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How it Should Have Ended: Picard Season Three
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this post was submitted on 13 Dec 2023
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Risa
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If I can offer a counter argument to what others who've replied to you have said, in my opinion, season three of PIC is the single worst season of Star Trek to date. Nothing but empty, cynical fanservice, and the introduction of the worst sort of Scrappy-Doo character in Picard's adult son, Jack Crusher.
People like the season because it's getting the TNG band back together, but the season embodies all the complaints that were levelled at season one, justified or unjustified, but simply has some familiar faces. Slop in a trough.
Season 3 has a ton of problems, but it's still a much better send off for the TNG crew than Nemesis was, and that's good enough for me.
Insurrection was probably a better sendoff.
I am part of the group that thinks Insurrection was not just bad as a movie, but bad as a plot line all together. Literally everything about the Ba'ku-Son'a conflict falls apart at the slightest scrutiny.
I know some of the other Trek movies have this problem, but this goes especially for Insurrection: it felt like a mediocre TNG TV episode stretched out way too long. Much like a Son'a skin treatment. Also, there was just something about it that felt like a re-hash of an actual TNG episode, but I can't pin down which one.
I will contend that Generations takes the cake as the worst TNG movie. Obviously, the goal of this film was to get Kirk and Picard on the screen at the same time. Everything else in this film is a contrivance to make this happen, and it's not even good science fiction to get us there. To add grevious insult to injury, we get tragically little screen time between Malcom McDowell and Patrick Stewart and their poorly crafted motivations in the film's "climax". This casting choice should have surpassed Wrath of Kahn by a light year for scenery chewing awesomeness, but is instead overshadowed by Capt. Kirk barely accomplishing anything instead.
Also, in a moment of "let's double-down on fan-service", Picard Season 3 has a nod to Generations. There's a blink-and-you'll-miss-it moment when the gang is on the Daystrom Institute space station. A sealed room is marked as containing the remains of Capt. Kirk, probably of interest since he went MIA only to turn up decades later in Picard's logs as having returned from the Nexus.
"Homeward," the episode where Worf's adoptive brother evacuates a pre-warp species to a new planet because theirs is dying using the Enterprise's transporters and holodeck to make them think they're just traveling over land to a new place. It's almost exactly the plan for moving the Ba'ku.
Oh man, that's really close. And no callback to that episode either. Picard or Worf remarking that "they must have gotten the idea from our own logs" would have been way better foreshadowing for the (b)admiral's involvement. It would have also changed the tone to be more Trek thematic, as it would say something deeper about unintended consequences through so much cultural contact.
“Nemesis” was never meant to be a send off, though. It’s not great by any measure, but I still think it was more entertaining than season three of PIC despite all that.
Both Seasons 2 and 3 were spoiled for me and everything the spoilers described made me not want to watch the show. This is in contrast to spoilers due SNW or Lower Decks that made the shows sound far more interesting.
But I feel like the damning view is setting the TNG crew on the bridge and having it feel really off. It wasn't even like when Scotty drank on the holodeck version of the original Enterprise. The crew looked off on the old bridge in a way that felt strange. Yeah, everyone is back, but it really feels off.
They actually hired people to come in and paint on a recreation of the specific wood grain on the arch behind the captain’s chair.
Imagine if that amount of care and effort was put into making a story suited to those characters?
Season 3 is the worst season of Star Strek, but the best Season of Picard. Picard seasons 1 and 2 were like entirely different shows winking at Star Trek.
Nah, seasons one and two were at least trying something, to varying degrees of success. All season three attempted was cramming its plot so full of nostalgia bait, the audience wouldn’t see just how rotten it was at the core.
I kinda see what Season 1 was trying to do. The only thing Season 2 tried to do was save production budget.