liking.

Visually, Disengage was a bit of a disappointment due to a washed-out, faded look that didn’t suit an already dark episode. However, the CGI and other effects work was perfectly okay, and unlike last week I didn’t feel too much of the dreaded “uncanny valley” in CGI sequences featuring the Shrike and the Titan.

Whether Disengage did enough to advance its two main narratives is still an open question, and one that I feel particularly attuned to after the disappointments of Seasons 1 and 2. I’m crossing my fingers that it will all be alright, and that the next eight episodes will see the story advance and unfold at just the right pace. Both this week’s episode and last week’s have left me worried, though.

Overall, I had a good time with Disengage. I don’t think it’s the best episode of the series or anything, but it feels like there’s the potential to consider it a solid addition, one that advanced key storylines just far enough. I certainly hope so, anyway!

Aside from pacing, my biggest point of concern – or rather, my biggest question-mark – coming out of Disengage has to do with Vadic and the way she’s both written and presented on screen. I feel that we’re going to learn something significant about Vadic in the weeks ahead that will completely reframe her characterisation, and give meaning and purpose to someone who feels a bit out-of-place right now. “Money” can’t be all there is – at least, I hope not!

So that was Disengage. Let’s see what Season 3 has in store for us next time.

Star Trek: Picard Episode Review – Season 3, Episode 1: The Next Generation

Sat 18.02.23Sat 18.02.23Dennis

Spoiler Warning: There are spoilers ahead for Star Trek: Picard Seasons 1-3. Spoilers are also present for The Next Generation and Voyager.

Before I’d even watched a single second of Star Trek: Picard Season 3, I was sceptical. In both Seasons 1 and 2, incredible premiere episodes gave way to stories that either failed to pull out a decent ending… or just failed across the board. Regardless of how The Next Generation landed, it’s the first chapter of a season-long story where success or failure will ultimately be determined over the next nine weeks. Having been burned by Picard twice now, I’m afraid that I begin this new season feeling more than a little jaded.

Taking the episode on its own merit, however, The Next Generation feels like a solid start. I wouldn’t say it was perfect – it’s an episode of contradictions, where a couple of story beats seemed to rush past in a heartbeat whilst its contribution to the overall narrative of the season may turn out to be too slow. But there were points of high excitement, fun little character moments, and more than enough intrigue spread across two distinct – yet surely connected – narrative threads to drive things forward and keep me engaged.

I said as Season 2 came to a close that I was bitterly disappointed to see most of the main cast being jettisoned in order to bring back characters from The Next Generation, and how I hoped their absences would be addressed somehow. Perhaps the most important of these characters was Laris, who, despite making only a handful of appearances across Seasons 1 and 2, was absolutely essential to last season’s story. Although we didn’t get to spend a great deal of time looking at Picard’s new relationship with her, I was pleased that Laris was able to be included and that we got to spend a little time with her before the main story took over.

I said in Season 1 that Laris and Zhaban served a similar role in the story to the residents of Hobbiton in The Lord of the Rings – being the familiar and comforting faces of home that Picard had to leave behind as he set out on his adventure. And Laris once again seems to serve a similar function in Season 3 as Picard sets off on a new quest. It was great to welcome back Orla Brady, and to catch a glimpse of Picard’s newfound home life with Laris before the main story kicked off. I’m glad there was time to include those sequences – and it gives me hope that we might get to hear something of Elnor, Soji, and the Borg Queen-Dr Jurati hybrid as well.

We got to catch a glimpse of Picard’s life with Laris before the main story got underway.

One of the biggest problems that has tripped up Star Trek: Picard in both of its seasons so far has been pacing. This is something that we won’t be able to judge fairly until we’ve seen most of the rest of the season, but there are causes for concern at this early stage – at least in my opinion. The Next Generation introduced us to some kind of mysterious threat that seems to be hunting Dr Crusher… but after setting up that she was in danger, the main story arc of the season didn’t really progress beyond that. Picard and Riker arrived at her ship, the Eleos, but there wasn’t any time left to go into detail about who might be hunting her or what they want.

And that could be okay… if the rest of the season has time to explain all of these points and tie together the different character arcs and narrative threads. But it’s also worth noting that The Next Generation didn’t bolt out of the gate. We met several new characters, but not the villain hunting Dr Crusher, and the episode ended more or less in the same place as it began: with Dr Crusher having fended off an attack, and the help she had called for – Riker and Picard – having only just arrived. In both Seasons 1 and 2, pacing issues across much of the season meant that too much story was left on the table, with whole storylines and characters literally ignored and dumped as time ran out. I sincerely hope that this problem hasn’t been repeated, and that The Next Generation hasn’t set up the season for a disappointingly familiar end.

In terms of the main story of the season, I’m not sure how far we’ve progressed.

Conversely, parts of The Next Generation seemed to race through – or rush past – potentially-interesting story beats. There were quite a few different elements crammed in to kick off storylines and character arcs, and the result was that not all of them seemed to get enough time in the spotlight – even though the episode as a whole wasn’t in a horrible rush.

It’s a contradiction! Raffi’s story in the criminal underworld was a bit of a whirlwind, taking her from off-the-wagon junkie to undercover operative in a heartbeat, and then culminating mere moments later in her failure (or what she will undoubtedly see as her failure) to stop an attack against a Federation facility. This storyline didn’t necessarily need more time, but it certainly could have had longer to play out. In past iterations of Star Trek, a story like this could have been an episode (or even a two-parter) in itself; Picard’s own undercover mission in Gambit comes to mind!

