It is the end of things in these episodes from Star Trek: Picard season 3 and The Mandalorian season 3, and yet at the same time, very much not.
While The Mandalorian has a clearly flagged fourth season beckoning, Picard ends its three-season run with this series of ten episodes, and yet at the same time, while it most certainly a fond farewell to the classic Enterprise crew we all love so much, it’s also a step forward to a “what’s next?” and simultaneously, paying tribute to what has been and what will always be treasured by those who have long loved Star Trek: The Next Generation.
Both series, one far stronger than the other in their latest iterations, beautifully declare how much connection, family, love and hope matter and how, though they are often seen as lightweight emotions, they possess a muscularity which can change lives and save the galaxy.
The storytelling is magnificent in sci-fi because it points to the very best of things that make us human and these two shows emphasise that in ways that make them worth watching and which underscore how good it is to be alive and to have those who matter right by our side …
Even at its most inconsistent, and to be honest, even with its many cute Grogu moments, The Mandalorian has not had the strongest of seasons, the series is one of those shows you are simply happy to let yourself be lost into.
Part of that has to do with the fact that, like many of the Star Wars told before and contemporaneously with it, The Mandalorian is wonderfully, fulsomely, heart-fillingly escapist, a journey to a long, long time ago in a galaxy far away that feels so perfectly put-together that you feel like it’s some sort of wondrously good sci-fi historical record and not a fictionalised piece of storytelling.
After a long days spent in a world rife with political intrigue and a transparent lack of justice, there is something innately good for the soul in the fact that here is a worlds, or really worlds, where justice is often served, where people can find for freedom and truth and win and where characters whom you love can find the kind of fulfillment of purpose and hope that we all long for.
Every last one of those things was on display in the final two episodes of The Mandalorian season 3 which largely centred on the disparate survivors of the purge of their home planet of Mandalore, split between true believer fundamentalists like Din Djarin’s (Pedro Pascal) tribe, and more mercenary, helmet-removing souls who abandoned belief in favour of pragmatism to survive, who are ready to take their “cursed” homeworld back.
They have determination and expectation rife on their side, and in the world of Star Wars that counts for a lot, but alas, they also have Moff Gideon (Giancarlo Esposito) who, apart form being a deceptively slimy member of the Shadow Council, made of remnant Imperial warlords, is using the bombed-out ruins of Mandalore, which he created, to begin his campaign to retake the galaxy with his clones using suits made of the Beskar alloy, all rendered in an unsettling shade of glossy Empire black.
So, hope and thrilling expectation on one side and resurgent fascist nightmarish on the other – who in the Force, which, oh, by the way, Moff Gideon has also woven into the yet-to-be-realised malevolence of his clone troops who —– SPOILER ALERTS!!! —– Mando dispatches in a volley of explosive glass and water at one decisively furious point, is going to come out on top?
You won’t be surprised to learn that it is the Mandalorians, now led by Bo-Katan Kryze (Katee Sackhoff), who come out on top.
That’s hardly unexpected; in the best possible way, The Mandalorian is very much a part of a the Star Wars tradition which infuses its storytelling with the darkest of elements such as authoritarian fascism and ruthless killing and dictatorial impulses which always finds a reckoning with the forces of good and right who inevitably come out on top in the best Western tradition of the good guys/gals triumphing over the bad.
There’s a recurrent fairytale feel to shows like The Mandalorian which time and again, and it’s why we love it so much in part, which celebrate the power of the driven underdog to really make a difference.
Moff Gideon’s forces are massively well-equipped, including his gloriously red and deadly Praetorian Guards, and by any measure he should win out; but Bo-Katan, backed by Din Djarin, the Armorer (Emily Swallow) and a host of others who aren’t swayed in their loyalty when Kryze admits she botched the original battle for Mandalore (for very good reasons with dire results), has a prevailing sense of destiny and right on her side and that, in the end, counts for more than overpowering weaponry and technology.
In fact, in a world where Ukraine is fighting back, often quite successfully against a supposedly superior invasive Russian military force, it’s a reminder that you can achieve your aims even with a massive number of odds are stacked against you.
It’s inspiring stuff and it’s driven by the fact that the Mandalorians passionately believe in taking back their planet and are prepared to do what it takes to make that happen, a trenchantly powerful self-belief that means they keep going and going to realise their goal of retaking their home planet in “Chapter 23: The Spies” and “Chapter 24: The Return”.
In amongst all the fighting, which ends up with the type of inspiring “This is the way” ceremonial moment, this time by the living waters of Mandalore, that characterise victorious moments in the franchise, we have some delightful moments of humour such as when Grogu is given the pilotable exoskeleton of a rebuilt IG-11 which gives him an independence of movement and action and the chance to engage in some limited, electronically-generated vocalisation in the form of “yes” and “no” which leads to some highly amusing moments of rebellion against his adoptive dad, Din Djarin.
It’s a light and bright series of moments which, along with some Easter eggs such as the R5-D4 droid – who has quite the history, thank you – recreating an iconic R2-D2 scene from the original (now middle) trilogy in the Skywalker Saga, gives the third season of The Mandalorian, which ends up a bucolically lovely moment on Navarro between Din and Grogu, the kind of finish which wraps up a tad threadbare but still enjoyable narrative, in a very upliftingly Star Wars-ish way and which, quite apart from wiping the slate and setting things up nicely for season 4, reminds of the power of hope and belief and how good it is to escape into a galaxy where this happens with a happy regularity.
