Bought Picard season 3 DVD. Watching the first episode, I realised I’d seen it before, when I watched the first few eps on the plane coming back from Japan last year. Seems like a pretty solid final season, bringing back all the old crew. Can’t wait to finish what I started on that flight, now (just) over a year ago.
Watched another ep of Picard. This third ep, called Eighteen Seconds, was pretty good. The eighteen seconds refers to an incident Riker tells Jean Luc about when his son was born and there were complications, and the eighteen seconds it took for him to get to the medical ward where he was. The son was okay, but we learn later that at some point he died. And Picard gets his own eighteen second moment when he thinks his (newly discovered) son is in danger. It’s so great that, so many years after the end of The Next Generation (in my opinion the best of the Treks) we’re back here for more.
Watched another ep of Picard. This was the fourth one, titled No Win Scenario. Picard and the crew were trapped inside a nebula’s gravity well and the focus of the ep was in trying to get out of it. They eventually pulled the old we’ll sail out of here on the energy wave of the nebula’s birth creature’s contraction waves scenario, as featured in other TNG eps. It really was a bit of a ship in a bottle episode. This time it didn’t feature the Worf/Rafaella storyline, just focused on Picard and the crew of the Titan in the nebula. I didn’t mind it because I’m not a big fan of the Worf/Rafaella storyline. So much of it just doesn’t add up for me. As for the ‘A’ story, I kept wondering why Bev Crusher looks different as an older woman here to what she did in the TNG final All Good Things. I know a lot of it’s down to prosthetics, but I actually like the way she looked, the way she aged, in that finale than here. I suspect there’s been some ‘work’ done.
Watched the sixth episode of Picard, called The Bounty. Riker, Worf and Raffaela infiltrate the Daystrom Array to find the secret weapon the Changelings stole, and encounter…Data in stasis. Before this, Riker eyeballs the Genesis Device (from Wrath of Khan) and Worf gets surprised by a Tribble in a jar that has been genetically modified to act and look like some kind of Alien facehugger. When he’s revived, Data glitches, going into various other personalities, including Lore. Brent Spiner’s acting here is brilliant. He contorts his face into Lore, and you know it without him even needing to say it. Meanwhile Picard and the rest of the crew visit Geordie at a shipyard to enlist his help. It’s a kind of graveyard for famous ships, including various Enterprises, the Voyager, and even the Bounty from ST4. This provides a plot point when Picard’s son, Jack, with the help of Geordie’s two daughters, steals the Bounty’s invisibility cloak. It’s definitely ramping up. The cliffhanger features an appearance from Deanna Troi, so it seems the gang’s now all here.
Watched a couple more eps of Picard season three. These were Dominion and Surrender, the final fourth and third eps. They were very talky with a lot less action than usual. The MA Vadek gets a nice line as she’s ejected into space and about to die: ‘Fucking solids!’ she mutters. She was an otherwise annoyingly gloaty antagonist throughout the entire show. This sets us up for a nice ‘the gang’s back together’ scene with all the TNG principals gathered in the planning room deciding what to do next. What exactly is gonna go down on Frontier Day? The final scene of Surrender has Jack in a therapy session with Troi who is trying to get Jack to open the mysterious and probably evil red door he keeps seeing in his visions. What’s behind it? I can only think of the most evil thing I’ve ever seen on ST:TNG – Lwoxana Troi!
I watched the second last episode of Picard season three, titled Vox. So what’s behind the evil red door Jack sees in his visions? It turns out it’s Locutus. Enter the Borg! By this point the original Next Gen crew have commandeered the old Enterprise D because it’s ‘analogue’ and not tied to the Borg collective’s connections. Jack confronts the Borg queen on board a giant Cube parked (or hidden) within the atmosphere of Jupiter. The reason for the Borg’s interest in Jack are pretty convoluted, to do with his DNA pointing the way to some kind of Borg ‘evolution’. I still think Lwoxana is more scary than them though.
Watched the last episode of Picard, called The Last Generation. This whole final season of Picard has been a legacy season, seeing them off one final time, taking stock of what they’ve done and where they’ve boldly gone. Seeing the original TNG crew on the deck of the Enterprise D again made me deeply nostalgic for the TV series. Those seven years (plus most of the four films afterward) were such a wonderful memory. Thank you, Next Generation. Overall, you went out with a satisfyingly epic bang. If this is the very last, it ain’t a bad way to go.
But I do have notes…Watching the original seven crew members go through their paces as they rush to Jupiter, where the Borg has a vast cube containing the transmitter controlling the entire Federation fleet, had me wondering how they were doing all this without an actual ship crew to back them up. Also, I hated the solution the Borg, in league with the Changelings, used to overthrow the Federation by secretly having crew members’ DNA being altered to include Borg implants whenever they used the transporter pads. This smacked of the worst pseudo biological science – something that’s always been a weakness of the Trek franchise. Oh, someone’s been biologically altered beyond their normal humanity; that’s okay, we’ll reverse engineer the treatment to make them good as new (or simply cut the transmission that’s making them that way). Please! And, as usual, the stupid Borg, who are all about collective connections, leave themselves conveniently vulnerable by having one weak point, namely the transmitter on the Cube.
So, in the end, the story wasn’t much chop, which is a pity. The original TV series had some wonderful stories, plus those wonderful characters. I guess one out of two ain’t bad. After tying everything up with a neat bow there was a sad little epilogue where Jack is confronted by Q, who has a new mission/purpose for him. Sad, because it wasn’t followed up (or hasn’t been, yet).