Seeing Is Believing
“The Star Gazer” helps Star Trek: Picard avoid the sophomore slump.
Star Trek: Picard
“The Star Gazer”
Season 2, Episode 1
Written by Akiva Goldsman & Terry Matalas
Directed by Doug Aarniokoski
Starring Patrick Stewart, Orla Brady, Isa Briones, Evan Evagora, Michelle Hurd, Alison Pill, Jeri Ryan, and Santiago Cabrera
Guest Starring Alex Diehl, April Grace, Rich Ceraulo Ko, Dylan Von Halle, and Madeline Wise
Special Guest Stars John de Lancie and Whoopi Goldberg
56 minutes
Original broadcast 3 March 2022
1. Photographs & Memories
When Star Trek: Picard premiered its first season on 23 January 2020, I was ecstatic.
And not simply because lifelong Trekkers (count me among them) had a new television series to enjoy. Watching fresh Star Trek episodes had, by that point, become an expectation—at least for me—given the pace of planning and production for new Trek properties thanks to CBS’s 2 November 2015 announcement that the network’s streaming platform (launched as CBS All Access on 28 October 2014 but renamed Paramount+ on 4 March 2021) would try to increase its market share by adding an original Trek program to its at-that-point small (and, let’s be honest, undistinguished) platform.1
This gamble has paid handsome dividends despite initial uncertainty about its wisdom. CBS Corporation, which held Trek’s television rights thanks to the 2005 split of Viacom (Paramount’s parent company) into separate film and television divisions, on 9 February 2016 hired the talented writer-producer Bryan Fuller (who began his television-writing career on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and Star Trek: Voyager, but who’d gained respect as the creator/showrunner of Dead Like Me, Wonderfalls, Pushing Daisies, and, especially, Hannibal)2 to shepherd into existence Trek’s sixth live-action program (and the franchise’s seventh overall series, if we count—as I do!—the criminally underrated Star Trek: The Animated Series that ran for two seasons, from 1973 to 1974).
CBS also brought aboard Alex Kurtzman, the co-writer of the franchise’s first two “Kelvin Timeline” feature films (respectively, 2009’s fun-but-flawed Star Trek and 2013’s daring-but-dreary Star Trek Into Darkness), to help Fuller conceive, create, and produce this new series, whose title was revealed on 23 July 2016 to be Star Trek: Discovery.3 Despite this program’s contentious first-season production (an unfortunate franchise norm), CBS officially relaunched Trek on television 12 years after the 13 May 2005 broadcast of Star Trek: Enterprise’s disappointing series finale (“These Are the Voyages…”) by releasing, on 24 September 2017, Discovery’s two-part series premiere: the evocative “The Vulcan Hello” and the excellent “Battle at the Binary Stars.”
The behind-the-scenes tumult referenced earlier led Bryan Fuller, at CBS’s request, to resign as Discovery’s showrunner in October 2016.4 Although he remains credited as Discovery’s co-creator alongside Kurtzman, Fuller no longer contributes to it or any other Trek program. Considering how good, unconventional, and spirited a writer he can be, Fuller’s exile from the Trek franchise is a great pity that I had hoped—futilely, it turns out—the passing of time would remedy. Kurtzman, moreover, prevailed against all other rivals in the corporate jousting that Fuller’s departure provoked to inherit from longtime Trek producer Rick Berman the role once intended for Fuller: Trek’s head honcho and guiding guru.
Alex Kurtzman, in other words, is the man overseeing every part of what CBS (in a savvy bit of corporate branding) now officially labels the “Star Trek Universe.” Kurtzman, through his Secret Hideout production company, is now to Trek what Berman was during the 1990s and 2000s, namely the person most loved and most hated by Trekkers (or Trekkies, depending upon one’s preferred nomenclature), that audience of smart viewers who are as combative, garrulous, and sarcastic a group as any fanbase in the world (or, probably, the cosmos).
This renewed era of Trek television—what many fans (count me among them) call New Trek—has prospered beyond all expectations. Discovery premiered its bravura second season on 17 January 2019 and had begun working on its third by 28 February 2019, then completed Season 2 with 11 and 18 April 2019’s inspiring two-part finale, “Such Sweet Sorrow.” Before those dates, a companion series titled Star Trek: Short Treks began offering 15- to 20-minute Discovery-related shorts (or “minisodes,” in producer’s parlance) with the 4 October 2018 debut of “Runaway.”
