is star trek picard bad

Star Trek Picard: Where did it all go wrong?

Opinion: The final frontier of quality

Paramount Plus' Star Trek series, Picard concluded its second season this week, and the 10-episode run has felt like a real slog. 

After announcing in 2018 that Paramount had tempted back Patrick Stewart to play Jean Luc Picard once again, there was a hope that we would not only see Picard in his twilight years to get the bad taste of Star Trek: Nemesis out of our mouths, but to see what that world has been up to since we last saw them.

While there have been some high points, mainly from the performances of all the actors, the majority of the series has been riddled with plot inconsistencies, jerky twists that don’t lead anywhere, and camera angles so silly they are reminiscent for Adam West's crash, bang, wallop days as Batman. 

With the finale of Season 2 wrapped up, we wanted to go into what’s missing from the show, alongside some thoughts of the viewers who have also been invested in Picard, and the series of Star Trek: The Next Generation .

A little bit of history...

I first watched Star Trek on Sunday afternoons with my family in the late 1990s, where Voyager and Next Generation would play in marathons while others would watch the EastEnders omnibus on another channel.

I don’t class myself as a hardcore Star Trek fan - more of a casual watcher who enjoyed the serialized stories. But it seems as though there’s been a big misunderstanding as to why those Star Trek shows worked so well in the 90s.

I watched the remainder of Picard out of pure curiosity - to see just how more nonsensical the stories can become. In one episode we’re watching Picard and company look for ‘The Watcher’, but instead, we see the police, twice put Picard and Cristóbal Rios in jail with their missing comms link, which is the badges on all Trek uniforms.

We then get a younger Guinan, normally played by Whoopi Goldberg, advancing the plot, very slowly, over three episodes. Then followed by Dr. Soong, an ancestor of Soong who created the android Data and Lore, who is also making an early synthetic of his daughter. There’s also Q who appears to be dying. Also, the Borg Queen is involved with Agnes.

It’s a lot. The early Trek series had a more procedural feel, a new adventure each week with a much neater feeling, whereas with Picard, there’s an overarching story to save the future. That arc has made the show feel so long-winded and lacking the efficiency of the early series. This storyline could have easily been a two-parter if The Next Generation (TNG) was still going.

The advent of streaming services have been wonderful, but with a captive audience already in place and without the fiery breath of executives demanding high ratings to sell back to advertisers, you can start to see storylines become bloated.

The wrath of plot holes

The first episode of Picard Season Two was a marked improvement - there was structure and a plot you could understand, with every character having a purpose. But once episode 2 arrived, we were brought to the many plot strands that yet again, made you care less for the characters.

While the finale tied up the many plots into a bow, even with Elnor having been resurrected by Q, as Rios decided to stay behind, I watched the credits with the same frustrations I had, rather than being moved.

I decided to ask a few viewers who had also been on the same journey as me, just to make sure that it wasn’t me thinking that I was becoming out of touch with television.

Richie Morgan is a freelance videographer and podcaster , and I asked him why he put up with watching it, regardless of knowing the show’s flaws. “I keep getting annoyed while watching it and yet I return every week. Maybe I love the characters and want to see them again?” Morgan wonders. “That might be the case if anyone remembered how to write or play those characters.  Maybe it's just because it's Star Trek, but it’s not with Picard here. Even at its darkest, whatever form it has taken, Star Trek was about optimism and utopian ideals either thriving or trying to thrive in the darkest places.” Morgan explains.

“Now I'm just tuning in every week to see returning characters tortured to death, or exploring their hideous retconned traumas, or in some cases committing actual murders.”

I’ve read high-praise of the show, but I can’t help but think that this is from wearing rose-tinted nostalgia glasses, in awe of the fact that Admiral Picard is back after 20 years. But without a coherent story, the series is already on course to be worse than Star Trek: Nemesis, the final film for The Next Generation crew.

Another viewer is a reader of TechRadar who got in touch after watching the penultimate episode of Picard towards the end of April. Ian Hicks sent in what he thought of Picard as a whole. “Whereas other Star Trek shows don’t hit the heights of TNG, it at least had all of the formulaic aspects of a typical star trek show. A thirst for discovery, a higher purpose and logic.” Hicks explains.

“Picard has none of these. It’s clear Sir Patrick Stewart can’t even himself recall what the character stood for. Where’s the unwavering authority, the moral righteousness, and virtue that made Picard such a beloved captain? It’s a hollow ensemble of lifeless hollowed-out Star Trek characters, that are thrown together into a story that makes no sense and goes off on so many confusing tangents, that it makes Season 1 look well-written.” Hicks continues. “Character traits flip flop to further the inane script rather than for development. It’s a show that tries to be everything and ends up being nothing.”

To boldly, go?

Season 3 of Picard is not only commissioned, but already filmed, as it was in production soon after Season 2 had been filmed halfway. With the cast of TNG coming back, I asked Richie Morgan again as to what he’d like to see in this final series of Picard, with himself being a lifelong Trek fan.

“I'm telling myself now that I don't care what happens in the next season. I'll just be happy to see everyone again.” Morgan reveals. “In an ideal world, I'd love to see an exploration of late 24th century Trek again. Maybe a stop to Deep Space Nine - perhaps a plot as to how the Alpha Quadrant rebuilt itself after the Dominion war?” Morgan wonders. “Or what's happening with the Klingons, the Romulans, or even the Ferengi!  An exploration of what it is to be an intergalactic hero in the twilight years of your life. Let's acknowledge their age and really tell that story. I want to believe they can do it." Morgan hopes. "I want to believe every character won't return with a miserable back story. That Geordie LaForge married Leah Brahms and she didn't immediately die.”

As we head into a story where the Borg is part of the Federation, sudden plot points may rear their heads once again, as the third season hasn’t had the chance to breathe and look at the feedback of its fans.

But with this clearly being the final season of Picard, not just the series but the character, there could always be a glimmer of hope that we can say a proper goodbye to this part of Star Trek, and see what else the franchise can offer.

That said, with the lazy plotting and non-sensical decisions made in the show's second season, I'm not hopeful. 

• How to watch Star Trek: Strange New Worlds online, wherever you are

Get daily insight, inspiration and deals in your inbox

Get the hottest deals available in your inbox plus news, reviews, opinion, analysis and more from the TechRadar team.

Daryl had been freelancing for 3 years before joining TechRadar, now reporting on everything software-related. In his spare time, he's written a book, ' The Making of Tomb Raider '. His second book, ' 50 Years of Boss Fights ', came out in June 2024, and has a newsletter, ' Springboard '. He's usually found playing games old and new on his Steam Deck and MacBook Pro. If you have a story about an updated app, one that's about to launch, or just anything Software-related, drop him a line.

Prime Video movie of the day: Mafia Mamma is the best kind of bad movie, in that it’s actually great

Prime Video movie of the day: Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves nails what recent Marvel movies fail at

Microsoft says Copilot app in Windows Server was a mistake

Most Popular

• 2 I tested the Google Pixel’s Long Exposure photo mode – and it’s another reason to leave my pro mirrorless camera at home
• 3 NYT Strands today — hints, answers and spangram for Wednesday, April 17 (game #45)
• 4 Samsung’s new cheap 98-inch 4K TV with 120Hz support could be your dream gaming TV
• 5 An incredible $100 billion bet to get rid of Nvidia dependence — tech experts reckon Microsoft will build a million-server strong data center that will primarily use critical inhouse components
• 2 I’m a photographer and Leica’s new smartphone makes my iPhone look painfully dull
• 3 Need proof that Samsung's Galaxy software is worse than the iPhone? Here it is
• 4 We’re now almost certain what the iPhone 16 series will look like
• 5 Scientists inch closer to holy grail of memory breakthrough — producing tech that combines NAND and RAM features could be much cheaper to produce and consume far less power

Follow Polygon online:

• Follow Polygon on Facebook
• Follow Polygon on Youtube
• Follow Polygon on Instagram

Site search

• Dragon’s Dogma 2
• FF7 Rebirth
• Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom
• Baldur’s Gate 3
• PlayStation
• Dungeons & Dragons
• Magic: The Gathering
• Board Games
• All Tabletop
• All Entertainment
• What to Watch
• What to Play
• Buyer’s Guides
• Really Bad Chess
• All Puzzles

Filed under:

Picard season 3 is great for me, less great for Star Trek

The Paramount Plus show is a little too good of a goodbye

Share this story

• Share this on Facebook
• Share this on Reddit
• Share All sharing options

Share All sharing options for: Picard season 3 is great for me, less great for Star Trek

I should start by noting that I am probably, by most fans’ reckoning, a Star Trek Casual. I grew up at a time when there was a lot of Star Trek on TV — three shows at once! — and absorbed a lot of the stuff by both osmosis and by having family members that were super into the various adventures chronicled in The Next Generation , Deep Space Nine , and Voyager . Personally, I had a great time watching these shows, but I was mostly just along for the ride. That’s how I’d describe my level of investment in Star Trek: Along for the ride, and happy to be here.

From this standpoint, the third and final season of Star Trek: Picard was a wild success. While re-tooling the floundering series to be a full-on The Next Generation reunion read as an obvious Hail Mary play to go out with a bang (and maybe an apology for Star Trek: Nemesis ), it managed to do so while remaining earnest throughout, turning things around by not just bringing back the cast of The Next Generation , but by doing so in what turned out to be an ode to all of ’90s Trek .

Personally, I had a great time. My Trek knowledge is mostly built around major touchpoints; the big fan-favorite things that everyone knows about Trek in general and The Next Generation in particular. Q , The Borg, “make it so,” all that stuff. Picard is playing a tune just for me. It’s also, unfortunately, very much ending things in a narrative cul-de-sac: not just sending off its characters, but much of what they represented.

[ Ed. note: This post contains spoilers for the end of Picard .]

Picard has ultimately made a mistake big franchises often make when their stewards’ primary interest is playing the hits: It makes its world smaller by making everything tie back to its legacy heroes. Its endgame literally makes nostalgia both the weapon that threatens to destroy the galaxy and the only thing that can save it: The Borg have, through Picard’s son Jack Crusher (Ed Speleers), found a way to splice themselves into the genome of every Starfleet member that’s used a teleporter. The few immune? Older folks. Namely, The Next Generation cast.

This is the broadest and funniest way that Picard has traded The Next Generation ’s legacy as a thought-provoking show that was foundational to a whole era of science fiction for spectacle and sentiment, the former spectacularly empty-headed, and the latter just genuine enough to endear those who aren’t sticklers for narrative cohesion. Picard is all over the place , waving around the most iconic foes of ’90s Star Trek in the Changelings and The Borg, while completely eschewing what made them interesting ideological foils to Jean-Luc Picard and the Federation he represents .

As Picard digs into its initial antagonists, the Changeling Vadic (Amanda Plummer) and the crew of her ship The Shrike , the series reveals that she and her cohort are different from the Changelings of the Deep Space Nine era , enhanced by cruel experimentation by Federation scientists that Picard was not aware of. It’s a huge moral crisis, especially for a character that’s positioned as the moral center of Starfleet, and it’s all rather quickly elided to dispose of Vadic in favor of the real threat: a resurgent Borg, this time almost entirely represented by the Borg Queen, as few drones exist anymore.

Not only is this far less complex than the Changeling dilemma, it’s also — to briefly stake a claim in a meaningless war that’s been waged since Star Trek: First Contact was released — even more antithetical to the Borg’s whole raison d’etre than they’ve ever been. The main reason I can abide this is simply due to the fact that Picard doesn’t dwell on any of it. It’s a pretty thoughtless show when it comes to thoughts that don’t revolve around the Next Generation cast members saying nice things to one another and saving everyone from certain disaster one last time.

In “The Last Generation,” Picard sets up a new crew that could carry the legacy of The Next Generation onward — a curious notion, given that Star Trek: Discovery ostensibly exists for that purpose, Strange New Worlds is here to provide a modern spin on Roddenberry’s first Star Trek , and Prodigy and Lower Decks refract the mission of Star Trek for younger audiences and comedy, respectively.

If the speculative “Star Trek: Legacy” — which may only exist in Picard ’s coda — were to be realized, it’s hard to feel particularly inspired about where it might go. In the end, Picard took us on a hell of a ride, but it too definitively asserted that Jean-Luc Picard and his friends were the be-all, end-all of this era of Trek. They played the hits big and loud, and even I, a Trek casual, could smile and sing along with them. I just wonder if anyone remembers what brought us here to begin with.

Picard is now streaming on Paramount Plus.

Next Up In Star Trek

The next level of puzzles.

Take a break from your day by playing a puzzle or two! We’ve got SpellTower, Typeshift, crosswords, and more.

Sign up for the newsletter Patch Notes

A weekly roundup of the best things from Polygon

Just one more thing!

Please check your email to find a confirmation email, and follow the steps to confirm your humanity.

Oops. Something went wrong. Please enter a valid email and try again.

Loading comments...

Discord wants to void your right to sue them in court — but you can opt out of the practice

The best sci-fi movies to watch on Netflix this April

Pokémon Go Bellsprout Community Day guide

Dune: Part Two, Netflix’s Rebel Moon Part Two, and every new movie to watch at home this weekend

Take-Two wins lawsuit over LeBron James’ tattoos

If you can’t touch grass for Earth Day, a Planet Earth 4K can help

Star Trek: Picard is boldly going nowhere, and I'm mad as hell

And, worse, I now feel held hostage by the Amazon Prime Video show, too

The first season of Star Trek: Picard was, for me, streaming the show on Amazon Prime Video, like a piece of magic.

Suddenly, before my eyes, I was watching Jean-Luc Picard boldly go back into space, having new adventures and taking me along with him like he did all those years ago when I was much , much younger than I am today in 2022.

Watching Patrick Stewart return as Picard felt almost unreal. It has been decades since Jean-Luc had captained the USS Enterprise and I, like I am sure many other Star Trek fans had done, had closed the box on Jean-Luc, Star Trek: The Next Generation, and the series of TNG movies he starred in.

So to see Jean-Luc again was incredible.

And, while the proceeding first season of Star Trek: Picard was far from perfect, and definitely lost its way a little mid-season, by the close I was excited for season two. Watching more of my Star Trek captain, the best captain (come at me Kirk lovers!), sounded great.

But now, three quarters through season two of Star Trek: Picard, I'm mad as hell as, simply put, I feel the show has derailed epically, managing to boldly go nowhere for the last 6 episodes. And, what's worse, as Picard is my Star Trek generation captain, I feel held hostage to continue watching the show now. The show's makers re-opened the Picard box and I cannot now just walk away. I need to follow his story to the end, no matter how bad the show gets.

Here I list what I think has been good, as well as bad, about Star Trek: Picard season two, as well as spell out how I would fix the show for the now confirmed (and final) season three.

Get the T3 newsletter!

All the best features, news, tips and great deals to help you live a better life through technology

To be very clear, what follows is my opinion on Picard season two. You may disagree with me and love it – and that's totally cool, what I consider to be bad or good may not be the same as you. I'm not a Star Trek super fan, either, so do not profess to talk for the Star Trek community. This is just my opinion on Picard's return as a Star Trek: The Next Generation watcher in the 1990s.

WARNING! THERE ARE SPOILERS FOR SEASON TWO OF STAR TREK: PICARD AHEAD. WARNING!

Star Trek: Picard Season 2: The Good

Ok, let's talk the good bits of season two, which are basically all confined to the first two episodes.

The whole pitch behind season two is that the show's makers are basically doing a kind of homage to Star Trek: First Contact, the 1990s movie which sees the crew of the USS Enterprise-E travel back in time to stop cybernetic Borg baddies from conquering Earth by altering the past.

Even though it's been done before, this is still a good plot and feels bang on Star Trek in my opinion. First Contact was also a great Star Trek film, and maybe even the best, so even getting echoes of it still resonates with me today. That opening with Picard looking into the mirror...

And, talking of the Borg, the return of a Borg Queen is also good. The new queen isn't quite as good as that played by Alice Krige in First Contact, but is still suitably menacing and looks and acts the part.

Also, the bit where the Borg Queen slingshots Picard and his team around a star to initiate the time travel was awesome!

Season two isn't all just a First Contact rip off, either, as the season also brought back mysterious TNG quasi-bad guy Q, with John de Lancie returning. De Lancie is great and really sticks a rocket up the show in the first few episodes – every time he is on screen the show ratchets up a few notches in terms of quality and excitement.

I also enjoyed the bad past future version of Earth where everything had gone a bit to hell and a fascist, war-mongering regime was in charge, with key members of the crew finding themselves suddenly playing out the lives of different people. It was classic Back to the Future 2 'bad Biff future stuff', and I liked it.

Ok, I think that's about it.

Star Trek: Picard Season 2: The Bad

Ok, now let's talk the bad.

I feel the biggest problem with season two is that writing has been for large swathes terrible. I didn't really notice in the first couple of episodes due to the action and quick pacing, but from every episode after it the limitations of the dialogue have become super stark to me.

Firstly, the story exposition is not handled well. What typically happens is that we get a clumsy, 'hang a lantern on it, nobody talks like that' exposition bit crammed into about 10 seconds, before the characters then proceed to talk at length around the plot in personal or cryptic ways, while often falling back into communicating their emotional or mental state at that moment.