I would have liked to have spent more time with Raffi. Although she and her nameless “handler” made mention of stolen weapons, I didn’t really feel that The Next Generation properly conveyed the stakes. It was only when the Federation facility was destroyed (a moment that had been shown in pre-season trailers) that the extent of the threat that Raffi was staring down became apparent – and by then this part of the episode was pretty much over.

If this storyline had a few more minutes dedicated to it, we could have had a bit more of a conversation about what this missing weapon was, why it was so dangerous, how long it had been since it was stolen… and more background that could have set up the attack on the base. As it is, it’s hard to get too invested in this story. We never saw the base, nor met anyone who might’ve been stationed there, and we don’t know if the weapon used to destroy it was the only one stolen or one of many. Without more information to put these points into some kind of context… it just feels a tad rushed.

The attack on the base and missing weapons could’ve used a bit more context.

That being said, Michelle Hurd did everything she could with the material she had and the limited screen time afforded her to really sell this storyline, and her emotional performance was deeply impressive. Given that she was working on her own for practically the entire time, it wasn’t an easy challenge to really sell the idea of Raffi being in this dark place, but Hurd rose to the occasion.

In terms of visual effects, The Next Generation had a couple of unspectacular moments. Generally, the quality of the animation work was high – and far better than the lacklustre visuals we saw in parts of Season 1. But there were a few moments with the USS Titan that I felt were just a bit “last-gen” and not quite up to modern standards, especially when we look at what other sci-fi series and franchises are doing.

This is a consequence of Paramount and Star Trek not having the budget or resources that the likes of Disney and Star Wars do, and that’s okay. In a season in which a big return to space is clearly on the agenda, though, it’s at least noteworthy that not all of the CGI moments in The Next Generation stuck the landing.

At first I couldn’t quite figure out what it was about a couple of shots of the USS Titan that I didn’t like, but I think I’ve finally nailed it down. In short, the ship is in the “uncanny valley,” looking real, but not quite real enough. Between the “lens” and the “model” there was just a bit too much smoothness; panels and lines don’t have the textural variation we’d expect to see on a real object. This problem plagued CGI through the 2000s, and if you look at Enterprise or the Star Wars prequels you’ll see far more extreme examples. While it wasn’t terrible, it was noticeable enough to pull me out of the immersion on more than one occasion – and to leave me lamenting the loss of physical starship models!

Picard and Riker’s shuttle leaves the Titan.

Aside from the heavy-handed nostalgia play, I’m genuinely not sure what the title of this episode was supposed to be about. The characters who were in focus for the vast, vast majority of the time were very decidedly not the titular “next generation,” and those who arguably might be – Sidney La Forge and the character who identified himself as Dr Crusher’s son – were only on screen for a couple of minutes at the most.

This isn’t a big deal really, but when the title of the episode clearly indicates the same kind of passing of the torch that we got back in 1987, we didn’t really feel any of that as the story unfolded. Perhaps someone cleverer than I am might be able to pick up on what the writers and producers were going for here, but I’m struggling to see it!

A few points that The Next Generation glossed over could’ve used some additional clarification. The last time we saw Admiral Picard he’d just taken up a new role as Chancellor of Starfleet Academy, and the pin/combadge he wore during this episode was the same one we saw him wearing on the bridge of the Stargazer in Season 2. Yet Captain Shaw made the point that Picard had now retired from Starfleet – and used that to deny his request to change course. So did Picard cease to be Chancellor of the Academy in between Seasons 2 and 3? I guess he must’ve – perhaps while deciding to move to a new planet with Laris – but it wasn’t clear.

If he did retire, how was Captain Shaw convinced to allow him and Riker to “inspect” the Titan? Captain Shaw clearly didn’t want the two of them to be there, and wouldn’t have voluntarily allowed them on board, so the question of exactly what status a retired ex-Admiral and ex-Captain occupy is a bit up in the air. The episode seemed to want to have it both ways: to tell the story of the retired old guard, but also make sure they had a pathway to commandeering a starship.

The specifics of Picard’s place in Starfleet weren’t made clear.

Captain Shaw is a great character – though I’m still convinced he won’t last very long, one way or another! I noted influences from the likes of Captain Stiles from The Search for Spock and Edward Jellico from Chain of Command, as well as perhaps a dash of Discovery’s Gabriel Lorca, in his characterisation. The strict, rigid, no-nonsense approach that we’ve often seen other characters come up against was on full display, and where Captain Shaw could have come across as a bit of a wet blanket – an unnecessary bump in the road as our protagonists set out on their journey – I think it worked well in context. Starfleet is bound to be populated by career officers like Shaw, and while he comes across as unsympathetic and even malicious due to his treatment of Seven, Riker, and Picard… in a way he isn’t wrong. These two were trying to take his ship and crew on an unsanctioned, dangerous, clandestine mission, and he was right to be suspicious of them and call them out on it.

In terms of the narrative of this first chapter of the story, though, I can’t help but wonder whether it might’ve been better for Picard and/or Riker to have called in a different favour! Instead of sneaking aboard the Titan and trying to secretively reroute the ship, couldn’t they have called in a favour from someone else in Starfleet – someone who could have hooked them up with a ship, or at least gotten them a spot aboard a ship with a captain who likes and respects them? I know that Dr Crusher warned them not to involve Starfleet – but they did anyway, and so I guess my question is: was this their only option? Maybe that’s a bit of a nitpick… and if I’m wrong and Captain Shaw sticks around, perhaps he’ll have a contribution to make to the story that will be more than worthwhile. Time will tell!

Captain Shaw may be an unpleasant man… but he was right, in a way, to be suspicious of Picard and Riker.