Cries for a spinoff featuring the voyages of the U.S.S. Enterprise (registry number NCC-1701) under the command of Captain Christopher Pike (Anson Mount), First Officer Number One (Rebecca Romijn), and Science Officer Spock (Ethan Peck)—three characters from Gene Roddenberry’s 1966-1969 Star Trek (a/k/a The Original Series that started it all) who appeared throughout Discovery’s second season—grew louder, while rumors that Michelle Yeoh would headline a new program chronicling the adventures of her character, former Terran (or Mirror Universe) Emperor Philippa Georgiou, with the covert-operations organization Section 31 began swirling (and were confirmed by Kurtzman on 14 January 2019).5
So, it was the best of times for Trek aficionados, but nothing prepared them (by “them” I mean “me”) for Sir Patrick Stewart’s surprise 4 August 2018 announcement (at that year’s annual Star Trek Las Vegas mega-convention) that “Jean-Luc Picard is back.”6 Having admired Stewart for his remarkable stage career, for his fierce commitment to social justice, and for his wonderful screen performances—especially as Picard in all seven seasons of Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987-1994) and four subsequent feature films (respectively, 1994’s Star Trek: Generations, 1996’s Star Trek: First Contact, 1998’s Star Trek: Insurrection, and 2002’s Star Trek: Nemesis)—his revelation that Picard would return in a new series caused me to smile for hours on end at the prospect of Stewart reprising a character whom I’ve loved, respected, and venerated for 35 years.
Then came all the production rumors, writing-staff appointments, cast announcements, and other reports that I obsessively track when any project I can’t wait to enjoy—literary, cinematic, or televisual—is being prepared. When “Remembrance,” Star Trek: Picard’s terrific premiere episode, appeared (or “dropped”) on CBS All Access on 23 January 2020, I couldn’t have been happier that Jean-Luc Picard had returned to television for the first time since Star Trek: The Next Generation signed off the airwaves, on 23 May 1994, with its magnificent series finale, “All Good Things. . .” (and had returned to any screen for his first appearance in 18 years).
Season 1, with a few ups and downs, didn’t disappoint me, even if it did certain quarters of Trek fandom that seem congenitally conditioned to hate anything new, so I looked forward to Season 2 with genuine zeal. To quote Star Trek: Enterprise’s theme song “Faith of the Heart,” it’s been a long road getting from there to here since, by the time Picard’s first year concluded (with 26 March 2020’s broadcast of “Et in Arcadia Ego, Part 2”), COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns had overtaken all our lives. Season 2 was coming, we’d been told, but when it would arrive was an open question given the strict safety protocols imposed by Paramount upon all film and television productions to keep their personnel healthy, to say nothing of the fact that the octogenarian Stewart was a member of one of the pandemic’s highest-risk groups.
So, the question arose, could Star Trek: Picard recover from these circumstances to offer us anything relevant, worthwhile, and compelling?
I’m happy to report, dear reader, that the show’s cast and crew replied to this query by saying, in essence, “you ain’t seen nothing yet.”
2. Phonographs & Memories
“The Star Gazer” opens Season 2 brimming with confidence, wit, and élan. Jumping straight into the action, this installment smash cuts into a chaotic shipboard disaster that’s accompanied by a glorious Star Trek Red Alert (whose onscreen graphic and unmistakable klaxon go straight back to the James T. Kirk-era feature films).7 We see a group of young Starfleet officers running down corridors that lurch to one side while bursting with sparks, then entering a turbolift that lurches to another side while bursting with sparks, then firing phasers after reaching the bridge of an unnamed starship under attack by a figure barely visible in the foreground. These same young officers, including a Vulcan man bleeding green blood, are dispatched by phaser shots from this same humanoid presence, who’s clad all in black and who’s connected to different computer consoles by mechanical tentacles emanating from its back.
These events occur briskly thanks to director Doug Aarniokoski’s energetic pacing (and the crackerjack work of co-editors Steven Haugen and Drew Nichols), which gets Season 2 off to a rip-roaring start that accelerates to madness when we see four principal characters from Season 1—Admiral Jean-Luc Picard (Stewart, also dressed in black), Cristóbal “Cris” Rios (Santiago Cabrera, dressed in a Starfleet captain’s uniform), Dr. Agnes Jurati (Alison Pill, dressed in a formal dinner dress), and Seven of Nine (Jeri Ryan, dressed in her Fenris Rangers threads from Season 1)—trying to manage the chaos, with the ship’s computer calling out percentages tracking that tall, unidentified figure as it gains control of the ship’s computer systems. The cyberneticist Jurati warns that all is about to be lost, causing Picard to enable the onboard auto-destruct system before the screen whites out and cuts to Star Trek: Picard’s elegant opening credits.
Yes, friends, it’s a thrilling (and grand-old) Star Trek sequence that reminds careful viewers of the unforgettable teaser to the fabulous Season 5 Next Generation entry “Cause and Effect,” which sees Picard’s U.S.S. Enterprise-D destroyed before the opening credits roll thanks to a temporal disturbance that, as always, spells trouble.