And this is compounded with the slow pacing of many of these scenes, which also tend to be quite static. The result is you get many scenes that are just deflating to watch, crammed with awkward dialogue. It's like faux emotional filler that leaves you a bit dazed and confused, which funnily enough is how Picard looks in many scenes as he tries to come to terms with what is happening. I feel your pain Picard!

Talking of filler, boy does Picard season two have a lot of it! After the first couple of episodes, I've watched as the amount of Borg Queen and Q action is reduced to a tiny amount of each episode, taking up mere minutes (or less!) of each 45-minute show, all the while being fed filler B-plots that have left me cold or bored.

The sub-plot with Rios getting imprisoned was not only flat and not exciting to watch but obviously never going to come to anything but his inevitable safe return. While I got so bored watching Raffi and Seven traipse around Los Angeles and that car chase with them was terrible – slow and repetitively shot. Something that is supposed to be exciting just turned into more boring, meaningless filler. The dialogue between Rios and Dr. Theresa is also wildly inconsistent in my opinion and that whole episode where Picard and Guinan find themselves trapped in a miserable looking concrete room with the FBI agent, only for the FBI agent to suddenly have a complete change of heart, set them free, and then actually quit his job all because Picard tells him he once saw some Vulcans when he was a kid just felt so cheap. Once again we'd had multiple scenes with main characters trapped in filler dialogue with nothing of action or consequence happening.

Oh, and then there was the weird, trippy 'in Picard's mind' episode. The less said about that the better.

Honestly, it feels that the core main narrative of this season, which is First Contact retold but with Q madness injected into it (sounds exciting right!) is just buried behind a raft if filler. Even the 'themed' episodes we've had in the middle of this series, such as the heist one set at a party, felt only loosely connected to the plot and largely inconsequential. I just can't get away from the idea that what we're watching in season two of Picard is First Contact, a 1 hour 51 minute movie, but stretched out over 7 plus hours with largely boring filler to justify a series.

Basically, for me, it comes down to season two of Picard not giving me enough of the good stuff, while also not learning from the first season's flaws. The first season went missing mid-season for a few episodes, but season two has gone missing so far for every episode after its second. Each episode since I've been waiting for Q or the Borg Queen to stick another rocket under the show and get us back on track at the same time, but so far it just hasn't happened.

Here's hoping, then, that tomorrow's penultimate episode of Star Trek: Picard season two can move toward ending the series more the way it started, with its big guns and primary plots front and centre. Hopefully 6 episodes of mostly filler have left the powder dry for a spectacular two-part finale.

Oh, and one more thing

I think my frustration with how season two has panned out, for me at least, comes down to me desperately wanting the show to do well and for it to give Jean-Luc a good send off. After all, if you're going to bring one of the most beloved Star Trek heroes back then you've got to do it right and, while I felt season one was on the right track to doing this, I feel season two has moved further away from it markedly.

Come on guys, this is Picard – let's make sure his final trek isn't tripe.

Rob has been writing about computing, gaming, mobile, home entertainment technology, toys (specifically Lego and board games), smart home and more for over 15 years. As the editor of PC Gamer, and former Deputy Editor for T3.com, you can find Rob's work in magazines, bookazines and online, as well as on podcasts and videos, too. Outside of his work Rob is passionate about motorbikes, skiing/snowboarding and team sports, with football and cricket his two favourites. 

Here's everything you need to know about the energy-boosting supplement

By Bryony Firth-Bernard Published 19 April 24

Titan OS is coming to Philips TVs

By Rik Henderson Published 19 April 24

What we want in our return to the Wasteland

By Andy Sansom Published 19 April 24

Late night or early morning, it's worth watching

Taking things to the IMAX

By Andy Sansom Published 18 April 24

Less of Let It Be and more Let Us See

By Andy Sansom Published 17 April 24

A stand-up story to give you shivers

A quick turnaround indeed

By Andy Sansom Published 14 April 24

Join the squad before it's too late

By Andy Sansom Published 13 April 24

Light up your living room and chillax

Useful links

• When is the next Prime Day?
• Best 5G phones
• Best VPN services
• Best laptops
• Best smartphones
• Best mattresses
• Best phone deals
• Best mattress deals
• Best TV deals
• Discount codes

Star Trek: Picard (2020–2023)

• User Reviews

Awards | FAQ | User Ratings | External Reviews | Metacritic Reviews

• User Ratings
• External Reviews
• Metacritic Reviews
• Full Cast and Crew
• Release Dates
• Official Sites
• Company Credits
• Filming & Production
• Technical Specs
• Plot Summary
• Plot Keywords
• Parents Guide

Did You Know?

• Crazy Credits
• Alternate Versions
• Connections
• Soundtracks

Photo & Video

• Photo Gallery
• Trailers and Videos
• Episode List

Related Items

• External Sites

Related lists from IMDb users

Recently Viewed

Star Trek: Picard Is Garbage

No amount of fan service can save this dumpster fire of a show.

Star Trek: Picard is so bad it's almost impressive. A direct follow-up to The Next Generation with Patrick Stewart reprising his role as Jean-Luc Picard and appearances from beloved characters including Riker, Seven of Nine, Q, Guinan, and Data. How could they screw that up? Well, they did. This is the worst Star Trek show ever made (yes, worse than Enterprise), created by people who don't seem to understand what made TNG special— or what made Picard such a great character. It's an insult to the legacy of one of the greatest TV shows ever made, but mostly it's just garbage. Here's why.

It's obsessed with violence and misery

In The Next Generation, violence was always a last resort—and even then it was used reluctantly. This was a hopeful future where empathetic, enlightened people would negotiate, debate, or otherwise think their way out of dangerous situations. Picard, on the other hand, is full of gunfights, over-choreographed fight scenes, and stupid, gratuitous violence—presumably because the producers, missing the point of Star Trek, think it's dark and edgy. Every character is sad and angry, and there's none of the cosy optimism, warmth, or heart that was so intrinsic to TNG. It's utterly joyless and determined to make every single character's life as deeply miserable as possible.

Related: If You Want A Good Q Story, Forget Star Trek: Picard and Play Star Trek: Borg Instead

There's no actual science fiction in it

Star Trek: Picard is not science fiction. It thinks it is, or at least wants to fool you into believing it is, but there is no substance here at all. TNG used the genre to ask big, challenging questions, present compelling 'what if' scenarios, raise difficult moral quandaries, and invite you to solve mind-bending mysteries. It was a show that made you think —about science, philosophy, morality, the cosmos, and even yourself. It was intellectually nourishing . Picard, in comparison, is junk food. Empty calories. It's shallow, obvious, and painted in broad strokes. It's one of those shows you watch, then realise a week later that you haven't thought about it once since.

Picard feels like a totally different character

In TNG, Picard was a tough, capable captain who never let his emotions get the better of him. But he wasn't a monster either. He had depth, empathy, and a burning desire to do the right thing—even if it meant risking his reputation, or even his life , in the process. He was a hardass, but he had heart too. In Star Trek: Picard, however, this character we spent 187 episodes with is nowhere to be found. The new Picard is overly sentimental and constantly drifting around in a dreary fog of nostalgia. His characteristic toughness and pragmatism—and, as a result, his edge —have been stripped away entirely. This simply isn't the Jean-Luc we fell in love with in TNG.

There's no dialogue, just sarcastic quips

Like so many modern movies and TV shows, Star Trek: Picard has decided that its characters, rather than saying anything interesting or meaningful, should instead communicate almost entirely through the medium of epic Marvel quips. In season two, upon encountering a new form of the Borg, Agnes Jurati exclaims: "Well, that's new!" The unexpected return of the most severe existential threat humanity has ever faced? Better say something cute. That's just one example of many, where the 'witty banter' actively ruins a scene. The dialogue really is dreadful. It's either snarky one-liners like this or cringeworthy cod-philosophising poorly disguised as deep wisdom.

The fan service is relentless

This is a show stuffed with callbacks, winks at the camera, obscure deep lore references, and brazen nostalgia baiting. But none of it is earned. It invokes TNG and other, better shows, but has nothing to offer of its own. It's fan service of the most cynical kind, existing not because it adds anything to the story, but because it'll make guys at Comic-Con shout "Wooooo!" Star Trek was one of the most original, inventive shows on TV, but Picard is little more than a tepid regurgitation of old, tired ideas. Of course, this is a larger issue with TV and movies in general these days—but that doesn't mean the people making Picard couldn't have resisted the urge to pander.

Everyone is an alcoholic for some reason

Picard's writers are obsessed with booze. The characters are constantly swigging the stuff, wearily saying they 'need a drink', knocking back shots of neat liquor, or getting drunk. Sure, humans love drinking and probably still will in the future. But in this context it's just the laziest kind of shorthand for: these characters are, like, so deep and troubled, man. Put a drink in someone's hand, and voila, they're depressed! This might seem like a weird thing to focus on, but it's a perfect example of how desperately lacking in nuance this show is. There's no subtlety whatsoever, and every TV and movie cliché you can imagine is present in some form, without a trace of irony.

They made Q boring

This might be the worst crime of all. Getting the wonderful John de Lancie back to play omnipotent being Q should have been a massive deal. But like everyone else in Picard, this hollow facsimile of the character has been denied all the joy, mischief, and fun that made him such an endearing, watchable villain. He's just as miserable as everyone else now, with none of the fiery wit and spark that defined his TNG incarnation. No silly costumes, no mariachi bands, no gleeful, sneering evil; just standing around dressed in black being all morose. Seriously, how do you screw up Q of all people? De Lancie is still brilliant and he deserved better.

It's a shame, because Star Trek: Picard had a lot of potential. The first teaser suggested this would be a thoughtful character-driven series, giving us an insight into Picard's twilight years. We'd see him reflecting on his past, reuniting with old friends, and enjoying a peaceful life on his vineyard. But, inevitably, both seasons have dragged him out of retirement and back into space. It's such a waste taking this character and forcing him into big, stupid, violent space adventures that play to none of his strengths, joined by a crew of one-dimensional, annoying characters.

Next: Blade Runner Is A Masterclass In Turning A Movie Into A Video Game

Den of Geek

Star Trek: Picard Season 3 Episode 7 Review – Dominion 

Vadic's attempt to take over the U.S.S. Titan doesn't provide as many answers as we might have hoped on Star Trek: Picard

• Share on Facebook (opens in a new tab)
• Share on Twitter (opens in a new tab)
• Share on Linkedin (opens in a new tab)
• Share on email (opens in a new tab)

This Star Trek: Picard review contains spoilers.

Star Trek: Picard Season 3 Episode 7

Given that “The Bounty” was the easily best episode of Star Trek: Picard to date, it was probably always inevitable that whatever came after would feel like a letdown. Such is the case with “Dominion,” an hour that purports to finally offer viewers some answers about Vadic , the Changelings , and their larger plans, but where very little actually happens. This is not to say the episode is bad , per se. (And it’s certainly far from the worse episode of Picard we’ve ever seen!) There are a handful of solid subplots at work throughout—the stuff with Geordi, Data, and Lore is especially emotionally compelling—and while they don’t all come together in an entirely satisfying way, they certainly set the table for an explosive follow-up next week.

The episode starts off incredibly strong, with a surprise guest appearance from Star Trek: Voyager ’s Tim Russ as Tuvok and a ridiculously tense and satisfying sequence in which Seven of Nine must attempt to figure out whether or not the man she’s talking to is her old friend or a Changeling imposter. It turns out that he’s the latter, but watching the deft way that Seven susses out the truth—and her righteous anger when she realizes the real Tuvok has been taken prisoner is a shining example of how much Jeri Ryan can do with the smallest of onscreen moments.

And to its credit, “Dominion” does attempt to maintain this level of emotional heft, with several major revelations about both the Dominion War and Starfleet’s past spread over the course of the hour. Unfortunately, none of it is as interesting onscreen as Picard clearly wants it to be, particularly when the episode poses so many more questions than it answers. Yes, the fact that Starfleet committed clear atrocities during the Dominion War is horrific and goes against everything that the Federation has told themselves that they are and want to be. Our ideal version of Starfleet would obviously never withhold a cure to a genocidal virus that its very own Section 31 created in the first place, or attempt to use another species’ suffering to its own benefit. 

Ad – content continues below

Yet, it somehow appears that Section 31’s secret experiments on Changeling prisoners of war (called Project Proteus) are precisely what seems to have helped them evolve into beings that can mimic human genetic material in new and undetectable ways in the first place, the same abilities that are now essentially fueling Vadic’s plans for revenge. (And given how important Section 31 has been in both this series and in season 2 of Star Trek: Discovery , surely that Michelle Yeoh-led Emperor Georgiou spin-off has to be confirmed soon, right? Right? ) 

Picard Season 3 Episode 7 Easter Eggs: Star Trek Reveals Truth About the Changelings

Star Trek: Picard Season 3 Owes a Debt to One of the Best Original Series Movies

As the U.S.S. Titan continues to search for the missing William Riker and attempts to evade capture by the Shrike , the group eventually decides to allow Vadic and her goons to board the ship in the hopes of setting a trap and capturing them by surprise. This is obviously an extremely stupid and doomed plan—and particularly if you watched season 3’s earlier episodes where every time Picard had an idea it turned out to be objectively terrible—but at least it finally gives us a proper face-off between Vadic, Picard, and Crusher, an excellent attempt at a good cop/bad cop interrogation in which all sides involved are essentially guilty (directly or indirectly) of terrible things. 

Amanda Plummer remains delightfully creepy as she chomps on all the scenery in sight and dances around to a symphony only she can hear. That said, it might be time for us to admit that, as villains, go, Vadic isn’t particularly interesting. Her character has become more a revenge-obsessed middleman and less an entertainingly fearless space marauder. Her crazy-sounding pronouncement about how Jack “was never for” his parents is just one of many heavy-handed hints pointing toward the idea that the son of Jean-Luc Picard is not who he seems. Yet, the hour does little but introduce more questions about both his identity and what the Changelings want from him in the first place. I mean…I guess it’s cool that Jack can read minds now? And is also somehow a badass fighter despite most likely having little to no training in weapons or hand-to-hand combat?  At least he and Sidney La Forge are cute together. (I’m here for the prospect of Geordi and Jean-Luc being cranky, reluctant in-laws, is what I’m saying.)

Part of the problem is the question of Jack Crusher’s true identity just isn’t that intriguing on its own. Yes, I think we’re all pretty invested in the character as he relates to Picard, Crusher, and whatever the relationship is between them now, but we barely know him in his own right as a character beyond that. The sudden revelation that he’s always felt deep down as though something is wrong with him doesn’t completely track with the swaggery bravado we’ve seen him display throughout this season to date and it’s hard to believe he’s been hearing voices telling him to do things all this time without ever feeling the need to tell anyone else about before in his life. And can anyone tell me why Jack’s suddenly decided that his life isn’t worth risking the safety of others when that’s exactly what he’s been doing with his mother for months before Picard found them?

This is no slam on Ed Speelers, who is certainly doing his best to infuse Jack’s frequently nonsensical and/or confusing dialogue with genuine emotion and weight. But at this point, keeping the secret of whatever’s truly going on with him feels as though it’s becoming increasingly dictated by where we are in the season episode order than whether it makes sense for the story we’re watching. Per Vadic’s pronouncement at the end of the hour, we might find out who he “really is” next week, but is it going to be too little too late?

Throughout the hour, we also hear more discussion and speculation about the supposed planned Changeling attack on the Frontier Day celebrations but are once again given no real information about what the group intends to do or why they somehow need Picard’s dead human body and Jack’s living one in order to pull it off. Now that I’ve read it I’m partial to  the theory that they’re trying to somehow resurrect or recreate Locutus of Borg because even if that doesn’t entirely make sense, it’d be fun as heck to watch.

3.5 out of 5

Lacy Baugher

Lacy Baugher is a digital producer by day, but a television enthusiast pretty much all the time. Her writing has been featured in Paste Magazine, Collider,…

• Google Nest Wi-Fi Pro 6E is $60 off
• Tesla is recalling Cybertrucks
• The best laptops for 2024
• Best Mint alternative

Don’t watch ‘Star Trek: Picard’ season three, it’ll only encourage them

The third season is yet another misguided waste of everyone’s time..

The following article contains spoilers for earlier Star Trek properties but doesn’t reveal specific spoilers about Star Trek: Picard season three, not that you should be watching it anyway.

It’s 2034 and Warner Bros. decides it needs to wring more cash out of Friends , the decade defining cultural juggernaut and sitcom behemoth. Imagine what that show would be like; A warm and cozy three-decades-later check-in on characters you know intimately well. After all, you probably spent your formative years watching them mature from young single New Yorkers to a series of families. Maybe it’ll tickle those nostalgia glands, reminding you of when you watched the show with your own family as a kid.

Unfortunately, the hotshot creator of the age decided they want to go in a different direction this time. This needs to be a dark and gritty miserycore grief orgy that better reflects our more rough-and-tumble times. After all, TV these days can’t be gentle or comforting, offer escapism or posit a better world, not since Trump, Brexit, Bolonosaro, January 6th and Ukraine. The creative team have got that quote on a poster in their office, the one about the triumph of evil , and they’re not going to sit idly by, they’re taking a stand .

