📺 Watched Star Trek: Picard season 2 and 3.

Dwelling here only on season 3: if you grew up in the era of Star Trek: The Next Generation and enjoyed it (or at least the re-runs), then it’s very likely you will like this one too.

In fact if you only saw certain clips of it then you might think you were actually watching the older series, at least if one overlooks the special effects being less rickety and the entire Enterprise crew having aged a few decades. Space apparently doesn’t keep you any younger than standard 21st century living. Not even if you’re a robot or an all-powerful never-dying galactic alien or whatever, which is a little strange but I suppose hard to work around.

To be fair, they do try and provide in-episode explanations of this and the other curious happenstances in the fantastical world which probably have more to do with the logistics of getting an old and much-loved human cast from 30 years ago together than a screenwriter’s vision. It’s occasionally a bit contrived, occasionally a bit cheesy, but I appreciate that one does what one must to allow the original crew to save the galaxy one more time.

There are some systematic differences vs TNG, including more swearing and greater character flaws compared to the almost always extremely family-friendly original. Plus the series is designed to follow a single story line rather than the old-school one-story-per-episode method.

But all in all, it’s undoubtedly a parting gift, and an excellent one, to fans of 1980s-1990s trekking. Although I’m not entirely sure if it’ll be quite as intelligible or entertaining if you don’t know, for example, why Worf’s new meditation habit is intrinsically hilarious even in concept.

Don’t miss the post-trailers scene on the last episode!