The brutal honesty regarding Star Trek: Picard season three is I didn’t need it to exist. I enjoyed season one overall. Season two was dire. I didn’t need a grand send-off for the Star Trek: The Next Generation cast as far as I was concerned that was done. There was no narrative-inspired hole that needed filling. When it was announced all the cast was returning for the season my answer was a nonchalant shrug and an internalised ‘huh, okay’.
I was not hurtling towards this season on a wave of impending nostalgia. I was ambivalent.
What we got was a brilliant and meticulously constructed TV show that is easily one of the best pieces of Star Trek ever put to screen large or small.
Warning: This article has spoilers from this point.
TV Show Grammer
Not erase it. Take it. Help you carry it. But I forgot the one thing that all counselors should remember. You can’t skip to the end of healing.
– Troi
We’ve been blessed recently with writing on genre shows that have been the best of the best, mainly in the form of The Last of Us and Andor. I’ve written about both The Last of Us and Andor on this site for this reason. I’m not going to advocate that the third season of Picard reached those lofty heights but it climbs four-fifths of the way up that mountain.
What’s been fascinating about the show is how accessible the people in the writing room have been on relatively small YouTube channels. This has included Terry Matalas on down. The way they’ve talked about how the show has been constructed and what it means to be in a writer’s room and it’s been fascinating.
In relation to Andor, Tony Gilroy talked about the grammar of a show to refer to everything you consider at a meticulous level to deliver a great show. The various conversations with the writers of Picard series three have given, at times, a forensic discussion of what it means to actually achieve and do that.
The way they talk about how everything is broken down from the overall vision of the show right down to all the beats in a script and how to make sure they hit them all and then how each line has to serve a purpose so you get a beautiful economy of storytelling. Have we explained too much or too little? How do we construct this scene without toppling into absurdity? How do we tie all these elements that have to navigate from A to B across the whole show, episodes, scenes and characters together? That’s what it takes and it’s beautiful to hear people talk about actually doing it and putting in the damned effort.
While I prefer not to focus on the negative, these insights also make it plainly obvious why some shows don’t work. You can argue it’s due to time, but Picard series three was compressed. You could argue it’s due to budget yet Picard series three is one big bottle show for a lot of it. What is patently clear is people are being employed on some franchise shows that literally don’t have the experience and expertise to construct and maintain the grammar of a great TV show.
Legacy Characters 101
It’s not the years, honey. It’s the mileage.
– Indiana Jones
I don’t have legacy characters on some sort of divine pedestal as some people do. Hell, I don’t even like the term. I do understand that legacy characters are attached to their past selves with a rubber band and if you stretch that rubber band too far or too fast it snaps. It’s often said fans don’t like their legacy characters to change, and it’s undoubtedly true this is the case for some, but I think it’s sometimes the work hasn’t been done to ensure the rubber band doesn’t snap.
Star Trek Picard series three is an exercise in how to handle legacy characters 101 and it’s enthralling to watch. It’s also achieved by three simple rules which obviously prove difficult in other attempts: –
- The characters have been allowed to change due to the passage of time
- The characters have been allowed to be actual humans not archetypes
- The writing puts in the work to get people from A to B
This delivers a look at Star Trek: The Next Generation that is touched on and seen in episodes during the show’s original run but only sparingly. The characters were often archetypes moving through a plot, it’s only episodes like The Inner Light and Family, to name a few, in which our characters truly act like real human beings. In this show, we get people with real human characteristics that have accumulated over the years or the miles and it makes them substantially richer as a result.
The simple truth is the legacy characters in Picard series three have never been more interesting. The writers’ managed to change the characters without snapping the rubber band. They did this by enacting change that doesn’t become deconstruction and putting the work into the script to get people from A to B.
Plot Matters, But Also Doesnt
The symphony I discovered didn’t have brass and strings but rather squealing of wheels down a hall, squeaking of boots on concrete, creaks of cage doors, screams of all tempos, pitches, and whistling. She whistled while she injected us, exposed us, inflicted us with more pain than any being should ever be expected to endure.
– Vadic
One of the singularly great things about Picard series three is the plot matters but also doesn’t. This is because the plot and the story are not the same. It’s something I’ve waxed on about before in the context of tabletop role-playing games.
You could strip out a lot of the plot mechanics in this series and the character beats would still be enthralling. Hell, you could do a lot of this stuff stripped away from any of the sets and special effects and play it as a dramatic read on an empty stage and it would still be fascinating to watch. This in itself is also great Star Trek as a lot of the best stuff has a sense of also being a stage-play as much as they are TV shows or films.
It’s also not a bloody mystery box.
This is another indictment of how low modern media criticism has gotten with people proclaiming the series is a mystery box. No. It’s just a mystery. A mystery box is when the writers lay out mystery tracks in front of you with zero ideas of how they are going to resolve them. When the writers have approached the series as a whole, it’s just a mystery.
The genius of all this is despite the fact the emotion of the story is distinct from the plot the fact the show is constructed as a complete whole means moments, language and even the end-credit artwork delivers subtle hints to what is actually going on.
