Season 2 required to watch or skip it?

[Citiprime]

This question makes no sense, if asked the same way you skip almost every season of Star Trek.

Back during TNG, I remember there were people who would skip seasons 1 and 2, and some would even recommend that people do that when they were trying to get them into the series.

It's also true with other shows too. For example, usually people skip the first season of Parks and Recreation since it's so dissimilar to what the series eventually became.

 

[thribs]

Just watch episodes 1,2 and 10. That's all you need.

 

[Jayson1]

Back during TNG, I remember there were people who would skip seasons 1 and 2, and some would even recommend that people do that when they were trying to get them into the series.

It's also true with other shows too. For example, usually people skip the first season of Parks and Recreation since it's so dissimilar to what the series eventually became.

I believe the idea was TNG didn't get good until Riker gets a beard.

 

[TroiFan4ever]

is season 2 required to watch or skip it since it has time travel shenanigans? or just watch Season 3?

That's entirely up to you to decide but I would watch it.

About two weeks before S3 premiered I watched the first two seasons in their entirety. Season 1 actually felt like a chore to watch because it was horrible! I didn't get it at all no matter how hard I tried to follow the story! Things were just all over the place.

Season 2 however while nowhere as good as Season 3 was a big improvement from Season 1. Actually the time travel stuff is why (in my personal opinion of course) Season 2 is better. It was quite fun to watch actually.

The only redeeming factors about Season 1 for me is, Picard's dream of him and Data playing poker in Enterprise-D's Ten Forward lounge, Picard meeting with Troi in "Nepenthe", and Riker's brief return to Starfleet to command the USS Zheng He. Oh, and I guess maybe parts of "Stardust City Rag". That's literally it.

So if anything I probably would've excused myself from Season 1. Probably save myself some brain cells. Haha

 

[The Wormhole]

I believe the idea was TNG didn't get good until Riker gets a beard.

It's the basis of a TV Trope.

 

[Reanok]

I thought season 2 was really good there were good character moments for all the characters. I liked seeing Guinan and Q again. And I liked Annie Wersching playing the Borg Queen did a wonderful job playing a different take on the Queen.

 

[FederationHistorian]

That's entirely up to you to decide but I would watch it.

About two weeks before S3 premiered I watched the first two seasons in their entirety. Season 1 actually felt like a chore to watch because it was horrible! I didn't get it at all no matter how hard I tried to follow the story! Things were just all over the place.

Season 2 however while nowhere as good as Season 3 was a big improvement from Season 1. Actually the time travel stuff is why (in my personal opinion of course) Season 2 is better. It was quite fun to watch actually.

The only redeeming factors about Season 1 for me is, Picard's dream of him and Data playing poker in Enterprise-D's Ten Forward lounge, Picard meeting with Troi in "Nepenthe", and Riker's brief return to Starfleet to command the USS Zheng He. Oh, and I guess maybe parts of "Stardust City Rag". That's literally it.

So if anything I probably would've excused myself from Season 1. Probably save myself some brain cells. Haha

That’s an interesting take I've never heard of before.

I can see how it could be better, if one went from NEM to PIC S2 and skipped over S1 entirely.

Its better continuity for Picard from NEM to S2 to be a Chancellor at Starfleet Academy than moping around his home for a decade.

And it does continue with Starfleet being front and center, instead being a place Picard visits.

And its easier to overlook the lack of followup with Rios and Jurati’s relationship, or Picard being a synth, and no need to worry about the lack of callbacks to Seven ‘s loss of Icheb’s when Raffi is mourning Elnor.

But there are too many ties to S1 in the S2 premiere, so a continuation of the S1 concepts was expected. And then they did not deliver on it.

Maybe that what the issue was with S2; they basically rebooted the whole concept of PIC, instead of building upon it.

 

[James Cole]

About two weeks before S3 premiered I watched the first two seasons in their entirety. Season 1 actually felt like a chore to watch because it was horrible! I didn't get it at all no matter how hard I tried to follow the story! Things were just all over the place.

&

Season 2 however while nowhere as good as Season 3 was a big improvement from Season 1. Actually the time travel stuff is why (in my personal opinion of course) Season 2 is better. It was quite fun to watch actually.

&

I can see how it could be better, if one went from NEM to PIC S2 and skipped over S1 entirely.

It's funny, I actually watched PS2 a year before PS1... they are very, very different...

I think whether people like season 1 or not will come down to how they react to the postmodernist deconstruction approach inherent to the season. Some might find it a refreshing, daring take, others will just be repulsed by it all.

Season 2 is a decent idea poorly implemented... much like DISCOVERY season 1, it's partially Akiva Goldsman taking the outline established by a Berman era veteran and implementing it in questionable ways. There's less potentially incendiary about it. The heavy handed agitprop is largely confined to 204, leaving the most potentially divisive aspects being Picard's childhood, Q, and how Seven and Starfleet were approached. You don't have legacy characters being fridged left and right, and almost every single surviving one having some kind of grimdark trauma happen to them since they were last seen.

 

[fireproof78]

The word grimdark needs to be retired.

The TNG crew suffered more traumas in the 7 seasons, and 4 movies, that could be just as easily considered dark as the Picard seasons.

To me, Season 1 wasn't deconstructing anything but exploring actual consequences from events that occurred. The fall of a significant power, the loss of identity post Dominion War, the questions that arise from experiencing so much loss.

It's not a deconstructing because we return to Starfleet at the end.

 

[Tuskin38]

Every main character in TNG has trauma in their background, either from the beginning or added sometime during the series.

 

[The Wormhole]

Hell, by the end of the series every single one of them had at least one dead parent. In fact, TNG is the only series of "Legacy Trek" (TOS-ENT) where that's the case, all the others have someone who still had both parents at the end of the TV series run. Of the newer shows, we can infer most of Disco's main characters have both parents dead, as it's unlikely any of them survived nine hundred years. Maybe Prodigy, given those characters don't know about their parents aside from Gwyn who only had a father who is now dead. But otherwise, the new shows have someone in the cast who still has both parents living.