The time-travel implications of “The Star Gazer’s” teaser become clear when, after the opening credits and Jeff Russo’s grandly re-scored title theme end, we find ourselves gazing at Earth from orbit as Irma Thomas’s fantastic, rhythm-and-blues-infused 1964 cover of Jerry Ragovy’s & Jimmy Norman’s song “Time Is on My Side” overtakes the soundtrack. We plunge toward the ground to find ourselves in Château Picard’s vineyards during the grape harvest, with a location card informing us that we’ve flashed back 48 hours.
Thomas’s song begins as extradiegetic music, then becomes diegetic when we see a vinyl album playing on an old-style phonograph’s turntable for Picard, for his Romulan caretaker/château supervisor Laris (Orla Brady), for his human and Romulan field workers, and even for his dog (the pit bull named Number One) to enjoy. Hovering harvester machines beam the vineyard’s grapes right off their vines, while Picard and Laris glance longingly at one other (but only when the other person looks in a different direction) in shots that establish a new tone for the man and the series that bears his name: lighter, brighter, and more romantic.
3. Times & Travels
Act One’s first moments also tell us that a new showrunner has beamed aboard. Terry Matalas takes the reins from Michael Chabon, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist (of 1995’s Wonder Boys, 2000’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, and 2007’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, among others) who oversaw Season 1 and who remains an executive producer for Season 2. Matalas is most famous for co-creating and showrunning 12 Monkeys (2015-2018), the SyFy Channel’s excellent, four-season televisual adaptation of Terry Gilliam’s terrific 1995 time-travel film 12 Monkeys (written by David and Janet Peoples, who based their screenplay on Chris Marker’s 1962 photo-montage masterpiece La Jetée).
The televisual 12 Monkeys nicely expands both its predecessors’ temporal shenanigans into a vast, history-spanning conspiracy that melds several different science-fiction tropes with nearly as many thriller conventions to meditate thoughtfully upon issues of memory, history, environmental degradation, social fragmentation, medical ethics, and human fallibility that, perhaps surprisingly, does both its filmic precursors proud.
I mention surprise because this program’s first season is so clearly indebted to Star Trek’s depiction of time travel—as much as, if not more than it is to La Jetée’s philosophical musings and to the cinematic 12 Monkeys’ ecological conspiracies—that, while enjoyable, its inaugural 13 episodes offer little we haven’t seen or read before. Matalas and his writers, despite two exceptional entries (the seventh, titled “The Keys,” and the twelfth, titled “Paradox”), don’t quite master the Trek franchise’s sideways approach to the temporal paradoxes, loops, and revisions; alternate realities; parallel worlds; diverging histories in urgent need of repair, and time-freezing-or-flowing-in-every-direction-but-forward scenarios that make Star Trek’s take on time travel so distinctive.
Trek’s oblique ways of spinning these yarns evolved fitfully during The Next Generation’s (TNG’s) production because creator Gene Roddenberry, by that program’s 1987 launch, wished to avoid what he considered time travel’s many clichés despite the great success of Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home’s plot of sending The Original Series cast back to 1986—the year of the film’s release—to bring two humpback whales forward to the 23rd Century to deal with an extraterrestrial probe that devastates Earth’s ecology when it loses contact with these cetacean creatures, which, the audience quickly learns, were hunted to extinction early in Trek’s 21st Century.
As former franchise leader Rick Berman and, especially, TNG and Voyager writer-producer (plus Enterprise co-creator) Brannon Braga have commented many times over the years, finding different ways of addressing time travel led TNG’s writing staff (and, later, the writers’ rooms of Deep Space Nine and Voyager) to invent all manner of reasons for space and time to be more malleable than either Trek’s characters or audiences might expect.8 Various spatial anomalies, subspace inversions, holographic illusions, psychological phenomena, extraterrestrial interventions, and massive explosions bedevil the Enterprise-D crew in TNG’s most notable time-travel outings, including Season 2’s “Time Squared,” Season 3’s “Yesterday’s Enterprise,” Season 4’s “Future Imperfect,” the aforementioned “Cause and Effect,” Season 6’s “Timescape,” Season 7’s “Parallels,” and, not to gush too much, “All Good Things . . .,” which remains one of the best television-series finales ever broadcast.
Braga wrote three of this list’s final four entries (and co-wrote “All Good Things . . .” with Ronald D. Moore), meaning that Terry Matalas, with “The Star Gazer,” takes up the mantle that Braga lay down when he departed the Trek franchise in 2005. Matalas, moreover, may have created the televisual 12 Monkeys with Travis Fickett (who, not coincidentally, serves as a consulting producer for Picard’s second season), but it isn’t until Monkeys reaches its second season that both men embrace the wild and wooly possibilities that journeying through time (or “splintering,” in 12 Monkeys parlance) affords their characters’ experiences and their production staff’s creativity.
