Photo Illustration by Luis G. Rendon/The Daily Beast/Paramount+
When Sir Patrick Stewart first signed on to revive his iconic character, Jean-Luc Picard, for a new television series, he asked that it not be a The Next Generation (TNG) reunion series. “There was no reason for us to walk down memory lane,” he once said in an interview. Instead, the first season of Paramount+’s Star Trek: Picard focused on new characters, new storylines, and new adventures for the elderly hero. With the exception of cameos of fan-favorites sprinkled here and there, Picard Season 1 avoided stories involving the Enterprise crew, instead focusing on his life as an admiral to the Federation.
But things changed for the second season, which aired last spring. Picard began to reintroduce iconic TNG characters into the major storylines, including the omnipotent Q (John de Lancie), percipient Ten Forward barkeep Guinan (Whoopi Goldberg), and the menacing Borg Queen (Annie Wersching). The showrunners and Stewart realized it would be impossible to bring up Picard without mentioning The Next Generation, as they have become synonymous with each other in Star Trek history. It became inevitable that the show would have to revisit the rest of his past, including the main cast of TNG, as Picard’s story slowly comes to a close.
With the show’s third and final season, which premieres Feb. 16, Star Trek: Picard does just that, leaning into the entire Star Trek lore–not just that of TNG, but also The Original Series, Deep Space 9, and Voyager canon. The end result is a story that feels very fan-service filled with callbacks and inside jokes, while remaining captivating through its character-driven plots and intriguing storylines that are easy to follow along for fans of Picard, even for those who aren’t the most Trek-enthused.