All good things come to an end in Picard Season 3 Episode 10!

With everything on the line, the crew of the Enterprise make a desperate attempt to rescue Jack from the Borg cube while Seven, Raffi and the other grown ups take back the Titan. Will they succeed, or will they be “The Last Generation” of humanity? Picard season 3 episode 10 written and directed by Terry Matalas.

Mark Turetsky: Will, it’s the end of an era. The Enterprise and its crew are being hauled out of mothballs to save the galaxy one last time. Wait a sec, I’m reading the summary of Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country.  

Will Nevin: That was a totally different thing, Mark. Although some of the themes were the same, admittedly. And, hey, this time, the Enterprise was *literally* hauled out of mothballs.

Mark: There are no moths in space, Will.

The Battle of Jupiter

Mark: The episode opens with one of the wilder, most unexpected cameos of the season: a distress call from Walter Koenig as Federation President Anton Chekov, son of Pavel. 

Will: That was a really nice nod to the dearly departed Anton Yelchin, of course. An inspired little tribute and good for them for doing it. And a callback in itself to Voyage Home with its warning to stay away from Earth.

Mark: And great that they could get Koenig, even if only in a voice role. Chekov was somewhat underdeveloped as a character on The Original Series and in the movies, but I can’t help but stan Koenig for his performance as Bester in Babylon 5. This rather unexpected appearance set me up to think that the whole episode might be packed with surprise cameos and that… didn’t quite happen, but I can’t blame the episode for what I read into it. Even so, we had callbacks to Enterprise, to Deep Space 9 and Voyager; it was only fitting that they’d fit in a callback to TOS.

Will: And while I’ll never forgive the Kelvinverse for Into Darkness, Yelchin died so young and tragically, it was only right that Koenig was able to step in some way to mark that. This is getting ahead a bit — but after I read an Engadget review that was a straight plot summary, I reserve that right — but I was surprised in this episode by two things: 1) everyone made it out alive (save for the Enterprise-F, it seems) and 2) the lack of cameos you mentioned. It is confoundingly strange that Janeway did not make an appearance, but as we both surmised off-air, there has to be some non-narrative reason why she didn’t stop by in this season.

Mark: It’s not like Mulgrew is uninterested in doing Trek: she plays two series regulars on Prodigy. Near as I can tell she wasn’t available or they couldn’t afford to bring in yet another guest star, and they already had Tuvok coming in to film, so why not give what was obviously Janeway’s scene to him?

But as you say, we’re getting ahead of ourselves a bit. There’s still quite a bit of Borg drama to get through. First off, I’ll get right out ahead of it before our readers start mailing us rotten fruit: I was wrong. The Borg here are not fully functional like I surmised last week. They are in terrible shape, due to the events of the Voyager finale. This does a few remarkable things: it makes the interior of the Borg cube more or less empty of Borg drones/extras and it gives us the reveal of just how badly off their Queen has become. We have Jane Edwina Seymour stepping in to be the Queen’s physical presence, in a pretty remarkable makeup and set dressing job, with Alice Krige reprising the voice role. 

Will: If you thought the Borg was already pretty hardcore in its exploration of body horror, this episode was something else, wasn’t it? It was a bit too convenient for the cube to be so decimated (yes, pedantic people of the world, I believe it was reduced by one-tenth), but damned if it didn’t make for some impressive visuals — including the horrifically transformed Queen. They did a nice job between the directing and the VFX to make the performances of Seymour and Krige as seamless as possible. Really nice work.

But before we got to the cube, it seems like everyone on the D was saying their goodbyes. It tried to strike a balance between recognizing the stakes of the moment (something that, say, the MCU typically does a terrible job of) and being too maudlin. Did it ever tip over into the latter for you?

Mark: Not really, no. The away team is heading off on what could well be a suicide mission, and I really appreciated just how pissed Data got that he wasn’t going (he got a scant few years to deal with having emotions, and now pile on top of that being merged with Lore’s instability). And of course, Worf had to be the butt of the joke in the tense moments by referring to their team as a “threesome,” with Riker’s response of “do you even hear yourself?” (my friend Jules points out that this could very well be Tobias and Michael from Arrested Development with these lines). I enjoy the duo they’ve formed over this past season, but this might have been a bit much.

