Over two wildly different seasons so far, Star Trek: Picard has tried to navigate just what it wants to say about its titular legend. Are our memories of Jean-Luc Picard justified or warped through rose-tinted recollection? Is he too tied to the past, or the only figure Starfleet could turn to to navigate a tumultuous future? Its third season opens in much the same way; it’s just that this time, it’s not just Picard dealing with the weight of legacy.
“The Next Generation” is pointedly named — knowing that, for the most part, you are likely here running down a clock before one of Patrick Stewart’s former colleagues shows up this season. The episode opens up this navigating of how people see each other through the lens of their history with Jean-Luc himself, but it’s a struggle that almost each and every character, old and new, is asked to deal with. Set just long enough after the events of season two’s absolutely pants-on-head bananas finale that Picard never has to actually address anything that happened in it, the episode opens with one of those new-old faces wrestling with this almost quite literally: Beverly Crusher, Gates McFadden in the flesh, hunted by mysterious pursuers as she defends her ship — and a similarly mysterious passenger — from a hostile boarding action. From her being awoken to the sound of an old voice log from Picard, to her desperation when wounded by her assailants to reach out in spite of years of obvious hurt between both her and Picard and her and Starfleet, it’s clear that something bad has caught up with Beverly, and she’s very close to paying the ultimate price for it.
As this setpiece lays down the hook to bring Picard back into contact with Crusher — apparently for the first time in the decades since the TNG movies, with Beverly leaving Starfleet altogether and cutting all ties in the preceding years — the premiere sets the ground work for this season’s big new threat through this lens of pasts catching up to people. We don’t know much just yet about what Beverly has done to earn this ire, nor do we know what happened between her and her former colleagues on the Enterprise to warrant her exile. But from the get-go, Picard makes it earnestly clear that this final season’s exploration of Star Trek history wants to go beyond the nostalgic thrill of seeing all these TNG stars together again, although there’s plenty of that even if the only TNG stars we get to see this episode are Picard, Riker, and Crusher. Time and time again, it asks us to consider our view of these characters and their histories, and the characters in their orbit, and question if they’re of value beyond mythmaking.
We see this as Picard and a re-recruited Riker — eager, apparently, to spend some time away from his Imzadi — flaunt their status as Starfleet legends to bully their way onto Riker’s old command, the U.S.S. Titan, to gain a ship they can use to rendezvous with Beverly, believing they can lean on the bluster of their legacy to run off on an adventure again. We see it on the Titan when they encounter its first officer, a now-commissioned Seven of Nine, or as she is begrudgingly forced to identify herself as, Commander Annika Hansen, a fact that irks her as much as the rude welcome Riker and Picard face from her commanding officer, Captain Liam Shaw (Todd Stashwick, relishing being a brazenly assholish boss with a shit-eating grin that makes Shaw almost as charming as he is annoying). That welcome, puncturing right through Riker and Picard’s casual persona as old heroes to let them know that the Titan is his ship, not theirs, is perhaps the most “The Next Generation” feels more akin to Picard’s first season than anything else in this episode. It’s a blunt, yet pointed reminder that both Jean-Luc and Picard itself often trade in on his own hype too much. But it’s hard to say just what Picard wants to do with that kind of argument around its hero, as not only does it immediately place Shaw in the position of the episode’s antagonist for much of its runtime — it also just lets Picard and Riker trade in on that hype anyway, when Seven agrees to defy Shaw’s orders and get them where they need to go to help Beverly.
It’s not just the old Trek faces this episode dealing with the baggage of their past though. We also catch up with Raffi as she seemingly goes through a rough patch herself — already broken up with Seven after their brief relationship last season, at first, we’re lead to believe that she has fallen back into old habits, trawling the seedy underbelly of the planet M’Talas Prime in search of drugs and information. But it turns out even if this is a feint — Raffi quickly drops her substance abuser mask to reveal she’s working with a mystery handler in Starfleet Intelligence — there’s still parts of her past haunting her. Her cover story brings her in conflict with her ex-husband again, and her estranged son denying Raffi access to her granddaughter. Even within Starfleet, she’s kept at a distance and somewhat untrusted, as her nebulous handler prevents her from following her own leads — even, as we learn, that doing so leads to a devastating terrorist attack on a Starfleet recruitment facility, where a stolen experimental portal weapon opens the building up, and on top, of itself.
But even as this weaves itself into the mystery Riker and Picard begin to uncover when they board Beverly’s adrift vessel, the premiere ends with another reminder that the real ties binding our disparate new and old heroes is this shadow of the past. With Beverly in a failing medical pod to try and heal the injuries sustained in the opening assault, Picard and Riker find themselves cornered by a massive, hostile ship — a four-pronged alien vessel called the Shrike, that we know is home to the season’s villain of the piece, Vadic, played by Amanda Plummer. It’s a ship that’s been chasing Beverly down for a while now, as she hops from planet to planet, finding her foes just behind her, always wearing new faces (a threat that will set any old school Star Trek fan’s alarm bells ringing). Whatever Vadic wants, it’s something that’s pushed Beverly away from everything in her past, from Picard and her former friends aboard the Enterprise, to Starfleet itself.
Except we don’t learn any of this from Beverly, of course. She’s unconscious in stasis, and on death’s door. We learn this from her irascible mystery passenger (played by Ed Speleers), locked away for his own safety in the opening action scene and now with Picard and Riker at gunpoint. But he’s a mystery no longer: he’s Beverly Crusher’s son, a secret kept from all her friends as much as just why Vadic wants the both of them. This is the ultimate twist of what “The Next Generation” wants to say about the sins of its character’s pasts, a reveal that asks us to look at our familiar TNG heroes through the eyes of a literal next generation. What better way to examine the legacy of these old heroes than a man born of that legacy? One whose ties could be bound to more than just Beverly herself?
Even as the Shrike emerges into view to end the episode, the real question on our minds isn’t just what Vadic is up to, or the mystery Raffi and her handler are chasing. It’s this: what if Picard’s examinations of the sins of the past are actually about the sins of the father instead?