In the end, Star Trek: Picard’s journey this season was really about not being alone; it was about opening yourself up to the vulnerabilities of love by accepting and seeking out the strength in others — while also acknowledging the personal trauma and pain that make us who we are.

“Farewell” was a touching and poignant conclusion that expertly wrapped up a half-dozen storylines, while also setting up the much anticipated third and final season of the series.

The major loose threads covered in this satisfying conclusion include Jean-Luc Picard’s essential healing, Renée Picard’s successful Europa Mission (thanks to the ultimate sacrifice from Tallinn), and the official introduction of the new 25th century Borg… as well as two major, deep-cut character reveals that only a cynic would label as fan service.

Beyond those major narrative themes, each character’s season-long arc is wrapped up neatly, from famed 21st century medical activist Cristóbal Rios (Santiago Cabrera) to the surprise return of Cadet Elnor (Evan Evagora) on the Excelsior – with all the Seven (Jeri Ryan) and Raffi (Michelle Hurd) love-sandwiched in between. Every character had a fitting swan song.

But, of course, the anchor to this season — and this episode — has been the return of Q (John de Lancie), who was up to his old tricks again in launching Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart) into this this season-long journey of self-discovery, all while battling his own mysterious trauma. The scenes between Picard and Q in “Farewell” are among the best of the series, echoing back to their last finale in “All Good Things.”

The episode opens with Queen Agnes’ prophecy about two Renée’s — “One who lives, and another who dies” — at the top of the gang’s mind, as they plot their next steps in preventing Adam Soong (Brent Spiner) from stopping Renée Picard’s (Penelope Mitchell) spaceflight. Seven, Raffi and Rios head to Soong’s evil lair where they solve some high stakes technobabble to take down a few drones that Soong has programmed to target the Shango should he fail in stopping Renée’s launch on the ground.

Meanwhile, Picard is with Tallinn (Orla Brady), who he has realized is going to sacrifice her life by impersonating Renée to distract Soong. Her plan works to perfection, much to the chagrin of Picard, who Tallinn has helped directly understand that “other people’s lives aren’t up to you, and their deaths aren’t your fault. You can’t control who we lose, and we can’t spare ourselves the pain of it.”

Tallinn’s death — masquerading as Renée to divert Soong’s attack — is handled beautifully in not only the emotional way in which she connects with Renée for the first time and is able to share her respect, love, and admiration for the young explorer — but also in her dying breath in the shadow of the launch when she tells Picard to absolve himself, “or the only life left unsaved will be your own.”

Lesson learned for Picard, but not so much for Soong, who spends most of the episode twirling his black mustache while melodramatically peacocking around the launch site. But not to fear. However heavy-handed those scenes come across in the episode, the final shot of Soong trashing his lab before pulling out a top-secret file referencing Khan was a great payoff — another example of the fun that was injected into this engaging season of Trek.

As part of the destruction of Soong’s lab, his daughter-slash-experiment, Kore (Isa Briones), exacts the ultimate revenge by hacking into his system and deleting his research. The move catches the attention of someone very special, who apparently already has business on Earth seeing that supervisor Tallinn has just passed on.

In one of the biggest surprises in Star Trek history, a Traveler of all space and time — formerly known as Wesley Crusher (Wil Wheaton) — drops in to pluck Kore from downtown Los Angeles, recruiting her to join the Traveler cadre. The reveal showing Wesley living his best life as a Traveler works on every level.

In-universe, it’s an out-of-the-blue callback that fits perfectly with Kore’s arc (a child who broke free from what she was ‘designed’ for, like how Wesley broke from his expected Starfleet destiny) — but like the other casting surprises which the Star Trek: Picard team has managed to keep under wraps until just the right moment (Seven, Hugh, and Riker/Troi last season), it’s a major accomplishment to have pulled off.

Throughout all of the around-the-edges production beats — the announced return of the Next Generation cast for Season 3, Wheaton’s three years hosting The Ready Room, and his own fan-fiction about what Wesley might be up to these days — it was all just perfect.

A surprise that no one saw coming, one that fits the narrative, and in the end makes you feel great about the way Star Trek’s never ending connective story threads continue to circle back on each other… all of which leads us to the backbone of this season: Q and Picard.

With the crew back together in the chateau, resigned to their fate living in the 21st century, Picard wanders his childhood home to replace the skeleton key hidden in the wall for him to find again as a child in the future. The key played a critical role in his mother’s suicide, and as he did in “Tapestry” 30 years prior, Picard knows that this particular thread is a part of who he is and can’t be unraveled.

As Q signals the end of his latest tribulation for Picard, the two sit down for a moving meditation on their relationship and bond through 35 years. The spectacular scenes open with a tired and pensive Q immediately letting his guard down, coming clean to Picard. Where he once facetiously said “in all the universe, you’re the closest thing I have to a friend” to the Enterprise captain in “Deja Q,” on the verge of his own mortality Q reveals to Picard that those words were truer than anyone ever realized.

