Patrick Stewart gives Jean-Luc Picard an old age worth watching, and the series never settles on what to do with it. A promising first season, a lost second and a fond third add up to a show for those who already care.
Star Trek: Picard starts from a question the franchise had never bothered with: what happens to the captain once the ship is gone. Jean-Luc Picard is a retired admiral on his family vineyard in France, with a dog, two Romulan housekeepers and a Starfleet he no longer recognises. Kirsten Beyer, Alex Kurtzman, Akiva Goldsman and Michael Chabon, the credited creators, want a slower, sadder Star Trek about an old man’s regrets. Over three seasons of ten episodes each they make three different programmes: a promising first, a second that loses its way, and a third that drops the new questions to answer an old one.
What holds it together is Patrick Stewart, and he holds it almost alone. Early in the first episode Picard gives a television interview and is asked why Starfleet abandoned the Romulan evacuation. Stewart lets the courtesy drain out of his face, and his voice drops to nothing before it climbs. It moved us more than we expected, and the reason is not the writing, which is on the nose, but the face: here is a man who has been right for so long he has forgotten how to be wanted. He plays the whole first season on that.
The new crew is better cast than written. Alison Pill’s Dr. Agnes Jurati talks when she is frightened, which is constantly, and Pill makes the nerves funny before the plot makes them something else. Michelle Hurd’s Raffi Musiker is the one person allowed to be angry at Picard, and Hurd plays the grievance as something she has kept warm for years. Santiago Cabrera’s Rios flies a ship crewed by holograms of himself. On the reclaimed Borg cube, Isa Briones’s Soji Asha and Harry Treadaway’s Narek circle one another while Jonathan Del Arco’s Hugh tries to keep the other former drones alive. Hanelle Culpepper directs the opening episodes at a walk, and they are the best-paced hours in the run.
It looks expensive and consistent, which with four credited cinematographers, Darran Tiernan, Philip Lanyon, Jon Joffin and Crescenzo G.P. Notarile, is no small thing: shallow focus, dark backgrounds, lights that smear across the lens whenever a ship moves. Dave Blass and Todd Cherniawsky build the cube as a rusted cathedral of green light and wet walls, and the vineyard in oak and afternoon sun. Jeff Russo gives Picard a soft piano theme. Jerry Goldsmith and Alexander Courage are credited for the fanfares the show borrows, and it plays them whenever it wants a cheer it has not yet earned. The 15 certificate is earned on the cube, where bodies are taken apart on tables, and we did not enjoy it.
The writing is where it falls down. The first season’s Romulan conspiracy needs explaining in every corridor, and the season ends by answering its mystery with a larger one we will not describe. The second season is the low point. It sends the crew into Earth’s past, splits them into pairs and gives each pair a waiting room, and Brent Spiner turns up as Dr. Adam Soong, enjoying himself more than we were. Somewhere around the sixth episode we stopped following and started counting how many were left. Ten hours is a long time to spend on a story that would fit in two.
The third season, with Terry Matalas writing and directing, is the one most critics prefer, and we liked it too. The crew of The Next Generation reassembles, Ed Speleers arrives as Jack Crusher, and Jeri Ryan’s Seven of Nine, the best thing in the show after Stewart across all three years, at last gets a uniform and a chair. Stephen Barton’s cues lean hard on the Goldsmith theme. It is a fond, well-made reunion. It is also the least ambitious of the three: the first season asked what a synthetic person is owed and what Starfleet had become, and the third flies a familiar ship down familiar corridors and says nothing further about either.
The Next Generation was a programme about a room full of grown-ups solving a problem by talking. Picard is a programme about one grown-up and a great many people shouting in the dark, and it is at its best when it lets him sit down. Watch the first three episodes for Stewart and the last ten for the company. The middle ten are for the committed, and we say that as people who committed.
