So I just got done watching season 3 of Star Trek: Picard and I've got to say, at the end, I gave a slow clap. Finally, us old fans, got what we were waiting for.
Like many fans of the Next Generation crew, I felt a little cheated by the end of Star Trek 10, Nemesis. Now don't get me wrong, the movie was pretty good, better than the prior movie, Insurrection, but Data dying and in such a stupid way and ultimately the whole gang still having perceptibly many stories in front of them since in my opinion they weren't that old. Cheated I tell you.
Well season 3 of Picard is basically, in my opinion, pretty much a very long Star Trek 11. And man it takes some pretty bold moves virtually ignoring a lot of the Star Trek verse of the past few years for sure.
It pretty much retcons its prior two seasons which have been ripped to shreds on Reddit and other fan sites in a similar fashion to Star Trek Discovery. I tried watching the first half of the first season of Star Trek Picard a couple years ago and even though I still had a bit more of my subscription back then to CBS All Access (the precursor to the current Paramount Plus) I refused to watch anymore of it. Like many of the negative reviews I read, I agreed that the plot, characters, and focus of the show had turned into something totally different and just wasn't a Star Trek show anymore.
Well with season 3, the producers seemed to have conceded to popular demand and gave us fans what we deserved, a long-awaited Next Generation Legacy show.
I'll not do a review of the entire season, you can find plenty of that elsewhere. Including a full explanation as to how we see what is depicted above the elderly crew of an Enterprise that was supposedly destroyed. They make a good excuse for that. Great excuse? Nah! It's Star Trek after all. Why should the writers really challenge themselves to come up with jaw-dropping excuses for things when a bunch of technobabble and a few knowing nods can pass well enough. For instance, "never you mind" the incongruity of logic when you see a massive Galaxy class starship, missing a standard compliment of over a thousand crewmembers, powered with hundreds of windows needlessly lit all across it, battling the Borg controlled fleet, occupied and operated by only seven senior citizens.
All hokie plot holes aside, this was a much needed love letter to us fans. And frankly, even Patrick Stewart perked up in this season. During the first two seasons, I thought I would die of old age waiting for him to breathily creak out his poorly acted lines. Sorry to say that, but it's true. But in the end, surrounded by his friends, he was able to recapture the Jean-Luc Picard of the '80s.
So season 3, finally, put it into engage and made it so.