Will: We’ve talked about this before, but it seems like Worf got some of the awkward comedy bits that Data would have received in the past. Spiner’s deadpan delivery of, “I would like to make it a threeway,” could have been a funny moment without sacrificing the believability of a character like Worf. But Data’s (mostly) human now, so we don’t get those kind of jokes anymore. 

One thing in this whole sequence that I didn’t care for — and this is a problem as we switch from practical models to CGI — is that I don’t think the D should pilot like an escort. It was cool to see it tear ass through the cube like the Defiant, but you lose the sense of scope and scale when you do something like that.

But I did like Data’s impassioned speech to his friends…although it did seem like they forgot they were talking to one of the greatest technological marvels ever created.

Mark: Agreed: it felt much more like the Defiant. The Enterprise, especially the D, has always been a huge if graceful ship, but I wouldn’t categorize it as quick and maneuverable. I also appreciated that Data made his plea on emotional grounds (though I kinda wanted him to let loose with a “just let me fucking do this!”) and reference to his gut. Just about every member of the old crew got their moment to shine, including Blazin’ Bev Crusher manning the Yar/Worf weapons station. I like that it was treated in-universe as unexpected and out of character.

Will: A lot has changed in 20 years, Mark! This whole storyline — the Enterprise coming to the rescue with its retired crew at the helm — was maybe not the deepest or most complex. But on the whole, it was satisfying. Maybe not as satisfying as last week, but satisfying nevertheless. Ultimately, in the minds of fans, I think this is going to be remembered like “Best of Both Worlds” — the first part was *incredible* and the second half did what it needed to do without any major missteps.

Remember the Titan? 

Mark: Which brings us to the, shall we say, legacy Picard cast plotline. Seven and Raffi, along with a few other non-assimilated crewmates, take back the Titan. I feel like something we haven’t really touched on is that this season has really done a lot with transporter tech: transporter enhancers and blockers were pretty big plot points in the early season, and now here we have transporter guns! It’s a really cool way to deal with having to disable antagonists who can’t be stunned by phasers.

Will: And, importantly, it did cool transporter stuff without fundamentally breaking the technology, like we saw in Star Trek (‘09) with its infinite range transporting. Although, as an aside, I don’t think this season did a great job with distance and time — every destination seemed like only a quick warp away.

But, yeah, what an interesting change in tone from First Contact and a Picard who said not to hesitate killing assimilated crew because, “You’ll be doing them a favor.” 

Mark: It’s worth noting that Seven and Picard seem to have different relationships to their identities as former Borgs.

Will: Here’s a thought: One thing this season never managed to do was give Seven and Raffi any time to resolve their feelings/relationship. It certainly wasn’t going to be done in this episode when literally the fate of the galaxy was at stake, but it’s still odd they never got around to that.

Mark: It’s a shame that they backburnered the series’ queer relationship in exchange for pure nostalgia. But I think that’s an overall issue with this season: it seems wholly uninterested in any of Picard’s previous stories or relationships. In fact, it’s weird that this is even a season of Picard, when it so clearly wants to, and mostly succeeds at, being something else entirely. That impulse isn’t necessarily a bad thing, because Lore knows that the show has had serious issues, but all the same, it seemed like instead of fixing or resolving those issues with those characters, they opted to do what is, in effect, a season of TNG. 

Will: Let’s be honest, though: The series kinda floundered at being that other thing. I don’t know that I’ll ever rewatch season one, and it seems like the best part of season two might have just gotten undone. But I think in a linear fashion, alas.

Anywho, the Titan scenes were solid, nicely building with what was going on in the cube, as both seemed to crescendo with similar “all is lost” moments only for the heroes to come through.

Mark: Sounds like some kinda Star Trek.

The End of an Era

Mark: Ultimately, I think what will be discussed most from this episode is where everyone ends up in the “One Year Later” coda. Curiously, this section starts with Picard, La Forge and Riker decommissioning the Enterprise-D, implying that they maybe had some Star Treks for a whole year on their old ship. So bring on whatever novels and comics might cover those adventures, I guess?