So let’s talk about Dr Crusher’s son. As of the last time we saw her, Dr Crusher only had one son: Wesley. And as we saw at the end of Season 2, he’s off doing his own thing with the Travellers and Supervisors. So who is this new character really – and if he is Dr Crusher’s son, will we learn who his father might be?

The obvious connection – especially in a show called Star Trek: Picard – is that he’s Picard’s son, and especially considering that Laris mentioned earlier in the episode that Picard and Dr Crusher had “tried” to become lovers, that could very well play out. We’ll take a look at this in more detail when I update my theory list, but for now suffice to say that this seems to be the most likely outcome.

I’m sure we’ll find out a lot more about Crusher Jr. in the episodes ahead!

But even if we’ve figured out this character’s parentage, there are still a lot of unanswered questions. Riker and Picard both noted that it’s been about twenty years since they last saw or heard from Dr Crusher… but her son is clearly not twenty years old or younger, so he must’ve been around during the years before she disappeared. That doesn’t mean she would have told her friends about having another child – but it does raise questions. If he’s Picard’s son, and Picard seemed to be in danger, could that explain why Dr Crusher chose to leave her friends behind? Was it all for his sake?

Again, that’s something we can consider in more detail in my theory update. This revelation of Dr Crusher’s colleague being her son raised a lot of questions – but it was also a story point that was blitzed past pretty quickly in The Next Generation. The character emerged, pointing a phaser at Riker, revealed his connection to Dr Crusher, and then it was time for a close-up look at the Shrike before the credits rolled. There was definitely scope to spend a minute or two more on this revelation – both for the sakes of Riker and Picard and for us as the audience. This bombshell didn’t get more than a few seconds in the spotlight before the episode rushed to its next point.

We could – and perhaps should – have spent a couple of minutes more on this moment.

Last season, I argued that an apparent studio-mandated decision to have every single episode end on a cliffhanger was to the story’s detriment, and with The Next Generation ending with not only one but arguably four shocking moments, I feel a tad worried that that trend might continue. In retrospect, Season 2 feels like it was chopped up quite artificially, with a strong focus on these cliffhanger endings to such an extent that it didn’t serve the story, splitting up storylines across multiple episodes unnecessarily. We’ll have to judge this aspect of Season 3 when it’s over, but it’s certainly noteworthy at this early stage that The Next Generation also ended in similar fashion.

Who was the mysterious stranger eavesdropping on Riker and Picard? It seems a safe assumption that he’s some kind of friend or ally of Vadic – the season’s main villain who was teased in pre-season trailers but is yet to make an appearance. He could also be a Starfleet operative, or perhaps someone aligned with Dr Crusher. But it felt like quite a played-out trope to have Riker and Picard meeting up in a bar to have their private chat about secretive and sensitive issues. I know it’s another nitpick – but couldn’t Riker have met up with Picard at the vineyard? If this character’s spying is going to be relevant to the story later on – and surely it will be in some form – it just feels a bit clichéd to have him overhear them speaking in such a public setting.

One of the best things Picard did in its first season was re-establish the relationship between Riker and Picard, taking it beyond anything we ever saw in The Next Generation and the films of that era. No longer serving together opened up the possibility of a genuine and deep friendship between the two, and the episode Nepenthe was the perfect way to revisit Picard, Riker, and Troi and establish a new, post-Starfleet dynamic for them.

And The Next Generation picked up that thread from Season 1 and has begun the process of exploring it further. Picard turned to his old friend for help – and with both men being retired or no longer on active duty, there was the opportunity to really examine how well they work together and how close they’ve become. Although Riker and Picard worked well together, and there was trust and mutual respect between them really from the first season of The Next Generation, it’s only in Picard that we’ve seen this friendship genuinely blossom and come into its own. It’s been great to see – and it feels like the perfect and natural evolution of this relationship.

This episode did great things with the Riker-Picard relationship.

The themes of age and how we treat older people were present in The Next Generation, though perhaps not quite to the extent that I’d been expecting. We got a moment where Picard was unaware of the closure of a starbase and had to be corrected, and a comment from Riker about how both men were past their physical peak, but Riker’s story seems to be teeing up some kind of relationship or family dysfunction angle between himself, Troi, and their daughter Kestra. Jonathan Frakes seemed to suggest in a pre-season interview that Riker has felt unsettled and has been keen on returning to Starfleet, and that could be the source of the tension there.

Having seen Riker and Troi in semi-retirement in Season 1, seemingly doing the best that they could to have a happy family life and provide for their daughter, I hope that this story doesn’t end up coming across as a kind of gratuitous and unnecessary shake-up. I’d have been happy, quite frankly, to have left Troi and Riker behind, with Nepenthe serving as their post-The Next Generation epilogue. With them returning this time, I just hope that if there is to be a relationship dispute, it won’t feel tacked-on or overplayed.

Riker seemed to suggest that all may not be well in his marriage.

But we’ll have to wait for Troi’s return before we can assess how that particular storyline will land! For now, suffice to say it’s enough to cause a little concern, because undoing or otherwise overwriting what we got in Season 1 would not be my choice – especially if it seems only to be there to inject a sense of drama into an already-dramatic season of television.

I was surprised to see how heavily The Next Generation leaned on visual and musical callbacks to The Original Series films. The Wrath of Khan, The Search for Spock, The Undiscovered Country, and even The Motion Picture were all influential, with everything from fonts to musical motifs being directly lifted from those titles. I said before the season aired that I was getting a kind of “Picard does The Wrath of Khan” vibe from some of the clips we’d seen in trailers, but I wasn’t expecting to see the series lean so heavily on the feature films of the ’80s for inspiration. Don’t get me wrong – as a child of the ’80s, that style of sci-fi is exactly my kind of thing! And it worked well in The Next Generation. I just wasn’t expecting it!

