So I really loved Picard Season 3. I have a bunch of very spoilery thoughts and some nitpicks
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- I guess I'll start with the future. I think Terry Matalas gets Star Trek, and I think he hit the right nostalgia notes for most of the season. Setting an episode at the fleet museum so we got to see all the classic ships...great. Bringing back the Changelings and the Enterprise D...chef's kiss. The episode with Ro and the awkwardly poetic end for Shelby...great touches. If he wants to do Captain Seven and the crew of the Enterprise-G for another series, sign me up. If he wants to do pretty much anything else, sign me up. I'd love to see him get another show.
- I was surprised that we didn't get more cameos. I think Chief O'Brien would've worked well on the show. Someone like Bashir would've fit in nice. Janeway would've made a ton of sense. I know they didn't want to step on Prodigy's toes...but I don't see how Janeway being on two shows at the same time steps on anyone's toes. They referenced her as being alive so it can't be "well what if we want to kill Janeway on this kid's show". I do wonder why DS9 is the black sheep of the universe. They retconned Worf's DS9 ending and he's never spoken of it again. But since the story focused on Changelings for so long and involved Seven as a key figure, I figured we'd get more than just Tuvok as cameos. Where's the Doctor???
- Season 3 made me so mad at Seasons 1 and 2. It's so obvious that this show needed to be Picard and his crew. Not that I didn't like the new characters - I liked a lot of them. But it was so much more fun to have the whole cast there, and I can't believe they waited until season 3 to do it. This is what season 1 should've been, and we could've had two more seasons with this as the jumping point.
- Speaking of that, Matalas didn't seem to have a ton of love for the first two seasons either. They essentially abandoned the Laris storyline after the season premiere even though that was a huge part of season two, and the rest of the season 2 storylines (the Jurati Borg and Q's "death") got "Rise of Skywalker" level retcons. I liked season 3 better than Seasons 1 and 2 but it's weird and confusing to re-write continuity with a couple one-off lines.
- I loved the character moments, but the plot this season doesn't hold up under much scrutiny. One thing I thought I liked about season 2 was that the Borg seemed like a nullified threat. Maybe they could be villains again, maybe not. But for the Borg to essentially be the main villain for all three seasons is pretty lame in my opinion. And to be fair, I didn't even like that the season was about Starfleet being infiltrated again (since it was technically a storyline in all three seasons if you count the Evil Starfleet from the beginning of season 2). Changelings on a ship being chased by Changelings could be a cool story, but I'm a little tired of Starfleet command always being evil or replaced or infiltrated or whatever.
- So why did the Changelings work with the Borg? Is it just an "enemy of my enemy is my friend" situation? What did the Changelings get out of the Borg being rebuilt? Wouldn't they hate the Borg just as much as they hate any other solids? How did the Borg Queen even find the Changelings and how is it better revenge to assimilate Starfleet than to simply take over themselves (which they'd already done).
- The whole Enterprise D thing was cool, and I feel like the explanation made sense? I don't know how difficult it would be in the 25th century to rebuild a ship by yourself, even if you're a master engineer and you have 20 years to do it. But maybe when he says he rebuilt it, he means he had low-level grunt help. I saw an article saying that maybe he used the outlawed "slave androids" from season 1 since they would've been legal for some of that time. Since he references drones, maybe that's all he needed to do. And to be fair, maybe the D wasn't as damaged as we think and it just needed a decent amount of cleanup (which could be done in 20 years).
All in all, I thought it was a great sendoff for the Next Generation Crew. I acknowledge that the series wants to move forward with new blood, but I would love an anthology series where we get an episode for different TNG/DS9/VOY castmembers (either main cast or even smaller roles like Naomi Wildman). Let's see what everyone is up to and get cool little one-off stories for Bashir and Quark and Tom Paris and even Harry Kim. Let's see the Doctor again! I know a lot of these guys could come back for the already-announced Starfleet Academy but I want an anthology show to put some of these characters to bed. Then we can either do a time jump again (like Next Gen did), pick up from Discovery, or whatever.