In the sequel, Rachel’s famous for her wellness TikTok that often makes allusions to “reclaiming” the US as a white ethnostate. Joey lost an arm while filming a movie and is now in prison after a failed heist to pay off his life-ruining medical debt. Monica’s got a crippling adderall addiction and slips away most nights to murder the neighborhood cats and dogs. Everything’s shot in ultra gloomy vision, and there’s no laugh track, jokes or a studio audience, just unrelenting misery.

This revival is dense with references to the Friends backstory as well as the broader Friends universe. Remember that Lisa Kudrow played Phoebe’s twin sister Ursula on Mad About You , right? If not, you better get yourself to Wikipedia to study up. I mean, it won’t be relevant to the plot, but it’s something you remember, so clap, go on, clap .

You might be wondering why such a project would be allowed to happen, given that it wouldn’t be fun for fans of the original series. Times change, characters age, but you can’t turn a cozy sitcom into Breaking Bad overnight and expect that to be satisfying. You’d hardly think it’d be a big pull for newbie viewers either, who’d probably steer clear if they weren’t already familiar with 236 episodes of intricate backstory. Nostalgia revivals don’t need to be slavish to their source material, but it’s hard to see the appeal for something so grim and unpleasant.

Apropos of nothing, let’s talk about the third and final season of Star Trek: Picard .

Season three was sold as something of a course correction for Picard after its first two deeply unpopular runs . It ditched all but Raffi from the roster of original characters created for it, and instead pulled in the stars from Star Trek: The Next Generation . As well as the returning Jonathan Frakes, Marina Sirtis and Brent Spiner, we’ll see LeVar Burton, Gates McFadden and Michael Dorn back in action. And, in the six of ten episodes I’ve been permitted to watch under strict embargo, I’d say only one of them feels like the character we know and love.

Unfortunately, while we have the other TNG stars, the creative team of Executive Producer Alex Kurtzman and showrunner Terry Matalas didn’t bother to grab any of that show’s lightness of tone. Picard remains a grimdark slog, shot on perpetually underlit sets and featuring a succession of increasingly-bleak setpieces. The plot is stretched so thin that the first four episodes turn out to be little more than an extended prologue for the rest. A prologue that could, I should add, have been an efficient, and possibly more enjoyable, hour. The story is so obvious, too, that you’ll be ahead of the characters pretty much non-stop as they stumble from one idiot plot to the next.

It’s maddening that we can see how much of the plot is blocking itself to ensure things can’t move forward too quickly. There’s a whole episode of gosh-isn’t-this-tense tension that could have been eliminated if anyone in Starfleet pulled out a tricorder and used it as God intended. In this utopian future, where science and technology really are advanced enough to look like magic, why does nobody employ the tools hanging from their waistband? Mostly because Paramount ordered ten episodes, and ten episodes is what we’re going to give them. Another episode has a time-filling punch fight runaround because it’s now somehow impossible for a serving officer to use a Federation ship’s intercom system to call the bridge and warn them of impending danger.

Picard is one of those series where you often find yourself shouting at the screen as the next stupid moment unfolds in front of you. Even worse is that the show’s creative team seem to think that it’s us, the audience, who are deficient in the thinking department. There is scene after scene in which characters repeat the same lines back to each other because the crew assume we’re not paying attention. Because of the limits on spoilers, I’ve re-written a scene to match the sentiment, if not the words verbatim, so you can get a sense of what to expect:

CREW 1 : The ship is being pulled closer to the black hole’s gravity well.

CREW 2 : We do not have enough power to pull ourselves away, sir.

RIKER : Are you saying that we’re dead in the water?

CREW 1: We will be passing the black hole’s event horizon in 17 minutes.

RIKER : We’re dead in the water and we’re sinking.

PICARD : We’re going to be dead in 17 minutes, Will, unless we can find a way to solve this.

RIKER : We’re sinking into quicksand, and there’s no time to grab a helping hand.

The irony is that this run is so thicket-dense with references that the show basically assumes that you’ve already seen pretty much everything produced during Trek’s gold, silver and bronze ages. But, to make sure nobody’s left behind, everyone has to speak in exposition so hamfisted that, now that this is over, I think Michelle Hurd deserves personal injury compensation. Raffi gets saddled with so many cringe-inducing lines where she states, and restates and re-restates the obvious that I started grasping fistfuls of my own hair to relieve some of my discomfort.

And as for the storyline, what can I say? It’s clear that Alex Kurtzman is only comfortable writing in a single register. His go-to is usually a militaristic, testosterone-fuelled paranoid Reaganite fantasy in which the real villain was our own government all along . He did it in Into Darkness , Discovery season two and even the first season of Picard – to the point where Starfleet is now so lousy with double agents that all of their schemes fail because the saboteurs are all too busy sabotaging each other’s plans instead of that of the wider Federation.

If Picard is nothing else, it’s nearly pornographic in its use and misuse of franchise iconography. I always felt that Jeff Russo’s Picard theme sounded more like the library music for a corporate advert than the makes-your-heart-soar theme a Star Trek deserves. And here, it’s been ditched in favor of Jerry Goldsmith’s sumptuous, nectar-for-the-ears score for First Contact . The first title card is a direct pull from Wrath of Khan , and pretty much every element therein is an elbow to the ribs, reminding you of older, better Star Trek movies and TV series.

An early scene has a character “hijacking a starship” under false pretenses while it’s in spacedock. You know, the mushroom-shaped megastation orbiting Earth from The Search for Spock onwards. And because we’re already going beat-for-beat for a sequence xeroxed from 1984 , said starship even jumps to warp as soon as it’s past the exit doors. Despite the fact that the sort of hardcore Trek fans who would spot the reference would also note that you’re not meant to jump to warp while inside a solar system when there’s no urgent need to do so.

I’ll admit, this is postgraduate degree-level Star Trek nerdery, but you can’t have it both ways: If you’re trying to placate hostile viewers with the excessive fan service, you can’t then complain when they point out that you’re doing it all wrong.

The show’s teaser trailer already revealed we’re getting an overstuffed roster of villains to round out the run. Amanda Plummer’s captain of an enemy ship that shares a design with the Narada from Star Trek ‘09. Then there’s Daniel Davis’ holographic Professor Moriarty, as well as Data’s evil twin brother Lore. Both of these sorta make sense in the context, but there’s a hell of a lot of narrative scaffolding to explain away the fact that Brent Spiner is now 74 years old. (The dude looks good for it, but it’s hard to play an ageless android when time marches on and the de-aging CGI budget is spent on smoothing out Patrick Stewart’s face for a single flashback and the pointless needle-drops that open every episode.)

Now, before you scurry off to Memory Alpha to confirm that Moriarty was locked away in a holobox at the end of “Ship in a Bottle,” and Lore was disassembled at the end of “Descent Part 2,” yes, they were. Try to remember that showrunner Terry Matalas and executive producer Alex Kurtzman treat Star Trek’s continuity less as something which informs storytelling and more as a series of shiny objects to keep us all amused when the plot sags or anyone has any time to think about what’s going on.

I’ll also add that the trailers and promotional material have very intentionally kept a lot of material back. There are more classic-era heroes and villains crowbarring their way into the story in the way that, if it were fanfiction, would seem excessive. But, if I’m honest, the second or third time someone, or something, familiar popped up, I wasn’t whooping and cheering, I was sighing. The Star Trek universe is vast and broad and deep, but Picard makes it feel like a puddle where everyone knows each other, and everyone under the age of 30 has grown up watching The Next Generation . If you’re serving in the US Navy, for instance, how likely is it that you’d know the ins and outs of every exploit of even the most well-traveled combat vessel?

Now, I don’t have the language or experience to discuss this properly, and I’m aware of others who do feel differently . This is just my opinion, but I think the depiction of drug and alcohol use in Picard has always felt off . And since I can’t talk about the third season, I’ll talk about the first, where something very similar happened and is just as vexing here as it was back then. Raffi deals with her son’s rejection by relapsing, but then mere hours later, she’s back at her station and advancing the plot. I don’t recall a sense that her use clouded her judgment and I don’t think it was discussed subsequently – so despite the portentiousness in the build-up, it was depicted almost like someone just having a bad day and knocking back some drinks. I’m not saying that’s a bad thing, because there are plenty of people who use drugs and it doesn’t impact their professional lives at all. (Read any Making-Of book about The Original Series and you'll notice more than a few references to the production team's drug use.) But if you’re going to write a plot where scenes hang on the will-she-or-won’t-she tension of relapse, but it all turns out to be hunky dory straight after, what was the point of depicting any of this in the first place?

Then there’s the violence, and the casual way that it’s doled out, especially in the show’s numerous interrogation scenes. I’m not advocating for forced confessions, but given Starfleet’s advanced science, and the Federation has a planet of literal telepaths at its disposal, why are we always punching people in the nose with a butt of a phaser pistol? I mean, I know why: It’s a nerdy sci-fi show play acting as a muscular basic-cable drama, but that doesn’t mean it works . I’ve often theorized that many modern-day Star Trek creators would much rather be over the hall making their own Star War instead. Maybe I’m wrong, and the Picard crew is really nostalgic for the hamfisted Bush-era politics of 24 .

It was always going to be hard to pull Picard out of its creative slump that started back when the show was greenlit. If there was ever a character who we’d seen grow, change, mature and treat his own life with more kindness, it was Jean-Luc Picard. Some of TNG’s best episodes forced Picard to consider his own life, his history, his mortality, his motives, including the series’ grand finale. “All Good Things” isn’t just good Star Trek, it’s one of the best series finales ever made, encompassing the entire breadth and depth of The Next Generation in one glorious sweep. And between seven years of TV and four less essential but still important movies, he was done .

I wrote somewhere, I forget where, that a smarter idea would have been to center the action on a less-well served member of the Enterprise D crew. I’d have been second in line to watch a Geordi LaForge spin-off (behind uber fan Rihanna, of course), and there’s plenty to explore there. Or a Beverley Crusher spin-off, as she solves people’s problems as a simple country space doctor back on Earth or on some far-flung planet. Maybe a sci-fi version of In Treatment fronted by Marina Sirtis could have worked, and would have certainly cost less than this.

All of which would be preferable to what we got, which despite initially having a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist at the helm, was two years of go-nowhere, do-nothing bore-a-thons. Its brief moments of cleverness drowned out by the baffling character decisions, tin-eared dialog and ligneous acting. And both had plots which would have struggled to fill a movie stretched out across a painfully slow ten hour runtime.

And that’s before we get to the moralizing, which had characters pointing at a bad thing and saying “thing bad.” I don’t think the second season’s 26 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes is because the (inexplicably) conservative wing of Trek fandom was outraged that a show about happy space communists solving problems while remaining friends suddenly “got woke.” Good, old-fashioned Star Trek at least had the good grace to cloak its progressivism in allegory that could slide past the otherwise closed minds of some of its viewers. By comparison, Picard felt like the first draft of a high school theater production made the term after the teacher had explained agitprop.

Maybe that’s why I feel so annoyed by Picard , because all of the things that are wrong with the show, and its kin, are examples of amateurishness. Amateurish plotting, amateurish dialogue, a lack of thoughtfulness about the material, what it says, or what it’s doing. Just an endless parade of big, dumb, brash, po-faced melodrama used in place of some sort of maturity or integrity. I don’t expect Star Trek to be brilliant all the damn time, but I do expect a minimum standard of something to be upheld. And this falls so far below it, it’s hard to call it Star Trek. Some people will call that gatekeeping, but Star Trek can be anything it damn well wants to be, so long as it's competently made and halfway entertaining.

The constant callbacks got me thinking about the period when Nicholas Meyer was, directly or indirectly, the major creative force behind Star Trek. It’s been 32 years since his 1991 swansong, The Undiscovered Country , and it remains a high-water mark of cinematic Trek. Drawing to a close the story of The Original Series crew, Meyer didn’t go for nostalgia, but savaged his characters, exposing their flaws, their bigotries, their failings. There was redemption, and heart, and it never needed Meyer to stage endless close-quarters phaser-fu fights in unlight rooms.

But that was a filmmaker with a clear vision, and the good graces to really drag his characters in the dirt before washing them clean. Imagine what would happen if Picard encountered any of the same level of subtext – they’d probably spend an hour running from it before beating it over the head with the butt of a phaser rifle and then spend the next hour feeling glum about it. If nothing else, I’d say don’t even watch Picard for ironic kicks, lest Paramount think it’s somehow a runaway hit and continue to produce crap like this.

Latest Stories

Tesla cuts model y, x and s prices in the us and says it’s ending the referral program.

Tesla has slashed the prices of its Model Y, X and S vehicles by $2,000 each. The company announced the price cut for US buyers on X. It also said it's ending its referral program benefits in all markets.

What we're listening to: The Tortured Poets Department and Eternal Sunshine

Reviews Editor Cherlynn Low dives into new releases from Taylor Swift and Ariana Grande, and explores what music means to us when songs are consumed more like books and journal entries.

Apple will reportedly unveil a genre-defining calculator app at WWDC 2024

The new Mac calculator will reportedly have round buttons and Notes integration.

Microsoft's AI tool can turn photos into realistic videos of people talking and singing

Microsoft Research Asia has unveiled a new experimental AI tool called VASA-1 that can take a still image of a person — or the drawing of one — and an existing audio file to create a lifelike talking face out of them in real time.

Finally, someone used Pareto’s economic theories to find the best Mario Kart 8 racer

Who hasn’t spent sleepless nights pondering what would happen if we applied the theories of Vilfredo Pareto, the early 20th-century Italian economist, to Mario, the Mushroom Kingdom’s Italian high-jump champion and part-time elephant cosplayer? Data scientist Antoine Mayerowitz, PhD, tackled that age-old question.

Rebel Moon Part 2 review: A slow-mo sci-fi slog

Rebel Moon: Part 2 - The Scargiver is an empty feast, a relentless onslaught of explosions, sci-fi tropes and meaningless exposition that amounts to nothing.

Prison Architect 2 is denied release until September 3

Double Eleven and publisher Paradox Interactive have delayed Prison Architect 2 by four moths to work on technical issues.

Ryan Gosling and Miller/Lord’s Project Hail Mary could be the sci-fi event of 2026

Amazon MGM just set a March 20, 2026 release date for Project Hail Mary, an adaptation of the Andy Weir novel. The film stars Ryan Gosling and is directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller.

Some of our favorite Anker power banks are up to 30 percent off, plus the rest of this week's best tech deals

Engadget's weekly deals roundup includes sales on Sonos, Apple, iRobot, Google Nest and more.

Automate your vacuuming and mopping with $400 off the Roomba Combo J9+

If you’re looking to automate more of your home cleaning setup, iRobot’s flagship Roomba Combo J9+ is on sale for $400 off. The vacuum-mop hybrid robot, which only arrived last fall, has a redesigned dock that automatically empties debris and refills the device’s mopping liquid.

Tesla is recalling Cybertrucks because their accelerator pedals could get stuck

Tesla has issued a recall for around 3,878 Cybertruck vehicles, a National Highway Traffic Safety Administration notice has revealed.

Engadget Podcast: PlayStation 5 Pro rumors and a look back at the Playdate

This week, Engadget Senior Editor Jessica Conditt joins Cherlynn and Devindra to chat about the PS5 Pro, as well as her piece on the PlayDate two years after its release.

The Morning After: The bill to ban TikTok is barreling ahead.

The biggest news stories this morning include US vs China in the form of TikTok vs WhatsApp, and did you know Taylor Swift has a new album out?

Fallout has already scored a green light for a second season

Amazon has renewed the hit show for a second season.

Baldur's Gate 3 developer confirms it won't make the sequel

The developer behind the popular, award-winning and slightly bawdy Baldur's Gate 3 may not be doing a sequel, but it does have other irons in the fire.

The best PS5 games for 2024: Top PlayStation titles to play right now

Here are the best games you can get for the PlayStation 5 right now, as chosen by Engadget editors.

The 6 best Mint alternatives to replace the budgeting app that shut down

Intuit has shut down the popular budgeting app Mint. Engadget tested a bunch of popular alternatives. Here are our favorites.

Apple says it was ordered to remove WhatsApp and Threads from China App Store

China's Cyberspace Administration ordered Apple to pull Threads and WhatsApp from its App Store in the country, the company said.

Surprise: Taylor Swift is joining Threads at the exact same time as her new album drop

Taylor's Threads account, and her first post, are going live around midnight.

The bill that could ban TikTok is barreling ahead

The bill that could lead to a ban of TikTok in the United States appears to be much closer to becoming law.

Advertisement

Supported by

‘Star Trek: Picard’ Series Finale Recap: Saying Farewell

In the end, the final season of “Picard” was a worthy send-off for the “Next Generation” crew.

• Share full article

By Sopan Deb

Season 3, Episode 10: ‘The Last Generation’

“What began over 35 years ago ends tonight,” Jean-Luc Picard says, standing on his favorite bridge and glaring at his most distasteful enemy. It recalled his “The line must be drawn here!” from “First Contact.”