There was a real ’80s flair to parts of *The Next Generation*.

Dr Crusher didn’t always get a lot to do in The Next Generation and the films that followed. She had some episodes in the spotlight, and we saw her take on a commanding role on the bridge in later episodes like Descent and All Good Things, but for the most part her role as the ship’s doctor was a limiting factor. Stories with medical mysteries or where characters had to visit sickbay were where we saw her most often.

With that in mind, where The Next Generation excelled was in ensuring that Dr Crusher stayed true to her characterisation, but took on much more of a leading role in an action-packed storyline. Traits like her courage, that we remember from her earlier appearances, came to the fore in a new way, and this bold direction for her character didn’t feel in any way forced. On the contrary, it felt like the natural evolution for her – especially if she’s been operating independently for such a long time.

The semi-automated Eleos was an interesting vessel, and I hope we get to spend a little more time with this starship. Dr Crusher and her son seem to rely on the ship’s computer for things like propulsion, where in past iterations of Star Trek we’d have expected to see people operating those stations and departments. But, as Seven reminded Picard aboard the Titan, it seems that Starfleet is embracing more and more automation. An analogy for things happening here in the real world, no doubt!

The “deadnaming” of Seven of Nine by Captain Shaw was something I was uncomfortable about at first, especially after Seven’s arc in Season 2 was all about embracing the Borg side of herself. Captain Shaw clearly has a chip on his shoulder about the Borg, as he made clear in a comment to Picard, so perhaps that’s something we’ll learn more about next time. He might’ve lost someone to the Borg, or even aboard the Artifact.

Commander Seven… uh, I mean Commander Hansen.

That being said, this kind of deadnaming – forcibly referring to someone by an old name with which they no longer identify – may have been a way of quickly communicating to us as the audience that Captain Shaw is someone we should dislike, and that kind of shorthand can work well in a story with time constraints. But in a broader sense, when we step back and think about Star Trek’s positive, progressive future and how far we’d have expected society to advance by the dawn of the 25th Century… surely something like deadnaming would be socially unacceptable, even for someone in a position of power like Captain Shaw.

In short, I can see why the writers chose to include this aspect of Shaw’s character. Seeing how uncomfortable it made Seven of Nine was a quick and relatively easy way to get across the message that this character isn’t someone we should be rooting for – and I get that. But it has an implication for the Star Trek galaxy as a whole that feels a little uncomfortable. I hope we’ll learn that the rest of the crew of the Titan have more respect for Seven and are willing to treat her better!

Captain Shaw is being set up as an antagonist.

So let’s start to wrap things up.

Season 3 is off to a solid start. My scepticism about the pacing of the episode is probably more to do with the muddled and mismanaged first and second seasons and the way those stories ended. I certainly hope that The Next Generation has set up this new story for success, and if nothing else it was nice to spend some more time with Riker and Picard, as well as Dr Crusher, Seven of Nine, and Raffi.

Seeing how these stories will come together is genuinely interesting, and while we could’ve spent a bit more time on Raffi’s side of things, with some more context provided about the stolen weapons and attack on the Federation outpost, it worked well enough. Captain Shaw was the only new character that we got to spend a lot of time with, and while I don’t like him, I can see where he’s coming from and can certainly appreciate that an organisation such as Starfleet must be populated with people just like him. Dr Crusher’s son and Ensign La Forge were on screen so briefly that we didn’t really get a good read on either – but there’s more than enough time in the episodes ahead to rectify that.

The final shot of the episode: the Eleos and the Shrike.

As I said a couple of weeks ago: it’s probably time to watch The Wrath of Khan if you haven’t seen it in a while! That film seems to be serving as inspiration for Season 3 right now, though the story is far from identical.

I had a good time with The Next Generation, taken on its own merit. It wasn’t perfect, and I don’t think it hit the same high notes as Season 1’s Remembrance or Season 2’s The Star Gazer – but if the story that it’s set up has been meticulously planned and will reach a better, more definitive end point than either of the show’s past outings managed, then none of that will ultimately matter. I’m keeping my fingers crossed that that will turn out to be the case.

Star Trek: Picard Season 3 – Comic-Con trailer thoughts and analysis

Tue 08.11.22Dennis

Spoiler Warning: There are spoilers ahead for Star Trek: Picard Seasons 1-2 and the trailers, teasers, and announcements for Season 3. Spoilers are also present for Star Trek: The Next Generation, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, and Star Trek: Voyager.

At New York Comic-Con back in September, Paramount showed off a new trailer for the upcoming third season of Star Trek: Picard, and I’m finally getting around to taking a look at it! This time, I’m going to give my thoughts and analysis of what was shown off in the trailer, as well as speculate a little about what the plot of Picard’s final season might end up looking like.

The first thing to say is that Season 3 appears to be another standalone story, one that doesn’t follow on directly from the events of Season 2. Does that mean that we’ll never know who or what caused the anomaly that was so central to kicking off (and resolving) last season’s main story? And does it mean that the dangling story threads from Season 1 will also be left unresolved when Picard comes to an end? I hope not – but I have to say that, based on what we know of Season 3 at this stage, my hopes of the unresolved storylines from Seasons 1 and 2 being addressed are fading fast.

Will Season 3 provide a conclusion to unresolved stories from Seasons 1 and 2?