Will: This might be the nerdiest, most fanboy-ish thing I’ve ever said, but I’ll say it anyway: I hated the decision to rechristen the Titan-A into the Enterprise-G. First, if an Enterprise is going to be destroyed, that needs to be made clear on screen. Second, the Enterprise has always been the flagship of the fleet. No offense to the Titan — it was a solid little ship — but it wasn’t the best the fleet had to offer. Finally, if it was renamed to honor Picard and his crew, shouldn’t it have been the U.S.S. Jean-Luc Picard? 

Mark: Probably a much more apt name for the ship, but could you imagine how much worse the cries of nepotism would be for Jack Crusher serving on it? Especially since he gets to sit in one of the three command chairs as a mere ensign? Still, let’s not beat around the bush: it’s called the Enterprise because they desperately want Paramount+ to pick up the much hinted-at Star Trek: Legacy. 

Will: And Jack said the thing! [leo_meme.jpg]

Mark: And that’s an interesting thing to name a Trek series. One of the themes of this coda is that names matter. Jack chooses to keep his name and not change it to Picard. They rename the Titan. Shaw, in his final report to Starfleet, calls Seven by her chosen name. And there’s this question of legacy. 

Star Trek: The Next Generation carried only one legacy name from The Original Series, and that was the name of the ship. The captain wasn’t Kirk’s grandkid, Data wasn’t made by Scotty, La Forge isn’t related to Uhura (okay, okay, Riker is clearly a reused version of Will Decker from Phase II and Star Trek: The Motion Picture). They were brand new characters. Similarly, Deep Space Nine and Voyager followed that pattern (with, yes, a few characters like O’Brien and Worf brought over). And that’s because the world of Trek is supposed to be a true meritocracy. It’s one where your name shouldn’t matter. And yet here, with this proposed series set to bring Trek into the 25th century, it’s Picard’s son who’s at the center of it, with a possible romantic entanglement with La Forge’s daughter. And that bugs me. This isn’t Star Wars and Trek shouldn’t have a Chosen One.

Will: I think fans are being sold a bill of goods, at least online, with the idea of Legacy even happening. Here’s a quote directly from showrunner Terry Matalas: “If it’s something that’s going to be done, we want to make sure we don’t rush into it. We want to make sure we do it right. That’s where we’re at with it, I say coyly. At the moment, there’s nothing developed on it. But we talk all the time.”

If that’s where you are — if you’re only at the “gee, I wish we could do this” stage — why would you so obviously set up the spinoff? In that same Variety interview, Matalas says it wasn’t his intention to do that with this episode, but, I mean, come the hell on. It’s painfully obvious that’s at least what he wants to do, even if Trek czar Alex Kurtzman and Paramount/CBS have no interest in it.

With each passing day, it’s less likely Legacy gets the greenlight. And why should it? Everyone loved this third season — after two largely wasted ones — because it brought the whole family back together in a meaningful way. Legacy won’t be able to do that, and it’s got the flaws you mentioned baked right in. (Also, if Matalas’ plan to keep Captain Shaw is only through video logs, count me out. Woof.)

As we’ve discussed, I’m not into Disco (sorry!) nor the animated stuff, but I loved Strange New Worlds — as you as my review partner can attest. I believe there are stories to be told in the 25th century; hopefully with a new crew but with the cameos and guest spots that made this season work.  

Mark: That’s the other thing, which you mentioned up top: it’s clearly set up as the last voyage of the Enterprise-D crew, but nobody dies. Everyone is just left in this new status quo, potentially to show up as cameos on future shows. And it’s… I don’t want to use the word chickenshit, but it feels like it lacks stakes. I get that it’s nice to end with a nod to the final moments of “All Good Things…” and leave our friends in a happy place, but “All Good Things” left everyone where they were because there was a movie franchise being set up. Here, there’s nothing being set up aside from the possibility of a spinoff. 