The Trek franchise, in other words, paved the way for Matalas, Fickett, and their group of talented writers, producers, and technicians to explore—in 12 Monkeys’ second, third, and fourth seasons—outré notions about time travel that delve into the complex consequences for each character’s physical existence and emotional equilibrium. During these three years, 12 Monkeys becomes, in short and in full, one the best time-travel series ever seen on American television.
Careful Monkeys viewers will note many screen influences upon its puzzle-box narrative—from its two filmic forebears to Star Trek to Quantum Leap (1989-1993) to Doctor Who (1963-1989 and 2005-Present), to say nothing of literary ancestors as diverse as H.G. Wells’s classic 1895 novel The Time Machine (a default choice since every later story involving mechanical time travel is influenced by this book), Robert Heinlein’s memorable 1941 novella By His Bootstraps and his brilliant 1959 short story “All You Zombies—,” Philip K. Dick’s terrific 1966 novel Now Wait for Last Year and his worthwhile 1967 novel Counter-Clock World, Marge Piercy’s unforgettable 1976 novel Woman on the Edge of Time, Octavia E. Butler’s 1979 masterpiece Kindred, Gregory Benford’s celebrated 1980 novel Timescape, and even Charles Dickens’s classic 1843 novella A Christmas Carol.
So, Season 2 of Star Trek: Picard boasts a sterling pedigree that “The Star Gazer” honors by deftly weaving all these influences, plus an impressive number of Trek-specific allusions, into a tapestry that’s both exciting and exquisite to behold.
4. Meetings & Greetings
The 48-hour flashback that begins “The Star Gazer” allows returning viewers to discover what’s transpired in the 18 months since “Et in Arcadia Ego, Part 2” concluded Picard’s first season on mostly satisfying notes, none more so than transferring Picard’s mind from his dying body into a synthetic duplicate that allows Patrick Stewart to play his character without prosthetic makeup or de-aging visual effects that make Picard look younger. One of Star Trek: Picard’s best qualities is that its protagonist is a man in his nineties, bringing all the knowledge, wisdom, humor, and moral integrity that he’s accrued during his long life with him.
Picard may live on the grounds of his family’s French vineyard, but he serves as Chancellor of Starfleet Academy in San Francisco, California. Agnes Jurati is touring the galaxy with Soji Asha (Isa Briones), the daughter-we-didn’t-know of The Next Generation’s android character Data (Brent Spiner) and the woman whose identity as a synthetic person provokes the conflict that powers Picard’s entire first season.
Soji and Jurati, we learn, are taking a goodwill tour of the galaxy that sees them visiting different planets (in this case, the Beta Quadrant’s Raritan IV) to assure their inhabitants that artificial lifeforms (called synths) pose no threat to organic life now that the Federation’s ban on artificial people (a policy in effect for 14 years when Season 1 begins) has ended (thanks to Picard and company’s efforts during this initial year’s serialized story).
Raritan IV is populated by Deltans, the hairless and sensual species first seen in 1979’s Star Trek: The Motion Picture (yet first planned for the unmade Star Trek: Phase II television series that Paramount and Roddenberry developed during the mid-1970s, but that became a feature film following the success of George Lucas’s 1977 Star Wars—or, as we now know it, Star Wars: Episode IV: A New Hope). One unnamed Deltan (Rich Ceraulo Ko) smoothly hits on Jurati, but must then endure her hilarious monologue about how and why she’s not relationship material.
For audience members who don’t remember, Jurati—played here by Alison Pill with the same winning awkwardness we saw in Season 1—tells her hopeful suitor that the only reason she’s not in prison is because her actions helping to save the galaxy from the extra-dimensional cybernetic creatures briefly seen at the conclusion of “Et in Arcadia Ego, Part 2” convinced the Federation to pardon her for murdering her boyfriend, Bruce Maddox (John Ales), an action also mitigated by Jurati having been placed under the control of a Romulan infiltrator’s powerful mind meld.
This approach to exposition—light, airy, and casual—nearly obscures the fact that there’s so much catching up to do in “The Star Gazer” that these early scenes might be dreary summaries, rather than fun synopses, of how our favorite characters have spent their time.
Seven of Nine (the always terrific Jeri Ryan) now commands Cristóbal Rios’s La Sirena freighter to fight marauders attempting to steal medical supplies bound for less-travelled parts of the galaxy, Rios (a wonderfully weathered Santiago Cabrera) now captains the U.S.S. Stargazer, Raffi Musiker (Picard’s former second-in-command, beautifully played by Michelle Hurd) now serves as first officer of the U.S.S. Excelsior, and the young Romulan warrior-monk Elnor (the elfin Evan Evagora) is the first member of his species admitted to Starfleet Academy.