And before we go any further, I want to address that. Picard, despite having a lot of promise when it was announced and when it premiered, has been hit-and-miss so far; a rather disconnected series that has boldly tried some new and potentially-interesting ideas, but that hasn’t always managed to pull them off successfully. I still haven’t written up my full thoughts on Season 2 as a whole, but suffice to say that there were some pretty significant problems that seriously hampered my enjoyment. If Season 3 is, as I suspect, leaving all of that behind to rush off into another new story, for me that’s a double-edged sword. On the one hand, spending too much time looking back at the underwhelming elements of Season 2 isn’t what I’d want to see… but on the other, Season 3 represents Star Trek’s last chance – at least in this iteration – to make more of some of those unresolved storylines. Season 2 could end up looking better in retrospect if it turns out to be one piece of a greater whole… but if Season 3 drops those stories to do its own thing, it will remain a disappointment.

I’ve already shared my thoughts on the way the casting situation has been handled, but as we’re diving back into Picard Season 3, I think it’s worth pointing out again that the return of The Next Generation’s main characters – all of whom got some screen time in the new trailer – has come at the expense of several genuinely interesting characters from Seasons 1 and 2 of Picard that we were only just beginning to get to know. As it seems unlikely that most of them will be seen in the franchise again – at least, not for a long time – I think it’s worth reiterating just how much potential has been squandered.

The cast of *Star Trek: Picard* Season 1 – most of whom are not returning this time around.

If the Star Trek franchise is to survive long-term, it can’t simply coast on nostalgia. Trying new things, innovating, and introducing new characters has been what the franchise has done since the 1980s, but the current crop of Star Trek shows all seem to be falling back on nostalgic crutches in a way that they really shouldn’t. Picard Season 3 may be the epitome of this backwards-looking take on the franchise, but it’s certainly not the only example.

But that’s enough about that for now! We’re here to look at the trailer rather than talk about Picard or the franchise in a general sense, and the New York Comic-Con trailer definitely raised a lot of interesting (or potentially-interesting) points!

First of all, the season’s main villain, played by veteran actress Amanda Plummer, will be called Captain Vadic. Vadic was seen briefly in the trailer, and seems to have an almost Khan-like obsession with getting revenge on Picard and his former Enterprise-D crewmates. Exactly what her beef is with the retired admiral is unclear… but given who else is involved, surely there has to be a connection to The Next Generation, right?

Well, not so fast! In both Seasons 1 and 2, key storylines were ultimately not connected in a major way to Picard’s past… or at least, not to elements of his past that we were already familiar with. Speculation abounded regarding the Coppelius synths, the mysterious super-synths, the Borg Queen, the anomaly, and Q, but ultimately in both seasons the writers chose to go in a different and new direction. Captain Vadic could be connected to Picard either because she’s a returning character utilising a nom de guerre or because she’s related to or otherwise connected to a classic character. And don’t worry, I have plenty of ideas in that vein that we’ll talk about on another occasion! But I think we have to consider the very real possibility that this character, as well as whatever may have caused her to hate Picard and his crew, will be something entirely new to us as the audience.

I liked what I saw of Amanda Plummer’s performance in the trailer. She brought a ferocity to Captain Vadic that straddled the line between dedication and obsession, and had an almost animalistic or beastly quality that echoed not only Khan, but other great Star Trek villains too. Vadic has been described as an “alien,” though what species she could be if not human wasn’t clear. Could her scars suggest some kind of ex-Borg origin, perhaps?

Vadic’s ship, the Shrike, seemed to draw inspiration from Nemo’s Narada that we saw in 2009’s Star Trek reboot film, as well as perhaps from the Romulan vessels seen in Nemesis, which could all hint at a Romulan (or Reman) origin or connection. The sweeping, blade-like lines of the Shrike give the vessel a genuinely threatening appearance, and if what we saw from Picard and Riker in the trailer depicts them and their vessel in combat against the Shrike, Vadic’s ship seems to have the weapons to back up its intimidating look!

Speaking of starships, we got a closer look at the USS Titan in the new trailer – and it looks absolutely fantastic! One of the criticisms some fans have had of Picard – especially with last season’s 21st Century story – has been the lack of starships, and in addition to the Titan we also caught a glimpse of Star Trek Online’s Enterprise-F. Though I dabbled briefly in Star Trek Online, MMO games aren’t really “my thing,” but I’m nevertheless happy to see the creative team take inspiration from the game on this occasion. Fans of Star Trek Online will be thrilled, undoubtedly!

La Sirena was also present, and may be being used by Raffi and/or Seven of Nine. I like the design of La Sirena and I hope the story will find a way to include the smaller vessel alongside bigger ships like the Titan and Enterprise-F. Rounding out the “starship porn” in the trailer was a beautiful shot of Earth Spacedock – bringing back memories of both The Next Generation and some of the Star Trek films in which the massive station was featured. Could a Search for Spock-inspired starship heist be on the cards? I guess we’ll have to wait and see!

The Enterprise-F, with a design borrowed from *Star Trek Online*.

Although the producers are keeping a pretty tight lid on the season’s story, the trailer did actually give us quite a lot to go on. Captain Vadic seems to be chasing Dr Crusher – perhaps to get to Picard or get his attention – and her reason for doing so seems to be connected to her hatred of Picard and his Enterprise-D crewmates. As I said, we’ll speculate more about her possible reasons in the days ahead.

As part of her anti-Picard vendetta, Captain Vadic appears to have put together what I’d describe as something of a “rogues’ gallery” of The Next Generation’s villains. We saw Professor Moriarty – the sentient hologram created in the Season 2 episode Elementary, Dear Data – as well as Lore, Data’s “evil twin.” Could there be more villains from The Next Generation era who’ll be brought on board? I think that’s a distinct possibility!

