Picard: Season 2
review by Bobby Blakey
Since its debut in the 60s Star Trek has become easily one of the most popular franchises in history. With several TV shows, movies, cartoons, comics, books and products the property shows no sign of slowing down. After their success with Star Trek: Discovery on CBS All-Access that has since become Paramount+, they brought the next chapter of the famed Enterprise Captain with Picard featuring the highly anticipated return of Sir Patrick Stewart in the role. Now fans can continue the adventure with Star Trek: Picard Season Two.
Picard follows the end of the 24th Century, and 14 years after his retirement from Starfleet, where Jean-Luc Picard is living a quiet life on his vineyard, Chateau Picard. When he is sought out by a mysterious young woman, Dahj in need of his help, he soon realizes she may have personal connections to his own past. In season two Picard and his crew go on a bold and exciting new journey into the past. Picard must enlist friends, both old and new, to confront the perils of 21st century Earth in a desperate race against time to save the galaxy’s future – and face the ultimate trial from one of his greatest foes.
I wasn’t as big fan of Next Generation for no other reason that I just didn’t watch a lot of series TV when it was on. Obviously since then I have dived head first into so many shows and have had the chance to get into some of the Next Generation series. That being said I was both excited and worried to see this show being made. I love Stewart so could not wait to see his latest take on the character, but also didn’t want the show to sully the memory of such an iconic character like has done in other projects. I really enjoyed the first season but wasn’t a big fan of a lot the characters. Despite that I was still eager to dive into this new season to see where we were headed.
This latest season kicked right into high gear and immediately felt like an improvement to the already good first season. The return of the Q instantly makes it more compelling and wastes no time to get in on the fun of the chaos you know he brings with him. For most of the season it is really good throwing the crew into chaos as you would expect from anything Q is involved in. It’s not until about half wat through the season that it slowed down for me and started to drag in spots, but even with this less compelling moments the show still works. Its and interesting take on not only the latest adventure, but ended up being a perfect cap to the saga of Picard and Q that began with the very first episode of Next Generation all those years ago. The additional inclusion of more classic characters will no doubt make fans happy and help to elevate the show for the old school fans while still being new.
This season would have served as the perfect ending to the series and the Next Generation saga, but also to the story of these new characters. A lot of them are left where they could do stuff with them if they wanted to, but it’s already been announced that only Jeri Ryan and Michelle Hurd being the only ones returning alongside Stewart.
The new season is seemingly getting the original gang back together so will be interesting to see what they do with the final season, but this one does a good job wrapping up those not returning.
Stewart still does a great job despite starting to finally show his age, but that is also the charm of returning to this character and not trying to be anything other than what he is. Seeing his interactions with all the classic cast through these two seasons has been great, but his banter with Q played to perfection by John de Lancie like he never left. These two make this season and it was the kind of thing fans probably didn’t even know they needed but worked to perfection.
This release not only includes all 10 episodes of the second season as well as a galactic amount of bonus content including over an hour of exclusive, never-before-seen featurettes, deleted scenes and a gag reel. Beam down and grab your copy of Star Trek Picard: Season Two when it hits Blu-ray™, DVD and limited-edition Blu-ray™ Steelbook on October 4th from CBS and Paramount Home Entertainment.
