Star Trek: Picard (2020-2023) Review
1-5/10
Thirty episodes across three seasons, built around a seventy-nine-year-old Patrick Stewart returning to a character he’d last played on screen in 2002, eighteen years earlier.
The premise had one thing going for it. That was a great actor willing to come back and a franchise willing to let a man be old on camera. Almost nothing was done with either.
Seasons one and two are a 1. There’s nothing at all good in them, and the first in particular spends its running time desecrating characters other shows had built. Season three is the one people defend and I don’t. At most a 5, and the reason is structural. It’s a single episode’s worth of plot inflated to ten hours, and the ending, the Borg solution and the reunion all landed on me as nothing.
Season One Is Disgusting
The first season is the worst thing the franchise had produced up to that point and the objection isn’t tonal squeamishness. The premise is workable on paper. Picard is retired to his vineyard, disgraced over a failed Romulan evacuation, and synthetic life has been banned after an attack on Mars. A young woman arrives who turns out to be Data’s daughter. What the season really does with that is assemble a crew of unpleasant strangers on a small ship, move them slowly toward a planet, and resolve everything in the last twenty minutes with a fleet arriving and a portal that’s never explained.
The bigger problem is what it does to people other series had built. Icheb, a rescued Borg child from Voyager, shows up purely to be tortured to death on screen, his ocular implant extracted while conscious, so that Seven of Nine has a reason to be angry.
Hugh gets the same treatment. The Borg drone from The Next Generation who was given a name and an identity across two episodes is brought back, made sympathetic again, and killed for a plot beat in the seventh hour.
To me, what the show calls darkness looks like asset stripping to me. Both characters exist in this show as material to be destroyed in front of the audience that remembers them, and the Icheb scene turns my stomach for all the wrong reasons. It’s a cheap way to generate a reaction and it costs the earlier work something permanent.
Then the finale kills Picard and immediately transfers him into a synthetic body. That removes the only real stake the season had constructed. A show about an old man confronting mortality resolved his mortality in the last fifteen minutes by making him a robot.
Killing somebody else’s character to generate feeling in yours is the cheapest move available and it damages the original work. Icheb and Hugh were built across episodes of other series and spent here in single scenes. The test is whether the death does anything the plot couldn’t do otherwise. Neither of these does.
If you build a season around mortality, don’t undo the death. A resurrection in the last act tells the audience the entire theme was a device. A resolution that requires a portal nobody explained is a resolution you didn’t write. Note where your own plot needs something to simply arrive.
Season Two Is Worse in a Different Way
The second season is less offensive and more pointless, and that’s a different failure. Where the first season enrages, this one bores me, and I’m not sure which is worse.
Q returns, alters the timeline, and the crew travel to Los Angeles in 2024 to repair history. That means the majority of a Star Trek season is set in a present-day American city with no science fiction in it beyond the premise.
The actual subject turns out to be Picard’s mother and her suicide, which he witnessed as a child, and the season’s resolution is that his lifelong emotional reserve originates in that event.
That’s a considerable reduction of the character. Picard’s caution and formality had been a temperament and a philosophy across seven seasons and four films, and this season reassigns all of it to a single childhood trauma he’d never previously mentioned.
It’s also the second consecutive season to explain a legacy character by inventing a hidden relative or a hidden wound. A sister for Spock in Discovery, a mother’s death for Picard here, and the pattern is the same borrowing of significance instead of building any. The Borg Queen and Jurati material is where it becomes incoherent. A character merges with the Borg Queen, becomes a new and benevolent Borg collective, and the show presents this as a resolution and not as the beginning of a problem.
Nothing from this season carries into the next. That’s the most honest verdict available on it. The show’s own third season proceeds as though seasons one and two contained nothing it needed.
Season Three Is a Ten-Hour Episode
Almost everybody rates this season highly and I find it a 5, and the disagreement is about structure instead of about affection.
What it is, and what its defenders like about it, is a Next Generation reunion film. The whole cast returns, they get a proper send-off that neither the series finale nor Nemesis managed, and the Enterprise-D flies again.
Terry Matalas took over as showrunner and the craft is better. It looks better, the dialogue is better, the plotting holds together, and it’s made by somebody who has watched the earlier show and understood what people liked about it.
The problem is that it’s one episode. A conspiracy inside Starfleet, a changeling infiltration, a Borg plot routed through Picard’s son, and a final assault on Earth, and that’s a plot that would have run two hours in any previous era of the franchise. Stretched across ten, it’s mostly transit. Characters travel somewhere, discover the thing the audience already knows, travel somewhere else, and the middle four hours could be removed without altering the outcome.
