With Star Trek: Picard coming to an end in its third season, the franchise that Gene Roddenberry built is facing an amazing opportunity, and one that seemed practically impossible just a few years ago. Now that the show is fully embracing the title character’s past by bringing back the beloved crew from The Next Generation -- and indeed, doing so in the era of Peak TV that allows writers and actors to dig in on their characters like never before -- the likes of not just Jean-Luc Picard, but William Riker, Beverly Crusher, Deanna Troi and the rest may finally get the deep focus, not to mention the send-off, that they have long deserved.
“I think it’s important to say that the third season is much more than a reunion season,” Patrick Stewart told TV Insider last year. “Much, much more. It’s intense. It’s personal. It’s social. It’s a family. And it gets very serious.”
Will Season 3 pull it off? Could Picard’s grand finale turn out to be the ultimate Next Generation story? That remains to be seen, but let’s take a look at where we last saw the crew of the Enterprise-D -- and E! -- and how it could inform where the characters might go next.
Captain William T. Riker
Let’s start with the man himself, the chair-straddling, head-aimed-at-knocking-down-the-wall-as-he-walks Captain William Riker, a.k.a. director of the best Next Generation movie, Jonathan Frakes. Riker actually showed up pretty recently, alongside his wife, Marina Sirtis’ Deanna Troi, in the Season 1 episode of Picard, “Nepenthe,” as well as that season’s finale. In fact, “Nepenthe” was probably the best episode of Picard to date, which certainly bodes well for Season 3 where Riker, Deanna, and almost everyone else is supposed to come back too.
Frakes is perhaps the Star Trek vet who has been most involved with the franchise since his show ended, having directed the movies First Contact and Insurrection as well as over two dozen episodes to date, including for Discovery and Picard. (He’s also directing Episodes 3 and 4 of Picard Season 3.) In addition to Next Gen, he’s appeared in: Deep Space Nine, as Riker’s transporter clone Thomas Riker, obviously; Voyager, where Q transported him tens of thousands of light years across space in order to make a cameo; Enterprise, where he and Deanna showed up for that series’ most unfortunate final episode; and, more recently, the animated Lower Decks, where Riker is captain of the USS Titan (and Deanna is the ship’s counselor).
Those Lower Decks appearances are set a year or two after the Next Gen crew’s last big-screen outing, Star Trek: Nemesis. It was that film that saw Riker and Troi get married, and before the credits rolled, leave for a new life onboard the Titan as Picard’s first officer finally took that promotion he’d managed to duck for all those years on the Enterprise. But eventually, the couple would leave the Starfleet life behind -- well, kind of -- which brings me to…
Deanna Troi
Like Jonathan Frakes, Marina Sirtis has returned to the franchise multiple times since Next Gen ended, with three appearances on Voyager, that, ugh, Enterprise guest shot, and an episode of Lower Decks.
Star Trek: Picard takes place about 20 years after Lower Decks, so by the time we caught up with Riker and Deanna in “Nepenthe,” a lot had changed. They had a daughter now, the precocious Kestra Troi-Riker, who was named after Deanna’s older sister who, as Next Gen had shown us back in that show’s seventh season, had tragically died years earlier when she was just a child. But Riker and Deanna are also mourning their own lost child here as, several years prior to the events of “Nepenthe,” their son Thaddeus had succumbed to a rare disorder known as mendaxic neurosclerosis.
The family had left the Titan and moved to the planet Nepenthe about eight years prior to this episode with the hope that the world’s regenerative properties could help the boy, but to no avail. Deanna tells Picard that they’re OK now, but really, is that even possible? How does the loss of a child impact one’s life? Can Riker and Troi ever truly be “fine,” and will the death of Thaddeus continue to haunt them in Season 3? How can it not?
Sirtis promises that the Deanna of Season 3 will have continued to evolve. “Yes, there is a development,” she told Cinemablend. “It’s not same old, same old Troi.”
In any case, with Riker on reserve duty from Starfleet, he, Deanna, and Kestra settled into a simple life, living in a cabin in the woods… though some things would never change for them. It was there that Picard and the android Soji visited them, seeking a safe haven when they were on the run from some nasty Romulans, which is a long story and not really worth getting into here. But suffice to say, the interlude on Nepenthe gave Picard, Riker, and Troi some of their finest interactions… dare I say ever? The emotional connection between the characters, and between the viewer and those same characters, is very strong in this episode, and it bodes very well for Picard Season 3 indeed.
