In the final hour of Star Trek: Picard’s first season, the series did what it has done so well across 10 episodes. It brilliantly mixed nostalgia with a brave, creative new path for Star Trek, setting itself apart from every previous incarnation of the franchise, while grounding itself in everything that makes Star Trek so venerable.
 
For a series that prided itself on the journey of rediscovery taking place for so many damaged characters, “Et in Arcadia Ego, Part 2” is a tour de force. It’s a season finale that includes satisfying conclusions for more than half a dozen series’ standouts, all of whom are woven into this final hour of the narrative with the precision of a literary master – a literary master named Michael Chabon, who wrote the finale and earned a writing credit on an amazing eight overall episodes as the Picard series showrunner in Season 1.
 

Coming on the heels of what was likely the least well-received hour of Picard last week in “Part 1,” this episode manages to put most of the question marks from that set-up into the plasma exhaust and engage headfirst into an action-packed hour of resolutions and important commentary.

Ultimately, the series is about Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart), and we get so many stand-out moments here it is going to be hard to break them all down, but we are beginning with the end and the unexpected thrill of seeing one of Star Trek’s most beloved characters get a send-off unlike almost any in franchise history.

As we’ve said in a number of reviews, Star Trek: Picard is obviously not a sequel to The Next Generation. It’s different in tone, content and structure in immeasurable ways. But in so many ways, it also scratches that “sequel” itch. From the call backs to “All Good Things…” to the resurrection of an important one-off character in Bruce Maddox, the seeds of TNG’s stories and storytelling are a huge part of this series.

And now, in the finale of a show about Trek’s most popular captain, the uber-popular Lt. Commander Data (Brent Spiner) takes center stage for the final resolution of the series and gets an emotional and heartfelt sendoff that is predominantly celebratory — with a few dashes of somber — and serves as a powerful epilogue to Star Trek: Nemesis.

Data’s consciousness, which has been reconstructed from a single neuron secured by Maddox from B-4, has been placed inside a massively complex quantum simulation where the neural image of Picard’s brain substrates has also been placed following his death. As Data confirms to Picard that the man has died — more on that later — the two have an incredible conversation in which Picard tells him that he dreams about him all the time, and he was furious at the android for sacrificing his life for his.

Picard is happy for the chance to tell his friend that he regrets never having been able to communicate his love for him, to which Data responds as only he can by saying that knowing this “forms a small but statistically significant part of my memories. I hope that brings you some comfort.”

The conversation is an amazing full circle payoff from the series’ opening moments in which the old friends are seen reminiscing in the dreamscape’s Ten Forward lounge. Now, 10 episodes later, they are meeting for real inside a quantum reconstruction — the great holodeck in the sky — as Picard faces his mortality. It’s a special moment, made even more so when Data reveals that Picard will only be there temporarily, as his friends race to save his life.

Before he leaves though, Data asks Picard to help him end his life, so that “he can live, however briefly, knowing that life is finite.” Data knows that mortality is what gives things like peace, love and friendship meaning. A final shot of Data, clad in a stylish smoking jacket, sees him fade into stardust while being comforted by his friend as he is serenaded by a cover of “Blue Skies,” sung by Picard star Isa Briones.

Of course, to get to that amazing conclusion, we see the show’s other characters come full circle, as well. For Seven of Nine (Jeri Ryan), the beloved xB from the Delta Quadrant, she ends up squaring off face-to-face with the series’ big bad, Narissa (Peyton List), who apparently has been hiding out on the Artifact since the end of “Nepenthe.” For Seven, her choice comes down to killing somebody “just because it’s what they deserve, just because it feels wrong for them to still be alive.”

For the second time this season, she makes the choice to kill, taking out Narissa — as payback for Narissa’s murder of Hugh — much in the same way she killed Bjayzl in “Stardust City Rag.” It’s a decision she rues later while talking to Rios, who is also regretting his decision to once again having to watch a captain he dedicated himself to die.

Throughout the series, Cris Rios (Santiago Cabrera) has been full of surprises. He’s never gone the expected direction for a rogue captain that left Starfleet under murky circumstances, and at the end of “Et in Arcadia Ego” his regret seems to be tinged with an acceptance that committing yourself to a cause, and letting “another self-righteous old starship captain” into his heart, might not be such a bad thing.

