“It’s not my job to be interesting.”
-Jean-Luc Picard, Star Trek: Picard, Season 2, Episode 7
They just had the first ad for Star Trek: Picard Season 3 last weekend, and it occured to me I still had to finish watching Season 2. I dunno. I don’t think I hated it as much as the rest of the Internet, but I don’t see how I could.
The best way I can describe this season is “all over the map.” It is not as focused as Picard Season 1 nor even as focused as most examples of Star Trek: Discovery, the franchise’s other example of serial season narrative. This might explain why it was harder to binge-watch the whole thing in succession compared to Discovery or Strange New Worlds: I wasn’t that invested in what I was seeing.
When I refer to focus, Picard Season 1 touched on a lot of things, such as the aging of Picard and the process of how a social-democrat Federation became a creepy semi-authoritarian state because it had been subverted by the intelligence service of a defeated enemy – like that has no relevance to current events – but there was a straight premise: Picard (Patrick Stewart) discovers that the deceased Data somehow has a daughter (Isa Briones) and needs to save her from the plot of a secret faction of the Romulan government. This quest ends up recruiting a whole new group of characters (and Seven of Nine) who seemed set up to continue their adventures in Season 2.
Well, they started Season 2 that way, with the formerly civilian Picard, Seven (Jeri Ryan), Raffi Musiker (Michelle Hurd) and Cristobal Rios (Santiago Cabrera) all regaining their Starfleet commissions and coming together for a deep space mission with Dr. Agnes Jurati (Alison Pill) that throws everything up in the air with the return of the Borg and a dimensional reset by a returned Q (John de Lancie). To set the universe back from the Human-racist dystopia it has somehow become, Picard and his friends have to use the patented slingshot-around-the-Sun method of time travel, ending up at a time that looks just like the present, apparently before the Eugenics Wars but at a point where the existence of the future Federation hinges on the mission of a young female astronaut who just happens to be named Picard. I mean, never mind that this can’t be a direct ancestor because she wouldn’t be passing on the family name. Unless she had a child as a single mother. Which is just the first of the cutesy ways this story attempted to dramatically link everything together without considering the consequences.
It would be one thing to start with the continuity from Season 1, and then find some reason to upset it. It’s another thing to throw everything completely out of continuity and then make increasingly strained attempts to bring in characters or actors from Season 1 who have no reason to be there. Like poor Elnor (Evan Evagora) who started this season as a Starfleet cadet under Raffi, became a Romulan guerrilla against the Human fascist timeline, then got tortured and killed no later than Episode 2, occasionally appearing as a flashback or hallucination to haunt a guilty Raffi. Soji (Briones’ character) has no reason to be in this story, so after briefly catching up with her in the first episode, the 21st Century story moves to Briones playing Kore, a medical patient whose father is Brent Spiner playing yet another Soong ancestor, except that this guy is totally unsympathetic and ends up being the reason that Earth becomes an authoritarian regime at war with aliens – which was briefly alluded to in Episode 2 but isn’t really connected until the end of Episode 8.
To the extent that any of this connects to Picard or his internal situation, it’s in something that old Q ends up saying to young Guinan (Ito Aghayere): Humans are “trapped in the past.” She later tells Picard that this is a strength of the race, in that “you live in the past until you’re able to reconcile it, you do the work because you want to evolve.” In Picard’s case, despite settling down and regaining his status in Starfleet, he isn’t able to get close to his recently-widowed Romulan head of staff (Orla Brady) and can’t explain why. In another one of the too-obvious coincidences, when Picard’s team slingshots to the 21st Century, he has them crash-land Rios’ ship at the Picard estate (which is abandoned at this point) to plan out options, but the darkened grounds bring up family trauma which he was apparently doing a great job of suppressing, because this was the first time in the character’s history that it came up. The temporal agent who is assigned to protect astronaut Picard (who is also played by Brady and who just happens to be Romulan) asks Picard if Q brought him back so he could confront these experiences, and in the final confrontation at Chateau Picard against Soong and a Borged-out Jurati, Picard remembers his mother’s tragic fate, which was pretty clearly telegraphed over several episodes.
Childhood trauma and emotional repression are important issues for Stewart, which he’s spoken about in his personal life, but are we really supposed to believe that Q pulled off all this craziness just so that Picard could learn to forgive himself and open up to love? Well, actually, that does sound just like the sort of thing Q would do, since at least one episode of Next Generation has confirmed that Q did feel sentimental about Jean-Luc. But those episodes were much better executed and didn’t take ten hours to get to the point.
There are great bits and pieces, like in Episode 8, where a de-Borged Seven of Nine, now more in touch with her emotions and empathy, is thus capable of telling Raffi that she’s manipulative and full of shit. But it was a bit hard to follow one thing in particular when we had characters like Renee Picard and Kore brought in one episode and then not used much or at all the next, to say nothing of Rios, as a Hispanic, literally landing in Los Angeles and getting tangled up with a young doctor serving the illegal immigrant community in this show’s most obvious reference to current events. Although that particular romance is probably the best acted part of the season.
And why did Q die? Like much else, there isn’t a believable explanation. Just as there isn’t an explanation for why Brent Spiner chose to let Data die but came back as another character and is supposed to be back in Picard Season 3 as Lore, without makeup and not much explanation for that. But if there’s a theme running through the whole series of Star Trek: Picard, it doesn’t seem to be aging and death per se. Rather, as one ages toward death, one has to say goodbye to the past, including all those people who were the main part of it.
Heavy, if not depressing, stuff. And now Season 3 is supposed to bring back all the other stars of Next Generation in a final goodbye to the series. I had said that Picard Season 1 was well-acted but not very well written, and Season 2 is that much more badly written, to the active detriment of the story. In both stories, they managed to stick the landing, barely, but one hopes that this coming season is a better journey towards the end.