Star Trek: Picard Premiere Review

by Russ Brown “The Opaque Senator,” GGR Contributor

I'll admit, I was excited and yet very nervous about this series. I very much enjoyed Star Trek: The Next Generation, though I came into it years after its ending (I was pretty young when the series was live). The series had some very interesting episodes and themes way ahead of its time. The movies for TNG unfortunately were very hit or miss. They finished with Star Trek: Nemesis; a movie that also was a bit hit or miss. There was some stellar action and interesting themes, but it never truly coalesced. So when I heard they were picking up the series 20 years later focused around the famous Starfleet Captain, Jean-Luc Picard, I was worried. There have been so many remakes and reboots and continuations of older series lately and so many of them have missed the mark. One of the biggest reasons has been the blatant ignoring of major plot points or endings. The Roseanne reboot for instance ignoring Dan's death, and so on and so forth. Some have suffered from an overuse of cheap CGI (Knight Rider reboot). Others still failing to capture what made the original series or movie so much fun (The A-team remake for example).

All that apprehension aside, this is first thing the premiere of Star Trek: Picard gets right. They aren't ignoring the end of the TNG series and where we left the characters. Star Trek Nemesis still happened in this continuation. Also, Star Trek always did a great job in using the futuristic settings, aliens, and characters in mimicking real world current events. This is something that is also already evident from Episode 1. The world of today is vastly different than the world of the early 1990s, and thus so, the world of Jean-Luc Picard is also changed greatly in the two decades since he last captained the Enterprise. A pilot episode of any series has a difficult job to do. They have to leave an audience wanting more, to continue to want to watch, but also do a good enough job world building and helping to understand where you are when you watch it. This can be a difficult job. But Picard does it well. I want more. I want to see what happens next. I want to see this decorated now-retired admiral back in action, both wiser and more experienced, but also older and weakened take on new challenges. And the look and choreography have also started off admirably.

Now, quick plot synopsis. Spoilers ahead...We find Picard living in retirement on a vineyard in France with No. 1 (his pit bull) and 2 attendants. We open with a dream of he and Data on the bridge of the Enterprise playing poker. In the background, a planet explodes to wake Picard up. Then we cut to a lovely young lady and her alien boyfriend celebrating, in which things very quickly go awry and they are attacked my masked intruders. The girl who goes by the name Dahj (Isa Briones, American Crime Story Season 2) also gets overpowered and is about to be abducted, when she all of a sudden “activates” and quickly disposes of the intruders. She then flashes to a vision of Jean-Luc Picard and goes to find him. Picard then gives his first interview in years to discuss some of his work on history and enlightening people about a tragedy. This interview serves as a framing device for the series. Picard goes into why he's retired and what's happened to the world since we last saw him in Nemesis. He was an admiral, and the Romulans were facing a cataclysmic disaster with a soon to explode supernova threatening to wipe out 9 billion lives. Despite hostile tension with the Romulans, Picard convinces the Federation to help in the largest scale evacuation ever attempted. “Like the pyramids” the interviewer exclaims. “No...Dunkirk” says Picard. Things go awry when “synthetics” (androids like Data were) mutiny and doom the mission. Starfleet decommissions the creation of synthetics and abandons the Romulans. The interviewer tries to get one over on Picard trying to pry as to why he left Starfleet, to which he exclaims “they stopped being Starfleet.” He believes they had abandoned their founding principles on that planet.

Soon after, Dahj finds Picard and enlists his help. Picard has another dream about Data and a painting he did. The painting was done in pairs and the second was in storage. Picard, realizing his subconscious is trying to tell him something, goes to look up the other painting and realizes the face painted looks exactly like Dahj. Dahj is somehow Data's daughter. The two were separated when Picard went to leave, as Dahj was worried the people after her would track her to Picard. But she calls her mom and she tells her to return to him, to which she seems to “activate” again and track him.

Jean-Luc and Dahj

They meet up near Starfleet headquarters where Picard tells her who he thinks she is. But they are attacked again, and this time Dahj is killed with Picard getting knocked out in the process.

Picard wakes up back home, where his Romulan caretakers tend to his health. He decides to travel to the Daystrom Institute on Okinawa to learn more about whats been going on with synthetics since Data's death in Nemesis. Here we are introduced to to Agnes Jirati (played by the super underrated Allison Pill, The Newsroom) who both gives him some answers and brings in some familiar names. She shows Picard what remains of B4, Data's early prototype from Nemesis, and shoots down a fan theory/kernel of hope from the ending of Nemesis: even though Data uploaded all of his memories to B4, he was far too primitive to function properly with Data’s memories. She also drops the name of Dr. Thomas Maddox. Astute TNG enthusiasts will remember that name from the extremely well done episode, “Measure of a Man.” This episode featured a trial of sorts between Picard and Maddox, who was looking to have Data shut down for study. Picard and Data ultimately won the trial, but Data had promised to work with Maddox when he could to further his research. Apparently, Maddox had been doing just that in the intervening years, and the possibility exists that he may be behind the creation of Dahj, with Data's essence as it was Maddox’s belief that Data’s essence existed in any positronic neuron. We also get the cliffhanger that sells the episode. We find out that these human synthetics are always made in twos, so there is a twin out there as well, likely in danger. The episode closes with a young woman looking just like Dahj being approached for help, and in the zoom out we see it is taking place on a reconstructed Borg cube full of Romulans. Whoa.

It was a cool ending, spot on for a pilot episode for a series. I am looking forward to continuing and hope we get many more episodes of Picard to come like this one. It was the perfect balance of answering some of the questions we all had while also teasing enough to make us want to tune in to the episodes that follow. In this crazy almost unrecognizable world, it's nice to see a familiar idealistic character being returned to help us find our way through.