Elnor, thanks to Raffi’s influence, is assigned to his first training cruise aboard the Excelsior, but not before Picard gives him a gift: a memoir written by Spock titled The Many and the One. The academy sequence includes so many callbacks, Easter eggs, and allusions to the Trek franchise’s history (including the starship U.S.S. Hikaru Sulu, named after the Enterprise helmsman and Excelsior captain played by George Takei in The Original Series, and by John Cho in the Kelvin-timeline movies) that we should feel relieved that Terry Matalas and his co-writer, New Trek stalwart Akiva Goldsman, adeptly integrate them into this outing’s 56 minutes.
Perhaps the most significant allusions are this episode’s title and the name of Rios’s new command, the Stargazer. The second starship to bear this designation, its forerunner was Picard’s first command as captain, which he describes to Montgomery Scott (James Doohan) in the charming Season 6 TNG installment “Relics” as “an overworked, underpowered vessel always on the verge of flying apart at the seams” and which we see only once, in the underrated Season 1 episode “The Battle.”
Yet, as we learn in an additional flashback that Goldsman and Matalas insert early in “The Star Gazer,” this entry’s title has additional meaning for Picard. When he enters the château’s cupola-style greenhouse, Picard sees that its windows are shattered and remembers the day that his younger self (Dylan Von Halle) first arrived at the vineyard with his family, who moved there from Paris. Picard’s mother, Yvette (Madeline Wise), finds her younger son, whom she calls “my little Magellan,” in this greenhouse and promises that the two of them will make their own world there while his father, Maurice, works the vineyard’s fields and his brother, Robert, attends school. Young Picard then asks an unexpected question: “Will you fight less here?”
Yvette’s face falls, then, in flashcuts that may be memories or premonitions, we see Yvette as she’s physically struck by a man (presumably her husband) and dragged away, suggesting that domestic violence hasn’t been eliminated by the 24th Century no matter how idyllic this era may seem.
Some fans have objected that this storyline violates Trek continuity and Gene Roddenberry’s vision of a peaceful future society, but, in fact, it doesn’t, since the only times we see Picard’s long-dead parents during TNG’s seven seasons both come during visions generated by unusual space-time conditions. The older Yvette (Herta Ware), in the imaginative Season 1 episode “Where No One Has Gone Before,” gives her son crucial advice about the Enterprise-D’s plight when it warps to a faraway galaxy where thoughts become reality, while Maurice Picard (Clive Church), in the Season 6 masterpiece “Tapestry,” appears during the strange afterlife created by John de Lancie’s immortal trickster Q after Picard dies on Dr. Beverly Crusher’s (Gates McFadden’s) operating table. Picard sees and hears his father rebuking him for enlisting in Starfleet rather than honoring tradition by working the family vineyard.
Picard’s memories of his mother begin to explain why, in TNG and its four follow-up films, he maintains such tight control over his emotions, enjoys only a few passionate (yet fleeting) romantic encounters with women, and never marries or has children, truths that form important aspects of Picard’s journey in the seventh movie, 1994’s Star Trek: Generations. Picard also reveals, during his chancellor’s address to Starfleet Academy’s second-year cadets, that Yvette is the source of his explorer’s credo, heard as Picard’s final line in The Next Generation’s pilot episode (“Encounter at Farpoint”): “Let’s see what’s out there.”
Gene Roddenberry famously proclaimed that humanity would overcome its violent tendencies by the 24th Century, but not even The Next Generation’s first two seasons depict a species so perfect that human weaknesses have been eradicated (even if TNG’s society is far more advanced, far more peaceful, and far preferable to the one we 21st Century viewers inhabit). Roddenberry’s desire to eliminate petty conflicts among the Enterprise-D’s crew was a welcome innovation in TNG’s portrayal of future humanity—or, at least, of the people commanding humanity’s most advanced starship—but not even TNG’s first season, the time when Roddenberry exercised the tightest control over this program’s production, avoided interpersonal conflict as much as some Trekkers claim that it did.
5. Gazes & Phases
Goldsman and Matalas, in other words, explore territory in Picard’s past that’s gone mostly uncharted in onscreen Trek while bringing aspects of Patrick Stewart’s personal life into his character’s experience. Stewart’s mentioned in several speeches, interviews, and articles how his father, Alfred, physically abused and demeaned his mother, Gladys, to the point that Stewart, in 2007, became a patron of Refuge, the British domestic-violence charity. These memories of Picard’s troubled youth also knit together three significant reunions in “The Star Gazer” that demonstrate just how good a character drama it and its parent series are.
