TL;DR – A beautiful start to the final season.

Disclosure – I paid for the Paramount+ service that viewed this episode.

Star Trek: Picard Review –

I have enjoyed the first two seasons of Star Trek Picard, even though they have been very uneven. But I did have some hesitations coming into Season 3 because it felt like the show was dumping most of its supporting cast to give The Next Generation crew one last run. Was this nostalgia going to be a lovely swan song for the final season or an anchor to drag it all down? Well, this first episode makes it feel like it is not the latter.

So to set the scene, we open in the 25^th Century as we zoom through a nebula to the SS Eleos XII, where Captain Beverly Crusher (Gates McFadden) is under attack from unknown assailants. After dispatching them but gravely wounded, Beverly sends an encoded message to Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart), a man she has not spoken to in 20 years. Jean-Luc needs to go help his old friend, but how else are you going to do that by bringing in some help from old friends in the form of Captain Will Riker (Jonathan Frakes). Now from here, we will be looking at the episode as a whole, so there will be [SPOILERS] ahead for the show.

We knew from the start that Picard was only going to run for three seasons, which was unsurprising given Patrick Stewart’s age, but it gave the show a sense of finality like you knew what you were signing up for. Now that we are here, there is almost a sense of trepidation, like you are about to see a final story where all the gloves are off. In that space, we see Picard about to journey into his final goodbye with the one he loves but then called to save someone from his past that he cares about deeply. As jumping off points for a season go, it is a good one.

However, while we get the rescues of Beverly … and a surprise other … there is also the work of filling out the rest of the narrative framework we will be working in. That job mainly falls to Raffi (Michelle Hurd), who is undercover with Starfleet Intelligence. Unfortunately, I did not buy the misdirect of her falling off the wagon again, but that was short-lived. Something is going on with portals, which leads to one of the most spectacular special effects sequences in Star Trek outside of a battle sequence.

While we have a good set-up for the story, with just the right about mystery and suspicious people staring just a touch too long, we also get some moments that send a shiver down your spine. The first moment that Seven (Jeri Ryan) said she had to go by Annika here meant you knew everything you needed to know about how much of a dick Liam Shaw (Todd Stashwick) is before you even met him. There is such a shift in tone in a moment without anything needing to be explained. There is a lot of nostalgia around the place, but it never gets in the way. If you have watched all of The Next Generations, you will get all of those items in the SS Eleos XII reference, but if you haven’t, they are just fragments of the past that help establishes a character’s history. When they first revealed it, I was not really a fan of the Neo-Constitution class USS Titan-A. But now that we have seen it in action, it looks a little less blocky.

In the end, do we recommend Star Trek: Picard – The Next Generation? Yes, yes, we would. There was a chance that this was going to be nostalgia overload. But they walked the line of looking to the past while still charting the future. This is just the first episode, and seasons of this show have gone skewiff before, but I feel like we are in a good place in the future from here.  

By Brian MacNamara: You can follow Brian on Twitter Here, when he’s not chatting about Movies and TV, he’ll be talking about International Relations, or the Solar System.

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Credits – All images were created by the cast, crew, and production companies of Star Trek: Picard
Directed by – Doug Aarniokoski
Written by –  Terry Matalas
Created by – Akiva Goldsman, Michael Chabon, Kirsten Beyer & Alex Kurtzman
Based on – Star Trek: The Next Generation created by Gene Roddenberry
Production/Distribution Companies – CBS Studios, Amazon Prime & Paramount+
Starring – Patrick Stewart, Jeri Ryan, Michelle Hurd, Ed Speleers, Jonathan Frakes & Gates McFadden with Orla Brady, Todd Stashwick, Ashlei Sharpe Chestnut & Anthony Azizi and Stephanie Czajkowski, Joseph Lee, Chad Lindberg, Jin Maley, Amy Earhart & Grace Lee