Season 1, Episode 1: ‘Remembrance’
Like a nice glass of refreshing liquid — tea, Earl Grey, hot even — Jean-Luc Picard is back in our living rooms. And the creative team behind “Star Trek: Picard” would like you to know it is decidedly not as if he never left.
The decision to bring Picard back to life in a stand-alone series rather than in a “Next Generation” revival is a brilliant one, if the first episode is of any indication. (Full disclosure: I’ve seen the next two episodes of the series, so I am not completely in the dark about future developments in the plot.)
There are just enough nods to “Next Generation” lore to signal for die-hard fans that this is a show that understands why Picard’s return is so important to them. But it doesn’t lean so heavily into nostalgia to overwhelm a great story. And it is a great story.
More on that in a moment.
What most makes “Picard” work is Patrick Stewart, of course. In the opening minutes of the show, during which Picard dreams of playing a card game with Lt. Cmdr. Data (Brent Spiner), it is clear that neither has forgotten how to play their parts even after so many years. Stewart has Picard’s fatherly mannerisms down pat while Spiner resurrects Data’s earnest obliviousness without skipping a beat. (And such a nice touch to open with Irving Berlin’s “Blue Skies,” the song Data sang in the middling 2002 “Next Generation” feature, “Star Trek: Nemesis,” along with a shot of the Enterprise.)
But the team of writers — which includes Michael Chabon, Alex Kurtzman and Kirsten Beyer — also wrote the character in a way that reminds fans of why they fell in love with the character to begin with. Part of the issue with Picard is that the television version has historically been significantly different than one we’ve seen in the films. In the original series, which aired from 1987 to 1994, Picard was a measured diplomat with a talent for staying calm.
In the movies, Picard became something else entirely: an action hero, and an impulsive one at that. (Picard’s most famous line, from “Star Trek: First Contact,” “The line must be drawn here and no further,” is well delivered by Stewart because of his talent, but it was quite out of character.) This Picard, a version 20 years older than the one we see in “Nemesis,” is closer to the one we saw on our television screens: witty, warm, inquisitive and fierce about his beliefs in right and wrong. (It makes sense to see Picard tending to a dog named No. 1. But the sight of Picard shooting at his own assimilated crew members in “First Contact,” not so much.)
We learn in the premiere that Picard is retired and living at Chateau Picard in France. He is under the care of two Romulans, Laris (Orla Brady) and Zhaban (Jamie McShane). Picard gives his first ever television interview — how convenient for exposition purposes! — in which a rather feisty reporter very kindly reminds him what he’s been up to. He has written books! He became an admiral!
But the plot really takes off when we learn that Picard pushed for the Federation to assist the Romulans, whose home planet was about to be destroyed by a sun that went supernova (as seen in the J.J. Abrams feature-length reboot from 2009, “Star Trek.”). The Romulans were the Federation’s enemy — and many in Starfleet disagreed with Picard. Here is a departure from “Generation”: In the show, Starfleet is often painted as an unflinching force for good. The notion that it would not help save the inhabitants of an entire planet from being wiped out would be unthinkable, enemy or not. (The precedent here is “Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country,” when there was much internal grumbling about Starfleet’s trying to negotiate peace with the Klingons, who were also about to die out.)
Initially, the Federation, at Picard’s urging, did assist Romulus. Picard even led the armada to ferry Romulans beyond the supernova’s reach. (This is presumably how Laris and Zhaban end up at Chateau Picard.) But at some point, a group of androids went rogue, destroying Utopia Planitia, acrucial shipyard near Earth, as well as some of the armada. Androids were banned in the aftermath and Starfleet quit the rescue efforts, much to Picard’s chagrin.
Curiously, there is no mention of Spock, who also led efforts to save Romulus, according to the Abrams reboot. Picard quit Starfleet soon after because, as he says to the rather annoying reporter in anger, “Starfleet was no longer Starfleet.” (Don’t overlook the dip into real-life politics here: “Star Trek” has done many episodes painting isolationism as a downward trend for civilizations.)
Picard’s fury, expertly conveyed by Stewart, is out of a moral grievance, not impulsivity as it was often in the films.
In Boston, a group of hooded figures attacks a young woman named Dahj (Isa Briones), who is on a date — and that date is promptly murdered by the assailants. But Dahj, finding superhuman abilities she does not realize she has, fights off the attackers. We later find out that Dahj is actually an android — a daughter of Data, who died at the end of “Nemesis.” (Data had a daughter in the “Next Generation” episode “The Offspring.”)
What I loved about Picard’s immediate embrace of Dahj was that it speaks to everything Picard was in the television show: a generous soul with a sixth sense for when someone is telling the truth, no matter how outlandish. And after his trip to Starfleet archives, he very tenderly tells Dahj the truth: She isn’t human. Picard’s archival materials are a treasure trove for Trekkies: the Captain Picard Day sign and the model of the Stargazer, for starters.
To Picard, Dahj is every bit as deserving of empathy as Data was.
“If you are who I think you are, you are dear to me in ways that you can’t understand,” Picard tells her. “I will never leave you.”
Yikes. This makes her death right in front of him minutes later, at the hands of those same masked figures we saw earlier, all the more awkward, especially when the murder does not appear on Starfleet surveillance cameras.
The end of the episode brings us my favorite “Next Generation” callback: a reference to Commander Bruce Maddox from “The Measure of a Man,” one of the series’s best episodes. Maddox has disappeared, but Picard and Dr. Agnes Jurati (Alison Pill) surmise that he created Dahj as a tribute to Data, and that Dahj was one of a pair. That means Dahj has a sister — who happens to be working on a Borg cube, which is doubling as something called a “Romulan Reclamation Site.”
Presumably, we’ll learn more about how the Borg and Romulans play into this in future episodes. Also, I imagine we’ll find Maddox down the road. Will he be played by Brian Brophy, as he was in the original?
The premiere was an ambitious, fresh twist on story lines we’ve seen before. The team behind “Picard” didn’t lean on plots from the show that had been explored repeatedly — like the Klingon civil war or yet another “Borg are coming to Earth,” type thing. Instead, “Picard” embraced one of the most critically-reviled films of the “Trek” franchise for its ideas, as with the appearance of B-4, the junior varsity Data from “Nemesis.”
It was an impressive start — familiar, without being derivative. It was like a brief encounter with an old friend who still has much more to say.
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January 23, 2020 at 09:00PM
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