This was ostensibly a reference to the Federation’s longstanding battle with the Borg, but it also applies to “The Next Generation” franchise. (The show began airing in 1987 and 35 years ago would be 1988.) And if this is the last time we see these characters, that’s OK. Not because this season of “Picard” wasn’t a strong one. Quite the opposite, in fact: It was quite good and recaptured everything that made “Next Generation” what it was.

The characters all used special skills to work together and save humankind. Some of the dialogue was campy. There were plot holes. And there were classic “Star Trek” tropes, like Jean-Luc nonsensically going to the Borg cube, when he was likely the least physically capable of the old crew in fighting off the Borg.

But overall, this season was a worthy send-off for the crew. It wasn’t perfect, but neither were the show or any of the movies. But it was worth doing. The story justified its existence, advancing each of the main characters and filling in some gaps.

And it confirmed one last time that “The Next Generation” was greater than the sum of its parts. That might have been why the first two seasons of “Picard” didn’t work as well. Jean-Luc wasn’t the best character he could be without his old friends. The chemistry wasn’t as fluid, and the story wasn’t as deep.

In the finale, we learn a bit about what the Borg have been up to, though I remain baffled that no one brings up Jurati or the whole Good Borg thing from last season . (Maybe it was for the best.) There was no collective left — only the Borg Queen remained, she claimed, though we know from last season’s events that this isn’t exactly true.

It was Jack who found the Borg Queen, at least in her telling. She speaks in a way that is contrary to what we’ve known about the Borg: She says she was lonely and that the Borg were left to starve. (This kind of undercuts the Borg’s whole message of being the perfect beings.) But now, the Borg want to evolve rather than assimilate, and Jack is the perfect partner to do that. (In order to survive, the Borg Queen, I think, resorted to Borg cannibalism. Yikes! Hope those drones won Employee of the Month or something.)

The Borg and the changelings came to an agreement in which the changelings would be the Borg’s vehicle to carry out some villainous plan to help them procreate. Aside from an ill-fated revenge that they didn’t really need the Borg for, I don’t know what the changelings really got out of this alliance.

Elsewhere, classic Star Trekking happens. Worf and Riker fight off some baddies on the cube. Beverly uses her now finely honed combat skills to fire weapons. (It’s somewhat amusing that Geordi refurbished the Enterprise D for display at the fleet museum and also included a loaded torpedo system. Thank goodness he went above and beyond!) Data shows off his lightning fast piloting skills, assisted by his newly acquired gut instinct.

Beverly is faced with an impossible decision: Blow up her son and save the galaxy, or, uh, don’t. I loved that Geordi is the one who asks her permission, because he now understands a parent’s love for a child. And when it comes time to fire on the beacon, Geordi really, really doesn’t want to do it.

Jean-Luc finds another solution. He assimilates himself so he can get in contact with Jack in the Borg collective. Jean-Luc isn’t human, of course. He is an android — apparently, he can just plug himself in to the network like a flash drive. Jean-Luc tells Jack that he is the missing part of Jean-Luc’s life. (Patrick Stewart plays this perfectly.)

Jean-Luc is finally able to admit to himself how lonely he was outside of Starfleet, and that Starfleet merely covered up that loneliness rather than filling it entirely. Jean-Luc gives his son something he’s craved his whole life: approval and unconditional love. And Jean-Luc also won’t let his son go. He offers to stay in the hole with him so they can climb out together, and Jean-Luc gets to be the father he never knew he wanted to be.

Eventually, Jean-Luc pushes Jack to unassimilate himself and turn against the Queen. And that’s that: The universe is saved again. Our thanks to the crew of the Enterprise for the umpteenth time.

The episode ends in the only appropriate way for the “Next Generation” crew: They sit around and toast one another. Jean-Luc quotes Shakespeare, and then they whoop and play cards just like at the end of “All Good Things…,” the series finale of the original “Next Generation.”

The end wasn’t perfect, but it was proper. And that’s about all you can ask from a season like this. I don’t need any more — I want the Enterprise D crew to Costanza it and leave on a high note. They’ve earned it.

Odds and ends

Somewhat amusingly, Jean-Luc does not express any concern for or otherwise mention Laris throughout this season , another example of the team behind “Picard” trying to erase the first two seasons of the show from existence. But Laris, for her part, actually appeared in the season premiere and, one could argue, help put the events of the reunion in motion.

I keep thinking about that scene early this season with Riker and Jean-Luc at the bar, when Riker has to defend the honor of the Enterprise D. We didn't know it then, but that foreshadowed the whole season.

I would have liked to hear more about what Worf has been up to since the events of “Nemesis.” At the end of “Deep Space Nine,” Worf was named an ambassador to Qo’noS. In “Nemesis,” Worf somehow just becomes a member of the Enterprise crew again with little explanation. In this season, it is implied that Worf helped destroy the Enterprise E — more detail would have been nice.

The “Worf as comic relief” thing, as when he fell asleep on the bridge immediately after he helps to save civilization, also wore thin. But there is a fun callback in the last scene of the episode: Beverly saying Worf should have another glass of prune juice. A warrior’s drink!

Pavel Chekov’s son, Anton, being president of the Federation was a nice touch. Anton is likely a reference to Anton Yelchin, who played Chekov in the rebooted feature films beginning in 2009. He died in 2016 as a result of a car accident .

When Seven and Raffi figure out a way to transport assimilated crew members off the bridge using phaser rifles, it’s quite the deus ex machina. That technology would’ve been helpful all season!

That was a funny moment when the cook is ordered to pilot the Titan. He didn’t even finish flight training, why is Seven making him take the wheel? Have Raffi do it! (Within minutes, the cook executes complicated evasive maneuvers, so that must have been some training.)

At first, I found New Data to be jarring but after a couple episodes, this version grew on me. When he says he hates the Borg, you can see the Lore side of him burst through. It’s a fresh take on Data and Brent Spiner pulls it off.

That was a nice bit of wordless acting from Jonathan Frakes and Marina Sirtis when Riker heads down to the cube for yet another mission with Jean-Luc. The swashbuckling Riker gives the slightest of smiles, as if to say, “You know who you married. You know why I have to do this.” And Troi reluctantly agrees. Later, when Troi tells Riker he will only have a minute or so to save Jean-Luc once the Enterprise fires on the Cube, he responds again with cool confidence in a near death situation.

There will certainly be some disappointment among fans that Kate Mulgrew did not reprise her role as Admiral Janeway this season. The events in “Voyager” presumably are the reason the Borg cube was in such terrible shape when Jean-Luc beams aboard. Given the multiple references to Janeway and what was happening on Earth, it would have been nice to have gotten a glimpse of her. (And man, how gnarly does the Borg Queen look now?)

Ah, there’s Tuvok, offering Seven her own ship. As Vulcan as ever.

In the grand scheme of things, this is still only the second most successful attack by the Borg on Earth. Sure, they get to Earth, bring down the planetary defense systems and attack cities directly, all while using Starfleet ships. But in “First Contact,” they actually went back in time and assimilated all of Earth before the pesky Enterprise crew initiated a do-over. And honestly, if Jean-Luc and his merry band hasn’t been able to rescue Earth from Evil Jack, they could have just done what they did last season or in “First Contact”: Go back in time. It’s easy!

Troi gets to drive the Enterprise D again. It went better than it did last time, when she crashed it.

Beverly is an admiral now? What a promotion, considering the decades she spent out of Starfleet running a rogue operation. I wonder if Riker, Geordi or any of the others were like, “Hey, what about us?”

Ed Speleers did an admirable job as Jack Crusher. It’s not easy to go toe-to-toe with Patrick Stewart, but Speleers fits in seamlessly as Beverly and Jean-Luc’s son. (While we’re here, what’s up with Jack’s brother, Wesley?)

I hope all of you stuck around for the post-credits scene. Q is still alive! Of course he is. We don’t acknowledge last season around these parts.

Sopan Deb is a basketball writer and a contributor to the Culture section. Before joining The Times, he covered Donald J. Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign for CBS News. More about Sopan Deb

Explore More in TV and Movies

Not sure what to watch next we can help..

As “Sex and the City” became more widely available on Netflix, younger viewers have watched it with a critical eye . But its longtime millennial and Gen X fans can’t quit.

Hoa Xuande had only one Hollywood credit when he was chosen to lead “The Sympathizer,” the starry HBO adaptation of a prize-winning novel. He needed all the encouragement he could get .

Even before his new film “Civil War” was released, the writer-director Alex Garland faced controversy over his vision of a divided America  with Texas and California as allies.

Theda Hammel’s directorial debut, “Stress Positions,” a comedy about millennials weathering the early days of the pandemic , will ask audiences to return to a time that many people would rather forget.

If you are overwhelmed by the endless options, don’t despair — we put together the best offerings   on Netflix , Max , Disney+ , Amazon Prime  and Hulu  to make choosing your next binge a little easier.

Sign up for our Watching newsletter  to get recommendations on the best films and TV shows to stream and watch, delivered to your inbox.

Is 'Star Trek: Picard' Really So bad?

Let’s see what’s out there…

What exactly is out there? Simply put, more than some of the reception to the Next Generation revival has been negative. Both loyal Star Trek fans and critics alike are treating the Paramount + original series, Star Trek: Picard , like a Klingon encountering a colony of fat, purring tribbles. In the logical words of Spock, it’s Pure Energy , or in this instance, Pure Hatred .

Recently, a critic had this to say:

Star Trek: Picard is so bad it's almost impressive. A direct follow-up to The Next Generation with Patrick Stewart reprising his role as Jean-Luc Picard and appearances from beloved characters including Riker, Seven of Nine, Q, Guinan, and Data. How could they screw that up? Well, they did. This is the worst Star Trek show ever made (yes, worse than Enterprise ), created by people who don't seem to understand what made TNG special—or what made Picard such a great character. It's an insult to the legacy of one of the greatest TV shows ever made, but mostly it's just garbage...

This blistering condemnation is from Andy Kelly over at The Gamer . So, is it really that bad? Is Kelly being too harsh? Why is it so bad? Can Starfleet crews put out this so-called dumpster fire with Enterprise fire suppression protocols? C’mon. Let’s talk all things Jean-Luc Picard .

Sci-Fi Guy is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Ready for more?

Picard has resurrected one of Star Trek’s best villains

We’re three episodes into the final season of star trek: picard , and it’s now much, much clearer exactly what kind of enemy picard and company are facing..

By Alex Cranz , managing editor and co-host of The Vergecast. She oversaw consumer tech coverage at Gizmodo for five years. Her work has also appeared in the WSJ and Wired.

Share this story

We’re three episodes into the final season of Star Trek: Picard , and it continues to be a chaotic ballet of storylines. There’s a lot happening on this show. Beverly Crusher has become a frontier doctor / Robin Hood-style smuggler traveling the outer fringes of the Federation with her son, Jack Crusher, and has spent months being hunted by mysterious forces. Worf now works as a spy for Section 31 and has spent months anonymously working with Raffi to hunt down a new cell of terrorists who seem to be as mysterious as the forces hunting Crusher.

Now, Picard, Riker, and Seven have haphazardly commandeered the Titan and are fleeing through a nebula with a greasy, cruel, and mysterious Vadic (Amanda Plummer) chasing them. And in the third episode, all those plots crash into each other, and the true villain of the season appears to have been revealed.

It goes without saying that spoilers are coming, so click away now if you don’t want to know more.

It’s changelings.

If you didn’t watch Deep Space Nine , you almost certainly have no idea what a changeling is. They were the primary villain of the show (apart from Odo, played by René Auberjonois, who was a hero and main character on the show). Originally from the Gamma Quadrant, changelings built an enormous empire, the Dominion, and used their shapeshifting ability to hide their own influence as the architects of that empire. They then invaded the Alpha Quadrant, infiltrating and destabilizing the governments of the Klingons, the Romulans, and the Federation.

It was only because of some super unethical biological warfare and the threat of genocide that the Dominion finally retreated from the Alpha Quadrant and agreed to leave the worlds of Star Trek , as we know them, alone. Since then, the Star Trek franchise has studiously avoided the changelings. While it’s had no problem trotting out other familiar Big Bads like the Borg, the Romulans, and even the Gorn, the changelings have stayed safely shuttered away in the Gamma Quadrant — someone else’s problem.

Behind the scenes, there’s certainly rationale for this. Deep Space Nine is often considered the black sheep of the Star Trek franchise; it was a much darker show that focused on complex and very adult themes. While Star Trek tends to be a big space Western about the wonders of exploration and / or cool space fights, Deep Space Nine liked to ponder things like how the colonized overcome decades of institutional violence or the complexities and sometimes necessities of terrorism.

So it just wasn’t as popular a show. People who tuned in for space adventure didn’t necessarily want to tune in for stories like “adorable Ferengi teen struggles with war-induced PTSD.”

But in the years since Deep Space Nine ended, the way we watch TV has changed. Now it seems like we hunger for darkness and extreme moral complexity in our space adventures. Where The Next Generation was expertly built for the world of syndicated TV , Deep Space Nine was an attempt at a modern prestige drama a good seven years before The Sopranos kicked off the golden age of television and popularized the form. People can appreciate a Deep Space Nine reference now — where once they might have cringed and braced themselves.

And it’s fitting that changelings would be the big villain of the final season of Star Trek: Picard . Back on Deep Space Nine, the changelings and their war were used as tools to explore the potential flaws of Star Trek and its utopia-like Federation. They wiped away the veneer of flawlessness. And this season of Picard is very much about wiping that same veneer away from its heroes.

Few scenes have exemplified that better than the crackerjack one between Picard and Crusher in this episode. In the last episode, Beverly wordlessly confirmed to Jean-Luc that her son was also his son, and he spends a good chunk of this episode stewing on that knowledge before confronting Beverly in one of the best scenes of the show. These actors haven’t lost the chemistry that made their relationship so compelling 30 years ago. Gates McFadden seems to bring something out of Patrick Stewart, and he gives one of his best performances as Picard in years. There’s real fury in his eyes as he confronts her about the child she hid.

McFadden has a tough job in this scene because she has to make you believe that the very kind, if obstinate and egotistical, Beverly Crusher of The Next Generation could really abandon all of her loved ones and friends to raise a child in secret. The decision, as Crusher explains it, was rooted in fear. Crusher lost both of her parents at a very young age to a space-based disaster, her grandmother to a parasitical alien ghost in a lamp, her first husband to a Starfleet accident, and her first son to extra-dimensional god-like alien travelers. These are not all things you would know unless you were an obsessive consumer of Star Trek , and McFadden has to remind us of all of that trauma with only a few lines.

And she does. The scene works, and it’s some of the most mature and adult performances we’ve seen in Star Trek since, well, Deep Space Nine . So it makes sense it happens in the same episode we find out changelings are the Big Bad of the season. If you’re going to make your Star Trek characters this flawed and morally complex, there’d better be a changeling lurking somewhere nearby.

Tesla recalls all 3,878 Cybertrucks over faulty accelerator pedal

How phish turned las vegas’ sphere into the ultimate music visualizer, the invisible seafaring industry that keeps the internet afloat, airplay turns the delta emulator into a full-on retro console, you can buy a refurbished steam deck for almost half off.

More from Entertainment

The Nintendo Switch 2 will now reportedly arrive in 2025 instead of 2024

The best Presidents Day deals you can already get

Vudu’s name is changing to ‘Fandango at Home’

Tommy Tallarico’s never-actually-featured-on-MTV-Cribs house is for sale

• The Inventory

On Star Trek: Picard , Everyone's Really Bad at Their Jobs in the Best Possible Way

Chaos reigns once more in "mercy," but once again: it's sort of the good kind..

There’s certain rules about time travel that Star Trek ’s heroes try to follow, either to avoid completely imploding the timeline or because, well, someone above them in the Federation will get very huffy about it. This week, Picard ’s heroes realize that in order to save the day, they’re going to have to do what they do best: be incredibly bad at following orders.

Related Content

If last week’s messy sojourn into Jean-Luc’s mind was Picard ’s second season doing the bad kind of chaos, then “Mercy” is thankfully more akin to the fun kind of chaos the season already explored with Team La Sirena being really terrible at infiltrating fancy parties . Now that time is truly running out for the season to resolve one of a gabillion different disasters—ensuring Renee Picard goes on the Europa mission and the future is saved, stopping the Borg Queen from starting a 21st century collective, stopping Q’s nonsense , and now also adding Dr. Adam Soong to the whole “stopping nonsense” list—the episode sees our heroes actually do something really quite funny: simply say “screw the rules of time travel, we’ve got a mess to un-mess.”

Star Trek ’s relationship with time travel , especially when it comes to the perspective of Starfleet officers, has always been defined not just by temporal rules, but by the standards these officers hold themselves to. From the tragedy of Edith Keeler in “City on the Edge of Forever” to DS9 's “Past Tense” ( surprisingly quite relevant to this season of Picard , that one), whenever Star Trek plays with time it’s not just about the logical mechanics of the idea, but how high a standard our heroes hold themselves to in order to maintain those mechanics. Kirk has to let go of his love of Edith to ensure the sanctity of the future, Sisko and his colleagues stuck in a dystopian 2024 have to find a way to ensure their messy influence on the timeline doesn’t alter the course of history, no matter how badly things go wrong. But they always do it the right way, because no matter the odds, they’re Starfleet heroes and there are rules.

