I Just Work In Space

Star Trek: Picard, Season 3

starring Patrick Stewart, Jeri Ryan, Michelle Hurd, Gates McFadden, Ed Speleers, Amanda Plummer, Todd Stashwick, Marina Sirtis, Michael Dorn, LeVar Burton, Brent Spiner, Ashlei Sharpe Chestnut and a shit-ton of goofy cameos.

created by Akiva Goldsman, Michael Chabon, Kirsten Beyer and Alex Kurtzman

WARNING: THERE WERE ALREADY SOME SPOILERS IN THE CAST LIST, WHAT MAKES YOU THINK THE REST IS GOING TO BE ANY DIFFERENT?

Let's start at the end: do I like Star Trek: Picard? I guess the answer has to be "mostly."  But of course, like any other microwave-ready-meal intellectual property project, it cheats. It's got all the extra salt and fat that's used to make a pre-packaged throwback offering more palatable. Of course it threatens the normal side-effects of bloating and swollen extremities, so it's already got some deficits as well, especially for those of us who are nostalgia-allergic. Well, OK, maybe nostalgia-sensitive. If I were really allergic, there's no way I'd be going to see the new Indiana Jones movie this June or The Flash just because they goosed it with a soupçon of Michael Keaton Batman, but I don't have the steel-guts intestinal wherewithal to completely disregard the shiny offering that definitely doesn't have a hook hidden inside.

I've watched all three seasons of Picard but this is going to just be about the last one, partly because I don't really remember a lot about Season 1 and Season 2. The first one can be summed up, I think, something something Romulans and also I think robots? The second one was time travel, I remember that because I hate time travel as a trope, unless you're going to lean ALL THE WAY IN to the dopey-ness of it and come out with Doctor Who. Everyone else is a Dabbler, which sounds like a stupid-ass Doctor Who villain. If that's the case, you'd better be under an alien face built out of a two-inch layer of latex, sweating yourself into kidney failure under some klieg lights on a warehouse soundstage in Cardiff going "hwaaaaaargh!" for 42 takes in a row for my amusement. Otherwise your dabbling is just some lame-ass excuse to make a sci-fi show on the cheap by setting it in "present day," like a coward.

Anyway, if you haven't seen those seasons and are still (inexplicably) still reading, the gist is this: Picard is dead and is also now a robot, but you can't tell because of how awesome robots are these days. Also the immortal omnipotent Q died, but that's OK because they never knew what to do with that character from Day 1. Immortal and omnipotent, but one time got punched out by Avery Brooks. I know Benjamin Sisko eventually becomes a demigod himself, but at that point he was just a mad guy. Talk about power scaling.

Speaking of Benjamin Sisko, the big news in Season 3 is: changelings! That's right, everyone's favorite goo-based life forms are back, but with way more computer processing power to make the CGI look approximately 187% more disgusting.

Also, Picard is a dad! Of some kid he never met because the kid's mom, everyone's second favorite TNG doctor Bev Crusher, decided to... keep him a secret? That had to be a tough one to crack in the writers' room and I would argue that nah, needed another pass or three. Doc and JLP boned after TNG, fine, they hinted at that plenty of times during the show, but then she a) had a baby, b) named him after her dead husband and c) ran off to raise him to be a Han Solo. OK, that is a lot. It was great to see ole Gates back in action, with a slick JoBeth Williams in Poltergeist/Rogue from X-Men hair streak, though in this case it was not an indicator of magical powers in any way. Just the mark of bad judgment and questionable parenting, so definitely more Poltergeist than Rogue.

But if that wasn't enough, of course Boy Crusher-Picard is also beset with demons... or maybe is one himself?!?!? He gets red eyes and does cool cinematically interesting violence and has gross visions. Sure sounds demon-y to me! But no, in the end, it just turns out that, as chance would have it, the son of two of the leads from the show this one references is a Chosen One/Most Specialist Boy, like Harry Potter but with a laser gun.

