A year and a half has passed since the events of season one, and much has changed with where all of our heroes find themselves. Jean-Luc Picard is increasingly preoccupied with the roads it now seems too late for him to travel, and with memories of his mother who put him on the road he did travel. Soon, a crisis comes for Picard, calling him by name. When he visits an unusual anomaly in space, he quickly encounters two important specters from his past.
Overall, I was really picking up what this first episode of season two was putting down. It was full of wonderful one-on-one character interactions: Picard and Laris, Rios and Jurati, Seven and Picard, Picard and Guinan. The theme of emotional avoidance was made strongly again and again, clearly setting the table for the story to be told this season. The scene between Guinan and Picard (her bar is at 10 Forward Avenue, get it?!) was especially nice, really demonstrating their friendship as they talked intimiately over "hooch." (Even if Guinan's "why I'm aging" explanation felt a bit forced and undermined a similar beat coming for Q later in the epsiode.)
It was great to have a more menacing version of the Borg back on the scene; I for one have felt like they've been defanged significantly in pretty much every appearance since First Contact. There was great action, with some of the most impressive and painful looking stunts Star Trek has ever served up. And the production values were off the charts; "new Trek" has always looked expensive, but this episode looked as impressive to me as any Star Trek feature film ever has.
Part of getting Patrick Stewart to return to the role of Jean-Luc Picard was letting him contribute more story elements to the scripts than he ever got to before. I'm willing to bet that one of those contributions was the revelation that Picard's father was abusive to his mother -- an aspect of Stewart's own life that he's spoken of publicly and powerfully on many occasions. On the one hand, it feels like background we really ought to have known about Picard before now, with as much time as we've spent with the character. On the other hand, it truly does feel internally consistent with pretty much everything we have learned about him over the years. It explains why he was so reluctant to ever return home, informs the rift he had with the "brother who stayed behind," and quietly reinforces all we know of his moral code. (Also, his wistful regrets about being "the last Picard" echo nicely with his anguish at losing his family in the movie Generations.)
All that said, though... there was a good deal of "inelegance" to the script that served up all these great elements. The "48 hours earlier" trope was used in the most cynical way here: "nothing happens" in the first three-quarters of this story, so we're going to manufacture some action by teasing the end just to grab your attention. The theme of "regret" was hit so hard that I can't help but be nervous how this season will tackle it in a way that feels meaningfully different from one of The Next Generation's all-time great episodes, "Tapestry" (which, notably, also used Q to get at the issue). Then there's the convenience of it all. I understand they want to bring back all their actors from season one (and I'm happy to have them), but moving almost all of them into formal Starfleet roles felt like quite the expedient cheat -- and hard to reconcile for most of them, as we saw them in season one.
Clearly this episode is the opening chapter of the novel that will be season two. Once the whole shape is revealed, my take on this first hour might change dramatically. But as an island unto itself, I give "The Star Gazer" a B+.
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