Picard learns to love again, for what it’s worth.

Star Trek Picard’s greatest problem is that it’s never been sure what its central premise is: is it that Picard, now deep in his twilight years, isn’t quite the same man he was and must face up to mortality? Or is that he is very much the same man, the passage of time be damned. It flip-flops between the two, contradicting itself and undermining either premise. If he’s the same man, why try and change him by adding superfluous tragic back story to his already lengthy personal canon? If he’s not the same man then why constantly have him try to be, despite the very obvious fact that Patrick Stewart isn’t up to it anymore?

With many of the superfluous subplots tied up in Hide And Seek, Farewell ends up having to force a great deal of manufactured peril to fill its allotted runtime, peril that’s not only unearned but unsatisfyingly resolved and the series continues to define the bottom of the barrel scraping that’s marred the whole Kurtzman era. It is, though, marginally better than season one though.

With Soong going full-on Bond villain (although not quite having a volcano lair), Raffi, Seven and Rios are forced to disarm his back-up missile plan while he turns up at the launch and uses the power of being a rich white asshole to try and get close to Renée and stop her destiny (even though he must be way past the point where he could genuinely believe he’s going to be rewarded for his actions).

The actual resolution of the entire season’s plot is resolved laughably easily and early on in Farewell; Soong gets his just desserts in more ways than one, although the tease of him having a folder marked “Project Khan” is just ick. Maybe not everything genetically-related in Star Trek needs to revolve around Brent Spiner? Kore, too, gets a hastily cobbled together out, with an offer from none other than Wesley Crusher, Traveller, who recruits her as a Watcher (who, it turns out, are a wholly owned subsidiary of The Travellers) as compensation for not being needed for the forthcoming third season.

With twenty-four minutes left to go, the remaining crew return to the abandoned Chateau Picard to hang out and stay out of the way of history or wait for Q to turn up and sort everything out. No matter which way you cut it, though, Q’s behaviour and motivation make zero sense and no matter how much babble the writers dump onto John de Lancie or Patrick Stewart, nothing can make it make sense in the way they seem desperate to make it.

Rios’ decision to stay behind, having been heavily telegraphed, comes as no surprise and despite his loss being a significant one for the series (he was easily the best new character of the entire series), you can hardly blame him for wanting to peace out when the going’s good and the writing’s barely passable. At least his staying behind gives “surplus” energy for a surprise gift. The hug between Picard and Q is a genuinely sweet moment though and all in all the episode handles the Farewell portion of the proceedings fairly well.

Q, ever the prankster, returns them to moments before the big self-destruct that kicked off the whole series – one which Picard immediately cancels as he now realises the intruder isn’t The Borg Collective – it’s Jurati’s Borg Cooperative.

And they’re there because a big new trans-warp conduit has opened and needs to be contained, hence her coopting the fleet into the cooperative. I do like that the fleet has a good degree of variety in ship design, unlike the ctrl+c ctrl+v of Riker’s fleet in Et in Arcadia Ego, Part 2 and, of course, cadet Elnor turns up on one of the ships as Q makes good on his promise of a surprise.

With the initial energy discharge dissipated, even the Borg don’t know who is behind the conduit but they offer to monitor and study it as new provisional members of the Federation. It’s an intriguing set-up for the final season of Picard, but based on previous behaviour I’m willing to bet that it will barely be mentioned, let alone be central to whatever shenanigans they get up to next.

So Farewell, then, to the second season of Star Trek Picard. An improvement over the first season, for sure, but that’s a very low bar and this whole series still feels like something of a mistake.