This entry was written during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. Without the labor of the writers and actors currently on strike, this television series wouldn’t exist. To learn more, visit the WGA strike hub and the SAG-AFTRA strike site.
“Finish the sentence.”
Picard hugs Q. That’s my primary memory of “Farewell,” the final episode of Star Trek: Picard‘s execrable second season, which I completed reluctantly after having walked away from the show entirely a few episodes earlier. In the intravening weeks, CBS had announced that the entire Next Generation cast would return for Picard‘s third and final season; and although I swear to you, I gave a lot of thought to just skipping that reunion regardless, given how piss-poor season two had been, I realized that doing so would simply never work. Resistance, to coin a phrase, is futile.
Q dies in this episode; except he doesn’t, really. Further underlining the degree to which this entire series is ultimately little more than fanboy masturbation, Q will be back in an inexplicable stinger at the end of the following year. That stinger, in turn, further underlines what the final shot of Star Trek: Picard‘s final episode proper already tells us: this entire creative project was about putting the Next Generation crew back on the shelf in the exact same positions they held at the end of the television series, effectively wiping the movies from canon without actually de-canonizing them. It’s dumb — like if Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country had concluded with orders from Starfleet requiring a new five-year mission for the Enterprise crew, demoting Sulu back onto Kirk’s bridge as a kicker — but what’s even wilder, of course, is to contemplate why the hell the Picard showrunners bothered making this season, given their overall intention.
The entire narrative and thematic purpose of season two seems to have been: 1/ get rid of the Picard crew (this week, Rios chooses to remain in the 21st century, joining Soji, Agnes and Elnor in the penalty box), and 2/ explain why Picard’s been so emotionally distant for his entire life. Talk about a question that never needed to be answered! It’s a thread that seems so fundamentally dissatisfied with Picard as a person; and it sweeps away all the things that made him a great character, substituting them for far less interesting — and far more American — aspects: anti-intellectualism, ableism, both-sidesism, uniforms are for squares, whiskey is better than tea, etc., etc., etc. Dad-rock Picard. Enjoy it, Sir Patrick.
Ok, there’s a couple more purposes to season 2, one of which, admittedly, I kinda like: for whatever reason, Terry Matalas got it into his head to try to close the loop on Gary 7, the Traveller, Guinan, Tallinn and Wesley Crusher, turning the Travellers into a web of space-guardians who intermingle in critical events in galactic history. That’s poppycock, of course, but it’s the kind of poppycock the Star Trek novels tend to go for, tying disparate strands together that were never meant to weave; and I have consumed and enjoyed more than my fair share of it, in paperbacks over the years! If Star Trek: Picard is ultimately fan-fic, at least this thread is the most honest about it.
One final purpose: Wesley joins Guinan and Q in the ranks of the indispensable Next Gen characters that Matalas won’t be bringing back in season three, so he takes the opportunity to close the loop on them in season two. The only one of these three that gets any real juice out of the experience remains John de Lancie, whose final scenes in this episode are as rich and poignant as his ravings earlier in the season. That guy really knows how to play Q. Pretty much everyone else feels rusty as hell, in comparison.
Ironically, Q’s sermon to Picard leaves the good captain “unshackled from the past” and theoretically able to move forward with a new emotional life; this, of course, is exactly contrary to what Star Trek: Picard, under Matalas’ aegis, is about. Season two and three of this show are about finding those shackles and hooking them back up; excavating destroyed starships and dead best friends, everything old being new again. I’ll dive into season three next week, and I promise, I’ll be a lot less snarky about all this, because at least season three remembers to have a bit of fun with it all. But as an unintended essay on the creative poison that is the legacy sequel, Star Trek: Picard couldn’t have done it better.
Blogging the Next Generation: Picard runs Thursdays on tederick.com as I work my way through every episode of Star Trek: Picard. The original BTNG did the same for Star Trek: The Next Generation.