Spoilers So, what do we think of Season 2 now that it's done?

I think a balance between the two is appropriate.

 

I think Season 1 was better overall and had a similarly strong start, but S2 had a flabby Act 2, but a marginally better final two episodes.

 

If my thoughts seem disjointed, forgive me. Also forgive me if I come off a little dramatic here.

I'm one of the select few who actually liked the first season quite a bit. It wasn't a perfect Star Trek season, but it definitely felt unlike any other Trek I'd seen before and I wanted more of it. I hoped season two would just improve upon season one, but, that never happened.

I'm still quite shocked at how much I did not like season two. I know it's easy to say things like this, but this was probably the first Star Trek season I came back from feeling disappointed, angry, and extremely frustrated. The season began on quite a high note, as if they took into consideration some of the feedback that season one was too dark and heavy-handed and reset the narrative to feel like more of a traditional Star Trek show.

I was actually very much in love with the idea of taking Q's antics and extending it across an entire season. Making the season a gauntlet of intriguing twists and turns sounds very exciting in concept. But instead, it became this tangled mess of stories that didn't quite mesh well together and ended up just being stretched for time. So many times throughout the season it felt like we were just running in place and not really making any significant progress on anything.

I still don't even understand how or why Picard's traumatic past factored into this season's story. Even when Q revealed why, I didn't see why it was so important or how it was supposed to even help Picard.

The show wanted to explore this aspect of Picard, but the problem with it is this wasn't something we really wondered or questioned about him in seven seasons or four films. Nothing remotely about him came off as someone who lived a somewhat traumatic childhood. So to explore this doesn't really answer or shed new light on the character for me.

In the end, you just get the sense that this season seems to exists purely to just get everyone out of the way for the big TNG reunion next season. It's quite disappointing because I would've liked to have seen the existing cast continue alongside the TNG cast. Elnor knew all about Picard from his biography and I would've loved to see him, as a cadet, have some interactions with Picard's former crew.

In recent years, I've started to lean into the idea that the TNG films and Star Trek: Picard are just not ancillary to the overall experience of Star Trek: The Next Generation; they're just bonus content because All Good Things was an absolutely PERFECT finale.

All in all, it's a season of Star Trek I'm very likely to not watch again.

If my statements are controversial, happy to discuss further.

 

Also not helped by the fact that Soong is not a climate scientist; he's a geneticist. It was never clear to me how the Europa mission invalidates the work he's doing since he isn't actively trying to stop the climate crisis. If it has to do with Kore and her inability to be in the sun, fine. But the story doesn't make this clear from my recollection.

What also makes no sense to me is why Agnes-Borg wants Soong's help. She lures Soong into helping her with the prospect of him being someone of importance in the Confederation years, but as demonstrated, the Confederation eliminate the Borg. You could argue that isn't who Agnes-Borg evolves into, but at that point, she's still the Borg that we know. So even if she had been successful, she was assuring the Borg's destruction.

What bothers me most is we've seen the showrunner on Twitter having to answer questions from viewers because the story, itself, isn't clear. While I know it's not unusual to question something you just watched, season two had so many things happen that could've had such major implications for the Star Trek timeline as a whole, it's near impossible to just look the other way and pretend like it isn't such a huge deal.

 

On the contrary, PIC's first season was critically liked by most critics and viewers (it was just panned by the very vocal chuds who thought it was still 1997) S2 had more mixed opinions, but felt less underwhelming than most The Book Of Boba Fett.

ICE was a littlw too on the nose but Star Trek IV was clearly about saving the whales.

I thought PIC's S2 was still more focused than DSCO's first season while it compared more fairly with DSCO's S3 (a series in transition with characters and writers).

Picard having a strange past with a avoidable tragedy makes sense on hindsight when something felt rather "off" about Picard's brother way, way back in TNG's "Family" and it may have been Q's parting gift to settle Picard's inner demons that he repressed under a uniform (when he never settled down to have a family and his bloodline went extinct because his dipshit bro didn't invest in basic fire safety).

Soong had super advanced shield technology for the 2020s, hinting it's not really our TL, and that it was massively expanded and improved upon for another 25-100 years until it became the massive shield network enveloping the planet as a replacement for a wrecked atmosphere.

Lots of detail some of the audience didn't pick up on, even if S2 didn't fully gel and got too padded.

And this scene from a very early TNG episode has an extra layer of poignancy to it now:

 

I really don't know how I feel about Season Two. I've been trying to determine my feelings for that particular season, but I simply cannot decide how I fee.

 

...I guess I'm a chud.

 

Sorry, I can differentiate people who just don't find Picard to their taste or find it underwhelming and those more dubious, very vocal "anti-fans" who have a more irrational, religious dislike of Picard...