Picard has decided that frankly, things can get bad enough that sometimes it’s worth chucking those rules out of the window, especially when your antagonists are similarly indisposed to following them. The Borg queen is running around 2024 LA in one of your friends’ bodies, killing folks and munching lithium out of phone and car batteries so she can start making nanoprobes (don’t ask how, please, just accept it, Picard begs of us)? Q’s going full screw-it mode and just playing about 70 different mind games at once? Jean-Luc and his friends might as well be just as messy about the whole thing, because at least if it gets them the results, they have a future to go back to.

That considerable desire to be in screw-it mode 24/7 lends “Mercy” a great deal of momentum in its myriad plots that was sorely lacking in “Monsters” last week. It means that even when Picard and Guinan spend the episode in the custody of FBI agent Wallis—who it turns out is obsessed with an alien encounter in his childhood he perceived as sinister, but was anything but, as we’ll learn—there’s at least a bunch of forward planning going on. Mostly because, after realizing how interminable things are going trying to hide their true motives from Wallis, they just both decide to reveal that Guinan’s an alien and Picard’s from the future. With that knowledge, Picard can just openly tell Wallis that his past alien encounter was in fact with a Vulcan trying to mind meld with him and erase his fear of seeing an alien being, not a monster trying to attack him. Now Wallis is less of an irritating roadblock to them ensuring the Europa Mission’s safety, and more of a willing ally. Guinan, meanwhile, separated from Picard, gets to learn from a late-arriving Q that the whole reason for this entire timey-wimey mess in the first place is because it turns out that Q’s not so immortal as he thinks he is, and is utterly petrified at the prospect of dying, hence all his trying to prove something with Picard. Look at all this progress! And it’s only because everyone just decided to stop caring about being so stuffy all the time. Wonderful.

Meanwhile, after Borg-Jurati goes on her battery brunch and leaves Raffi and Seven wounded—and full of regrets, between Raffi harboring guilt over Elnor’s death and Seven grappling with her own complicated feelings about the Borg— the duo’s own decision to go on the offensive lets them eventually figure out a way to learn just what the Queen is looking for in her plans to restart the collective. And that brings them back into Rios’ orbit just in time for him to... well, hang out on La Sirena on his extremely ill-advised impromptu date night with Teresa and her son, figuring out the damage the Queen did to the ship while also letting his surprise guests gorge themselves on replicated cake (what is it with people on this ship and replicated cake ?). At least he gets a kiss out of it? But he’s there to help Seven and Raffi, and while his thread in the myriad “everyone’s saying screw it to the rules” theme of this episode is the slightest, he’ll probably stand to pay the highest price, considering Seven and Raffi figure out that what the Queen wants is La Sirena itself, advanced tech to kickstart her collective creation. Shouldn’t have brought your love interest to the spaceship, my guy!

Borg-Jurati has at least one stop before assaulting La Sirena however, because like I said, it’s not just our heroes going on an offensive against the standards of time travel this episode. Tired of eating batteries, the Queen makes her way on over to Dr. Adam Soong’s place, using her knowledge of not just the future but the dark alt-timeline she came from in the first place to tempt the ethically unsound geneticist to her side. Given the mission of stopping Picard and the Europa flight to ensure his legacy is secured—just as he’s seemingly lost it, with Q’s own, still-mysterious game plan evolving by giving Korre the chance to escape her father—Soong pulls a ridiculous amount of strings to get his own black-ops strike team, perfect for Borg-Jurati to start assimilating into her first new warriors.

The battle for La Sirena is about to be upon us, and... to be perfectly honest, when this whole trip back to 2024 started this season, I did not expect it to culminate in a battle between the Borg Queen in the body of Jurati, a Soong, some drone-ified henchgoons, and Team Picard aboard a spaceship that’s crash-landed outside of a future French vineyard. But it’s certainly going to, and that’s quite an exciting set-up for Picard ’s final two episodes to deal with. It took a mess to get there, but at least the show embraced that mess and had some fun along the way. No doubt we’ll find out if it was worth all that next week!

Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel and Star Wars release dates, what’s next for the DC Universe on Film and TV , and everything you need to know about House of the Dragon or Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power .

Advertisement

Who Is Vadic in ‘Star Trek Picard’? Everything We Know About the Villainous Big Bad

She was touted as the season’s big bad, but is there a greater evil at work?

“Star Trek” has had some memorable villains in the past: Khan, Q and The Borg Queen to name just a few.

When the villainous Vadic was introduced as the big bad in “Star Trek: Picard” Season 3, viewers knew there had to be more to her than possessing a super powerful warship.

As the season progressed, her true, tragic origin was revealed. Here’s everything we know about the villainous Vadic.

Warning, this post contains spoilers through Episode 7 of “Star Trek: Picard.”

Who Plays Captain Vadic?

Vadic is played by Amanda Plummer on “Star Trek: Picard.” She is an original character introduced in Season 3. She appeared in promos ahead of the season premiere, and debuted in the second episode titled “Disengage.”

You may recognize her from her role as robber Honey Bunny from “Pulp Fiction.”

Plummer is the daughter of Christopher Plummer. The elder Plummer also played a legendary “Trek” villain: General Chang of the Klingon Empire in “Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country.”

Is Captain Vadic Human?

On the outside, Vadic appears human. She has two scars running down her face, earning her the name, “The Marked Woman.”

In reality, Vadic is a Changeling, an alien species of shapeshifters first introduced in “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.” Her true form is a gelantinous state. Her species’ homeworld is the Founders Homeworld in the distant Gamma quadrant.

Is Vadic an Ordinary Changeling?

Like others in her species, Vadic can change her form and shape. She impersonates a Starfleet lieutenant while arresting Will Riker at Daystrom Station. She kills the other arresting officers before revealing her female humanoid form.

A foe capable of besting the legendary crew of the infamous U.S.S. Enterprise certainly has a few tricks up her sleeve. Literally.

Vadic’s hand is actually another Changeling whom she receives instructions from. She cuts off her hand so this other unnamed Changeling can take form. Yes, it’s as gross as it sounds.

Why Does She Hate Starfleet?

In order to win the Dominion War, Starfleet devised a virus — a biological weapon — to weaken the Changelings.

In Episode 7, Vadic reveals Starfleet gave her the ability to mimic human blood and hold her solid form longer than other Changelings. Her “evolved physiology” comes from cruel experiments conducted upon her and her “loved ones” as a prisoner of war.

She and nine other Changelings were subject to all sorts of tests as part of Project Proteus at Daystrom Station. In Greek mythology, Proteus was a sea god who could take many different forms.

Vadic and the other Changelings were burned, injected with chemicals, electrocuted, spliced and experimented on. The goal was to create “perfect, undetectable spies who could drop into any species and create chaos.”

Vadic eventually was freed and took the face of the female scientist that tortured her.

She has the ability to pass on her evolved physiology to any Changeling who wishes, at the cost of shorter life span and constant pain.

What Does She Want With Picard and Jack Crusher?

Vadic seeks revenge against the Federation for “taking her family.”

The Changeling’s plan for Frontier Day — an event where the entire fleet gathers in one place — remains unclear.

Picard and Beverly Crusher surmise they want Picard’s human body and Jack Crusher’s blood to create a perfect replica of Picard to infiltrate the Frontier Day festivities.

But Vadic suggests Jack is something more, telling Beverly, “He’s not for me. We could bond over that, since he was never really for you either.”

What Ship Does Vadic Command?

Vadic commands the Shrike, a powerful warship of unknown origin.

It’s far more powerful than the Titan and has a massive weapons payload, including an experimental portal device stolen from Daystrom Station.

The Shrike used the portal weapon to disable the Titan by “teleporting” its own photon torpedos back at it, although it easily could’ve used other weapons as well.

What Are Unanswered Questions About Vadic?

It’s unclear how and where Vadic obtained the Shrike.

Who is the mysterious “hand” she take instructions from?

And why is Jack Crusher so important to her?

New episodes of “Star Trek: Picard” air Thursdays on Paramount+.

• Gameumentary
• Review in 3 Minutes
• Design Delve
• Extra Punctuation
• Zero Punctuation
• Area of Effect
• Escape the Law
• In the Frame
• New Narrative
• Out of Focus
• Slightly Something Else
• Terms of Service
• Privacy Policy

In ‘Farewell,’ Picard Secures a Launch but Can’t Stick the Landing

This discussion and review contains some spoilers for Star Trek: Picard season 2, episode 10, “Farewell.”

One of the more frustrating aspects of modern Star Trek is the extent to which the franchise seems compelled to embrace long-form serialization without doing any of the hard work involved.

If “Monsters” illustrated the uncanny valley that Star Trek: Picard occupies between prestige television and classic Star Trek , then “Farewell” demonstrates just how uncomfortable the franchise is at telling season-long stories. “Farewell” takes the audience back to the opening moments of the season premiere, “ The Star Gazer ,” in what should be a dramatic payoff to a season-long arc. Theoretically, the second season of Picard has come “full circle,” back around to where it started.

This is a hallmark of prestige television. This sort of storytelling demonstrates a confidence and assuredness from the production team, signaling to the audience that they are in reliable hands. It is a technique regularly employed by shows like Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul , which will often provide viewers teasers depicting out-of-context images from later in the episode or even the season (like a burnt pink teddy bear or a car-trunk machine gun ), promising they will make sense in context.

Ideally, by the time that “Farewell” revisits the events of “The Star Gazer,” the audience has seen enough in the intervening eight Star Trek: Picard episodes that the scenes play dramatically differently. The characters have changed and grown, their relationships shifted and evolved, to such an extent that the sequence takes on an entirely new meaning. In a well-constructed season-long arc, this payoff offers an emotional catharsis that elevates the entire season.

On paper, it’s possible to see how this would actually work. Q (John de Lancie) has one final conversation with Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart), and the two part as friends. Agnes Jurati (Alison Pill) has spent four centuries rebuilding and reinventing the Borg Collective, and Picard is able to accomplish the ultimate diplomatic coup when they apply for “provisional membership of the Federation.” Picard himself has grown to become more comfortable and more accepting.

Unfortunately, “Farewell” doesn’t pull any of that off. Very little of the episode’s developments feel particularly organic or compelling. A large part of that is down to the fact that Picard is a show much more interested in plot than character, and little of the season’s plot fits with what the dialogue insistently tells the audience about its characters. As a result, a lot of the second season feels like a jumble of things happening, rather than characters evolving.

This is most obvious in the conversation between Q and Picard. In isolation, this is a charming scene. Patrick Stewart and John de Lancie are both fine actors and good screen partners. There is something moving in the idea of Q effectively rewriting the universe as one parting gift to an old friend. “Even gods have favorites, Jean-Luc, and you’re one of mine,” Q admits, gently cupping Picard’s face, in what feels like a rare moment of complete honesty from the trickster.

Tying back into one of the big recurring themes of Picard , Q argues that this entire extended adventure has effectively been a therapy session for Picard. “I am moving on,” Q explains of his choice. “In your parlance, I am dying. Alone. I am dying alone.” Q explains that this big trial was always deeply personal to both Q and Picard. “You ask me why it matters,” Q confesses. “It matters to me.” There is just one problem here: Picard never felt particularly intimate or personal.

From the outset, the stakes of the second season of Star Trek: Picard were galactic and universal in nature. In “The Star Gazer,” the Federation’s entire fleet is almost assimilated by the Borg. In “Penance,” the entire timeline is rewritten to create a dystopian alternate reality. Even within his conversation with Q, Picard points to the deaths of Tallinn (Orla Brady) and Elnor (Evan Evagora). While Q later reverses the death of Elnor, he shrugs off both losses.

Even “Farewell” doesn’t seem particularly convinced by Q’s arguments. It features the return of Wesley Crusher (Wil Wheaton), who recruits Kore (Isa Briones) to join him while also fashioning together a web of Star Trek continuity by revealing that “the supervisors” from “ Assignment: Earth ” were the same aliens as the Traveler in “ Where No One Has Gone Before .” They work to protect the “grand tapestry” of the universe that is only ever “a thread-pull away from annihilation.”

Even if the audience accepts Q’s arguments, there are still significant difficulties reconciling them to the larger show. Q vows to leave Picard “unshackled from the past,” but that rings false given the confirmation that the rest of the cast of The Next Generation are joining the third season of Picard . He also claims to have relieved Picard of some deep-set trauma, vowing, “If I leave you, I leave you free.” However, there was no hint of that trauma in Picard’s past before “The Star Gazer.”

More to the point, if the second season of Picard is about Q helping Picard move past his trauma, how does that pay off in the season finale? Returned to the Stargazer bridge, Picard aborts the self-destruct sequence and declines to sacrifice himself and his crew. However, this decision isn’t rooted in character. He doesn’t abort the sequence because he has a new perspective on life. Instead, it’s rooted in plot exposition. He knows that Jurati is the Borg Queen, which is just plot information.

Similarly, all of this leads into a crammed final 15 minutes in which “a galactic event” materializes completely disconnected from the actual plot of the season around it, creating an existential crisis that threatens to destroy “billions of lives.” Even “ All Good Things… ,” an episode that was clearly a major influence on this season, was smart enough to tie its anomaly of the week to the main plot. Instead, “Farewell” just pulls it out of nowhere, for some last-minute heroism.

There’s a sloppiness to the plotting of the second season of Picard that undermines any compelling character or plot work. This is most obvious in the season’s somewhat nonsensical internal logic when it comes to time travel, even by the standards of the franchise. When Picard met Guinan (Ito Aghayere) in the past, she didn’t seem to remember their earlier encounter in “ Time’s Arrow .” The production team argued that this was because of a disruption of the timeline .

However, when Picard reunites with Guinan (Whoopi Goldberg) in the future, she retains a perfect memory of their adventures over previous episodes, allowing her to deliver an exposition dump about what happened to Cristobal Rios (Santiago Cabrera) after the crew left him in the 21st century. “Farewell” opens with Picard noting that his ancestors recalled finding bullet holes in the chateau, implying that the shootout in “ Hide and Seek ” played out according to a predetermined paradox.

To be fair, the temptation with these sorts of narrative choices is to excuse them as “ timey wimey ” nonsense. Indeed, much like the sequence in which Adam Soong (Brent Spiner) removes a sheet of “fast-acting and fatal” neurotoxin from his palm using his other ungloved hand, these problems would be easier to excuse if the story worked in other ways. After all, the logic of Star Trek has never been entirely water-tight, but that doesn’t matter if the episode in question is compelling enough.

Instead, “Farewell” follows the path of least resistance without any underlying sense of character or story. The episode’s first half plays as an extended homage to “Assignment: Earth,” about a bunch of time travelers trying to ensure an important space launch. However, while “Assignment: Earth” has long been a point of fixation and obsession for Star Trek fans, it was a fairly mediocre episode of television, with Gene Roddenberry trying to use it as a stealth pilot for a different show .

As with so much of the second season of Star Trek: Picard , “Farewell” instead leans on easy nostalgia in place of these storytelling fundamentals. This is most obvious on the soundtrack, which replays familiar audio cues from The Next Generation and First Contact to tickle the audience’s nostalgia receptors. The idea seems to be that if Picard references enough other Star Trek stories and sounds enough like other Star Trek stories, it won’t matter that the internal narrative just doesn’t work.

It is a common problem with modern Star Trek shows pushing for season-long arcs. Some fans will insist that the problem is that the production team needs to plan more carefully, but that’s not really the problem . After all, much of the scripting on the best shows is improvised. Barry heavily rewrote and reshot its third season to make it work . Better Call Saul improvised arcs for characters like Kim Wexler (Rhea Seehorn) and Nacho Varga (Michael Mando) .

“Farewell” demonstrates the folly of building epic season-long arcs for a show that often struggles with the fundamentals on an episode-by-episode basis. Ironically for an episode about ensuring a rocket launch, “Farewell” doesn’t stick the landing.

Trending News

• What is the CFP? College Football Playoff National Championship?
• Is it possible to watch all 9 ‘Fast & Furious’ movies in a day?
• What exactly is the Charles Schwab challenge?
• Can I watch the ‘Luca’ movie free on Disney+?
• Is it ever possible to stream the Golden Globe Awards on Reddit?

Here are all the reasons why ‘Star Trek: Picard’ is just bad

Only we have chosen to channel that hatred to CBS’s Star Trek: Picard , rather than the world in general and/or innocent security officers.

It was so bad. 

It was terrible. It was a mind-numbing slog that became more incomprehensible the longer it went on.

What would have been forgivable offenses in a new program with new content and characters felt unforgivable in an established property with our favorite Star Trek captain of all time. 

So many interesting questions were posed over the first few episodes, only for them to be ignored/steamrolled in favor of more questions, which were sloppily answered to make way for even more questions. The final result was as if your high school math teacher took a cocktail of meth and PCP and started screaming very loudly about the quadratic formula, inches from your face.

Let’s go through all of the ways we could not stand the series, because there’s going to be a second season of this garbage and we’re not ready to think about that yet.