This was a series that had previously not been afraid to kill off longterm characters in a respectful, satisfying way. They handled Data’s and Q’s deaths really beautifully, but by the end of this season, both are back. And we could have had a nice payoff of Data meeting Soji, or some moment with the entirely forgotten Laris. Instead, everyone is just around for the sake of hanging out with each other. Everyone is alive for the sake of being available. Except for Fleet Admiral Shelby. She stayed dead. And Ro.

Will: Ahhh, but again, Matalas says he had to cut a Ro cameo from this final episode. (In addition to confirming your suspicion that Tuvok is 100% a Janeway stand-in.) And he wanted Soji too, so that’s at least some nod to the previous Picard characters.

Maybe they’re a little shy on killing off characters because (1) Nemesis was so poorly received and (2) I think everyone in corporate regrets killing off Kirk in Generations. But it was apparently Shaw’s destiny to die all along, which, as we said last time, was a major miscalculation.

As we close the captain’s log on this series, it’s a hard one to judge in its entirety. We’ve had great, cinematic action and a few perfect character moments, but we’ve also had some really lame plot contrivances and the show’s budgetary restrictions have been painfully apparent, especially in the first season.

Picard wasn’t great. But at times — particularly in this third season — it was more than good enough. 

Mark: I will say that they clearly did a lot this season for a little. It’s frankly amazing that they accomplished all that they did on a streaming TV budget, especially on the third season of a series that was never a huge success prior to now. It works as a post-Nemesis TNG movie, but I don’t think it entirely works as a cohesive series in and of itself. 

And now we’re left with some dangling threads for what might be in store for the future of Trek. We have Q putting Jack Crusher on trial, we have Agnes Jurati’s Peace And Love Collective, we have Wesley Crusher recruiting Kore Soong to join The Travelers and we have the tease of the Soongs being involved in the Eugenics wars (although I have a suspicion that’s going to be dealt with in the upcoming Strange New Worlds time travel story, which has James Kirk and La’an Noonien-Singh traveling to 2023 or thereabouts). That’s a lot of plot hooks to hang future stories on. 

Last season I opined that teases like the Travelers and the Eugenics Wars were turning Trek into something akin to the MCU, and this ending only made it worse for me. Star Trek has been a shared universe ever since Deep Space Nine premiered before The Next Generation ended. But this signals a shift into a very different stage, where things don’t just exist to tell a satisfying story, they also must serve to tease something entirely different that may happen somewhere far down the road. I’m grateful to be experiencing such a golden age of Trek, where even if you don’t like certain series, there’s still plenty of content for you. But I’m also wary of the need to interconnect everything which has hamstrung the MCU and made it exhausting for a lot of fans.

Will: Whaddya say we do it all again in June?

Mark: Make it so!

Make It So On and So Forth

• Will correctly predicted that there would be exactly *zero* additional Enterprise-D sets. The bridge, though, was spectacular. 
• Data has finally mastered smalltalk, with his “I’m okay” response to Riker’s “How you feeling?” when he’s clearly an emotional mess.
• I guess they couldn’t get Whoopi for the final reunion at 10 Forward Avenue, but the “Guinan is just offscreen, honest!” moment was a bit too much for me [Mark].
• Troi’s being able to locate Riker inside the cube was a callback to their ability to communicate telepathically, set up in “Encounter at Farpoint” and then largely abandoned as a premise.
• No La Sirena?
• The Borg Queen’s appearance in this episode is very reminiscent of Emperor Palpatine’s in The Rise of Skywalker. 
• Worf is studying mugatu meditation. Pardon me, but what do white apes with a unicorn horn have to do with meditation?
• The quote from Julius Caesar was lovely and it’s always a treat to have Patrick Stewart dropping Shakespeare on us, but a cheeky part of me wanted him to quote the line “The heavens speed thee in thine enterprise!”

Will Nevin

Will Nevin loves bourbon and AP style and gets paid to teach one of those things. He is on Twitter far too often.

Mark Turetsky

Mark Turetsky is an audiobook narrator and voice actor who sometimes writes about comic books. Originally from Montreal, Canada, he now lives in Northern Louisiana.