In the end, Picard became the TNG fan-service reunion it always should have been.

Expand / Enterprise-D is rolling again. Alpha Memory

Major spoilers for the third season of Star Trek: Picard are below.

Among the many sins of the 2002 film Star Trek Nemesis is the fact that its box office bombardment killed the still-nascent plans for a fifth and final The Next Generation release, a release that would have been intended as a finale in the same way that Star Trek VI: The Unknown Country was for the original cast.

I have no reason to believe that this movie is a great lost gem in the Star Trek canon; it was written by the same people who wrote the horrible Nemesis, and it was designed to be a kind of Spock research retread about data relaunch and restoration of the status quo. But his absence meant a lack of conclusion for the TNG team—a story that was not allowed to end on its own terms.

So when Patrick Stewart took the stage in 2018 to announce that "Jean-Luc Picard is back", it was exciting! Finally closing. And hopefully a more confident and sonically cohesive show than Discovery so far.

The first two seasons of Star Trek: Picard failed to deliver on that promise. They were wildly uneven, and while their best moments almost always involved other TNG characters, the show actively resisted a TNG reboot. But his third season, also preemptively announced as his final season, would finally bring all the TNG crew together for one last ride (and Raffi would be there too) .< /p>

I still had apprehensions for the first half of the season, and the reviews I stand by. Paramount sent in screeners of the first six episodes, and while those six episodes did a few things I liked, Picard still grappled with some of the things it did. had always struggled: not-quite-right characterization, an obsession with plot twists and emphasis, and a focus on Picard to the exclusion of most other characters.

But in the final four episodes of the season, something unexpected happened: the show finally delivered on its original promise.

It was Data and Geordi that tipped me off, looking back. In the first season of Nemesis and Picard, we experience the loss of Data almost exclusively from Picard's perspective. Picard was Data's friend, and Picard was a mentor to Data as he explored his humanity. But the eighth episode of the season finally thought about asking how Data's best friend would have coped with his loss, rather than focusing on what Data's boss would have. feeling. LeVar Burton is selling the hell out of Geordi's performance that he finally gets to give.

(It's also nice to have Brent Spiner back in his Data mode; Spiner was in the first two seasons of Picard as various obnoxious members of the Soong family, and the slimy register that Spiner uses to play these characters just isn't much fun to watch.)

It's emblematic of something that these latest episodes of Picard do though the movies never quite understood: every character has something to do. Gates McFadden is particularly underused in every TNG movie, but there are times in each where non-Picard and non-Data characters are present simply to provide extra body in a scene or go wild some Treknobabble. Picard is still first among equals - the show is named after him, after all - but once all the old TNG characters are finally back on the board, Stewart and Picard both feel more like actors in a set again.