These relationships mean nothing

The relationships forged on Picard are similar to those in a Sims family: ultimately meaningless and a waste of time that could have been spent doing something, anything more productive.

The initial episodes of the first season were interesting, because it stacked the deck with a catalogue of different archetypes from different genres: you have Jean Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart) as the old man on his final mission, Soji (Isa Briones) as the Joss Whedon-style ingenue with murder powers, Raffi (Michelle Hurd) as the jaded cowboy failed by the world around her, Agnes Jurati (Alison Pill) as the calculated scientist with a dark secret, Elnor (Evan Evagora) as a space samurai, and Rios (Santiago Cabrera) as the badass/bad boy with an unending supply of cigars.

It should have worked! The cast is super talented, the premise is interesting, if only the writing had not been accomplished by banging the skulls of Star Trek nerds against a computer to see what comes out.

Every character on this show was introduced, given anywhere between 45 seconds to three minutes of backstory, and then thrust into an action scene that did not deliver on any real action.

This is not Star Wars ; these relationships should mean something.

The one thing Star Trek has always done remarkably well is introducing a large ensemble cast of different backgrounds and showing how everyone gets along. With Picard , the trajectory of each character moves at light speed. 

Take Jurati: she started out as the mild-mannered scientist interested in Soji based on her background in synthetics, then it turns out she helped build her, she was in a secret relationship with Bruce Maddox (John Ales) (who she ended up murdering), she successfully hid the murder from others on the ship, had cry-sex with Rios, attempted to commit suicide, and admitted her complicity before the entire crew. 

 The first season only had 10 episodes. Can you even imagine what Jurati will be up to in season 2? She’ll probably start a band.

At this point, the only relationship we’re even mildly excited about is the potential one hinted at between Raffi and Seven of Nine (Jeri Ryan) in the season finale. But that might just be because the writers haven’t had a chance to beat us over the head with it yet. Any well-plotted character growth will probably be destroyed by the time the second season premieres.

Bingewatching is ruining good TV

This has been our biggest issue with new Star Trek properties; these adventures don’t need to be serialized.

Showrunner Michael Chabon described the narrative approach of Picard as “novelistic,” but the speed with which Picard moved through events in the first season felt more like a pulp comic than an actual novel. The plot did not unfold, it punched you in the face as it moved from one setting to the next.

What makes TNG so rewatchable is that each episode dealt with a new problem for the crew to puzzle over. Sometimes it was serious, sometimes it was silly, but the crew (for the most part) remained consistent in their characterization.

It makes sense for Picard to be more serious than the eternal optimism of TNG (especially in this current climate), but while the world may be darker, the characters should not be. 

We love Star Trek because it idealizes humanity, and what we can do if we set aside prejudice and judgment to work towards a better world.  Picard needs to remember that the heroics of TNG were frequently quiet moments of bravery, rather than mindless explosions. They might not be as loud, but they mean more in the long-term.

Join us and get our Star Trek news in your inbox

Molly Harris

Molly Harris is a riddle inside an enigma, wrapped in feminine wiles, and nestled in a soft, human skin suit with a blonde wig on top. She arrived to Chicago from the wild cornfields of Indiana and spends most of her time talking about science fiction and glitter and puns.

[email protected]

Thank you for writing what needed to be said.

lol nostalgia for episodic plots is amusing

just get ready to be let down over and over again, cause this is the format they’re gonna use going forward

or you can embrace the good, and accept that the episodic format is mostly dead for the moment

Everything about felt like bad fan fiction. Picard himself didn’t feel like Picard, it felt like Patrick Stewart using Picard’s name. And so much wasted potential. “Oh my God, Seven just woke up 10,000 Borg drones to wipe out the- oh, all the Romulans openned an air lock and they all got sucked out? The Borg that we’ve seen can operate in space?And who built that ship with massive doors for some reason that they have no security overrides on? And not a single Borg, I don’t know, held on to a railing?

Then there was Picard’s doing that absurd fake french accent in their ‘undercover’ operation that lasted all of twelve minutes. Picard is French. Why was his accent so over the top? Why did he need one? Why would anyone still have a non-English accent when French is supposed to be a mostly dead language by the 25th century?

Did bringing back Hugh have any real purpose? Did killing him?

Why set up the former Tal Shiar agents (and only real characters) living with Picard only to leave them behind? With the dog. Even Arc her took his dog with him.

Why bother killing Soji to set up the whole Twin thing when they could have just stuck with her through the series?

Why have the Soji like android be the villain spotted from ten miles away?

Why write a line as bad as Narissa saying “Did you REALLY think we wouldn’t… insert generic bad guy boast.”

How did Rafi manage to be the only poor person in a Galaxy where money wasn’t a thing anymore?

Why did Picard take a TAXI to see Rafi when A) transporters B) Taxis are already on the decline thanks to Lyft and Uber? Just to show a TNG shuttle so we can say “Hey! That’s a TNG shuttle!”?

Why have an elf warrior- sorry, Romulan warrior, with a sword an toted as the best of the best warriors in the galaxy, basically do nothing but stare wide eyed and get left behind?

Bad story, poorly handled characters, poorly handled established universe and the hackiest writing on tv in a long long time.

Do better, Season Two.

Tom Vrang-Bitters

Thanks for a truthful review. This violent, badly-written showneeds to go away forever.

I agree with you. Was so excited for this, and was so disappointing. But what I feel makes it worse was Michelle Hurd’s acting. She is over the top and unbelievable. Needs to go back to acting classes and play Raffi a better way.

Picard is awful. It is not Star Trek. Great article, thank you.

Episode 3 was some of the worst editting in a professionally done series I’ve ever seen. Around the 28 minute mark, the fight scene was…comical. The editting made no sense. Spec ops entering 3-4 guys through same door, one after another getting laid out. Major part of the fight that stood out was the woman romulan (who looks like an average white person with elf ears rather than a romulan), gets rifle butt in the face by the next guy coming through the door. Cut. His rifle disappears and he pulls out a knife after knocking her to the floor. She goes from on the floor in one cut to standing upright in the next cut and lays him out with no explanation of how she got up. Terrible editting, too much emphasis on action and exposition in Star Trek and just overall a horrible series. Star Trek Picard is the death of the franchise for me.

I could not get past the first 20 minutes of Discovery, it was that bad. Truly awful. I endured through all the episodes of Picard. I will not be watching season 2. Horrible, horrible show. Meaningless murders every 20 seconds it seemed. Why bring back Ichep and Hugh, only to kill them off? And I absolutely hated the captain, rafi, and that blonde scientist chick. Shame on everyone who was a part of writing this ilk.

I agree with you. Star Trek Picard is rather disappointing. I was in the middle of reading this but then a bunch of ads just filled up my screen. Not even that much to read here anyway. A picture is worth a thousand words. Making the picture bigger doesn’t make it worth more words. The quality of this article matches the quality of the show it is criticizing.

Star Trek Picard is so unfathomably awful because of the writers and whoever had creative control.

Everything that made Star Trek special was thrown away for whatever it is the writer’s think they’re creating here. It isn’t Star Trek. It isn’t a novelization of Star Trek. It isn’t good storytelling. It is junk TV.

Who allowed this and Discovery to be done to the Star Trek franchise? Was it a room full of fraternity-bro assh**les in suits with big egos and undeserving confidence? Feels like it.

SmarterThanYou

You. You “allowed” this by watching it. By paying for it. If truly no one had watched it or paid for it, it would’ve been cancelled. Stop thinking you’re doing others a “service” to watch TV “FOR THEM”. JUST DONT WATCH IT. then eventually it will go away, just like the “woke” BS did.

I have a sneaking feeling the writers of the show did not watch Voyager before starting on this project. If they had, they would not have found a need to rehash in 4 measly episodes was handled brilliantly in 4 seasons, namely the the whole Borg-to-human storyline. And why revisit Picard’s PTSD? Didn’t we resolve that with I, Borg and First Contact? Furthermore, cortical regulators are located above the right eyebrow, not behind the left eyeball. The Borg transwarp conduits were destroyed by Captain Janeway in Endgame, and it certainly does not take 15 minutes to travel 25 light-years in one. Finally, why are all the former drones maimed and handicapped? Wasn’t the Doctor in Voyager able to give Seven an ocular implant? Is that the best they can do with all their 24th-century medical technology? Most egregious of all: they completely ruined Seven. I understand that 20 years have passed since Voyager, but this Seven is a completely different character. A scotch-drinking, vengeful bountyhunter? Really?

Now, on to another problem: the characters. I like that they didn’t simply recycle the old crew, but the character exposition was just terrible. We get a flash-back, and then meet a new character. Another flash-back, and a new character. There was no emotional connection. It also didn’t help that everyone was getting killed off. Dajh had a whole 20 minutes of screentime. Dead. That villain lady. Dead. Maddox. Dead. Hugh. Dead. We meet Dajh’s sister on the planet, the next scene she becomes a murderess, and then is deactivated. And the worst of all: poor Icheb. They take a wonderful character of the older series developed over many episodes only to give him an undignified and pointless death. And for what? To justify Seven vaporizing that woman? It’s lazy writing and disrespectful to the fans.

Next, the tone of the show. As others have said, Star Trek is about optimism. I don’t mind a darker show, but this is just depressing. Ripping out eyeballs, gore, smoking, and pointless cussing is not Star Trek. It’s juvenile.

Lastly, I never sympathized with the android girls. Lal had more depth in one episode than they achieved in 10. They just naively wander about asking “Am I real”, pulling fits, and seem to know things that they cannot possibly know (“Data loved you”).

ALEXANDER FIELDS

You hit on most of the points that put this show in the trash bin, but there was one more which irked me to no end. Star Trek takes place in a post-scarcity future where money has ceased being useful to those in the Federation. This is mentioned over and over again in TNG. It was what Gene Rodenberry originally envisioned for Star Trek.

But suddenly in Picard everything just looks like 21st century capitalism again??? We have haves and have-nots in a world where machines can literally rearrange matter into any meal you can think of??? That shit is simply unbelievable and a huge step backwards.

Sad, Patrick is such a brilliant actor and the plot could have been so much better. Sorry to oofend but Agnes makes me ill, shocker!

‘Offend’

Matthew McCarthy

It just suuuuuuuuucks so much and then OH! theres’s season 2 and oh it suuuuuuucks too

So far Season 2 is actually worse for many reasons, but not least of which is destroying the legacy of one of Trek’s most interesting characters, Q. But I propose a solution: The Dallas solution. It’s lame, it’s the lamest narrative solution next to Deus Ex Machina, but for a lame show it could work. It refers to the way the the writers of the 9th season of the show Dallas brought back a character by having someone wake up from a dream, thereby resetting the show. Picard has a brain disorder, that has been established for a long time, This could all be going on inside his mind, he could come to in a hospital or something, thereby nullifying the entire bucket of dreck that is Picard.

Deathslayer

So They took everyyhing Star Trek out of Star Trek. I have seen more sci-fi in a big bang episode. Did they run out of budget so much they had to move the shoot to LA, from Outer Space? Why not have the episode be in the studio back lot? Why didn’t Q meet up with Picard at the craft table and fight him over a shrimp. I mean just have the show shot in a empty cubicle and it would be more exciting. Bizarre, writing is worse then bad. You now become a borg when some eye liner is put on your face? Trade a borg laser for a machine gun scope Yikes, man, the props dept was like our budget is…. What 100$? Sadness.

I see what the writers tried to do I just don’t care. We didn’t ask for 21st century rhetoric or even revisiting Kirk era rehash, what did they really discover by the episodes end? Killer whales have returned, they can now bridge realities. Oh and Q dies….. Good riddance should have taken the whole damn franchise with him!

Picard was so bad. I paid for two episodes from amazon. It cost me $4. I had to turn the second one off after laughing at the abysmal script. I want my $4 back. I felt like the people who wrote this didn’t even like or watch Star Trek. Most of the actors were terrible at acting, with the exception of Patrick Stewart who apparently was told to walk around looking vaguely sick to his stomach in every scene. And the whole propagandistic “let’s sell everyone on the beauty of artificial humans” was totally unappealing.

it’s a choppy awful mess that focused so briefly on anything in it that I got mental whiplash from the constant abrupt changes.

the whole thing reminds me of a random story generator fleshed out by bad writers. Start with a set of lists: characters, trek themes (even bad ones that have perpetuated like Brent Spiner playing all Soongs) , roll up a scene create a random problem and play it out. Themes are created: unresolved goals but they’re often unrelated to each other. What you end up with is fast paced scenes full of nostalgia with very little depth and logic. It’s just a fireworks show that blinds the viewer to the fact it doesn’t make sense, the pace, shallow depth and often black and white morality makes it cartoonish.

The CGI was like a cartoon, star trek ships have never seemed big or massive since The Motion Picture and perhaps the first few films and I wasn’t keen on the LGBT warp trail in the credits.

Leave a Comment Cancel Reply

Is ‘Star Trek: Discovery’ the most popular spinoff of all time?

Is ‘Star Trek 4’ ever going to get out of development hell?

Is J. J. Abrams really creating a ‘Star Trek’ prequel?

5 Great Lessons Star Trek: Discovery Learned From Picard Season 3

WARNING: Contains SPOILERS for Star Trek: Discovery season 5.

• Star Trek: Discovery season 5 takes a fun turn with space exploration, embracing the adventurous nature of Star Trek.
• Building on TNG and DS9, season 5 introduces new characters like Captain Rayner to shake things up.
• Discovery season 5 offers compelling villains like Moll and L'ak, adding mystery and tension to the galactic treasure hunt.

Star Trek: Discovery's fifth and final season learned all the right lessons from Star Trek: Picard season 3. Following the adventures of the USS Discovery and Captain Michael Burnham (Sonequa Martin-Green), Discovery has been many things throughout its four seasons. After the titular ship jumped to the 32nd century at the end of Discovery season 2, the show began exploring the Federation of the far future. While Discovery has often focused on dark and emotional storytelling, season 5 finally embraces the fun of space exploration. Between the latter half of Discovery season 4 and the first few episodes of season 5, the show has finally found a formula that really works.

Star Trek: Picard also told darker stories in its first two seasons, but Picard season 3 leaned more into nostalgia and fun. Admiral Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart) reunited with his Star Trek: The Next Generation crew for one last galaxy-saving adventure that involved big revelations and connections to the past. Picard season 3 became a resounding success , and many fans have been clamoring for the proposed spinoff, Star Trek: Legacy , ever since. Star Trek: Discovery season 5 seems to have learned a thing or two from Picard's success, and is shaping up to be the best season of the show thus far.

Star Trek: Discovery Season 5 Returning Cast & New Character Guide

Star trek: discovery season 5 builds on star trek's long history, both discovery season 5 & picard season 3 continued stories that began on tng..

The Star Trek franchise has been captivating audiences since the premiere of Star Trek: The Original Series in 1966, and with that comes a lot of history and lore. Star Trek: Discovery has always been connected to TOS , but Discovery season 5 has been building more directly on stories that were established in Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine . The main plot line of Discovery season 5 serves as a direct follow-up to TNG season 6, episode 20, "The Chase," and has sent Captain Burnham and the USS Discovery on a galactic treasure hunt.

Star Trek : Discovery's 32nd century finally feels more connected to the rest of Star Trek 's timeline.

As Burnham and Discovery search for the ancient and powerful technology of the Progenitors, they also seek to learn more about themselves and answer the biggest questions about life, itself. Discovery 's treasure hunt has already taken them to the planet Trill where Dr. Hugh Culber (Wilson Cruz) participated in a Trill ritual first introduced on DS9 . Aside from obvious connections to DS9 and TNG , Discovery season 5 has also included numerous shout-outs to previously established aliens and planets. Star Trek : Discovery's 32nd century finally feels more connected to the rest of Star Trek 's timeline.

Star Trek: Discovery Season 5 Embraces Nostalgia

Picard season 3 saw more returning characters, but discovery season 5 tells a classic trek story..

Not only has Star Trek: Discovery season 5 been building on established Star Trek history, but it has also embraced the nostalgia many fans have for TNG -era Trek in particular. Discovery season 5 may be set too far in the future to bring back characters like Star Trek: Picard season 3 did, but the show has still managed to feel more like classic Trek . Not only did the Discovery season 5 premiere show a photo of Captain Picard, but the episode also introduced a Soong-type android named Fred (J. Adam Brown), who bore a striking resemblance to Lt. Commander Data (Brent Spiner).

While Star Trek: Discovery season 5 still has many serialized elements, each episode also tells its own story, often taking Burnham and her crew to a new planet. In Discovery season 5, episode 2, "Under the Twin Moons," Captain Burnham and Mr. Saru (Doug Jones) find themselves under attack by automated drones, in a plot taken straight from TNG . Whether or not Discovery will have its own USS Enterprise-D moment like Picard season 3 remains to be seen, but the season has certainly leaned into its connections to the past more than any previous seasons.

Many of the new characters, like the android Fred and Captain Rayner (Callum Keith Rennie), wouldn't feel out of place on TNG or DS9.

Star Trek: Discovery Season 5 Introduces New Characters To Shake Things Up

Captain liam shaw & captain rayner have a lot in common..

