Star Trek: Picard Hits All the Right Notes

 I have been a lifelong Star Trek fan since about the age of seven, more than half a century. With each new iteration I have been simultaneously hopeful that the producers would get things right and fearful that they would get them wrong. Usually, it's been a mix of the two, with the ratio of good to bad being the operative question.

Being old enough to remember when Star Trek was just a single 79-episode series, and not a TV, movie, multimedia, etc., franchise, the original series from the 1960s has always been the gold standard to which all other iterations are compared, and it's not a stretch to say some have measured up to that standard better than others.

There have been many times that viewers have felt Paramount had milked their cash cow dry and run out of good ideas, but like agricultural fields allowed to lie fallow for a season, there is always the opportunity for new growth.

The latest period of renewal has come with advent of streaming. Paramount+, originally known as CBS All Access, has used Star Trek as its flagship franchise, producing several new series, including some real gems along the way.

Star Trek: Discovery got off to a rocky start in its first season, while its second essentially served as a back door pilot for Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. Beginning with the third season, it has explored a series treatment originally penned by Gene Roddenberry and fleshed out as the non-Trek series Andromeda in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

The series that has proved most surprising to me is Star Trek: Picard, which just wrapped up this week after three seasons, each of which encompassed a complete story arc. In this way, Picard captured the best aspects of both the films and TV series, as each season played out like an extended feature film. 

This was an innovative approach and it very much worked, especially in the just-concluded third and final season. Telling out a narrative over ten episodes gave the opportunity to be both expansive and concise at the same time, and best of all, to experience the types of moments that made for the best moments of Star Trek on both the big and small screens. Show runner Terry Matalas just made the whole thing work. 

While this particular iteration of Trek is now in the proverbial can—or canon, as the case may be—the final episode closed with some tantalizing tidbits, teasing of what could be ahead. Matalas has said in interviews that there is nothing solid in the works, but a passing of the torch certainly looks to be in the realm of possibility. Hey, we got Strange New Worlds out of Discovery, which seems set to yield a Starfleet academy spinoff as it warps off into the sunset later this year, so who knows. 

All I can say to that prospect is... Engage!