Further thoughts on the third season of Star Trek: Picard

Having finished watching the third season of Star Trek: Picard, I find I'm less enthusiastic about it than I would have thought.

For me, the best season of the series remains the first one, even if for half the final, two-part episode I experienced the kind of reservations that plagued my interest in the second and third.  I'm just not overly convinced that a completely serialized season works.  Babylon 5, for a lot of Star Trek fans in the '90s looking for something to energize them, suggested it was the inevitable future, but even it wasn't completely serialized.  Individual episodes could still tell their own stories.  I found Battlestar Galactica so hopelessly grim within just the first few episodes, I not only swore off any further suggestions that this was how Voyager should have played out, I was all the happier it didn't.  Deep Space Nine, when it attempted complete serialization at the beginning of the sixth season and end of the seventh, was further proof, for me, that story gets lost in the shuffle, not elevated.  You have to know what keeps the story interesting, not just keep the story going.

In the second season, I kept wanting more from the few elements that interested me (Q, Guinan), and less from the ones that didn't (Jurati as the Borg Queen's puppet, Rios in ICEland), it was difficult to know what to make of the results.  Later, I better appreciated the season, including how Guinan was used.

This last season will need similar effort.  I understand all the story beats and why they played out the way they did, but eventually it became so inevitable, and the familiar crew used so much it distracted from the pleasure of seeing them again.  Picard needed more grounding.  He needed more time with Beverly Crusher, who while being taken more seriously than ever before still found herself relegated to the background, no resolution, again, between herself and Picard, who instead spent most of his time with Jack Crusher (it would have been interesting as a subplot to somehow tie in the first Jack Crusher to all of this).  Data, instead of having a triumphant return, limped into the ensemble, and never felt any more important to Picard than he did in Next Generation, a direct contrast to their increased bond in the movies, which was so important it was the driving subplot of the first season.

This isn't to say I didn't enjoy the season.  As someone who's remained connected to these characters throughout the years (I remain one of the few fans of Nemesis), it wasn't such a long time since I saw the crew together, so for now, it's difficult to appreciate seeing them again.  I never had a problem like this with the original cast, since by the time I was born, the original series was long over and the movies were still in the midst of playing out, and by the time I was really able to appreciate any of it, both the series and the films were long concluded.  Seeing the crew age through the movies was just a matter of fact, as was following along with their sporadic later appearances, right down to Spock in Star Trek and Into Darkness.  (And, I guess, Walter Koenig voicing Anton Chekov.)  Even seeing the Enterprise-D again feels diminished by spending so much time aboard.

Most of this is quibbles.  In a lot of ways, this season is making amends for how the movies ended, and that the first two seasons avoided most of the cast.  If nothing else, Worf had a great part (the exception that proved the rule), and showed Riker in command mode, and of course Captain Shaw (who was also short-changed, eventually, but whose arc in general was one of the season's true highlights).  Finishing out, finally, the Borg saga, and even rounding out the Dominion War arc, finally including the Next Generation crew in it, that was well worth the time and energy put into everything.  If the season had included a few more wrinkles into the plot, rather than spend much of the back half coasting to the finale, believing the mystery behind Jack was enough, it would have been easier to appreciate.  But it was still well worth it.