The themes and emotions in the series are deep. I really liked the sins of the Federation feel to the show. While many people don’t like these elements as it paints the Federation as a less than altruistic organisation the simple truth is the actions the Federation took against The Borg and The Changelings are facts. I also think Star Trek works better when it is about humans who still have a small element of striving to be great rather than just simply being great.
But then I would think that as I adore Deep Space Nine.
Bottle Show Excellence
I’ve always known the world was imperfect. The broken systems, the wars, suffering, violence, poverty, bigotry. And I always thought if people could only see each other, hear each other, speak in one voice, act in one mind, together
– Jack Crusher
It’s quite easy not to think of Picard series three like this as you’re constantly distracted from it due to the quality of everything – but the show is a bottle show that is making cost-cutting choices at every opportunity. There are shows with substantially bigger budgets that get called cheap while this is a show, that we can probably safely assume, has been done on a very modest budget in comparison.
Yet while you watch you have yourself wishing you could do some sort of crazy marathon experience watching it all on a massive, high-quality cinema screen.
Just in case you don’t know the term, a bottle show is a TV episode that is filmed exclusively on standing sets or one very cost-efficient location (usually inside) to keep the costs down. Think about it, Picard season three is pretty much entirely filmed on standing sets a few of which get redressed for different purposes and some which are reused, such as the holodeck of the Ten Forward bar from previous seasons.
This speaks to the show’s meticulous construction from the start. The show is essentially a mixture of political thriller and submarine dramas like Crimson Tide. This was intended from the start allowing the show to deliver high quality while delivering within any budgetary constraints. Ironically, and this is what a lot of Star Trek has forgotten, this also plays to the strengths of Star Trek as it does not have to have astronomical budgets to be high quality.
This also exemplifies the challenges of modern streaming shows. Technology like The Volume seems to mean those constructing these shows don’t stop to think whether they can achieve something before actually committing to it and putting it on screen. Similarly, just because special effects can almost do anything as long you throw money at them doesn’t mean you should use special effects to achieve your aim. The techniques of TV series of old when budgets were a constant constraint across 24-episode seasons have value today.
It Feels Like Star Trek
Something’s different now. I don’t quite have the words yet. But we witnessed a kind of birth here and it reminded me that there’s a whole universe out there. And it can be beautiful and amazing.
– Wil Riker
Look, I’ve enjoyed series one and two of Star Trek: Discovery, especially season two which I think is a brilliant example of long-form, serialised high-budget cinematic Star Trek. I like Strange New Worlds and I am really glad that show exists. At the same time, even I’ll admit both these shows have a factor that makes them feel slightly off.
The factor that makes Star Trek feel like Star Trek is the characters are competent individuals doing great and amazing things on a ship or space station with an actual chain of command. It doesn’t feel like this is important until it is absent. There is just a bit too much histrionics in Discovery and while Strange New Worlds is better it still has minor annoyances like characters that just speak up a bit too much in ways that wouldn’t happen in a professional ship with a chain of command.
Picard series three reminds us why the highly professional bridge crew matters. While it shouldn’t limit the story, it does act as the bedrock and firm foundation on which the rest of the drama is based. The subtle ways that professionalism, ability and moral code are communicated throughout Picard series three beds in what Star Trek truly is.
The scene where they exit the nebula and they have that coordinated talking over each moment is easily missed but those things are what Star Trek is. It’s almost like a musical symphony of some of the basic things Star Trek should be about while not being the focus of the show. It’s not seen until it’s absent.
Sticking The Landing
I’m not asking you to give your lives for nothing. I’m asking you to fight for what’s below. Your families, your children. The Borg have taken our crew, taken our captain, but in this moment, here and now, we are all that is left of Starfleet. It’s up to us.
– Seven of Nine
This season of Picard is a masterclass in sticking the landing. It manages to weave the threads of the show, the theme and emotional through lines, and events from the past that make logical sense and truly deliver on the dynamic of Locutus, Picard and the Borg Queen along with growth for every legacy character as well as, yes, injecting in some nostalgia without distracting from events.
This is why you construct a show as a whole and don’t just write an episode or two in front of you.
The true strength of it is the action pales in comparison to the emotional conclusions and it’s not because the action is bad, it’s just because the emotional threads woven through the series have been so strong it’s those that really hit home as each of them concludes.
The Star Trek: The Next Generation films never really lived up to the series, often feeling like two-part episodes, with bigger budgets, but nowhere near as good. While appearing on humble streaming this series of Picard was the Next Generation period ‘big screen’ Star Trek we needed.
Can We Have More?
Let’s do what we spent our entire lives learning to be great at.
– Beverly Crusher
Considering how the show ended and the presence of that mid-credit scene how can they not be considering doing more with the new generation of cast members? I have my doubts they’ll launch another TV series based on an Enterprise when they have Strange New Worlds in full swing but they could do a series of films for Paramount+? It’s not like there is much difference between the two formats these days filming three films back to back isn’t that dissimilar from a TV series of six episodes.
There is now an aching, narrative hole in my heart for more 25th Century Star Trek written to this level. Just like when The Last of Us ended or Andor it is going to leave a literal hole in my life and an echo of something great that has, hopefully, only momentarily, passed.