‘Picard’ ends its first season with a solid finale, but it feels like something is missing.
Credit: CBS
I’m a little late getting to the season finale of Star Trek: Picard. The world being what it is right now—a chaotic maelstrom of sickness, mismanagement and fear—I admit I find myself distracted much of the time, reading frightening news reports, spending time with my kids who no longer have school to go to, and waiting anxiously while my girlfriend, a nurse, spends her working hours at the hospital.
We did finally get to the Picard finale last night, and I thought it was mostly good, though I also feel a little letdown by the season as a whole and by this final episode’s tidy ending.
This isn’t because I thought the season as a whole was bad. On the contrary, I thought it was really good. The acting alone would have kept me invested, but we also had a fun space adventure, a complicated set of “villains” and plenty of great writing.
What the season lacked was mostly time. Time to develop these characters and their relationships with one another more completely. Some characters, like Elnor, were given far too little screen-time. A couple more episodes and I think we could have reached a truly great season of television.
The other problem, I suppose, was the stakes. They were too huge. The problem with having a galaxy-destroying threat is that you pretty much know the outcome. Star Trek isn’t going to destroy the galaxy, ergo the uber-synth aren’t going to win. There’s not much surprise when Soji, finally convinced by Picard’s pleading and self-sacrifice, destroys the beacon and stops the synth-snake-monsters from entering through the portal.
It’s a little less clear what the Romulans will do, but again not entirely surprising when they ultimately stand down. I wonder, was Oh convinced by Soji’s final act of compassion or was she just worried about taking on Riker and the Starfleet armada?
Riker
Credit: CBS
There’s a delicate balance between setting up organic plots so that the payoff works and surprising viewers with unexpected twists and turns. Picard mostly doesn’t surprise us, and I have somewhat mixed feelings here. Other unsurprising events include:
- The discovery that Narek didn’t actually kill the synth. Sutra did the deed in order to convince the others to let her summon the uber-synth. When Dr. Soong finds out he tells her she’s “just like” organics and deactivates her. At least for me, it was pretty obvious that this is what Sutra did last week and that this would be the revelation in the finale. Narek is slightly redeemed here, though his ultimate fate remains a mystery.
- Narek’s sister, Narissa, is killed by Seven-of-Nine in an epic brawl inside the Borg Cube. I didn’t know how Narissa would die, but it seemed pretty obvious that some villain had to go.
- The death and resurrection of Picard was pretty much set up the moment we met Soong who was developing a synth body for his consciousness to enter. We knew Picard was sick, we knew this synth body was available, and we knew that Agnes Jurati was going to be able to assist Soong in the process. No great surprise when he is resurrected in a new body, then.
- Nor was it particularly surprising when Jurati got all heroic and helped save Picard. We knew she only killed Maddox in the first place because of what Oh did to her, after all.
Narek and Narissa
Credit: CBS
Now the question becomes, did we need more surprises, more twists and turns, in the season finale or did all these pieces fall into place just so, giving us a satisfactory conclusion to the season?
That’s where I come up a bit short. It was a satisfying conclusion despite the season being too short and faltering a bit with pacing. On the other hand, it all feels almost too neat and tidy by the end.
Picard is dead, then he isn’t.
The synth are the great destroyers that the Zhat Vash have been hunting down and killing for centuries in order to prevent a galaxy-destroying calamity, and then one simple act convinces them to stop even as that calamity is taking place.
Jurati is a murderer but it looks like she’s off the hook without a trial.
Soong is gung-ho in favor of his synth creations—even creepily telling Jurati that her sacrifice is noble, but that’s what he’d expect “from a mother”—and then when he finds out one of them did something wrong he changes sides, when moments before they were literally planning to destroy all organic life in the galaxy and he was fine with that.
The final scene with Data was beautiful and touching, though, and I didn’t want to see any of the good guys die, including Picard. Perhaps I just find fake-out deaths annoying these days, unless they’re done really well, and this felt a little unnecessary. Why even bother with him being sick if the solution is so easy in the end? Or why not have him come back in Season 2 instead, really convince us that he’s gone?
Agnes Jurati
Credit: CBS
In any case, overall I enjoyed this season a great deal and I’m glad to have seen Picard and eagerly await the second season.
What did you think of the finale and the season as a whole? Let me know on Twitter, Instagram, YouTube or Facebook.
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