That’s the structural cost of the streaming season and this show is the clearest example of it. Ten hours commissioned, two hours of story available, and the difference filled with scenes of people reacting to information the audience has had for three episodes.
So it did nothing for me and I understand why it does something for other people. A reunion is a reunion, and if the pleasure is seeing those actors on a bridge together again then the length isn’t a defect. If you want a plot, there’s one episode of plot in there.
Length is a decision and a streaming order isn’t a story requirement. Ten hours with two hours of plot produces transit, and readers feel the padding whether or not they can name it. The test is whether removing the middle changes the ending. Here it doesn’t. A reunion generates goodwill that can carry a weak structure, and goodwill is a real effect instead of a cheat. It’s also not transferable to anybody who didn’t watch the original.
Nostalgia is a shortcut to feeling and it costs nothing to deploy. That’s why it’s worth being suspicious of your own reaction to it.
The Borg Solution
The third season’s central plot mechanism doesn’t work and it’s the thing that most clearly did nothing for me. The arrangement is that Picard’s brief assimilation as Locutus left Borg genetic material in him, that this passed to a son he didn’t know he had, and that the Borg have spent decades waiting to activate it through the boy.
That requires the Borg to have had a plan running since 1990, contingent on a man they failed to keep, fathering a child they couldn’t have predicted, with that child reaching an age and a position in Starfleet where the transmission would matter.
It also changes what the Borg are. The Borg were frightening because they were indifferent and mechanical, an expansion instead of a scheme, and a Borg Queen running a decades-long revenge plot about one officer is a villain with a grudge.
That’s been the franchise’s trajectory with them since Voyager, which is covered separately on this site, and this is the endpoint. An unstoppable process became a character, then a recurring antagonist, and finally somebody’s estranged relative.
The resolution is Picard entering a cube and talking his son out of it. That’s the same resolution as the Locutus rescue in 1990, performed by the same man, with the emotional content relocated to a child invented for the purpose.
And the Jack Crusher reveal is the third instance of the franchise’s current habit. A hidden sister for Spock, a hidden trauma for Picard, a hidden son for Picard. Three shows, three retroactive relatives, and none of them earned.
What It Did to Picard
The most interesting thing available here was never attempted. That’s what makes the whole run a waste instead of merely a failure.
Patrick Stewart at seventy-nine, playing a man who has outlived his usefulness to an institution he gave his life to, is a premise with weight. The franchise had never depicted age plainly and had an actor willing to. The first season gestures at it. He’s retired, isn’t taken seriously, can’t get a ship, and Starfleet treats him as an embarrassment, and the early episodes on the vineyard are the best material in the three seasons.
Then it stops. He gets a crew, a ship, an adventure, a synthetic body that removes his mortality, and by season three he’s commanding a fleet action. That’s the opposite of the story the premise promised.
The synthetic body is the decision that forecloses everything. A series about a man confronting the end of his life can’t proceed once the end has been canceled, and nothing in seasons two or three has any weight because of it.
Stewart is also better than the material throughout and visibly so. He was an executive producer and by several accounts pushed for the show to be different from a Next Generation continuation. That’s a defensible instinct that the production satisfied by being worse instead of different.
The correct version is available in one episode of the old series. The Inner Light gave him a whole life and took it away in forty minutes, and this show had thirty hours and never found anything that good. That comparison is what makes me angriest about the whole run. Stewart could still do it, the premise was sitting right there, and the people in charge reached for a robot body, a fleet action and a secret son.
An actor’s age is material and almost nobody uses it. A man who has outlived his function inside an institution is a subject, and it requires no plot device at all. The moment you remove the mortality, the subject is gone. Everything after that’s an adventure with an old man in it. When your premise promises a small story and your season delivers a fleet action, the promise was the better idea. Compare your best hour to your new thirty. If a single episode of the earlier work did more with the same character, the new work has earned nothing.
Should you watch Star Trek: Picard?
No. Awful from front to back. Two seasons that strip other shows’ characters for parts and reduce a lifetime of temperament to a childhood wound get a 1 each from me. The third, which most people love, gets a 5 at most because it’s one episode of plot in ten hours. Add a Borg plan running since 1990 through a son nobody knew about, and a great actor at seventy-nine handed a robot body so the story wouldn’t have to be about anything, and there’s nothing left for me to forgive.