Here’s all the news we have about The Mandalorian fourth season, likely due sometime in 2024.
Star Trek: Picard season 3
————————- SPOILER ALERT!!! ————————-
Now that, THAT, is how you wrap up a long-running storyline, say goodbye to a cast of superlatively good and immensely meaningful characters, and generate all the feelings it is possible to have in almost two hours of finely calibrated storytelling.
The final two episodes of Star Trek: Picard season three also serve as the final two episodes ever of Star Trek: The Next Generation in effect with an article in Variety noting that it provides “them with the swan song they had never received.”
‘I wanted it to feel like a proper send-off in the way that I felt watching Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country,’ [executive producer Terry] Matalas says of the final film to feature the full original Star Trek cast. ‘In this case, we had 10 hours, so we could do better. We could give each one of these characters more, and end in a sense of family in ways that they didn’t have time in a two-hour movie to do.‘ (Variety)
And a fitting farewell is precisely what the crew of the Enterprise get, appropriately enough on the very ship that was their home for so many years and which, it turns out, while technically destroyed on Veridian III in the first Next Generation movie, Star Trek: Generations in 1994, had been ferried back to the Starfleet museum where Geordi (LeVar Burton) has been restoring it for a good couple of decades.
The reason the Enterprise-D comes in to play is because the people who turn out to be the saviours of the galaxy once again, this time against a Borg assimilation via genetic code, thanks to the Changeling infiltration, need a shop that is analogue and not hardwired into the digital collective consciousness that is not the entire fleet of ships the Federation possesses.
So, it is that Georgi, a very emotional Data (Brent Spiner), now with added gut instinct, Beverly Crusher (Gates McFadden), Worf (Michael Dorn), Will Riker (Jonathan Frakes), his Imzadi, Deanne Troi (Marina Sirtis) and of course Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart) end up on the Enterprise-D for one last journey, to both save the galaxy, which is once again in peril, and to save Picard and Crusher’s son, Jack (Ed Speleers) who has now been Borgified.
Yep, you know that voice in his head and those weird black tendrils and red flower petals that had been plaguing him his whole life, and particularly throughout the third season with increasingly distressing frequency?
Turns out, it was the Borg, the legacy of Jean-Luc’s assimilation all those years ago, 35 to be exact, which turned him into Locutus of Borg, and it turns out, changed his genetic code so that his son became a genetically-coded Borg transmitter.
Hell of a genetic legacy to hand to the son he has only just learnt is his, one which sends Jack into the arms of the ailing Borg queen, for whom her Federation-assimilating alliance with the Changelings in the last roll of the dice for a collective that is dead and dying and looks more zombie than alive (if they were ever really living), and which seems to doom the Federation and thus the galaxies it dominates, to enslavement in the Borg’s cold, cruel authoritarian hive mind.
Turns out the Borg are on their last nano-enhanced legs, their bold gambit to infiltrate Starfleet the last chance they have to have any future at all.
And Jack, full to the brim with his dad’s twisted genetic code, is the key to it all until of course his dad and his devoted crew (and family) come along and out an end to the whole nefarious scheme, and just in the nick of time too with a fleet of ships, hardwired to work together and under the control of anyone in Starfleet under 25 who are all assimilated into the Borg (though not forever, thank god, the result of a transmission from Borg Jack, which was once ended, sets them free again), all ready to lay waste to Earth.
They don’t, hurrah, and the galaxy is once again in debt to the rule-breaking denizens of the Enterpise-D whose closeness to each other and whose innate humanity, most notably, Data’s, is what saves everyone, helped along by Seven of Nine (Jeri Ryan), who gets a well-deserved to captain of the Enterprise-G (the rechristened Titan) and Raffi Musiker (Michelle Hurd), Seven’s new Number One.
In fact, it is humanity that is celebrated throughout these final two episodes as what is left of free-thinking members of Starfleet fight to what turns out to be a much better end than expected, and in so doing get the most favour Star Trek crew of all – except for all the others of course – the most wonderful and heartwarming of send-offs.
In the midst of a very tense final couple of hours, there are also moments of trademark humour, mostly between Riker and Worf who quip back and forth like nobody’s business even inside a Borg cube, some Easter eggs that point to pivotal moments in TNG‘s storyline, most especially the poker scene which finishes off the series’ final episode “All Good Things” which gets a beautiful redux at the end of Picard.
As a way to say goodbye to the crew of the Enterprise-D, these two episodes, with the finale more than appropriately-titled “The Last Generation”, contain everything we loved about the show, its characters and the ethos that powered it of doing what is right, of connection and family and of doing what it takes to keep others safe and sound, not just the wider Federation but also those the crew loves and treasures too.
That is truly emotionally resonant display in one of the final scenes of “The Last Generation” when Picard, in a desperate bid to stop the Borg and save his son, plugs back into the dying collective and convinces Jack that he doesn’t need the voices of the new Borg to keep him company and that he is loved as a son Picard treasures so much that he will stay in the collective with Jack if that what it takes.
It’s a powerful statement of fatherhood and selflessness that exemplifies what made TNG and this season of Picard so damn affecting, and why it’s found such an enduring place in our hearts.
As farewells go, Picard’s was a doozy, giving us a chance to say goodbye, and yet with the appearance of Q (John de Lancie) in the end-credits to Jack maybe a spinoff beginning too (??), making these two breathakingly good final two episodes of Picard, and TNG too really, some of the best goodbye TV to have ever been made and a way to unite past and present in a way that will be remembered well into the future.