Even Agnes Jurati’s (Alison Pill) redemption in this final hour is satisfying and complete, if not overly simplified. It’s incredibly cathartic to see her coming to rescue Picard from confinement and team up with him aboard La Sirena — despite the murder of Bruce Maddox. The competent professional from the season’s opening episode has returned, an indication of her true self finally set free of Commodore Oh’s mind meld-induced anxiety and instability.

Jurati steals the most unexpected thunderbolt of the finale as she and Picard work to get La Sirena off the ground, even telling the captain to “make it so” as he struggles to get the vessel into orbit. The moment is perfectly scripted by Chabon and directed by Akiva Goldsman, who captures her wonder perfectly.

And if that “make it so” moment wasn’t enough, moments later, she comes up with a brilliant tweak of the Picard Maneuver to help stall the Romulan attack. The site of hundreds of projections of La Sirena (not to mention dozens of Jurati’s smiling face) confusing the Romulans is another great callback.

While Raffi (Michelle Hurd) didn’t have a massively-large curve to travel on her re-discovery arc in this episode, it’s clear she has found her footing in fighting her addictive demons in support of her friend and mentor, “JL.” We also get a surprising connection at the end of the episode with Seven, as the two hold hands amorously as a potential set-up for Season 2. Is it earned? Debatable. Is it interesting? Absolutely!

For Elnor (Evan Evagora), the journey is simple and consistent: he’s fought for Picard, and he’s fought for the xBs —  of whom Seven has to remind him that just because someone “doesn’t belong anywhere,” it doesn’t mean they should be left to fend for themselves; an allegorical moment for the season if ever there was one. As the season winds to a close, Elnor is by Picard’s side, continuing to practice absolute candor throughout, especially when it comes to Narek.

Narek (Harry Treadaway) has earned a fragile truce with the La Sirena crew, but Elnor doesn’t believe he can be trusted, regardless of the fact he is helping the crew fight back against the synths — and that he didn’t kill Saga last week. (Turns out Sutra was just using him as a scapegoat to motivate her synth family to follow her.)

Narek’s cat-and-mouse dance of good vs. evil finally lands on the side of good when it is revealed that the turmoil driving him through the season was the knowledge that his family viewed him as a disgraced washout from the Zhat Vash, a nice bit of continuity tying back to Oh’s distrust of him in the beginning of the season.

It’s unclear where Narek ends up by the end of the episode; last we see of him, he’s being held by the synths during the La Sirena crew’s sabotage attempt. Unfortunately, his fate is just one of a number of notable pieces missing from the episode’s narrative construction — along with the fate of the xBs now marooned on Coppelius, how Picard managed to get the Federation to lift the ban on synthetics, and other bits of connective tissue that could have really enhanced the flow of the story.

The series packed a lot of story in to the short, 10-episode season, and the shortcuts required to get to the closing moments of the narrative were probably necessitated by the unplanned expansion of the season’s opening episodes from two to three — leaving the creative team with a much shorter runway by the end of the year. Hopefully, some of the production lessons learned from this first year will lend themselves to Season 2’s benefit.

But in the end, you have to make your own evaluations. You are either more worried about the ease at which Commodore Oh (Tamlyn Tomita) was allowed to escape the final confrontation — the head of Starfleet Security openly leading a Romulan attack fleet! — or you can put those concerns aside and marvel at seeing Captain Will Riker (Jonathan Frakes) back in uniform, leading a squadron of ships to save the day.

The opportunity to see Riker in command once more is one of pure joy, and Jonathan Frakes is clearly having fun in the part, gleefully chasing the Romulan fleet away from their intended target.

Before you think we’re ignoring something, yes, we noticed that every Starfleet ship seemed to be the same digital model — and an ADR’d line of Frakes dialogue explains away the repetition, saying Riker’s got “a fleet of them” — but since the visual effects work for the season only got completed last week according to VFX supervisor Ante Dekovic, we’ll chalk that up to a lack of available production time to allow for a wider range of ship variation.

Instead, our focus from this epic yet busy finale is on the wonderful closing arcs of all the characters discussed above, and, of course, for Soji and Picard.

In the end, it came down to the wisdom of Picard, knowing through his lifetime of experience that it was up to Soji (Isa Briones) to make the right decision. Knowing that regardless of how anyone felt about the impending doom, or the Federation’s role in succumbing to fear and shutting down the synths, it was really going to come down to Picard and the Federation being willing to give her the choice. Either be the destroyer — or not.