It's all an excuse to bring back the whole crew because "we can't trust anyone!" So we have to roll out the relics and, I have to say, for 30 years on after the last TNG episode, everyone has held up pretty well. Michael Dorn cheats a bit by getting to hide under the most makeup, but he's still fully Michael Dorn, playing that character with a weird comic undertone I've always really enjoyed. And that's the thing about this show in general: it's actually pretty funny. They give the most breezily gifted comic actor, Brent Spiner, the least to do on that front as he mostly plays the (conveniently and appropriately aged) Data pretty straight-up. LeVar Burton and Marina Sirtis don't get to do a whole lot past be concerned, so a lot of the comic relief actually falls to Jonathan Frakes, who really delivers. They lean in to the "we're too old for this" schtick without ever actually falling over. See, because if they did, someone would make a joke about breaking a hip and everything would be ruined forever.

It's basically all-hands-on-deck from both a crew and an old-favorite-plot-lines point of view. You get changelings from Deep Space Nine and you get, inevitably, the Borg. This is a mine they will never stop digging. They did a whole movie about it specifically, Picard dealing with his Borg shit, with one of the greatest shout-acted monologues of all time (props to an all-world-er, Alfre Woodard, for taking that shit to 11) and here we are still, figuring it out. Someone will be mad about Wolf 359. Someone will say Locutus. Someone will be tempted by a Borg queen. To be fair, you do have to go all the way back to the season finale of Season 2 of Picard to get that, though, so it's been a minute, almost literally.

It's a bunch of warm feeling in one bucket and a silly plot. But silly plots are only as good as their villains and Amanda Plummer leaving teeth marks on every square inch of scenery does her level best. It's definitely the Ricardo Montalban School of Nuance, the gold standard every iteration of every Star Trek anything has been trying to match since the USS Reliant exploded and turned into a planet in 1982. Does she get there? Well, nobody can match a thing if you're copying a thing, but she gets a damn sight closer than Benedict Cumberbatch did, and he was playing literally the same character.

Jeri Ryan and Michelle Hurd are the only two constants traveling through all three seasons. Hurd's character is dull and unlikeable, though she does her best with what criminally little she's given. Jeri Ryan continues to absolutely stomp every dick into the dirt that suggested she was just on Voyager because of how she looked in a catsuit. She exudes natural empathy and vulnerability while being completely believable as an ass-kicker-in-waiting when the situation requires. It's a great, subtle bit of acting that pays off decades of character development, honoring everything Seven of Nine carried forward out of her original character arc. She's the most solid, realest thing in any of this. I love the original TNG crew, but they feel necessarily shoved in to a world Seven actually lives in, fits in, feels things in. She can't be the heart of the show when it's named after another character and that character is played by SirPatStew, but she's just as vital, if slightly less central. The lungs I guess. I was going to say the soul, but I'm not a goddamned hippie. It's the 24th century, we're past all that.

For all the cameos and callbacks (Elizabeth Dennehy!) in some ways it was notable for the ones that were missed, like Kate Mulgrew (whose character was name-checked like 10 times, but never seen?) and Wil Wheaton (his mom and his secret brother, but no Wesley at all? I know he was in the end of Season 2, but this is weak sauce).

I was hoping with this kitchen sink approach to plot lines and villains, we'd finally get a payoff to "Conspiracy," the first season TNG episode this felt most like (with head-bugs instead of goo folk), and which also ended with an open question nobody every bothered to answer. But I guess we can't have everything. Picard gets a family after having his (brother and nephew) unceremoniously killed off in a house fire (no smoke alarms in the 24th century) off screen between movies. And the Bev-JLP romance finally confirmed, OK. A lot of fan service, a lot of contrivance, but the quality of the humans pulling it off makes it worth the pretty breezy hours of run-time it took to get through. Kudos to the show runners for trying to do something original and different for the first two seasons, to build a living, breathing galaxy where other things happen with other people involved around ole Jean-Luc, but Season 3, this is what people were hoping for. We got it. So I guess the lesson overall is: try less hard. I mean, it's right there in front of you. Just pick it up and wave it around a bit.