The Riker/Deanna romance was first teased in “Encounter at Farpoint,” the first Next Gen episode. But it was rarely played upon in the years that followed, as a show back then typically had to keep its characters in a sort of stasis, resetting to their basic parameters by the end of each episode. I call it the Ralph Kramden Puppy Syndrome because of the extreme, and very old, example of this phenomenon from an episode of The Honeymooners where Ralph adopted several puppies, only for them all to be gone by the next episode with no explanation at all.
The writers of Next Gen would push against this approach when they could, and by the time Deep Space Nine had kicked into full gear, television itself was changing and more serialized storytelling and character progression was happening. But the crew of the Enterprise-D mostly missed that space-boat. Until now.
In the Season 1 finale of Picard, Riker would take the captain’s chair again in order to help save the day. But it was “Nepenthe” that showed us how characters created in the late 1980s -- when ongoing storylines were a rarity and deep, complex, or permanent character development was even more rare -- could grow and change and still pack a hell of a wallop. In fact, Frakes has teased a big conflict between Riker and Picard this season -- a “‘f— you, you’re wrong!’ kind of conflict,” the actor told TrekMovie. It makes one wonder, what does happen when a captain and a retired admiral don’t agree in a crisis moment?
“Fighting with Picard feels odd, and somehow satisfying as acting fighting can be,” Frakes recently told IGN. “And disagreeing, and having stakes, and having objectives that are different than the objectives of the other actor in the scene.”
Doctor Beverly Crusher
Gates McFadden’s Doctor Crusher really hasn’t popped up much since we last saw her in Star Trek: Nemesis, toasting the late Lieutenant Commander Data with the rest of her friends. And really, Beverly didn’t get much to do in any of the Next Gen movies, which was true for a lot of this cast as big action cinema like that tends to favor a couple of lead characters at most. Any development Crusher got on the show was put on indefinite hold for the movies.
“I never felt I had a character arc in the movies,” the actress tells IGN. “I really had to dig for one.”
A hologram version of Beverly did pop up in the Star Trek: Prodigy episode “Kobayashi,” which takes place about four years after we last saw her in Nemesis. While not technically the “real” Doctor Crusher, the hologram was voiced by McFadden as she and other Star Trek luminaries helped tutor the show’s young, aspiring Starfleeter, Dal. Think of this appearance as a warm-up for the actress before she jumped back into shooting Picard Season 3.
While a deleted scene for Nemesis would’ve seen Beverly take over as the head of Starfleet Medical on Earth (again, as she had already done that when she was booted from the show temporarily in Season 2), this development for her was never canon and, so as far as we can tell, the Dancing Doctor remained onboard the Enterprise-E after the events of that movie. Oddly, in Season 1 of Picard, Jean-Luc meets with his old friend and the doctor from his first command, Moritz Benayoun, but Beverly has never been mentioned on the show until the marketing for Season 3 began.
What’s interesting about this is that in the Next Gen series finale, “All Good Things…”, a possible future was revealed where Jean-Luc and Beverly had married, and divorced, in the years after the show ended. Certainly, that version of the future is not a 1:1 with the world Star Trek: Picard is depicting, but Season 3 will finally fill us in on what actually happened between these two in the years since Nemesis. And apparently, they haven’t seen each other in a very long time.
"She hasn't seen Picard for … 20-something [years], I think, in the story,” McFadden tells IGN. “And it was so much to chew on. It was fantastic. And I loved every minute of it.”
Twenty years, huh? While McFadden isn’t really giving away any Season 3 secrets yet, it’s clear that something bad went down between Beverly and Jean-Luc at some point, and that the show will delve into their relationship in a way that Star Trek never has before. Like Riker and Deanna, Beverly and Jean-Luc were another will they/won’t they couple in the grand tradition of will they/won’t they couples. Feels like maybe, finally, they will. Or will have, at least.