Early in the episode, as she chides him about being completely under their control, Picard pushes her to see that it’s her own “failure of imagination” that is holding Soji back from seeing that she absolutely controls this final decision.

Once he’s aboard La Sirena and preparing to face the Romulans, Picard shows how much he believes in the synths by telling Jurati that they are children who feared extermination in being raised by a couple of hermits, “and fear is an incompetent teacher.” He knows that the best way to teach children is by example, so he contacts Soji again and tells her dramatically that he is going to give up his life to help change her mind.

As Soji activates the beacon, and the battle heats up, Picard’s battle with Irumodic Syndrome deteriorates, so he instructs Jurati to stabilize him (at the detriment to his long-term prognosis) so he can have one more conversation with Soji, this time on an open channel for everyone to hear.

In a powerful summation of the entire season, he explains to her that it’s up to her to make the right choice. That’s the whole point of why he is there, and why he saved her life and tired to save Dahj. So that she could save all of their lives in return. He trusts her and believes in her, and she eventually decides to take matters into her own hands by shutting down the beacon and ending the threat of the great Romulan Ganmadan — the day of annihilation. As Kestra hoped, Picard and Soji had one another to guide and save each other.

With the threat neutralized, the Romulans remove themselves from the Ghulion system, and Riker and Picard exchange goodbyes. Sadly, for Riker he has no idea what is in store for his friend, but as Picard whispers a final “adieu,” the expression on Jurati’s face relays an understanding that they are never going to speak to each other again.

Picard immediately collapses and Jurati knows there is no way to save him. He dies surrounded by his new crew, who are seen in various stages of mourning… before it is revealed that Soong has assisted Jurati in transferring Picard’s neural image into the synthetic “golum” body we saw last week — giving the former Enterprise captain another chance to live.

The move does not come as a major surprise, but certainly opens up a lot of questions about the technology and what it could mean for the Federation moving forward — which many may compare to the now-infamous “Khan blood” controversy generated by Star Trek Into Darkness. Hopefully, that will be one of the issues that Star Trek: Picard will address next season — along with the fate of still-burning Mars, and perhaps more investigation into what caused the Romulan star to supernova in the first place — but we’ll have to wait and see.

For now, Picard is alive — without any android superpowers, of course — and free of both the artificial heart and brain defect that has overshadowed most of his life. With a hearty “engage” command, La Sirena‘s new crew sets off at warp speed, destination unknown.

• Jurati’s comment mentioning how Maddox thought Alton Soong’s “cyber kung-fu was the best” is a reference 1990s computer hacker Kevin Mitnick and the phrase he made popular through his criminal exploits — also occasionally referenced by The Lone Gunmen trio in The X-Files.
• A provision of the Treaty of Algeron is used to give Ghulion IV status as a Federation protectorate; the treaty is most-commonly used to explain why the Federation does not use cloaking devices, but its first mention came in “The Defector” around the rules regarding the now-dissolved Romulan Neutral Zone.
• Captain Riker’s starship is the USS Zheng He, named for the 15th century Chinese explorer who traveled throughout Asia and eastern Africa during his time.
• The bridge of the USS Zheng He is a redress of a portion of the USS Discovery bridge set (with distinctive glass-panel display screens removed), and its captain’s chair is a slightly-modified version of the Discovery command seat — continuing the longstanding tradition of reusing the standing Trek sets as needed.
• Seven and Raffi are playing a game of Vulcan kal-toh during their shared moment aboard La Sirena, a game we know Seven must be letting her win.

Exactly how well Star Trek: Picard stuck the landing in the “Et in Arcadia Ego” two-parter will likely depend on how much you care about some of the shortcuts the producers took to get there. Ultimately, though, the finale stands on its own, an intelligent conclusion to a season where many issues of the day were reflected in a story of personal re-discovery, refugee dehumanization and the politics of fear.

How are things going to change for Picard now that he has a synthetic body? What’s next for Seven of Nine? How did Data spend his time in cybernetic purgatory? Is Rios still getting paid? Will Elnor EVER get to meet a cat!?

Share your thoughts on the finale — and your predictions for Season 2 — in the comments below!

Star Trek: Picard is set to return in 2021 — and the franchise will be back at some point later this year, with the launch of Star Trek: Lower Decks and the third season Star Trek: Discovery, both currently in post-production.

Jim Moorhouse is the creator of TrekRanks.com and the TrekRanks Podcast. He can be found living and breathing Trek every day on Twitter at @EnterpriseExtra.