Star Trek: Picard – Farewell Review

And with that, we bid farewell to Star Trek: Picard season two (while we wait on pins and needles for the highly promoted Next Generation reunion to come in season three – although Jeri Ryan has gone on record saying that she will be making at least an appearance in the final season of the show to tie up Seven’s storyline, such as it is). While season two was a much better effort than season one (insomuch as it had a mostly coherent narrative, made valiant attempts at character development – and even succeeded in several instances, and remembered that it has a ridiculously talented supporting cast that deserves a chance to shine just as much as Patrick Stewart), it still suffered from several of the hallmarks of this latest round of live action Star Trek: inconsistent plotting, adapting characters to what you need for the story in the moment and not laying the groundwork for their choices, and getting lost in the sci-fi of it all.

That being said, there was a lot to like within “Farewell,” the aptly titled season finale. This series has been at its absolute best when it opted to drill down into the humanity of its characters – mostly Picard, but we were granted some lovely moments for Rios, Seven, Raffi, Tallinn, and Jurati throughout the season, and the finale was no different. The sequence with Picard and Q, discussing just why Q set-up this one last adventure with his beloved Capitaine was truly touching to witness. It absolutely helps that John de Lancie and Stewart have nearly 35 years of experience working together to draw on, but without his bluster and stripped of his games, the honesty in Q’s reveal that he really just loved Picard and wanted to spend time with him was a wonderful button on one of Trek’s greatest supporting characters. And it rang true: Sure, Q has tested Picard and been prickly with him over the years, but their relationship was always built on something more than antagonism. Q challenged Picard because Picard fascinated him. Janeway would verbally spar with him (and Sikso literally sparred with him during their one encounter), but Picard would challenge him. And when you are an omnipotent god, challenging is fun.

The episode’s other stellar emotional sequence came courtesy of the meeting between Renee Picard and Tallinn. Heck, if I had to pick an MVP of the entire back half of the season, it would be Orla Brady and Tallinn. For someone who was a recurring cast member in the series’ first season – albeit one that I was begging for the show to give more screen time – Brady absolutely made herself indispensable this time around. From Tallinn’s speech to Picard that he cannot save people from their own choices – and her clear insistence that she gets to make her own decisions in her life, something that we rarely get to see laid out this clearly to a show’s hero, but something that absolutely should be shouted from the rooftops in more situations like these – to the gorgeous performance when Tallinn tells Renee how much she has meant to her, from afar, all these years, it was just a top notch sequence all around. If there’s one thing I hope comes from this season of television, it is that people in the business realize the incredible talent that is Orla Brady and that she gets a deluge of offers.

But the sequences with Q and Picard, and Tallinn and Picard, harkened back to the theme the series attempted in season one and successfully pulled off in season two: Release your hold on the past and let go. Picard opened the entire series depressed and holding onto the guilt he felt over the loss of Data years earlier. Yes, the plotline was mostly dropped throughout the first season, much to my disappointment, but Picard’s inability to let go of the past was a foundational element to the existence of this entire series. Showing that his guilt over the loss of Data was merely one piece of a complex guilt puzzle – one where Picard started out blaming himself for his mother’s suicide when he was a boy, so naturally he did the same with every other major loss suffered, creating a complex where he needed to protect those in his orbit (great in some ways for a Starfleet captain, but devastating for him personally) – helped color in a character we’ve spent decades with in ways we didn’t know we needed to see.

Which is what makes both his conversations with Q and Tallinn so crucial to this final crafting of the character as we prepare to say a final goodbye. Q’s final piece of advice – stop looking to the past and live in the now – is universal in its application, but especially key to Picard, a man who has built his life on the foundation of his past “failures.” And Tallinn’s sharp rebuke that she has the right to make the choices she wishes with her life – that she doesn’t need him to save her – is something that finally cuts through the fog of Picard’s self-flagellation and gets to the heart of his personal traumas. Not everyone needs saving, Picard, nor wants to be saved, and you cannot keep living in the past hoping you can change it to absolve you from your misplaced guilt. Heavy stuff but presented beautifully.

It was almost enough to make me ignore the ridiculous, gaping plot holes that ran throughout the rest of the episode (and, let’s be honest, the back half of the season). I already wrote a treatise last week on how having Jurati take over the Borg in whatever fashion she did and create a “new” Borg over the course of 400 years makes zero sense within the timeline of the series unless she created some small Borg offshoot that didn’t stop the main Borg antagonists from everything they did throughout various Trek series. Naturally, the finale ignores all of this, save to have Picard remind us that Seven has the most Borg experience – but does she if the Borg are the Jurati Borg? – with the sole goal of getting her in the Captain’s chair for a fun bit of fan service.* We also suddenly have the return of Rios’s new family after he peaced out on them pretty unceremoniously last week so that he can stay in the past (and so Santiago Cabrerra, who is now doing some great work over on HBO Max’s The Flight Attendant, can be free to do other things). I was also less than thrilled that my prediction of a Deus Ex Q ending was brought to fruition (although bonus points for having an actual god-like creature manipulate us into a mostly happy ending). There’s a reason those endings always feel hollow: They negate the losses along the way, removing the emotional impact the audience and characters experienced. In this case, it really only applies to Raffi in the Elnor lives side of things, but it’s still some pretty shoddy plotting.

*Speaking of fan service, it was fun to see Wil Wheaton return as Wesley Crusher, the Traveler.

This season of Picard certainly wasn’t a total loss – the early episodes were fun and engaging (even if the ending set lessened the impact of their strengths), we finally got to take the deep dive into Picard’s emotional center we were promised back in season one and while it was pretty predictable, it still made an impact, and the series allowed several underused actors (Brady, Brent Spiner, Alison Pill) to shine. I just wish the writers could get out of their own way and tell us a straightforward, character first story. Hell, I still don’t understand the detour with the FBI agent considering he never appeared again and added absolutely nothing to the plot! That could have been time spent developing Rios’s conundrum of staying or going, giving us any indication that Seven and Raffi do genuinely care about one another, or more time with Q, Soong, or anyone else. The writers proved they know how to create an interesting tale this time around – now, in the final season, they need to prove they can end it as well.