Spoiler Alert
Anyone who has not seen the first episode of Star Trek: Picard (entitled ‘Remembrance’) or any episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation and the subsequent movies is hereby warned that this post may contain a few unavoidable spoilers.
It’s been eighteen years since Star Trek: The Next Generation’s Captain Jean-Luc Picard bowed out of our lives in the disappointing movie Star Trek: Nemesis. Now he’s back in a much anticipated brand new show, Star Trek: Picard, chronicling later life of the now former captain of the USS Enterprise.
As regular readers of this site and it’s related social media accounts may know, I haven’t been overly impressed with recent additions to the Star Trek franchise. It all started to go wrong with Star Trek: Enterprise and it was a bit of a downward spiral from there, but I had much higher hopes for Picard. We’re only one episode in but so far, I have loved, loved, loved it.
Picard (Sir Patrick Stewart), now a retired admiral, is living in relative seclusion at his family vineyard with his dog, Number One, and a couple of Romulan refugees who work for him and also act as his only real confidants. He is now retired from Starfleet and has become jaded and embittered towards the organisation he once served and perhaps even towards the Federation as a whole for their failure to learn the lessons from history. His tired old zeal is awakened, however, when he is a approached by a frightened young woman called Dahj (Isa Briones), who begs him for help and who may well be the offspring of his deceased friend and colleague, Lt. Commander Data (Brent Spiner), who continues to haunt Picard’s dreams twenty years after his death. As much as I loved Data in The Next Generation, and am generally not a huge fan of dream sequences, I am glad to see that he has so far only appeared as a dream and nothing more. There’s nothing spoils a good story more than sucking the permanence out of death by contriving some lame excuse to resurrect a dead character.
This show accomplishes something in a single episode which Discovery has, in my opinion, failed to accomplished throughout its entire run: create continuity between the original story we all know and love and still create a well written brand new story. Star Trek: Picard begins with Jean-Luc very much at the end of his previous character arc and at the beginning of a new one, having lost much of his zest for life only to now be given an urgent and deeply personal reason to reawaken it. In spite of this, Picard has lost none of his sense of righteousness or his passion for history, as we see when he becomes angered by the TV journalist’s questions about why he left Starfleet. The first episode was also full of little Easter eggs and other references to The Next Generation which fans of the show couldn’t fail to appreciate, such as the ‘Captain Picard Day’ banner (TNG: ‘The Pegasus’), Picard’s Dixon Hill fedora and, best of all, the singularly beautiful opening sequence with Irving Berlin’s ‘Blue Skies’ playing over a starscape moments before the Enterprise D appears.
If I was forced to say something critical (and I must confess, I find it difficult to say anything truly bad about this episode, but I’ll give it a go), I would say that some of the other characters besides Picard, and perhaps Dahj to a lesser extent, seemed rather under cooked by comparison, especially the two Romulans who live with Picard. That’s not a criticism of the acting, but it feels a bit like Picard and Dahj were the only characters who were written with any real depth; clear motives, clear goals, obvious demons and things that matter to them. I am, of course, very conscious that it was only the first episode and first episodes of brand new shows take time to heat up so I’ll reserve any further judgement on that point until the series is finished.
All in all, a very encouraging beginning to a show which I was anticipating with both hope and fear. I am counting down the seconds until the next episode, partly because of the cliffhanger ending but mostly just because it was the best offering I’ve seen from the Star Trek franchise in a long, long time.
My rating: 🖖🖖🖖🖖🖖
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ATTENTION AUTHORS:
Every Tuesday, I post a new edition of Spotlight: a short post which shines a proverbial spotlight on a published novel or collection of short fiction. If you would like to have your book considered for a future edition of Spotlight, drop us an e-mail including a short synopsis of your book and a link to where we can buy it. Better yet, send me a copy of your book and I can include a mini-review.
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