The first involves Picard’s relationship with Laris, who, in Season 1, helped tend the château with her Romulan husband, Zhaban (Jamie McShane). We learn in “The Star Gazer” that Zhaban died 18 months earlier (or just as Season 1 concluded). During a quiet scene set on the evening of the grape harvest, Picard and Laris discuss their respective regrets, but Laris, in a pregnant moment, tells Picard, “Remember that Romulans don’t suffer loss as humans do. We love deeply, and then we honor that love by loving again, even more deeply still.” When Picard replies that duty has always held him back from pursuing romantic love to the point of marriage (or even commitment), Laris calls his bluff by leaning close, gazing deeply into his eyes, and asking, “What might you find if you were to just . . . stop? Here? Now?”
Orla Brady and Patrick Stewart are fabulous in this scene, playing their interaction so sensitively that when Picard moves to kiss Laris, we hope that happiness for our hero might occur right before our eyes. Yet, when Picard hesitates and chuckles, the spell is broken, with the pained disappointment in Laris’s eyes demonstrating just how fine a performer Brady is. Goldsman and Matalas write lovely words for she and Stewart to utter, but their soft, intimate, and beautiful work here is aided, once again, by director Doug Aarniokoski, who slows the pace so that both characters can simply live in the moment (which may or may not be a callback to the franchise’s ninth movie, 1998’s Star Trek: Insurrection).
Troubled by his reluctance, Picard beams to Los Angeles after his chancellor’s address to speak with an old friend. When Picard sees a plaque commemorating the city’s Forward Avenue Historic District, then glances at a building with only the number “10” inscribed on its facade, I involuntarily clapped aloud, then yelped with joy when Picard enters this well-appointed and well-provisioned watering hole to meet Guinan (Whoopi Goldberg), the mysterious El-Aurian character who tended far more than the U.S.S. Enterprise-D’s Ten Forward bar in The Next Generation. Guinan’s played so marvelously by the returning Goldberg that she deserves the Emmy nomination she almost certainly won’t receive.
Longtime fans knew this reunion was coming ever since Patrick Stewart visited the ABC talk show The View (hosted by Goldberg since 2007) on 22 January 2020 to promote Star Trek: Picard’s series premiere. When Stewart officially invites Goldberg to appear in Picard’s second season, the in-studio audience and Goldberg’s three co-hosts (respectively, Joy Behar, Sunny Hostin, and Meghan McCain) erupt into cheers, then thunderously applaud after Goldberg accepts Stewart’s invitation. Two years later, I’m pleased to say that Guinan’s return to Trek was more than worth the wait (she was last seen in a cameo appearance in 2002’s feature film Star Trek: Nemesis, which, to date, remains the final onscreen appearance of TNG’s full cast).
Guinan’s first words—“I’m gonna need some tea: Earl Grey, piping hot”—recall Picard’s famous love of this British drink, immortalized during The Next Generation’s seven seasons by his habit of ordering “Tea, Earl Grey, hot” from the Enterprise-D’s food replicators. Like Stewart as Picard throughout Star Trek: Picard, Brent Spiner as Data, Jonathan Frakes as Will Riker, and Marina Sirtis as Deanna Troi (all in Season 1), Goldberg is so good as Guinan that it seems she’s never stopped playing her.
Guinan offers Picard a choice of “top shelf or hooch” to drink, and when he correctly opts for hooch, Guinan pulls out a bottle of Saurian brandy, the first non-human liquor ever mentioned in Trek, all the way back in The Original Series’s fifth episode, Season 1’s gonzo “The Enemy Within” (first broadcast on 6 October 1966). They then discuss, as only two lifelong friends can, Picard’s refusal to enjoy the pleasures of familial commitment that Riker and Troi exhibit in Picard Season 1’s seventh (and best) episode, “Nepenthe.”
Although Picard doesn’t say it, his memories of his mother’s experience have always stopped him from entering long-term relationships, which underscores just how good Goldsman’s and Matalas’s screenwriting is. Unlike lesser talents such as David S. Goyer and the hacks who excrete scripts for Michael Bay’s films, Goldsman and Matalas resist making their characters signpost all emotions by announcing each feeling aloud the moment it’s experienced. Picard’s and Guinan’s chat is a far subtler and, thankfully, more meaningful exchange. Neither character need enunciate their thoughts and feelings as if in therapy, but instead addresses them in the elliptical fashion that people who’ve shared many years of friendship always do.
Picard’s stopover in Los Angeles precedes his final two reunions, which Goldsman and Matalas weave into their teleplay so expertly that this script should become a model for television writers everywhere. When Picard returns to his château, he receives a visit from Starfleet Admiral Sally Whitley (April Grace), who brings news of a spatial anomaly that’s opened in deep space and that’s broadcasting a mysterious signal. This rift is a now-classic Trek trope whose sickly green color immediately suggests one of two well-known Federation foes: the Romulans or the Borg.