Geordi La Forge
In some ways, Geordi La Forge, the one-time chief engineer of the starship Enterprise, feels like the character who has been most missing on Picard. At least, that was the case in the first season, which dealt with the legacy of Brent Spiner’s Data, who had died in Nemesis. And that’s because Geordi had always been Data’s best friend, so it seemed like a glaring oversight for him to not be present or even consulted by Picard when the Admiral encountered Data’s so-called offspring Soji and Dahj, let alone when Picard got the chance for one final goodbye with his old android colleague.
Sure, you can explain Geordi’s absence away through plot contrivances, not to mention the fact that once the Next Gen movies started there was a bit of best-friend poaching happening on the part of Picard. But just look at the way LeVar Burton silently plays that toast scene from Nemesis and try telling me he didn’t need to be part of that Data storyline.
That misstep may yet be alleviated in Season 3, as Spiner will apparently return as Data’s evil brother Lore, which at the very least would seem to open up some possibilities for Geordi in coming to peace with the loss of his friend all those years ago. But also, Geordi may be the returning Next Gen-er whose new storyline we know the most about so far.
At New York Comic-Con in October, Burton spoke about how Geordi was “never involved in a healthy relationship with anyone,” a reference to the character’s notoriously less than successful attempts at finding love on the show.
“It was unsophisticated, and I never liked it,” Burton tells IGN of that aspect of the character on Next Gen. “And so when [showrunner] Terry [Matalas] brought the idea that Geordi, when we see him again, is a family man, I was all in on that because it righted a wrong that always... I held it in a place of discomfort."
But now we will meet a Geordi who is married and has two daughters, Sidney, played by Ashlei Sharpe Chestnut, and Alandra, who will be played by the actor’s real-life daughter, Mica Burton. Sidney will even be serving as the helmsman of the USS Titan, which is the job Geordi had on the Enterprise when we first met him over 35 years ago! Interestingly, Geordi mentioned having daughters with those same names, plus a son, in that alternate future from “All Good Things…” Cool.
Like Frakes, Burton has directed a load of Star Trek episodes since Next Gen ended, though not for the modern shows. That includes the Voyager episode “Timeless,” where another, different alternate future depicted a Geordi La Forge who was captain of the USS Challenger. But while Picard mentioned him in Season 1, we don’t really know what Geordi has been up to since the events of Nemesis. The comics have depicted him as working at the Utopia Planitia Shipyards during the Picard era, but we can’t really consider that canon now, can we?
Worf
Turtle-shell foreheads off for Michael Dorn, who wins the Lifetime Achievement Award for the actor to put up with the most Star Trek bullshit. This guy has been in a total of 11 seasons of Star Trek, having done seven on Next Gen and then joining Deep Space Nine for another four mid-way into that show’s run. And this is in the days when they did 26 episodes per season! Plus, he shot four movies, cameoed in a fifth, and now will be a big part of Season 3 of Picard. And he did it all with that makeup glued to his head each and every day.
So don’t blame the actor for not showing up since Nemesis. Despite his run on Deep Space Nine, which ended in 1999 and saw Worf leaving the space station to become the Federation ambassador to the Klingon Empire, he’s inexplicably back to being a mere Starfleet officer in Nemesis, which was released in 2002. Like several other Next Gen-ers, that’s the last time we saw the character prior to the upcoming season of Picard, and we really have no idea what he’s been up to since then.
Worf has also gotten some of the deepest character exploration in all of Star Trek, in part because he’s always just been an inherently interesting figure to explore, but also because of the aforementioned long run on two different shows. He had a son, he got married, he was widowed, he changed jobs more than once, and he even learned how to become friends with the woman who was now the host to the weird worm that used to live in his dead wife’s body. Hey, this is Star Trek after all.
But there are always more layers to dig into with the prune-juice-loving Klingon, and Dorn promises big changes regarding him as well. “There's a lot of things that I wanted to keep and a lot of things that [the writers] actually convinced me to change about the character,” Dorn said at New York Comic-Con. “And I think that we will recognize a lot of Worf, and we won’t recognize a lot of Worf. Which is wonderful.”
Patrick Stewart agrees regarding the Worf of Picard Season 3, telling IGN: “The transformation in the nature, character and behavior of this man is extraordinary and so brave to do that. Because one of the reasons people watch the series is that they're familiar. They're familiar. You partly always know what you're going to see, but not with this one.”
