Editor’s note: The following contains spoilers for the Season 2 premiere of Picard.Star Trek: Picard’s Season 2 premiere is off to a killer start. Quite literally, considering everyone dies in the end. Except, maybe not considering Q is involved with tormenting Jean-Luc, once again. But let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves. “The Star Gazer” opens sometime after the events of the first season. Seven of Nine (Jeri Ryan) has become the new captain of La Sirena while Cristóbal Rios (Santiago Cabrera) has accepted a command position aboard the U.S.S. Stargazer.
After the Federation lifted the ban on synths, Soji (Isa Briones) has taken up work as an ambassador of sorts, accompanied by Dr. Agnes Jurati (Alison Pill), who seems to still be reeling from everything that she went through in the first season. Though, Soji’s role seems to be keeping Agnes from any more “drunk hailing incidents.” In the time between the first season and the premiere, it seems that Agnes and Rios’ fledgling relationship never made it out of the nest.
While everyone else seems to be moving on with their lives and thriving, Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart) is grappling with his past and the true final frontier that is time. Back home at Château Picard, Picard attempts to reclaim a sense of normalcy, but he’s struggling with making meaningful intimate relationships–particularly with a kindhearted Romulan named Laris (Orla Brady). The internal conflict about mortality and a desire to engage in a relationship prompts Picard to seek out his old friend and confidant, Guinan (Whoopi Goldberg).
Following an inspiring graduation speech at Starfleet Federation, which saw Elnor (Evan Evagora) become the first Romulan welcomed into the program under Raffi (Michelle Hurd), Picard is contacted about a situation that Rios and Seven are dealing with up in space. He reluctantly beams aboard the Stargazer, where he learns that an unknown entity has requested his presence specifically. Picard and Seven of Nine should have been a little more worried about the glowing green subspace anomaly that spoke with a collective of voices.
Once they engage with the anomaly, the energy-like cloaking field reveals that it was the Borg that were trying to lure Picard back into their fold. They demand assistance, which leaves Picard facing a new moral dilemma—help the Borg and potentially expose the Federation to their greatest enemy or go against the Federation directives and kill someone, or something, in need. Of course, where the Borg are concerned, resistance is futile, and the Borg Queen (Annie Wersching) forces her way aboard the Stargazer to hostilely take over, not just one Federation vessel, but the whole armada.
With the threat of the Borg taking control over that many Federation vessels, Picard is forced to make a dire decision, and he engages the self-destruct protocols. As the countdown begins, the crew of the Stargazer resigns themselves to their impending deaths, but death is not quite achievable in a universe where the cunning, conniving menace that is Q (John de Lancie) exists.
Picard awakes back home in France, though everything feels a little off-kilter as he gathers his bearings. Q arrives to taunt and torment Picard about his newfound life within the road not traveled and ominously informs him that “the trial never ends.”
Picard’s second season has charted a course into a strange new, and terrifying world — one that will undoubtedly lean heavily into the political and cultural themes that have always been infused into the very core of Star Trek.While Q may have prevented the crew of the U.S.S. Stargazer from meeting an imminent demise, he has likely planted them into a world filled with their worst nightmares. Picard feels like a much more mature and gritty approach to Star Trek, filled with deeper meaning, rich subtext, and the shades of Shakespearian tragedy that Stewart is known for playing with so well.
Grade: A+
Star Trek: Picard Season 2 is streaming now on Paramount+.