Picard season 3 is great for me, less great for Star Trek

polygon.com:

I should start by noting that I am probably, by most fans’ reckoning, a Star Trek Casual. I grew up at a time when there was a lot of Star Trek on TV — three shows at once! — and absorbed a lot of the stuff by both osmosis and by having family members that were super into the various adventures chronicled in The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, and Voyager. Personally, I had a great time watching these shows, but I was mostly just along for the ride. That’s how I’d describe my level of investment in Star Trek: Along for the ride, and happy to be here.

From this standpoint, the third and final season of Star Trek: Picard was a wild success. While re-tooling the floundering series to be a full-on The Next Generation reunion read as an obvious Hail Mary play to go out with a bang (and maybe an apology for Star Trek: Nemesis), it managed to do so while remaining earnest throughout, turning things around by not just bringing back the cast of The Next Generation, but by doing so in what turned out to be an ode to all of ’90s Trek.

Personally, I had a great time. My Trek knowledge is mostly built around major touchpoints; the big fan-favorite things that everyone knows about Trek in general and The Next Generation in particular. Q, The Borg, “make it so,” all that stuff. Picard is playing a tune just for me. It’s also, unfortunately, very much ending things in a narrative cul-de-sac: not just sending off its characters, but much of what they represented.

[Ed. note: This post contains spoilers for the end of Picard.]

Picard has ultimately made a mistake big franchises often make when their stewards’ primary interest is playing the hits: It makes its world smaller by making everything tie back to its legacy heroes. Its