Professor Moriarty joins a “rogues’ gallery” for an anti-Picard vendetta.

Captain Vadic was seen speaking to a group of characters – most of whom had their faces covered or obscured – promising “vengeance,” so I think it’s at least possible that we haven’t seen the last big or surprising announcement of a returning villain! Several of the characters with Vadic seemed to be aliens, and I can think of no shortage of alien adversaries that Picard and the crew of the Enterprise-D tackled during their adventures. Could the promise of revenge combined with Captain Vadic’s powerful personality have convinced them all to work together?

Any time a television show brings back a number of past characters all at once, there’s a risk of some of them being overshadowed. If, as I suspect, Captain Vadic is someone wholly new connected to a hitherto-unseen event in Picard’s past, her dominant role as the leader of the rogues’ gallery could end up relegating the likes of Lore and Professor Moriarty to smaller cameos. Depending on how it’s handled that could be fine – or it could be a little underwhelming. Paramount is promising big things from this “explosive” final season of Picard… so I hope the series can deliver!

We saw quite a lot of Riker in the new trailer, more than almost anyone else aside from Picard himself. The relationship between Riker and Picard was, in my view anyway, beautifully restored in the Season 1 episode Nepenthe, which saw the two men reuniting for the first time in almost twenty years (at least on screen). After seeing Riker out of uniform enjoying his family life and retirement, it’ll be great to see him back in action once more.

I feel that Worf’s appearance has the most potential to cause controversy out of all of the returning cast members. His statement in the trailer that he “prefers pacifism” and has abandoned the way of violence was played for laughs at first, but it represents a major departure from the character we knew through seven seasons of The Next Generation and four of Deep Space Nine. It’s definitely something that could feel like a natural progression if it’s suitably well-explained – some older Klingon characters, like Kor, for instance, seemed to mellow with age and become less quick to anger – but it’s definitely a move that could be controversial in some quarters. Could this be the producers and creators potentially setting up a calmer, more level-headed Worf for a leading role in his own series or film?

We didn’t see too much of either Dr Crusher or Deanna Troi, though the former seems to be a major driving force in kicking off the storyline. I expect we’ll hear of her distress signal in the season premiere, and that could be the moment where an off-duty Picard was approached by two Starfleet officers (was that scene in Guinan’s bar? I couldn’t tell!) As for Troi, she seems to be along for the ride with Riker, and her Betazoid senses were put to use describing the mood on what could be the Shrike as an “all-consuming darkness.” This ties into the themes of obsession and revenge that I touched on earlier.

Seeing Dr Crusher in some form of stasis pod was interesting; could her distress signal have been the lure to get Picard (and the others) back out into space? If Dr Crusher was the only one of the Enterprise-D crew who was on a deep space assignment, she would seem to be the logical target – as bait in a trap!

Raffi also seems to be being hunted – can we assume it’s by the same adversary? If so, Captain Vadic may be doing more than simply targeting the crew of the Enterprise-D – she may be trying to get to Picard by attacking anyone he’s worked closely with in the past. As his former aide-de-camp from his time as an Admiral, Raffi certainly fits the profile!

But there could be more to it than that. We’re getting into some seriously speculative territory, but if the story of the new season involves a villain (and/or a rogues’ gallery of villains) trying to hurt Picard by targeting those close to him, we could potentially learn of the deaths of some friendly faces. Elnor and Soji spring to mind as possible victims – both worked closely with Picard and neither are scheduled to make a major appearance this time around. Could one or both of their deaths have sent Raffi into hiding? Or put her on the revenge trail?

Finally we have Geordi La Forge. In the trailer his main moment came when he seemed to criticise Picard for dragging Worf and Riker into whatever crisis is going on… but it doesn’t end there. We know from casting – and briefly from an appearance at the Titan’s helm in the trailer – that Geordi will be joined by two of his children. One of his daughters will be played by LeVar Burton’s real-life daughter Mica, which is neat. Mica Burton hosted Star Trek Day 2021 alongside Wil Wheaton, and has been a fixture in the expanded Star Trek community ever since the franchise returned to the small screen.

Having covered the main characters – and speculated a little about some of them – we still have a few disjointed clips and images to assess from the trailer before we wrap things up! Starfleet Academy or Starfleet HQ appears to be attacked and destroyed at one point, but for some reason my gut instinct is to say that that may not happen in the real world. We could be looking at a simulation, dream, or plan rather than an actual attack. I don’t know exactly why I feel that way… but I do!

Is this moment real, or does it take place in a dream or fantasy sequence?

Amongst some wreckage in space we caught a glimpse of a derelict or abandoned starship. Could this be Dr Crusher’s ship – the one from which she sent the distress signal to Admiral Picard? The name and registry number was hard to make out from the trailer, and the design seemed similar to the USS Titan. The field of debris in which the ship was drifting seems too large to all have come from one (largely intact) vessel, so could this be the aftermath of a larger battle in which other ships were destroyed?

As mentioned, I can’t quite tell if the trailer’s opening shot sees Picard at Guinan’s bar on Earth (“Ten” on Forward Avenue in Los Angeles’ historic district that was featured in Season 2), but it certainly could be. Starting Season 3 in a location that was central to the story of Season 2 would go some way to tying the stories together if there isn’t a bigger connection between what seems to be two separate stories.

Is Picard dining at Guinan’s bar in this scene?