Picard quickly travels to the new Stargazer, where he reunites with Seven, Rios, and Jurati to see a Borg vessel of unknown design protruding through the anomaly in exactly the same way the U.S.S. Enterprise-C comes through a similar space-time rift in the TNG episode “Yesterday’s Enterprise” (and that recalls the anomalies seen in “Cause and Effect” and “All Good Things . . .”).
At this point, “The Star Gazer” once again hits overdrive as Picard addresses the Borg vessel, which has transmitted the message “Help us, Picard” alongside a plea to join the Federation. After a large Starfleet armada arrives to provide reinforcements for the Stargazer, the humanoid figure seen during the teaser beams through this ship’s shields and announces itself to be the Borg Queen, triggering all the action we watched during the teaser and bringing this episode’s timeline full circle.
The Queen, by the way, isn’t played by either Alice Krige (who originated the role in the franchise’s eighth movie, 1996’s Star Trek: First Contact, and who played it again in Star Trek: Voyager’s memorable series finale, “Endgame”) or by Susanna Thompson (who essayed the role in three compelling Voyager segments), making this Queen’s true identity unknown. When she tells Picard to “look up” just before the Stargazer explodes (quoting Yvette, as seen in Picard’s boyhood flashbacks), these words set in motion a mystery that will presumably take the rest of Season 2 to unravel.
The explosion’s effects recede to find Picard somehow alive, lying on the floor of Château Picard’s greenhouse, and wearing a black uniform unlike anything we’ve seen before. He stumbles into the main house to discover that Laris is unknown to the android Harvey (Alex Diehl) who serves as the estate’s majordomo. Solar shields cover the sky above the house and its vineyard, causing the perplexed Picard to ask, “What is happening here?” before a familiar voice replies, “An excellent question, Jean-Luc.”
Yes, friends, I again clapped aloud when John de Lancie appears onscreen as the godlike Q for the first time since Voyager’s Season 7 episode “Q2” (broadcast on 11 April 2001). De Lancie provides two fun voice cameos in “Veritas,” the eighth episode (broadcast on 24 September 2020) of Mike McMahan’s delightful animated series Star Trek: Lower Decks, but seeing him in the flesh, standing next to Stewart, is another joyful moment that Goldsman, Matalas, and the entire Picard production crew gift us in “The Star Gazer.”
De Lancie, moreover, is as terrific here as he’s ever been. He initially looks as young as he did during the 1990s (thanks to de-aging, or, perhaps, deep-fake software), but, when Q observes Picard’s advanced age, he snaps his fingers and, with a patented Q-flash, ages three decades. Picard’s unhappy response to Q’s presence has it all: surprise, exasperation, anger (“Q! Goddamn, Q!” Picard snarls in a moment of rare-but-glorious profanity for the good admiral), and more than a little dread.
Q doesn’t pull any punches or mince any words, either, making him genuinely frightening in a way we haven’t glimpsed since his early TNG appearances (when he put the Enterprise-D crew on trial for all humanity’s crimes). When Q says (referencing his final, genial interaction with Picard in “All Good Things . . .”), “Do you recall what I said to you when last we parted ways? The trial never ends,” we know that matters will now take an even more disturbing turn.
Then, in this installment’s final lines, Q speaks words that offer a mission statement for Season 2’s remaining nine episodes, that pay homage to American poet Robert Frost, and that de Lancie utters with masterful menace: “You’ve been talking a lot about second chances. Well, my friend, welcome to the very end of the road not taken.” Picard’s silent dismay becomes the final shot of “The Star Gazer,” which cuts to black just as its narrative achieves maximum tension.
As my diction throughout this review suggests, Picard’s Season 2 premiere is a splendid example of Star Trek, of televised science fiction, and of screen storytelling done right. “What a ride!,” was my first thought upon watching “The Star Gazer” soon after it dropped on Paramount+, but additional viewings demonstrate how well this episode tells its time-tripping tale. It honors the entire franchise with more allusions per minute than almost any other Trek episode or film, spins a fascinating yarn in its own right, and pushes cast and crew to deliver exceptional work on every level.
Whenever a television series enters its second season, the possibility of falling into the cellar of self-assured mediocrity is a trap lurking underneath every scene, but Star Trek: Picard avoids any possible slump with this superb franchise salute.
As such, I offer my gratitude to its makers and look forward (as I hope you do, too, dear reader) to all that comes next.
NOTES
Lesley Goldberg, “New Star Trek Series a Go at CBS All Access,” 2 November 2015, The Hollywood Reporter, https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/star-trek-tv-series-works-828638/.
Nellie Andreeva, “Star Trek TV Series: Bryan Fuller to Serve as Showrunner,” 9 February 2016, Deadline, https://deadline.com/2016/02/star-trek-tv-series-bryan-fuller-showrunner-cbs-1201698956/.