 

The first season did an excellent job of picking up the pieces from "All Good Things" (the Vineyard, Picard's illness), First Contact (Picard's unresolved feelings about the Borg), Nemesis (Data's death), and 24th Century side of Star Trek (2009) that we only saw glimpses of (the destruction of Romulus).

The second season looked at all the things TNG never did and did them. Namely: an evil version of the Federation, Picard going back to Present Day, trying to make sense of the mixed messages between his mother ("Where No One Has Gone Before") and father ("Family" and "Tapestry"), and addressing why Picard never found True Love, then having Q guide him through this. When they went back to Present Day, they put all the unintentional world building that had been done in every episode and movie from previous series where they want back into the past and weaved them together: Guinan, the Watchers, Vulcans on Earth, the Space Program, and mixed in some Social Commentary on Our World, like through ICE. I think they had all kinds of ideas and they wanted to do all kinds of things, and there's a good recipe that wants to emerge from a whole bunch of ingredients.

I'll watch PIC Season 2 when I feel like watching Picard but don't want to see it pick up the pieces from before (Season 1) and don't feel like seeing One Extra-Long TNG Movie (Season 3). Picard Season 2 is the season that ties the least to TNG and thus feels the most like Picard as Picard, strange as it is to say. It's nowhere near as heavy and weighty as Season 1, so Season 2 is something I'd be more likely to feel like I'm in the mood to watch. And I enjoy a lot of the actors playing different characters. If having the same actors play their ancestors suffers from Back to the Future Syndrome, then so be it. I know what it is now, I know what to expect, so I can just watch it.

I don't know how much of that makes sense to anyone else, but that's my opinion of Season 2 now that I've had more time to think about it.

 

I've defended Picard season 1. I found it mostly inoffensive and as an overall product it was pretty good. It's not TNG, it's not classic Star Trek, but it was alright.

But season 2, geeze laweeze. One nice thing I can say is that it wasn't bad in the Discovery sense where it irritates me. Picard season 2 was bad in a laughable sense. It was so bad in a lot of areas I couldn't keep a straight face. So kudos to them in that regard.

The first few episodes of s2 were alright. I rather enjoyed them. It wasn't until episode 5 or so where things got weird... So we're randomly dealing with Picard Mommy and Daddy issues? We spent way too much time on that and it felt really out of place. "What's the mystery of Picard's Mom and Dad?" It reminds me of the writers room for season 7 of TNG where they were running low on ideas and just threw out suggestions about character's siblings. Speaking of siblings, where's Picard's brother?

I'd wouldn't shed a tear if they never do a time travel plot ever again. Borg queen, need I say more? Presumably there was a Borg queen in the past, so there would've been the future Borg queen and the present Borg queen. What a huge threat to the timeline. It's an incalculable threat to the timeline and they're all alright with it. What made me laugh was when Q beamed them back to the present where the Borg queen was taking over the ship. Picard disengages the self destruct, because it turns out the Borg queen is Agnes and has had '400 years to think about this song.'

So... does that mean everything that happened in TNG and Voyager played out exactly the same except instead of the original Borg queen it was half Agnes assimilating people and blowing shit up? And now all of a sudden she's good? Dang, I guess that's the trouble you run into when you want to make this grand plotline, but run up against a bunch of lore getting in the way.

Then there's the philosophic element to this too. The queen decides to stop being evil when Agnes takes 2 minutes to say, "Ever think of not being authoritarian? You don't really want perfection, you're just lonely and you're destructive because you're lonely!" The queen, "Oh, dang, I never thought of that. Wow, you're right!"

Hahaha, oh man, the Borg worked as a contrast to the Federation, because the Borg took socialism too far. You don't have to dial back the Borg to say, "Hey, see, socialism can work if you're just not a dictator about it!" The Federation already represented that ideal. Cooperation for the greatest prosperity should be done voluntarily and that authoritarian rule towards perfection is inherently flawed.

Personally, I think the vision of the Federation is not realistic and can be summed up in a look at game B philosophy. However, I do believe it's a romantic ideal and a good lesson to teach children for the overall trust of a society when you look at game theory. Without going too far down that rabbit hole, it was pretty humorous how sloppily they changed the Borg and hurts the overall philosophy of the show.

One last Borg paragraph. You also have the Borg queen fueled from endorphins and Agnes fueled by cortisol? Hahaha, wtf? Is that supposed to be an allusion to the id and super ego where the id is fueled by happiness and the super ego fueled by sadness and stress? Alright... some people have anxiety and the only thing they have to go on is cortisol to achieve their goals, I guess. I mean, I get how the symbolism is pertinent to today's culture... it's just kind of bizarre.

Onto the ICE portion of the show. I didn't like the heavy handed black and white moralizing of ICE. I know people who are ICE agents and they're not evil people. They also know Spanish. One of my friends is Mexican-American, works for ICE, and guess what? He speaks Spanish well. I prefer the way TNG discussed social topics and nuance of political and philosophic issues. It's something that SNW looks to be doing. I really don't like this black and white one sided morality that Picard and DS9 throw at us.