Some of the shots of the Shrike and Titan chasing one another and battling seem to be reminiscent of the Briar Patch from the film Insurrection, so could that be a clue? Starship battles that take place in nebulae have been a part of the franchise from The Wrath of Khan all the way through to Discovery’s most recent outing, so it’s by no means a cast-iron statement. But the colour and appearance of the clouds in the nebula certainly brought back memories of Insurrection for me.

The Shrike having the power to outgun the Titan could mean that the ship is incredibly powerful – like Nero’s Narada or Shinzon’s Scimitar, for example – but it could also speak to the Titan potentially being an older vessel, perhaps one that has been recently taken out of mothballs and potentially with only a skeleton crew aboard. While the Shrike definitely has the appearance of a warship or a hunter, it could be worth keeping in mind the Titan’s potential condition!

After being given a field commission last season and assuming command of the USS Stargazer, Seven of Nine appears to wear the rank pips of a commander rather than a captain, though she does still seem to be on the command track. It wouldn’t be the first time that an officer below the rank of captain has been given a command, though, so Seven may yet prove to be in command of a vessel. Geordi, meanwhile, appears to hold the rank of either a commodore or perhaps a one-star admiral based on the single pip seen on his uniform collar.

I find it interesting, too, that Seven has chosen to remain in Starfleet while Raffi appears to have taken La Sirena on a mission of her own. Is this something that we’ll see her do during the season, or is this where her story will begin? If so, what could have caused her to abandon Seven, Elnor, and her role in Starfleet? And could this connect with my theory above about Captain Vadic potentially having attacked, kidnapped, or killed the likes of Elnor and Soji?

By far my biggest question at this stage is this: who else, besides Moriarty and Lore, might be joining Captain Vadic’s rogues’ gallery? I feel all but certain that we’re going to see other villains of The Next Generation era coming on board if this is a quest for vengeance against Picard and the crew of the Enterprise-D. From the Duras family and Sela to DaiMon Bok and even the Maquis, Picard and his crew thwarted the nefarious schemes of many villains during their adventures – and if Captain Vadic is indeed putting together a crew of her own to seek revenge, there must be no shortage of applicants!

If Picard and the crew are going to go out with a bang, as we’ve been promised, facing off against a team of their most powerful and feared adversaries could absolutely make for an exciting, tense, and explosive season of Star Trek. After the slower pace of Season 2 and its focus on Picard’s innermost thoughts and his personal family history, something a bit more action-oriented this time around could be just what the doctor ordered. Although I’m still upset about the decision to ditch most of the main cast members from Seasons 1 and 2 in favour of this return to The Next Generation’s characters, I’m hopeful that what we’ll get will be a fun ride and a great way to say goodbye.

Season 3 is purportedly the final voyage for Picard and the crew.

The trailer shown off at New York Comic-Con looked action-packed and exciting, so hopefully that’s representative of the new season. Although Picard has its problems and I have some gripes, the trailer itself has raised my hopes, and I’m now definitely looking forward to the new season.

So that’s it for now! Although this summer and autumn has seen me writing less and making fewer posts here on the website, when Picard Season 3 kicks off in February I still plan to review each episode in turn, as well as crafting a few theories and giving my thoughts on how the season as a whole shapes up. So I hope you’ll stay tuned and join me for that in the new year!

Star Trek: Picard Season 3 will stream on Paramount+ in the United States and on Amazon Prime Video around the world beginning on the 16th of February 2023. Seasons 1 and 2 are available to stream now and are also available on DVD and Blu-ray. The Star Trek franchise – including Picard and all other properties mentioned above – is the copyright of Paramount Global. This article contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.

Gates McFadden’s recent comments on Star Trek: Picard

Sat 08.05.21Sun 13.11.22Dennis

Spoiler Warning: There are spoilers ahead for Star Trek: Picard, including the entirety of Season 1 and, most significantly, casting information for Season 2. There are also spoilers for Star Trek: The Next Generation.

Over the course of Star Trek: Picard Season 1, we learned a little about some of Picard’s former crewmates from his time aboard the Enterprise-D. We saw Riker and Troi appear in person in the episode Nepenthe, as well as a version of Data. In the episode Maps and Legends, new character Zhaban – an ally of Picard’s – mentioned La Forge and Worf by name, seemingly confirming that both are still alive… at least as of the early part of Season 1! The only main characters from The Next Generation whose fates were not confirmed, and who were not even mentioned, were Dr Beverly Crusher and her son Wesley.

I don’t necessarily expect to see Wesley Crusher return, though I would suggest that actor Wil Wheaton’s continued involvement with Star Trek means it’s a possibility, at least on the production side. But given the close relationship between Picard and Beverly Crusher, I wasn’t alone in wondering what her absence from Season 1 might mean.

Wesley and Beverly Crusher in *Star Trek: Nemesis* – their last appearance in canon to date.

The teaser for Picard Season 2, which debuted at last month’s First Contact Day digital event, included a lingering shot over a model of the USS Stargazer – the ship Picard commanded prior to the events of The Next Generation. This, combined with Picard discussing the possibility of time travel in voiceover, seems to hint that the ship may play a role in Season 2. This is significant for the Picard-Crusher conversation, because while Picard was in command of the Stargazer, Dr Crusher’s husband Jack was killed. This event was mentioned a couple of times in The Next Generation, and it was arguably hinted at that Picard felt responsible for Jack’s death.

It may even have been the death of Jack Crusher that stopped Dr Crusher and Picard taking their relationship any further, at least in events we saw on screen. So a return to the USS Stargazer could potentially have brought back memories for Picard of Beverly Crusher, and there was scope for us to learn more about what happened to her after we last saw her in Star Trek: Nemesis.

