The main triumph of Star Trek: Picard‘s final season, after an “okay” first season and a completely unsatisfactory Season 2, is that it leaves fans wanting more.
All the more strange that it was largely the product of showrunner Terry Matalas, who was also strongly involved in Picard Season 2. But as Matalas put it in interviews, he thought that just as there was more that could be done showing Picard’s development in relative real time years after Star Trek: Nemesis, he also thought that that movie wasn’t a proper send-off to the Next Generation crew, and likened their reunion in this season to the final adventure of the original cast in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country. Which figures, because in comparison to the deliberately low-key Season 1 and the wandering Season 2, Season 3 Picard (like Star Trek VI) was a tightly focused narrative that retained action and suspense even as the threat in the story was only gradually revealed.
I have always considered Amanda Plummer to be awkward and irritating. In this case it actually worked. But she was good enough in portraying the pain and vengefulness of her character that Vadic’s death at that point in the storyline actually seemed anti-climax. That, and bringing back the fan favorite characters Ro Larren and Shelby just to kill them off as soon as they appeared were the only false notes of the season.
And then the whole thing turned out to be an intricate Borg plot, which explained a great deal about both Jack Crusher and Picard, but it also required a little bit more explanation that a casual viewer might have needed. First, the Borg villain was the original Borg Queen voiced by Alice Krige in the First Contact movie, as opposed to the Picard Season 2 Queen played by the late Annie Wersching, whom the crew picked up from a dystopian alternate history and who ended up merging with Agnes Jurati before the end of that story. Second, the reason the Borg Queen was so screwed up here is actually because of the series finale of Star Trek: Voyager, when Kathryn Janeway infected her with a terrible pathogen, which in the Picard finale is revealed to have killed most of the Collective as the Queen was forced to “cannibalize” them for her own survival. So really, this should have been a great tie-in to Voyager as well as The Next Generation, but according to fanzine articles, they couldn’t bring in Kate Mulgrew, or use Tim Russ for more than a couple of scenes, cause apparently Terry Matalas and the other producers just didn’t have the budget.
And then in only one year, Jack got through cadet training in time to join the USS Titan‘s crew, after they rechristened the ship the Enterprise (G). Which on one hand is cool, but on the other hand is the ultimate erasure of Captain Shaw (Todd Stashwick).
But in the wake of this optimistic finale, and the success of this season, there’s a lot of buzz (encouraged by Matalas) to continue using the younger characters (with Raffi and Captain Seven) in a continuation series, projected title Star Trek: Legacy. I’d even heard they were going to try some way to bring back the martyred Shaw, who started off as the season’s by-the-book Starfleet bad guy but became a fan favorite once people realized he was right much of the time.
The fact that they could present an unsympathetic character and then round him out (as they did with Vadic) is a good example of how this season used all of its elements correctly, as opposed to wasting people like Picard Season 2 did. Using Raffi (Michelle Hurd) and her story arc to bring in Worf (Michael Dorn) as opposed to bringing him straight into the main cast, worked really well and showed how both characters could work in the shadows, as well as displaying their sense of humor. The repeated return of Brent Spiner as Dr. Soong’s last “golem” actually had a clever resolution to the Data/Lore conflict. LeVar Burton as Geordi LaForge got to display more deep emotion in his scenes than he ever did in the whole Next Generation series. And this season, by extension the entire series, was a vindication for Jeri Ryan and Seven of Nine, who was clearly brought into Voyager for blatant sex appeal but (let’s face it) gave that show some much-needed edge.
The last couple episodes were a bit pat and “fan service” but they actually worked, and like The Next Generation’s series finale, created a satisfying ending for the main characters while still setting up possibilities for the future. And again, the producers really seems to be trying to make that happen, although the network budget constraints that killed some of their ideas might prevent “Legacy” from taking off. Still, it was announced earlier this year that Star Trek: Discovery is ending after next season, and the fact that Picard Season 3 was both popular with fans and a high-quality storyline should give more momentum to future Trek projects, as opposed to how the sails were deflated with the last appearance of the Next Generation cast in Star Trek: Nemesis. Not to mention, the other seasons of Star Trek: Picard.