Data
As I said earlier, Brent Spiner’s Data was killed off in Nemesis, sacrificing himself to save Picard. Of course, this is sci-fi, so that didn’t stop him from returning in Season 1 of Picard, first in a dream sequence, but then in a more substantial way in the season finale, which seemed to finally end the android’s story once and for all. Seemed to, anyway.
See, back in Nemesis, the Enterprise crew had found a prototype of Data named B-4. Data attempted to upload his memories into this more limited android prior to his death, and the film ends with the hint that B-4 might become a new version of Data. But by Picard Season 1, we learn that B-4’s system couldn’t handle the, um, lower-case-d data, and he wound up being disassembled and literally put in a drawer to collect dust.
But! In the first season finale of Picard, it turns out that Data’s consciousness had been preserved in what was essentially an artificial reality. Basically, his memories were stored in a computer, and when Picard himself died for a hot minute and had his memories also stored in a computer, he and Data were able to reconnect in a very touching capper to the season-long storyline. Data had the chance to assure Picard that he did not regret his act of sacrifice, and as Picard left the simulation, the android asked his old captain for one last favor: to shut down the simulation so that he could truly die, once and for all.
This is a very emotional and terrifically written and acted scene, and it’s so nice to just see Picard and Data together again for one last time. But it also raises a bunch of nerdy questions. For starters, since Picard “died” in this episode, only to be resurrected in an android body, why didn’t the big brains who did that for Jean-Luc also bring back Data in a new body? Why did they leave his disembodied consciousness floating around for decades on a hard drive somewhere? And also… who’s to say that they can’t just turn that hard drive back on, grab Data’s memories, and put them in a new body in Season 3?
That brings us to Lore, Data’s so-called evil brother, who has been confirmed to be returning for the new season. Sure, including Lore could just be a way to make sure Brent Spiner continues to be part of the action alongside his old castmates, but maybe, just maybe, this is setting up the return of Data, eh? Would that be a good thing? As adored as the character is, does undoing his death after all these years -- especially after he was just killed again in Season 1 -- do the android a disservice? I guess ask Spock.
Admiral Jean-Luc Picard
Of course, we can’t forget about the most engaging Admiral this side of Tanagra, Jean-Luc Picard. Obviously he’s gotten more action than any of this group in recent years, having had two seasons of his own self-titled TV show. But the fact is, even if you didn’t watch those episodes, there’s not a ton you need to know about them in preparation for Season 3.
Shortly after the events of Nemesis, he was promoted to Admiral. When the Romulan Empire was threatened by an impending supernova -- that’s actually the same supernova from the first Chris Pine Star Trek movie -- Picard embarked on a mission to evacuate as many Romulans as possible with a fleet of starships. Unfortunately, due to a series of events that you can google if you really must know, the evacuation didn’t happen, and Picard wound up retiring from Starfleet in protest. He moved back to the Picard family vineyard, which is where the first season of the show finds him.
During the course of the first two seasons, he would engage in various adventures with the Picard Squad -- that’s what I call them, anyway -- who were designed to be a bunch of decidedly non-Starfleet characters in order to fulfill Patrick Stewart’s wish to avoid the show being a Next Generation reunion. Which, of course, is exactly what Star Trek: Picard will now be in Season 3. A Next Generation reunion. But, as Stewart has promised, hopefully it will be much more than just that.
The Picard Squad were mostly written out of the show by the end of the second season, though the characters Raffi and Seven of Nine, of Voyager fame, will return for the new episodes. As for Picard himself, as noted earlier, he died and became an android in Season 1, but that’s mostly been treated as a joke since then. The Admiral was also reinstated at Starfleet and became the Chancellor of the Academy between Seasons 1 and 2, and he actually has a girlfriend these days too, a Romulan named Laris.
How any of this will connect to the events of Season 3 remains to be seen, but one thing is certain: Even Stewart, after all these years, has high hopes for where Picard and the Next Generation crew can go next.
And besides, the way the cast are talking in the lead-up to Season 3, it seems like there’s still some gas left in the warp core tank for more adventures after this.
“There is still enormous potential for narrative in what we’ve been doing, and there are doors left open still,” Stewart said at the 2023 TCAs. “We didn’t close all of them.”
For more on the show, check out our Picard Season 3 review.
source https://www.ign.com/articles/picard-season-3-could-be-the-ultimate-star-trek-the-next-generation-story