A few months ago (wait, really? a year??), I did a couple of episode reviews of AMC’s The Watch and then kind of petered out. I ran into some issues with my subscription that never got worked out and never finished the series or the reviews. I wish I could promise to write every episode up after watching them, but I know myself. I can’t promise to write with that kind of regularity, even if my editor were to -I wish- bribe me with dozens of Coffee Crisp candy bars.
So instead, I plan to write reviews of moments and episodes that inspire me. Yes, that will involve me talking about Baywatch Nights regularly, but, no, that will not be the subject just yet. Instead, Star Trek has caught my imagination yet again, and that brings us to the 25th century and Picard Season 2.
Oh, mon Capitaine, there will be spoilers.
Still here? Alright. For those of you reading this, let’s go back to the bleak, dark, and edgy super-duper adult future of Star Trek: Picard.
Quick Recap Of Season 1
Jean-Luc Picard is old and no longer a captain in Starfleet. He’s busy with his vineyard and keeps having dreams of Data. He knows something is going to happen but everyone assumes he’s just a crazy old man. Picard joins up with some new friends, old friends, and Borg friends, to save the day from a robot apocalypse. Favorite characters are killed off gruesomely, (I am still bitter about Icheb over a year later!), and there are naughty words and adult situations to remind you that this is a grown-up Star Trek.
In the end, Riker pops up to save the day with hundreds of copy/pasted Starfleet ships, and Picard dies. I don’t remember how, but he was dead. Data died too.
Picard is brought back in a cybernetic body and the season ends with the crew of the La Sirena off to boldly go and have gritty realistic adventures out in space.
Jokes aside, I enjoyed the season but it felt so intentionally divorced from the Trek we know that it felt awkward. Star Trek Discovery had the same problem with the first season, but they grew out of it by Season 3. Since then, Discovery has quickly become my favorite of the series that I am watching right now.
Picard might be doing the same thing.
Boldly Go To Season 2
Season 2 now has the crew of the La Sirena scattered about doing their own thing. Picard spends his time being awkward around his lovely Vulcan friend Laris and drinking wine. The typical spatial anomaly brings everyone quickly back together aboard the Stargazer (no not the original, but a new one) as the anomaly is asking for Picard specifically.
It’s the Borg! The most overplayed villain next to the Klingons. The Borg want to join the Federation. The (very different-looking, albeit stylish) Queen pops on over to the bridge of the Stargazer and demands power while tentacling her way into the Stargazer’s systems to control the not-copy/pasted fleet. Picard does the Janeway maneuver and activates the self-destruct sequence.
Boom. Everyone dies, Borg and fleet alike.
Picard suddenly ends up back home with his old frenemy Q welcoming our captain to the “end of the road not taken.”
This episode revitalized my love for the character of Picard and gave me much hope for the series going forward. Last season felt very disjointed. While there were some great moments and new characters, it missed that magic Star Trek had when at its best.
Season 2 kicks off with a literal bang and doesn’t waste any of its 45-minute runtime, sometimes to the detriment of our immersion. We get many “walk-and-talk” scenes that give us exposition but no real development. The dialogue is well-written and meant to catch us up from what happened between seasons and get us going on this new temporal adventure. I can live with that.
The speed at which we get the gang back together, even though they weren’t apart last time we saw them, surprised me. It gave me a sense that there is a big story to tell but we can’t waste much time.
The only time the episode slowed down was to give us some backstory on Jean-Luc’s childhood and his broken family. This will certainly come up later in the series, but it is interesting to see this side of our favorite Shakespearean captain.
Visually the episode was stunning, but this has been true of all the modern Trek series. Everything is crisp and feels futuristic but not unbelievably far-flung.
I got a major kick out of the uniform variety Starfleet suddenly has. It makes me want to go to a Star Trek convention to buy myself a couple and skip paying rent. New com-badges get my geeky self excited to order some ASAP and wear them in public daily on my Heathcliff hoodie.
Something just feels different this season. It is exciting without being depressing. I feel like we are about to embark on a grand adventure rather than a dour personal story of loss. Then again, maybe this takes a hard right when it gets to Albuquerque and is the starkest Trek yet and puts The Walking Dead to shame.
In the meantime, I have no idea how to close this out beyond saying I am excited to see more. I did not get that from the first season of Star Trek: Picard. I almost dreaded it due to the depressing, yet unarguably entertaining, choices the series made at times. At the time of this writing, Episode 3 is only a few days away. This originally was going to be an Episode 2 review. However, I spent so much time writing about the first episode that I have to save Episode 2 for another article.
Tell me what you want to read. Do you want me to do every episode immediately after airing while still on the “new episode energy?” Should I shoehorn in some Taco Bell references? Write about what menu items pair well with random episodes of modern Trek? (This was not sponsored by anyone, but Taco Bell, you can send me free tacos and lots of Baja Blast Zero, thanks!)
Star Trek: Picard Season 2 is streaming exclusively on Paramount+.
