SPOILERS AHEAD … AND RIFTS IN TIME AND THE SOUL WHERE IT’S DARK, VERY DARK, INDEED …
You would scarcely have called Picard season 1 a lighthearted romp in the park, full as it ruminatively was with thoughts on grief, loss, bigotry, hatred and paths not travelled (and profound regret about the ones that were) but next to season 2, it’s all Easter bonnets, giddily joyous laughs and picnics on a sunny day.
That’s pretty much to be expected when you have the Borg Queen (Annie Wersching), Q (John De Lancie back in fine form, whether you like the character or not), a tyrannically xenophobic alternate timeline and a eponymous protagonist who’s diving deep into the literal mother of all lingering existential issues.
If that sounds like a lot to unpack it is, but somehow in the first five episodes of a show that manages to pay homage to the past – hello Guinan old (Whoopi Goldberg) and young (Ito Aghayere)! – while staying resolutely in the here and now, when rifts in time permit naturally, Picard seamlessly unspools the narrative in ways that allow to luxuriate in the story, sit tensely to see where it will lead and rejoice in the coming together of old friends.
Everyone is back together again in episode 1 with Admiral Picard, now in charge of Starfleet Academy when he’s not harvesting the latest crop of grapes with the steady hand of Laris (Orla Brady) who may or may want to be more than just his right hand Romulan, farewelling Raffi Musiker (Michelle Hurd) and Elnor (Evan Evagora) off on their new assignments on the U.S.S. Excelsior, and keeping in touch with Chris Rios (Santiago Cabrera), now captain of the U.S.S. Stargazer – an Easter egg for those who know their Picardian history – and Agnes Jurati, who has found a place to call her own, also aboard the Stargazer which is joined, happily for team togetherness, at one point by Seven of Nine (Jeri Ryan).
You might be wondering what the pretext is for bringing everyone together when it seems as if they are happily and contentedly moving on with their lives after the grand galaxy-spanning adventures of season 1.
Surely, if everyone so dispersed, gathering together everyone together might seem a little forced?
Possibly, unless, and here’s the kicker, a green-tinged rip forms in space and time not that far away from the Stargazer, a rift that entreaties whoever is listening to get the Picard there post haste to help them, necessitating Picard being summoned aboard Rios’ ship for a mysterious meeting with an unknown entity who, everyone at Starfleet rather optimistically surmises, wants to join the Federation.
Oh happy day, diplomatic niceties can be observed, more inclusion practised and the galaxy made just that little bit safer and nicer; only, and it will not surprise you one jot to discover this, that’s not even remotely what happens with the Borg Queen enacting what amounts to an attack by stealth – stripped of her armada, she’s had to get sneaky and fast – and Q making the most of it to once again toy with Picard and the fate of humanity as a whole.
As set ups go, it’s a doozy, and as the gang find themselves being blown up by an auto-destruct – or are they? – and thrown into a dark, red-and-black hued autocratically fascist nightmare of a reality where humanity gives birth not to the visionary Federation but to a galactic empire rife with violent genocide and draconian brutality, it becomes very clear, very quickly, that whatever’s gone down has well and truly wrecked the world of Star Trek as we know it.
What really makes this sequence fly, and stops it getting bogged down in too much narrative guff, is that everyone remembers who they are and what their original timeline was like, and after freaking out – fair enough; not freaking out would’ve been the odd reaction – they set to finding out where, when and why they are, who’s behind it and what they need to do to fix it.
It’s a reasonably straightforward premise that is equal parts Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home – the point of time divergence where good and bad timelines head their separate ways is 2024, handy for production costs if nothing else; begone annoying futuristic special effects (well, for the most part) – mirror universe (and not; trust us, it makes sense in the end) and Best of Both Worlds with Picard having to confront some Borg-ian nightmares once again (though in the end it is Jurati who ends up becoming the Borg Queens’s psychological and nanite-filled plaything).
And the second season of Picard runs hard with it, gunning the pace more than it did in the more thoughtfully chilled first season but still allowing plenty of time for those meaningful explorations of humanity in all their fractured multitudinous glory which made the first season such an immersive joy.
While it’s far more pedal to the metal this time around, the show still manages to neatly balance a cracking narrative momentum, in which clues must be uncovered, foes and possible allies confronted and deeds done, all in the service of correcting the brokenness of time, with some heartbreakingly intimate scenes such as when Picard comes face-to-face with his emotionally hands-off approach to relationships, Jurati is sent into the dark night of the soul by the Bord Queen’s manipulations of Agnes’ endemically, soul-crushing loneliness, and Raffi has to deal with a wholly unexpected, heart-ripping death.
In only five perfectly-judged episodes, all of the characters are put through a lot, and by a lot we mean a LOT, and miraculously Picard gives them time, for the most part (Raffi kind of has to grieve on the run; partly by choice and partly by circumstance) to grapple with these existential challenges all while turbocharging a story that is going hell for leather to restore the timeline back to its Roddenberry-ian self.
In most other Star Trek shows, you’d expect that the timeline resetting will be a walk in the park, but this is Picard, a show that has shown an emotionally impactful fondness for taking the characters to hell and back and not always giving them the happy ending they deserve.
Granted we are only halfway through season 2 – which happily will be followed by a third season full of TNG alum – and nothing is guaranteed but it’s looking more and more like if that happy ever after (for now) is going to be restored, it’s going to come at great cost with every single character going to hell and back – the inclusion of Adam Soong (Brent Spiner) suggests things will only get more complicated, not less in the back half of the season – and the end point maybe not being as net and tidy as we’re accustomed to in the Star Trek universe.