"Picard" Year Two

Moderate spoilers ahead.

"Star Trek" as a franchise lately has been very up and down, very messy, and trying different storytelling tactics.  I thought the first season of "Star Trek: Picard" had a lot of good ideas.  It also had a lot of execution problems and way too many characters and little subplots to adequately do justice to all of them.  The new season course corrects in some respects, but it also falls prey to some of the same issues - the most obvious one being that it tells a serialized story over ten episodes, which is probably about five too many.

Everything starts out very well, with all of the new crew from Admiral Jean-Luc Picard's previous adventure having gotten their lives back on track, some with Starfleet, and some elsewhere.  Picard is considering cozying up with his Romulan housekeeper Laris (Orla Brady) when he's called in to assist with an emergency situation involving the Borg.  And then in steps Q (John de Lancie), who has decided that Picard needs a new test of character.  He whisks Picard and his crew into a different reality, setting them on a mission to travel to the past in order to save the future. A Borg Queen (Annie Wersching), another Soong ancestor (Brent Spiner), his daughter Kore (Isa Briones), and Picard's old friend Guinan (Whoopi Goldberg and Ito Aghayere), along with several members of the Picard family are involved in the adventure.

This season of "Picard" offers plenty of the usual action adventure nonsense, but in terms of exploration its primary interest is in digging into the psyche of Picard himself.  A major goal is untangling the traumas in his childhood, mostly related to his mother Yvette (Madeline Wise), who met with a tragic end.  This is also primarily where the writing runs into trouble, because the show piles on lots of other twists and turns and digressions, so it takes forever to get around to what the season is actually supposed to be about.  There are so many big obstacles set up, like the Borg Queen and Soong, which all resolve in fairly anticlimactic ways because they're really only distractions.  Even Q, who comes roaring out of the gate in the first two episodes as the primary baddie, seems to turn on a dime when the plot needs him to.  Several episodes either feel too long or two short, possibly because of chaotic production demands, and the finale is especially rushed. 

The characters are handled better this time around though, so they're easier to root for.  I especially like Rios, who isn't spending all his time talking to holograms of himself now, and gets to interact with other people and show off how charming he can be.  It initially feels like a cheat to have yet more Soongs around, in order to keep Brent Spiner and Isa Briones in the cast, but they're much more interesting and well-defined characters in this universe, with clear motives.  Thus, they're able to withstand the various iffy plot devices that get thrown at them.  Michelle Hurd still comes off as too untethered, but she's usually got Jeri Ryan as Seven to play off of, which helps a lot.  Allison Pill gets to stretch some acting muscles we haven't seen in a while.  And when they can't find anything for certain characters to do, I don't mind at all that they get benched.

Unfortunately, one of the weaker parts of the season is Patrick Stewart, who has noticeably slowed down since we saw him last as Picard, and seems to be struggling in certain scenes.  Though his appearance hasn't changed much, his age is catching up with him at last.  The upcoming third season of "Picard" will be the final one, and I doubt we'll be seeing more of the character onscreen after this.   And maybe that's why I'm feeling more forgiving toward "Picard," and had no trouble watching the season all the way through to the end.  It's very imperfect, but it is recognizably about the "Star Trek" characters I grew up with and still care about.  

And, frankly, as a "Next Generation" fan there's been a lot worse in the franchise's history.

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