Star Trek: Picard “The Next Generation” review — Jean Luc’s reunion too little too late

★★☆☆☆

Star Trek: Picard is back, and fans are delighted over the show’s stunning third and final season glow-up. Longtime “NuTrek” critics are strangely quiet; some are even singing its praises — probably because they got advanced copies. Even Red Letter Media’s Mike and Rich, easily the most entertaining of modern Trek detractors, are once again cautiously optimistic.

Hope, indeed, springs eternal.

But I’m not buying it.

It’s easy for just about anything to look half-decent in comparison to the previous season, one of the worst run of episodes in Trek’s long and (mostly) illustrious history. A nauseating clusterfuck of half-baked ideas and mind-meltingly bad logic, a half-collapsed house of cards, barely held together by the promise that the people running the show had something much better in store for anyone who hadn’t done a Captain Vandermeer.

Picard’s final season is giving us Starfleet, sweeping ship porn to comfortably familiar music, loving winks to lore and one final opportunity to bid farewell to arguably Trek’s finest crew. The problem is all the goodwill is gone, sapped away by two pitiful previous seasons. All I see here is a bunch of aged heroes back for one final payday and to boost their sagging convention prices, led by an over-the-hill thespian who couldn’t really give two shits about “Gene’s vision”.

Beyond the materialistic elements and member berries, there’s precious little of the “good old” Star Trek here. Everything is corrupt; no one can be trusted; the enemy (yes, she even has a facial scar) has a connection to the main hero; everyone has a kid on the ship, and proper lighting is the stuff of dreams. Everything is a copy of a copy of a copy.

Picard’s latest adventure is little more than a collection of reheated scraps; every frame a painful reminder that there is much better Star Trek already out there.