Much like Star Trek: Picard season 3 introduced Captain Liam Shaw (Todd Stashwick) to challenge Admiral Picard and Commander William Riker (Jonathan Frakes), Star Trek: Discovery season 5 introduced Callum Keith Rennie's Captain Rayner to test the patience of Captain Burnham and Discovery's crew. After Rayner makes a bad call on Q'Mau in the season premiere, he gets demoted to Commander, and Burnham recruits him to be the USS Discovery's First Officer. When Lt. Sylvia Tilly (Mary Wiseman) pushes Rayner to get to know the crew, he pushes back, pointing out that he has more important things to worry about.

Like Shaw, Rayner has a gruff personality that doesn't quite gel with the rest of the USS Discovery crew.

When Michael first asks Rayner to be her Number One, she acknowledges that she needs someone who will sometimes challenge her. This will likely come up in the episodes to come, as Discovery gets closer and closer to the Progenitors' treasure. Rayner has already hinted that he has a past with couriers Moll (Eve Harlow) and L'ak (Elias Toufexis), and his main goal is to find them and stop whatever it is they're planning. Over the course of Star Trek: Picard season 3, Captain Shaw became a fan favorite as more was revealed about his backstory, and it seems likely that Rayner will get similar results.

Why I'm On Rayner's Side In Star Trek: Discovery Season 5

Star trek: discovery season 5 has compelling villains, moll & l'ak may not be as menacing as vadic, but they all have compelling backstories..

Star Trek: Picard season 3 introduced one of Star Trek's best new villains in Amanda Plummer's Vadic, a Changeling with a grudge against the Federation. While much about Moll and L'ak remains a mystery at this point, the hints that have been dropped about them are interesting and suggest they have a compelling backstory. Rayner seems to know more about them than he's letting on, and Cleveland Booker (David Ajala) has a connection with Moll that has yet to be explored. Moll and L'ak are Star Trek's version of Bonnie and Clyde, but it's possible an even bigger bad hired them to steal the Progenitor technology.

It's possible a more powerful threat could emerge before Star Trek : Discovery season 5 comes to an end.

With all the secrecy surrounding L'ak in particular, whose species is not even known, it's possible he could have connections to Star Trek's past that have not yet been revealed. Moll and L'ak may not have quite the menace of Vadic, but both villains have advanced technology and absolutely no interest in working with the Federation. The Borg Queen (Alice Krige) also made a return in Star Trek: Picard season 3 as the one pulling the strings, and with technology as seismic as the Progenitors' treasure, it's possible a more powerful threat could emerge before Star Trek : Discovery season 5 comes to an end.

Star Trek: Discovery Season 5 Is Fun

Picard season 3 & discovery season 5 both remembered that star trek should be fun..

And last, but certainly not least, Star Trek: Discovery season 5 is simply more fun than any previous season. The latter half of Discovery season 4 showed hints of this, but season 5 has embraced the adventurous nature of exploration. With desert bike chases and automated weapons and invisible aliens, each episode of Discovery season 5 so far has had a least one big, high-energy action sequence. Like Star Trek: Picard season 3, Discovery season 5 has also found time for humor and laughter shared among friends even when the stakes are high.

It's unfortunate Star Trek: Discovery is coming to an end so soon after it found a winning formula, but at least the show will end on a high note.

Captain Burnham and the Discovery crew have been through a lot since season 1, and Star Trek: Discovery season 5 is finally letting them have fun. They may have to keep the Progenitors' technology out of the wrong hands, but they still get to embark on a massive treasure hunt centuries in the making. Saru has found love with Ni'Var President T'Rina (Tara Rosling), Commander Paul Stamets (Anthony Rapp) is rediscovering his love of science, and even Tilly has gotten back in on the fun of it all. It's unfortunate Star Trek: Discovery is coming to an end so soon after it found a winning formula, but at least the show will end on a high note.

New episodes of Star Trek: Discovery stream Thursdays on Paramount+.

Star Trek: Discovery

Cast Blu del Barrio, Oded Fehr, Anthony Rapp, Sonequa Martin-Green, Doug Jones, Wilson Cruz, Eve Harlow, Mary Wiseman, Callum Keith Rennie

Release Date September 24, 2017

Writers Alex Kurtzman

Directors Jonathan Frakes, Olatunde Osunsanmi

Showrunner Alex Kurtzman

Where To Watch Paramount+

Star Trek: Picard

Cast Orla Brady, Michael Dorn, LeVar Burton, Brent Spiner, Jonathan Frakes, Jeri Ryan, Patrick Stewart, Alison Pill, Isa Briones, Evan Evagora, Marina Sirtis, Amanda Plummer, Whoopi Goldberg, Gates McFadden, Todd Stashwick, Santiago Cabrera, Michelle Hurd, John de Lancie, Ed Speleers

Release Date January 23, 2020

Writers Akiva Goldsman, Terry Matalas, Michael Chabon

Directors Terry Matalas, Jonathan Frakes

Showrunner Akiva Goldsman, Terry Matalas, Michael Chabon

'Star Trek: Picard' Season 3 Introduces Amanda Plummer as the Ultimate Villain

Plummer is set to play the new big bad for the show's final season, alongside returning adversaries Lore and Moriarty.

In the new trailer for Star Trek: Picard Season 3 we got our first official look at the show's new villain. Earlier this year, executive producer Alex Kurtzman teased that she would be "amazing," and now from the new footage shared at New York Comic Con, we can safely say that this new character is certainly a worthy adversary for the returning Next Generation crew.

Introduced in the trailer as well as a new image is Vadic, played by Tony Award winner Amanda Plummer whom audiences may recognize from her roles in Pulp Fiction , The Hunger Games: Catching Fire , and more. The trailer introduces Vadic as an alien captain and a formidable opponent hellbent on the complete and utter destruction of Starfleet, and quite possibly humanity. We get a good look at her ship, the Shrike, in the new footage, and it's definitely reminiscent of Nero's ( Eric Bana ) ship in the 2009 Kelvin-verse Star Trek movie. However, Vadic is certainly not Romulan.

In the trailer, Vadic promises to scorch the earth beneath Picard's feet in her quest for vengeance — against whom it is unclear, but it's likely that she's at the heart of the conflict that leads to Beverly Crusher's distress signal. Former ship's counselor, Deanna Troi senses an "all-consuming darkness" in their new enemy with her empathic abilities, as the trailer showcases an all-out showdown against the bloodthirsty Vadic.

RELATED: New ‘Star Trek: Picard’ Season 3 Trailer Reveals the Return of Moriaty and Lore

Also introduced in the new trailer, alongside the returning crew members and their newest enemy, are returning Next Generation adversaries Lore and Moriarty. Brent Spiner has played a number of characters throughout the history of Star Trek , reprising the beloved android Data in Season 1 of Picard , and Soong-dynasty ancestor Adam Soong in Season 2. Fans have been wondering who Spiner will play this season as Data was given a permanent death in Season 1, and the trailer reveals his long-awaited return as Lore. Moriarty is even more of a surprise to viewers as a completely unexpected return from Daniel Davis . Davis originally played the classic Sherlock Holmes character Moriarty in a holodeck program frequented by Data and Geordi. On Next Generation , the hologram eventually gained sentience and was allowed to leave the Enterprise.

In addition to Plummer, Spiner, and Davis, Season 3 of Star Trek: Picard will feature Patrick Stewart, Gates McFadden, Jonathan Frakes, LeVar Burton, Michael Dorn, Marina Sirtis, Jeri Ryan, Michelle Hurd, and newcomers Mica Burton and Ashlei Sharpe Chestnut. The third and final season arrives on Paramount+ on February 16, 2023. In the meantime, you can watch the new trailer down below.

For more NYCC news check out these stories:

• Mike Flanagan’s ‘The Midnight Club’ Beats the Record for Most Jumpscares In a Single TV Episode
• ‘Vampire Academy’s Julie Plec Teases Heartbreak, Angst, and More at NYCC Fan Event | Recap
• 'The Super Mario Bros. Movie': Jack Black Teases the Possibility of Bowser Breaking Into Song
• 'Cobra Kai's Martin Kove Launches New Comic Book 'Prodigal Son' at NYCC [Exclusive]
• 'Halloween Ends': NYCC Spotlights Michael Myers Last Slash on Limited Edition Poster

• April 19, 2024 | Exclusive First Look At Artwork From ‘Star Trek: Celebrations’ – IDW’s One Shot Comic For Pride Month
• April 19, 2024 | Podcast: All Access Faces The Strange On ‘Star Trek: Discovery’
• April 18, 2024 | Lost Original USS Enterprise Model From ‘Star Trek’ Returned To Gene Roddenberry’s Son
• April 18, 2024 | Recap/Review: ‘Star Trek: Discovery’ Gets The Timing Right In “Face The Strange”
• April 17, 2024 | Watch: Things Get “Odd” In ‘Star Trek: Discovery’ Trailer And Clip From “Face The Strange”

Watch: Did This Moment On ‘The View’ Just Accidentally Hint Whoopi Goldberg Is In The Next Star Trek Movie?

| April 16, 2024 | By: Anthony Pascale 41 comments so far

Last week, Paramount Pictures officially confirmed it is developing a new “origin story” Star Trek feature film for its 2025/2026 release slate. Little is known about what this movie is about or who’s in it, but an unusual exchange on The View may offer a clue.

“What’s happening right now?”

The segment in question is actually from a couple of weeks ago, when Zoe Saldaña was doing publicity for her new movie Absence of Eden . In another interview, the actress had talked about how she was eager to return to play Uhura in a fourth Kelvin-era movie, although she didn’t have any concrete details about how or when that would happen. When The View co-host Alyssa Farah Griffin brought up Star Trek, Saldaña said something similar and noted Paramount had just hired another screenwriter to pen “a fourth script.”

Just after the subject of another Star Trek movie in the works was raised, Saldaña asked Whoopi Goldberg “Are you excited?” Goldberg, who played Guinan on Star Trek: The Next Generation (and later on Picard ), joked “maybe,” and then co-host Joy Behar jumped into the conversation. That’s where things got a bit confusing, as she seemed to be hinting that she’d already heard about some kind of role for Goldberg. Here is the exchange:

Saldaña: Are you excited? Goldberg: Maybe, just a little. Behar: Don’t tip your hand yet. Goldberg: What now? Behar: Don’t tip your hand yet. Don’t tell them you got the job yet. Goldberg: Okay. Behar: Did you get the job? Saldaña: For Star Trek? Oh my god! Goldberg: What is happening right now?… I have no other work. I’m trying to get home to Sardinia. Griffin: Do you have it or don’t you? Goldberg: I don’t know.

You can watch the full conversation in the video below (starting at 8:35).

Whoopi in new Trek?

It is not entirely clear what was going on here, and it may be nothing. But it does seem that Behar was hinting that her Oscar-winning co-host was being considered for a role in a Star Trek movie, presumably as Guinan. The project most likely to be casting roles already would not be the “Star Trek 4” sequel to Star Trek Beyond, as that isn’t expected to arrive until 2027 at the earliest and is (as noted by Saldaña) going through yet another rewrite. The more likely possibility is the origin movie, which is reported to be going into production later this year. The film is said to have a script already, with a story set decades before the 2009 Star Trek film (set in the mid-23rd century). El-Aurians like Guinan are very long-lived and Next Generation and Picard lore establish that Guinan was present on Earth in the past and ran a bar in Los Angeles during the early 21st century.

Whoopi Goldberg as Guinan and Sir Patrick Stewart as Jean-Luc Picard in Star Trek: Picard season 2

That said, this exchange on The View is far from definitive. Perhaps Behar was talking about a role for a different Star Trek project, possibly a streaming movie or one of the Paramount+ series. She also could have been completely mistaken, or could have been confusing one project with another and Goldberg has had no discussions about a return to Trek.  Goldberg did nothing to confirm she’s returning to Star Trek, although if she has signed on (or is in talks) about it, her casting would be a secret she wouldn’t want to divulge in the middle of an interview on The View .

Goldberg has previously appeared as Guinan in two Star Trek feature films: Generations in 1994 and Nemesis in 2002. The new “origin” movie is expected to have a new cast, but it would not be surprising if some legacy characters were included to create continuity, like Leonard Nimoy’s appearance in the 2009 Star Trek movie. So Guinan in “Untitled Star Trek Origin Movie” is entirely plausible.

Whoopi Goldberg as Guinan in Star Trek: Nemesis (2002)

For now, this is just another curiosity about the next Star Trek. What do you make of the exchange? Let us know in the comments.

Could it be this?

Goldberg does have one recent connection to Star Trek: She narrated a recap of the first four seasons of Discovery for a special edition of  The Ready Room . That recap was released on YouTube on March 28, the same day the episode of The View was recorded with Zoe Saldaña. Presumably, Goldberg recorded it much earlier, as work on the Discovery season 5 episodes of The Ready Room started late last year. Behar (not being a big Star Trek fan) could have been conflating things related to Whoopi and Star Trek, and if Whoopi didn’t know what day the segment was coming out, she would have hesitated to clarify.

Find more news and analysis on  upcoming Star Trek feature films .

Related Articles

All Access Star Trek Podcast , Discovery , Lower Decks , Star Trek Origin Movie , Strange New Worlds

Podcast: All Access Faces The Strange On ‘Star Trek: Discovery’

Star Trek Origin Movie , Upcoming movies

Paramount Pictures Officially Confirms Star Trek Origin Movie For Its Upcoming Film Slate

Star Trek: Picard

Watch: Whoopi Goldberg Serves Drinks To The TNG Cast On ‘The View’ + ‘Star Trek: Picard’ Episode 302 Clip

Michelle Hurd Talks Raffi’s Challenges And Working With Whoopi Goldberg In Star Trek: Picard Season 2

I get a sense that this is just awkward poking by Joy, there is not actual secret there.

Yeah, I agree. They’re reading too much into this. Would be fun though!

I take it the same way. At best they were just referencing the narration,

There’s nothing to see here, other than actors pulling each other’s chains. Fun stuff.

I can see her being in either movie. Or both! That would be a cool thread between the movies. One of the few they have left.

Agreed, that would be a neat link.

Star Trek Origins: Guinan

we can finally learn how she met Mark Twain!

There’d better be some graphic hook up scenes if they go there….

Yeah who knows but I would guess if she was in something it would be the prequel movie since (apparently) they are supposed to be making that one soon. That JJ verse movie is never happening lol.

I would love to see Guinan back.

It could also be the rumoured Picard movie.

They could be one and the same. Maybe there’s a time travel story that frames the prequel story again.

Anything is possible at this stage Eric although I got the impression that follow up to Picard would be a TV movie. So little is known about the prequel movie though so it’s certainly possible that there will be some sort of framing story connecting it to some of the legacy characters.

Ugh I hope not. Picard was already there for First Contact. It would feel so forced for Picard have to go back once again in time to save the federation from never forming.

Be down for that idea too.

That rumored Picard movie got called out as bull s**t quite a while back.

Heya. I’d love to see Guinan back, just not in the Kelvin movies. That is entirely separate for me.

Lol I know how much you hate JJ verse. But no I don’t see that happening anyway because it’s not the same seeing JJ verse Guinan hanging out with new characters.

I want the Prime universe Guinan. Or maybe she goes back in time from the 25th century and ends up in JJ verse in the 23rd century and meet her younger version. That’s not bad. 😁

Yep you know me too well lol. The best thing those movies did is make them separate from Prime and putting ACTUAL Guinan in there decades before the events of 2009 would wreck all that.

I think Guinan in the Kelvin timeline makes a lot of sense, as she’s able to sense changes to the timeline.

THat’s true too but I think this is different. When Yesterday’s Enterprise happened it erased the Prime timeline. Guinan essentially got moved from one timeline to thee next. With Kelvin that is not the case as we can see the Prime timeline continued unaffected post Spock leaving as is evidenced by ST Picard and even Guinan being in it.

Same here, even though arguably, it’s possible her species could navigate separate timelines.

True. I mean if she can project herself in PIC S2 then who knows?

I’ve been saying Guinan will show up this season on Discovery since she narrated that one clip about the history of the series.

That would make more sense to me. They would have to de-age her for a prequel movie, but on Discovery she could appear as she is now.

It would make sense given her history and the El-Aurian species being long lived. I could see her and Pelia both showing up, maybe even holding the final clues.

Trek movie schedule:(revised edition):

S31 P+ – 2024 Origins movie – 2025 Legacy/Picard anniversary movie P+? – 2026 Kelvin ST4 – 2027

could show up in S31 movie as Guinan but they apparently have a super small budget so I don’t see them deaging her so maybe she’s in the supposed PIC movie that Stewart was talking about

Whoopi, she is just amazing. Would love to see Guinan again.

Not a cameo. A good and well deserved story.

Very much YES!!!!

I want more than a cameo too but does she have that kind of time given The View?

I think she will make the time, if invited. She is not only in The View. Every year, she works in several productions on the side.

I always say Whoopi constantly upgraded STNG. Missed opportunities. Having her always so grateful to the franchise, she should be considered to make a bold return.

During Picard Season 2, she was not feeling well, having several health/treatment related issues. I think this is one of the reasons they hired a younger actor.