Not a fan of young Guinan. There's a lot of criticism I've seen of her, from the bar name to her not remembering Picard. That's all fair criticism. What I didn't like was her attitude. That's not the way Guinan talks about things. She had an even disposition in the late 1800's, even in regards to racism and slavery, but in the 2020's she's overwhelmed? The showrunners made a decision to not use Whoopi Goldberg as young Guinan or use de-aging CGI on her and I don't believe that was simply due to cost savings measures.

I suppose that's a nitpick in continuity and personal preference mostly. To get down to the point succinctly, I don't like the narrative that black people are held back by a modern day racism. I think it's largely untrue and a counter productive way to look at the world. The new ways people want to use the term 'racism' water down it's meaning in a way that's divisive, and conflates the real issues facing the black community that need to be fixed. I'm sure that's an unpopular opinion and we could write a book on our disagreements, so I'll just leave it at that.

 

No. It's pretty clear in the show that the new Queen hid herself from the Collective at large, only asserting control when able, i.e. when Voyager finally put the last bullet in the failing Collective.

 

Terry Matalas just did a 90 minute interview with Inglorious Trekspert, and he sheds some light on why Season 2 ultimately was uneven. What they envisioned for the season and what ulimtely got filmed were very different and scaled back. Most of it had to do with COVID and the challenges that presented. PIC only had two standing sets when production for season two began (La Serena and Picard's study): unlike SNW and DIS which had far more standing sets in place and were able to produce more "normal" seasons. Because of the health restrictions in place in LA, building new sets would take much longer (all the Stargazer scenes were filmed last because it took six months to build those sets) than they had to get filming underway so they had to film most of the season on location which is why the ultimately decided to go with time travel so they didn't have to make LA look like the 25th century. Additionally (those Matalas says it far more diplomatically than I do), CBS was concerned about Stewart's age and the possibility of him getting infected, which limited the number of actors they were allowed to use and why most of the cast were paired off into groups of two for much of early filming (all the group scenes were filmed towards the end of the season).

Matalas knew that some fans would not be happy with the direction of season 2 which is why season 3 was planned to be a starship bound, and starfleet heavy, season.

 

Good luck, Matalas. You're going to need it. And then some.

 

I listened to the interview it sounds like Picard season 3 is going to be really good. And Seven of nine will have an important story arc . And the difficulties filming due to covid it makes sense limiting the number of actors and crew filming around Patrick Stewart .

 

TNG and nuance in the same sentence? Must be some really weird Mandela effect because I remember it being as blunt as Star Trek has ever been. The entire first two seasons were nothing but Gene Roddenberry preaching his new age ivory tower mumbo-jumbo through a Picard who couldn't be more condescending and arrogant if he tried and they boiled down to "literally everything about '80s American culture is bad and wouldn't be missed by anyone." Even after it found its voice, episodes like The Drumhead (witch hunts create dictatorships), Force of Nature (ozone hole will kill us), The Outcast (reparative therapy is bad) or Chain of Command (torture is bad) were anything but subtle in their execution. If anything, they were more like attempting to knock down a wall by driving a tank through it, then turning around and shooting it with the main gun for good measure. Subtle just hasn't ever been the Trek way to do things, and not calling gay people by their name in The Outcast doesn't make it subtle when literally everyone can instantly figure out what the episode is really about.

 

Saved me some typing. I love how people treat TNG as the positive, subtle, message vessel who's messages were only discernible to the enlightened. As opposed to super preachy Picard, and eventually Sisko and Janeway, can come across.

 

I'm cautiously optimistic about season 3, though being a die hard TNGer I suspect I'm just going to love seeing everyone back together more than the actual story. One major difference is that S3 is 100% Matalas calling the shots. S2 (for all it's ups and down) was mostly Akiva Goldman who IMHO is a very uneven writer and I think he's probably more responsible for the season going off the rails halfway through than anything else.

 

I'm glad there's a white man here to tell hispanic and black people how to feel about their representation in this show.

There are plenty of issues with Picard season 2, but... yikes.

 

Season 2 was a mess, for sure. It started strong but quickly went downhill. That said, I do have high hopes for season 3.

 

I don’t think it’s controversial at this point to say S2 of Picard took a nosedive and had a lot of issues.

Unless a given poster has something new to bring to the table then I really don’t see why this needs it’s own thread and indeed why the opening wall of text couldn’t have been posted in the Picard General Discussion topic.

Great post.

Star Trek and nuance don’t belong in the same sentence ever as far as I’m concerned. Ask Lokai and Bele. Star Trek analogy has always been as subtle as a hammer to the head and I like that about it.