Picard receives a call for help from Beverly Crusher, with whom he has not spoken in 20 years. Warned to be careful with trust, Picard can only seek help from Riker to reach the edge of Federation space. Meanwhile, Raffi is on a mission of her own, working undercover to prevent the attack of a deadly new weapon.
Show runner Terry Matalas has said his goal with this season of Star Trek: Picard is to give The Next Generation cast a proper send-off in the form of a sort of 10-hour long movie. Time will tell if he nailed the "proper send-off" part, but the "10-hour long movie" part feels true already. Even serialized television often includes a stand-alone subplot or an episodic theme within each hour. Not "The Next Generation"; I really did feel like I was approaching "act two" of a movie when the projector simply went out, forcing me to wait a week for more. And to cement the "movie vibe": all of Jerry Goldsmith's themes from First Contact were brought back to form the spine of the musical score by Stephen Barton (a Terry Matalas TV veteran from 12 Monkeys).
I'm not usually one to binge-watch episodes of a single TV show, but I certainly would have fired up another episode here if I could have. This first installment was just so perfectly calibrated to tantalize. On the one hand, it doesn't make longtime fans wait; the episode opens immediately with a beloved character we haven't seen in ages. On the other hand, we only get Beverly Crusher, and then a satisfying team-up of Picard and Riker; to get the rest of the gang, you'll have to stay tuned.
Still, there was a lot of fun to be had already with just half the original Next Generation cast. Gates McFadden gets to play action hero in a sequence that tells us just how high the stakes are for Beverly Crusher even before we begin to learn more context at the end of the episode. Patrick Stewart and Jonathan Frakes have great rapport throughout a caper that plays with their friendship and their age in satisfying ways.
Fortunately, it's not just the Next Generation vets that get all the good moments. While it's too bad that Raffi was siloed all alone (for now) in her own subplot, the "quantum tunneling" weapon she was chasing turned out to be appropriately apocalyptic when we saw it in action. Seven of Nine had a nice subplot about bristling against Starfleet regulations, personified in the form of the perfectly obnoxious Captain Shaw (played to the hilt by another 12 Monkeys veteran, actor Todd Stashwick).
For pulling me in, and making an hour breeze by, I give "The Next Generation" a B+. I can't wait to see what happens next.
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