Picard with Dr Crusher in *Remember Me* from Season 4 of *The Next Generation*.

However, recent comments by Gates McFadden – the actress who played Dr Crusher in The Next Generation and four films – seem to rule that out, at least in Season 2. Though no character return should be seen as guaranteed, after Riker and Troi came back in Season 1, and with Season 2 seeming to at least acknowledge areas of Picard’s past that may be connected to his relationship with Dr Crusher, it wasn’t an unreasonable guess to think she might appear, and thus I’m a little surprised to hear Gates McFadden ruling it out with the season still in relatively early production.

Though we should be careful about assigning motivations, McFadden is about to launch her own podcast, and it was in that capacity that she spoke to website TrekMovie. Generating attention drives clicks and brings in listeners, and while I don’t doubt that McFadden was being honest about her non-appearance in Picard Season 2, we also have to consider in context what she’s saying and what she’s trying to do by talking about it so openly.

Gates McFadden is plugging her new podcast!

Ever since Star Trek: Picard was announced, practically every former Star Trek actor under the sun has expressed interest in reprising their role, and some have outright lobbied ViacomCBS and the creative team in charge of the franchise to make it happen. In short, by discussing her non-appearance in Season 2, McFadden may be hoping to generate buzz around a future return to the role in Season 3, or in another potential Star Trek project. And again, as with the launch of the podcast, we have to take into account why she chose this moment to talk about it.

In a way this is a pretty big spoiler, because now we know that Dr Crusher won’t be appearing in Season 2 – at least, not in any form we’d recognise. Given the season’s apparent time travel aspect and possible return to the USS Stargazer, I’m at least a little surprised by that. But perhaps there’s still scope to learn more about Dr Crusher and what became of her after the events of Star Trek: Nemesis, even if she doesn’t appear in person.

During The Next Generation’s second season, Gates McFadden’s absence was explained away by saying that Dr Crusher was working at Starfleet Medical on Earth. It seems plausible that she might’ve returned to that role following the disbanding of the Enterprise-E’s crew. If she continued to work with Picard in the years before the attack on Mars, there’s the possibility that their relationship took a romantic turn. It’s a shame we won’t get to see for ourselves in Season 2, though.

There is, of course, the possibility that Dr Crusher will be mentioned, as La Forge and Worf were in Season 1. If that’s the case, her presence wouldn’t be necessary in order for us to know at least whether she’s still alive in this era – I’m assuming she is until I hear anything to the contrary! And it’s also possible that, if the series is going to indulge in some serious time travel, that the role of a younger Dr Crusher will be recast for the new season. The supporting roles of Bruce Maddox and Icheb were recast in Season 1, and we’ve seen Discovery win a great deal of praise for the recasting of Captain Pike and Spock in Season 2, so the possibility of the role being recast certainly exists. I would think, though, that unless Gates McFadden has somehow talked herself out of returning to the role, if Picard Season 2 wanted Dr Crusher circa 2399-2400, the producers would approach her to reprise the role.

Dr Crusher in the future timeline seen in *All Good Things…*

So it was a bit of a surprise, as I keep saying! However, with John de Lancie returning as Q and Whoopi Goldberg coming back as Guinan, perhaps the producers decided that the show risked being overwhelmed with too many classic characters, or that there wasn’t enough time to do justice to Dr Crusher’s return. As with Riker and Troi last season, Dr Crusher would really need at least one entire episode in which she and her relationship with Picard could be a major story element. In a ten-episode season that has a lot of other storylines running, perhaps the producers decided that was too much.

And if that’s the case, I have to say I’m pleased – because it means the writers and producers have learned a lesson from Season 1. I’ve mentioned on a few occasions that I felt Season 1 of Picard did not conclude in particularly strong fashion. Too many storylines were abruptly dropped or not given any meaningful conclusion, and while Et in Arcadia Ego, Part 2 in particular was a very emotional episode with some fantastic moments, the finale as a whole left a lot on the table.

Picard with his new crew at the end of Season 1.

Dr Crusher could be essential to the story of a future season of Picard. Or, like Riker and Troi last season, she could simply be incidental. If the latter is true, the season as a whole needs to be structured in such a way that taking an episode off to visit her doesn’t have implications for the remainder of the story. And if it happens to be the case that the story of Season 2 is too full to fit Dr Crusher in, then that’s okay. I’d rather wait and see her return in a truly meaningful way than either have a rushed cameo or feel that the episode in which she featured was detrimental to the main story of the season overall – which, sorry to say because it’s an outstanding episode in its own right, is kind of how I feel about Season 1’s Nepenthe.

As always, I encourage you to check out Gates McFadden’s full comments (which can be seen on TrekMovie and appear in their podcast) for context, and to see for yourself exactly what she had to say. This is just my take on the situation! Given that Dr Crusher was very close to the top of my list of characters I considered plausible for Picard Season 2, and considering how amazing it would be to spend some more time with the dancing doctor, it’s a bit of a surprise – and perhaps even a little disappointing – that she isn’t returning.

Regardless, I hope that Dr Crusher can return to Star Trek in future, when a suitable role can be found for her. Hopefully there will be more seasons of Picard to come, and perhaps even more shows and/or films set in this era. Any such project could bring Dr Crusher back, and she would be very welcome!

Star Trek: Picard Season 1 is available to stream now on Paramount+ in the United States, and on Amazon Prime Video in the United Kingdom and elsewhere. Season 2 is currently filming and is targeting a 2022 broadcast. Gates McFadden was speaking exclusively to the website TrekMovie and the full interview may be found there. This article contains the thoughts and opinions of one person only and is not intended to cause any offence.