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine ran for seven seasons—from 3 January 1993 to 2 June 1999—in first-run syndication. Fuller provided the stories, but didn’t write the teleplays, for two fifth-season episodes: “The Darkness and the Light” and “Empok Nor.”
Star Trek: Voyager also ran for seven seasons—from 16 January 1995 to 23 May 2001—on the United Paramount Network (UPN). Fuller served as story editor for this program’s fifth season, as executive story editor for its sixth season, and as co-producer for its seventh (and final) season. He wrote or co-wrote 19 Voyager episodes.
Dead Like Me ran for two seasons—from 27 June 2003 to 31 October 2004—on Home Box Office (HBO), although Fuller, citing creative conflicts with MGM Television, ceased active involvement with this series after its fifth episode. He’s credited as a consulting producer for Season 1’s remaining nine episodes, but only as series creator during Season 2. MGM released a direct-to-DVD sequel film titled Dead Like Me: Life after Death in 2009 that didn’t involve Fuller in any capacity.
Wonderfalls ran for a single season—from 12 March 2004 to 15 December 2004—on Fox Television. Fuller served as creator, executive producer, and showrunner for all 14 episodes.
Pushing Daisies ran for two seasons—from 3 October 2007 to 13 June 2009—on ABC Television. Fuller served as creator, executive producer, and showrunner for all 22 episodes.
Hannibal, a loose adaptation of Thomas Harris’s four Hannibal Lecter novels (respectively, 1981’s Red Dragon, 1988’s The Silence of the Lambs, 1999’s Hannibal, and 2006’s Hannibal Rising) as well as elements of these books’ various cinematic adaptations, ran for three seasons—from 4 April 2013 to 29 August 2015—on NBC Television. Fuller served as creator, executive producer, and showrunner for all 39 episodes.
“Star Trek: Discovery Announced as Name of New Series,” CBS.com, 23 July 2016, https://www.paramountplus.com/shows/star-trek-discovery/news/1005509/star-trek-discovery-announced-as-name-of-new-series/.
James Hibberd, “Bryan Fuller on His Star Trek: Discovery Exit: ‘I Got to Dream Big,’” Entertainment Weekly, 28 July 2017, https://ew.com/tv/2017/07/28/bryan-fuller-star-trek-discovery/.
Joe Otterson, “Michelle Yeoh Standalone Star Trek Series in Development at CBS All Access,” Variety, 14 January 2019, https://variety.com/2019/tv/news/michelle-yeoh-star-trek-section-31-cbs-all-access-1203107023/.
Merrit Kennedy, “Patrick Stewart Is Reprising His Role as Captain Picard in New Star Trek Series,” National Public Radio, 5 August 2018, https://www.npr.org/2018/08/05/635809156/ patrick-stewart-is-reprising-his-role-as-captain-picard-in-new-star-trek-series.
The first six Trek films starring the entire Original Series cast are: 1979’s Star Trek: The Motion Picture, 1982’s Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, 1984’s Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, 1986’s Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, 1989’s Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, and 1991’s Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country.
Rick Berman and Brannon Braga—particularly Braga—have spoken in numerous interviews, convention appearances, behind-the-scenes documentaries, and Blu-ray commentaries about how the franchise’s various writers bent rules laid down by Gene Roddenberry during The Next Generation’s planning stages and its first two seasons, the period when Roddenberry—who’d been relegated to creative-consultant status on The Original Series movies after Paramount’s dissatisfaction with Star Trek: The Motion Picture’s box-office returns—maintained the greatest control over Trek’s second live-action series.
William Shatner’s 2014 documentary Chaos on the Bridge interviews Berman, Braga, and many other TNG cast and crew members about The Next Generation’s contentious early years, with speakers including research consultant (and Roddenberry’s then-assistant) Richard Arnold, script supervisor Lolita Fatjo, and graphic designer Michael Okuda claiming that Berman and second-season showrunner Maurice Hurley sometimes took the creator’s casually stated preferences about the program’s different elements as mandates for TNG’s depiction of humanity’s future even if Roddenberry, whose health began declining before the series premiered on 28 September 1987, didn’t intend them as anything more than suggestions for consideration.
See especially Adam Walker’s & Chris Gale’s 19 March 2013 Trek Core extended interview with Braga (“Brannon Braga: The London Star Trek Interview”) and Phil Pirrello’s 22 March 2022 Hollywood Reporter retrospective article about TNG’s fifth-season episode “Cause and Effect” (“‘Is This a Joke?’: How a Classic Star Trek Episode Broke the Rules of the Franchise”) for Braga’s frank and intelligent comments about his work for the Trek franchise, which are refreshing given Braga’s status as the person credited with writing more hours of Star Trek than anyone else.