I saw the video clip and she looks way better now. Even her voice is better, the Discovery clip, so cool to listen to her voice and her humor in the recap.

Maybe one of the future streaming movies they are considering doing could be about Guinan or she could appear in SNW as a kind of foil or pal of Pelia another long living species. Or they are secretly developing a Q vs Guinan movie but that would not appeal to mainstream audiences. That could be the plot of an upcoming streaming movie.

Would truly love to see Guinan back. Didn’t like season 2 of Picard much but Guinan was a big highlight.

Yeah, I thought Ito Aghayere did a fantastic job as Guinan too. That felt like great casting to me. I wouldn’t hate seeing both actors in the role, flashing back and forth in time maybe?

Agreed, if there was anything good out of PIC S2, it was bringing Guinan back. The rest was an absolute mess.

While I’d love to see Whoopi jump back into the role of Guinan in a solid role, I just hope it’s not a Guinan origin story. Part of the character’s appeal is the mystery surrounding her gifts (that presumably most or all El-Aurians share) and exactly how old she is.

I don’t think it could be could it? The origin movie is supposed to take place decades before ST 2009 and Guinan is way older than that

If it’s anything, I bet it’s the Picard Streaming Movie project. We’ll see. Not much here to count on anything other than Whoopi’s ongoing involvement in Trek, and I suppose that’s a good thing.

Is there actually a Picard Streaming Movie project, though?

That’s a pretty liberal reading of this exchange to leap to the conclusion that Goldberg is being considered for a role in a movie where a new writer had just been hired.

Fandom is busy filling in the production schedules (scroll this thread). If we roll into the third quarter without so much as a peep about progress on any of these proposed productions, guess what? You all have been played. Again.

Screen Rant

10 awesome star trek things lower decks brought back that we love.

Lower Decks is crammed full of callbacks to Star Trek's rich past and here's a selection of awesome things that the show has brought back.

• Star Trek: Lower Decks celebrates the TNG era with beloved characters and fun interactions like Riker on the USS Titan.
• The show brings back legacy elements like Voyager, Cetacean Ops, and Holodeck episodes with nostalgic flair.
• Lower Decks enhances the Trek universe by reviving characters from DS9, showcasing new storyline updates with humor.

Every episode of Star Trek: Lower Decks is packed full of callbacks and references that have brought back many beloved elements of the Star Trek franchise. Inspired by the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Lower Decks", Mike McMahan's animated comedy is a love letter to the TNG era . Following the adventures of the USS Cerritos and focusing on the starship's lower decks characters like Ensign Brad Boimler (Jack Quaid) and Beckett Mariner (Tawny Newsome), it provided a fresh perspective on the wider Star Trek universe.

With Star Trek: Lower Decks season 5 set to be the show's finale, it's a good time to reflect upon the many additions it made to the Star Trek canon. If it weren't for Lower Decks , fans wouldn't have received updates on beloved characters from Star Trek: Voyager and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine . Lower Decks has also brought back some classic Star Trek aliens like the Ferengi and the Orions, and has expanded Starfleet's understanding of their culture, and updated their standing in relation to the Federation.

Every Star Trek Legacy Character Guest Star On Lower Decks

10 star trek: lower decks brought back tng’s 24th century era, lower decks bridges the gap between nemesis and star trek: picard..

The 24th century era of Star Trek: The Next Generation and beyond is a golden age for the franchise . However, with nearly 20 years between the end of Star Trek: Nemesis and the modern era, live action Trek could never hope to dive back into the TNG era. However, animated shows like Star Trek: Lower Decks could bring back the TNG era and have its characters interact with some big names and deep-cut characters like Captain Sonya Gomez (Lycia Naff) . Despite this, Lower Decks never felt like it was indulging in empty nostalgia or fan service.

These nods to legacy characters gave a sense of a sprawling fictional universe, with bigger players in the Star Trek universe inspiring the Lower Deckers on their own smaller-scale missions.

Instead, Star Trek: Lower Decks continued the story of Starfleet and the Federation in the years after the final Star Trek: The Next Generation movie . It updated viewers on Admiral Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart) and his secret financial support for the Archaeologist's Guild, and even briefly revealed what Captain Morgan Bateson (Kelsey Grammer) was up to after he and his crew ended up in the 24th century. These nods to legacy characters gave a sense of a sprawling fictional universe, with bigger players in the Star Trek universe inspiring the Lower Deckers on their own smaller-scale missions.

9 Star Trek: Lower Decks Brought Back Captain Riker, Counselor Troi & USS TItan

"let's see how these pakleds do with their aft hanging out".

While Star Trek: Picard brought back Captain William T. Riker (Jonathan Frakes) first, audiences got to see the USS Titan's commanding officer in his pomp during Star Trek: Lower Decks . The Lower Decks season 1 finale brought back Riker and Counselor Deanna Troi-Riker (Marina Sirtis) to help the USS Cerritos battle the Pakleds. Boimler then got a temporary posting to the Titan, serving under Riker as they got into repeated skirmishes with the Pakleds in Lower Decks season 2, episode 2, "Kayshon, His Eyes Open" .

Captain Riker's ship was succeeded by the USS Titan-A in Star Trek: Picard season 3, which was eventually refitted and renamed the USS Enterprise-G.

Hilariously, Riker's doppelgänger in Star Trek: The Next Generation gave the Titan captain the experience needed to handle the two Boimlers created by the transporter accident on Karzill IV. Riker also reflected on missing the day-to-day science and exploration of his time aboard the USS Enterprise-D, and encouraged Boimler to " enjoy it while you have it ". Star Trek: Lower Decks ' Riker episodes were great fun, and finally gave fans a chance to see how TNG 's perennial Number One handled the center seat .

Riker Is A Great Star Trek Captain, But Not In This TNG Episode

8 star trek: lower decks brought back uss voyager, "it's voyager, **** got freaky".

Star Trek: Lower Decks season 4 brought back the USS Voyager for one final flight, this time as a museum which exhibited many of the stranger things encountered by Captain Kathryn Janeway (Kate Mulgrew) and her crew. In typical Lower Decks fashion, the Voyager mission went wildly out of control, as members of the Cerritos crew got "Tuvixed". Aboard the USS Voyager, Boimler and Mariner faced off against Star Trek: Voyager 's multiple holodeck villains after they accidentally resurrected the macroviruses .

Robert Duncan McNeill reprised the role of Star Trek: Voyager 's Lt. Tom Paris in the season 2 episode "We'll Always Have Tom Paris".

Star Trek: Lower Decks season 4, episode 1, "Twovix" was an irreverent celebration of Voyager's Delta Quadrant mission . Full of nods to some of Star Trek: Voyager 's wilder episodes, "Twovix" repositioned the USS Voyager as a starship of historical importance, regardless of how " freaky " things may have got . The final scene in which Voyager is visited by Federation citizens was a great way to communicate how important Janeway's mission was to enhancing the 24th century's knowledge of the Delta Quadrant.

7 Star Trek: Lower Decks Brought Back Cetacean Ops

"they like you very much, but they are not the hell your whales.".

Cetacean ops had only ever been briefly mentioned in Star Trek: The Next Generation , but it took on a life of its own following the publication of the 1996 reference book Star Trek: The Next Generation USS Enterprise NCC-1701-D Blueprints . That book revealed that on Deck 13 and 14, the Enterprise had cetacean ops facilities, including a navigation lab and lifeboats. Cetacean ops was staffed by dolphins and whales that helped with the starship Enterprise's navigation . Dolphins have a natural ability to navigate in three dimensions, which is what made them such an important addition to the crew of the Enterprise.

Cetacean ops was first mentioned in Star Trek: The Next Generation season 3, episode 15, "Yesterday's Enterprise".

After living in the imagination of Star Trek: The Next Generation fans for years, cetacean ops appeared in multiple episodes of Star Trek: Lower Decks , staffed by Lieutenants Kimolou and Matt, two beluga whales . Cetacean ops is something that felt naturally suited to animated Star Trek , not least because the Star Trek: The Next Generation Technical Manual referenced the Japanese OVA anime Gunbuster in its description of the facility. It also continues Star Trek 's important connection with whales , first established in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home .

Star Trek: TNG's Enterprise Had Dolphin & Whale Crewmembers

6 star trek: lower decks brought back tng movies’ argo & captain’s yacht, "i will always be puzzled by the human predilection for piloting vehicles at unsafe velocities.".

The Star Trek: The Next Generation movies featured two brand-new Starfleet vehicles; the Argo ground vehicle from Star Trek: Nemesis , and the Captain's yacht from Star Trek: Insurrection . The Argo was deployed to desert expanses like the surface of Kolarus III, where Captain Picard, Lt. Commander Data (Brent Spiner), and Lt. Commander Worf (Michael Dorn) discovered the head of B-12. Mariner used the Argo in Star Trek: Lower Decks ' season 1 premiere, "Second Contact", to deliver supplies to the Galadornian farmers . Although the Argo in Nemesis felt like an indulgence for car enthusiast Patrick Stewart, Lower Decks used it as a useful vehicle in Starfleet's inventory.

Patrick Stewart revealed on The Late Late Show With James Corden that he has a collection of classic cars including a McLaren 650S, Porsche Panamera and Porsche 911.

The Captain's yacht from Star Trek: Insurrection , named the Cousteau, was larger than a shuttle craft, and was classed as a large support vehicle. The crew of the USS Enterprise-E used the Cousteau to travel to Ba'ku during their insurrection against Starfleet. Star Trek: Lower Decks ' own insurrection used the USS Cerritos' captain's yacht to take on Nick Locarno (Robert Duncan McNeill) and his crew of renegade officers in the season 4 finale. Lower Decks gets a lot of use out of its captain's yacht, as it has appeared in multiple episodes between seasons 1 to 4 .

5 Star Trek: Lower Decks Brought Back Jeffrey Combs

"does co-conspirating mean nothing anymore".

Prolific Star Trek villain actor Jeffrey Combs added a tenth character to his resume by playing AGIMUS in Star Trek: Lower Decks . AGIMUS was a megalomaniacal computer that had subjugated a planet in the 2280s. A century later, AGIMUS was disconnected and bound for the Daystrom Institute, in the custody of Boimler and Mariner. It was a great role in the history of great Jeffrey Combs' Star Trek roles , and he brilliantly bouced off Jack Quaid's Boimler. After being imprisoned at the Daystrom Institute, AGIMUS formed an alliance with the wayward Exocomp, Peanut Hamper (Kether Donohue).

The Exocomps were service robots that gained sentience, first introduced in Star Trek: The Next Generation season 6, episode 9, "The Quality of Life".

As with many of Jeffrey Combs' Star Trek villains, AGIMUS had a redemptive arc in Star Trek: Lower Decks season 4. Seemingly betrayed by Peanut Hamper, AGIMUS learned the value of friendship over planetary domination, and gave up on his pursuit of conquest, freeing Boimler and Lt. D'Vana Tendi (Noël Wells) from his clutches. AGIMUS also gave Boimler vital intelligence on Nick Locarno's mystery ship, setting up the Lower Decks season 4 finale .

Every Star Trek Species Played By Jeffrey Combs

4 star trek: lower decks brought back the holodeck episode, "i was in the holodeck trying to find meaning in the randomness of death...".

Star Trek: Lower Decks season 1, episode 9, "Crisis Point" instantly went down in history as one of Star Trek 's greatest holodeck episodes . An extended riff on the first three Star Trek: The Original Series movies, "Crisis Point" was a deeply meta story about Mariner writing an epic holodeck "movie" for her and the Lower Deckers to participate in. The sequel, "Crisis Point II: Paradoxicus" upped the stakes further, with multiple nods to the derided Star Trek V: The Final Frontier , and a guest appearance by George Takei as Captain Hikaru Sulu.

Modern Star Trek hasn't explored the holodeck too much, aside from Star Trek: Picard season 3's rather unimaginative Ten Forward simulation...

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Star Trek: Lower Decks gravitated to the weirdness of the holodeck as a concept. From the ludicrous Mark Twain subplot to the violent and outright filthy holodeck simulations enjoyed by Dr. T'Ana (Gillian Vigman) and Lt. Shaxs (Fred Tatasciore), Lower Decks really grasps the infinite possibilities for weird wish fulfillment . Modern Star Trek hasn't explored the holodeck too much, aside from Star Trek: Picard season 3's rather unimaginative Ten Forward simulation, but at least there's one starship that continues to demonstrate the holodeck's full potential.

3 Star Trek: Lower Decks Brought Back Zefram Cochrane

"alright, buckos, prepare for your trek amongst the stars".

Star Trek: Lower Decks brought back Zefram Cochrane (James Cromwell) by revealing the monument first hinted at by Star Trek: First Contact . The inventor of Star Trek 's warp travel is a historic figure who is celebrated with a sprawling theme park based in Bozeman, Montana, where the first warp flight took place. In Lower Decks ' season 3 opener, "Grounded", Boimler, Mariner, Tendi and Rutherford visited Historical Bozeman to commander the replica Phoenix for a trip into space, accidentally bringing along a tourist for the ride.

Among its attractions, Historical Bozeman featured the First Contact Fun Zone, where kids could play on a replica of the Vulcan ship, T'Plana-Hath complete with swings and a slide.

1996's Star Trek: First Contact marked the franchise's 30th anniversary by presenting its origin story, and emphasizing the vital importance of Zefram Cochrane's first warp flight. By depicting Historical Bozeman in Star Trek: Lower Decks , Chris Klua, the writer of "Grounded" gave a tangible sense of Cochrane's impact on 24th century tourism . It's just one of many ways that Lower Decks has greatly expanded the franchise by focusing on banal and minute details that make the Star Trek universe richer.

Star Trek’s Origin Movie Could Be The Second To Break Tradition

2 star trek: lower decks brought back ds9, kira, quark, grand nagus rom & leeta, "tacky cardassian fascist eyesore.".

While Star Trek: Deep Space Nine fans still wait patiently for a comeback series or movie, Star Trek: Lower Decks has been on hand to make that wait less painful. In Lower Decks season 3, episode 6, "Hear All, Trust Nothing", the USS Cerritos docked at Deep Space Nine for trade negotiations with the Karemma, aided by Colonel Kira Nerys (Nana Visitor). It was a joyous episode that updated DS9 fans on what had happened to the station after the finale. Quark (Armin Shimerman) had cashed in on DS9's vital importance during Star Trek 's Dominion War , turning the station into a bustling tourist attraction.

Star Trek: Lower Decks also revealed that there are Sisko "truthers" who believe that Deep Space Nine's captain didn't ascend to the Celestial Temple, but is in hiding to avoid prosecution for war crimes.

Star Trek: Lower Decks season 4, episode 6, "Parth Ferengi's Heart Place" brought back Grand Nagus Rom (Max Grodenchik) and his wife Leeta (Chase Masterson). While ostensibly a Ferengi comedy episode, "Parth Ferengi's Heart Place" was a hugely important moment in Star Trek canon, as it depicted the Ferengi negotiating to become Federation members. In lieu of a proper Star Trek: Deep Space Nine revival, Lower Decks ' carefully considered updates on these beloved DS9 characters prove that they've not been forgotten by the wider franchise.

1 Star Trek: Lower Decks Brought Back Animated Star Trek

"why does everything feel… two-dimensional".

As Star Trek: Lower Decks ends with season 5 , it's worth reflecting on how it brought back Star Trek in a huge way. While Gene Roddenberry disowned Star Trek: The Animated Series , there's no denying that it capitalized on the bigger creative possibilites offered by animation. Lower Decks is the natural successor to Star Trek: TAS , and it was a massive improvement that pushed the franchise into brand-new territory . Not only was Lower Decks the most overtly comic of Star Trek shows, it could create some truly alien creations that live-action Trek would struggle to realize.

Multiple species from Star Trek: The Animated Series have featured in Star Trek: Lower Decks including the Caitians, Edosians, and Kukulkans.

It's thanks to Star Trek: Lower Decks that the reputation of animated Trek has been greatly improved following Roddenberry's disdain for Star Trek: TAS . Star Trek: Strange New Worlds ' crossover episode proved once and for all that animation is just a different format for storytelling. Animation also allows Star Trek to bring back characters like Captain Riker or Lt. Tom Paris as if only a year or two had passed since their last appearance, rather than decades. All of these characters, be they from Star Trek: Lower Decks or Strange New Worlds or Star Trek: Prodigy can co-exist, making the franchise a far richer experience for everyone.

All episodes of Star Trek: Lower Decks are available to stream on Paramount+.

Star Trek: Lower Decks

*Availability in US

Not available

"Star Trek: Lower Decks" focuses on the support crew serving on one of Starfleet's least important ships, the USS Cerritos, in 2380. Ensigns Mariner, Boimler, Rutherford and Tendi must keep up with their duties and their social lives, often while the ship is being rocked by a multitude of sci-fi anomalies. The ship's bridge crew includes Captain Carol Freeman, Commander Jack Ransom, Lieutenant Shaxs and Doctor T'Ana. This is the second animated spin-off in the franchise after 1973-74's "Star Trek: The Animated Series," but has a decidedly more adult tone and humor.