He tells him, “I am moving on. I am dying alone,” and then lovingly emphasizes, “I don’t want that for you!” But, as we know, Picard has ultimately been alone his entire life, and now, having freshly fought through his trauma, to see it in a different light, he has finally chosen himself. As Q says, “You have absolved yourself,” and that decision now gives him a chance to be loved.

Not one to completely believe everything he is hearing from his longtime nemesis, Picard’s heartfelt questions — “Why?,” and then “Why me?,” and then finally, “Why does all this matter?” — hit an emotional crescendo when the omnipotent rapscallion answers with, “It matters to me. You matter to me. Even gods have favorites.” Cue the waterworks.

From there, Q decrees that he is sending the entire crew home as his final, dying act, but before he does — as many fans have been expecting —  Cris Rios steps forward to say he is staying. He knows “he never fit” and “nothing stuck” for him in his life in the 24th century, so now it is his turn to get stuck in the past, where he will remain with Teresa (Sol Rodriguez) and her son.

For one last time, the quintessential Star Trek foil declares, “Farewell, mon capitaine. It’s time for me to go,” to which Picard steps forward to hug him and say, “But not alone. Isn’t that the point of all this?” With a smile and a snap heard around the quadrant, Q whispers a familiar refrain into Picard’s ear, “See you out there.”

It’s a beautiful scene; an expert companion to the emotional swansong that was “All Good Things,” and a fitting end for a character that has permeated the franchise for the better part of four decades. In context now with the whole season, the return of Q was a stroke of brilliance — the only character that could truly push Picard inward on his journey of self-discovery, one which gave us a deeper understanding of one of television’s most compelling characters.

The end of Q, though, is not the end of the episode, as the snap of his fingers sends Picard and Seven back to the bridge of the Stargazer, where Rios is no longer present — and another fan expectation comes true as the “different” Borg Queen seen in the season’s premiere drops her mask, revealing a fully-assimilated Agnes Jurati (Alison Pill) underneath.

That French melody which blasted confusingly across the Stargazer’s bridge ten episodes ago (Edith Piaf’s “Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien”) now falls into context, as Picard now understands it to be message of friendship from the new Queen — immediately triggering him to cancel the self-destruct sequence to stop the explosion seen in “The Star Gazer.”

Jurati’s request for help is one Picard honors, seeing his friend still inside the new Queen even after 400 years out in space… and he gives Seven command of the Stargazer, the best expert on hand to begin negotiations with the Borg.

As for Agnes, she has brought her Borg cooperative through space and time to protect the quadrant from a massive galactic event because “she needed a friend” to let her harmonize the fleet’s shields with their own.

Picard allows Agnes to take control of the assembled Starfleet taskforce we saw so many episodes ago — and the ensuing sequence on screen is a visual effects extravaganza, with Jason Zimmerman and his VFX crew going full tilt in rendering a glorious smorgas-Borg of ships and shields and spatial anomalies.

It all ends with the formation of a mysterious transwarp conduit created by an unknown threat with unknown intentions (Season 3 set-up, anyone?). With the newly formed anomaly requiring close observation, Jurati and her Borg request provisional membership in the Federation — sorry, but how cool is that! — and they volunteer to stay in position as “guardian of the gate.”

With the action complete, there is time for one final outing as the remaining La Sirena crew head to Guinan’s (Whoopie Goldberg) in Los Angeles to tie up a few loose ends, including details on Rios and Teresa’s life together, and the revelation that Renée Picard’s space mission lead to planet Earth’s restored climate. With drinks in hand, the gang salutes their present and departed found family as the opening chords from Star Trek: First Contact’s theme swell as part of Jeff Russo’s moving score.

To close it all out, Picard returns to his home to find Laris (Orla Brady) preparing to leave on her own adventures. In putting his new-found perspective to use right away, Picard cuts straight to the chase — while standing in the refurbished solarium — and asks Laris for a second chance to connect.

“While time cannot give us second chance,” he says, “maybe people can,” and with a smile and a nod, the Romulan agrees to his offer.

OBSERVATION LOUNGE

• Wil Wheaton. Good for him. This is Wesley’s first real appearance since his departure from mortal life in 1994’s “Journey’s End,” aside from his silent appearance at the edges of Star Trek: Nemesis — all that’s leftover from his deleted scene, a cut about which Wheaton wrote so eloquently back in 2002.
   
• Wesley reveals that the Travelers oversee and assign the Supervisors to critical points throughout history, connecting once more the story of “Assignment: Earth” to the modern Star Trek era.
   
• After a season of watching Seven and Raffi slowly rebuild their relationship, their kiss after resigning themselves to a life in the 21st century is a solid indicator that the work is paying off.

• Elnor returns to life thanks to a last-minute change of plans; leftover from Rios’ decision to stay in the past, Q’s “surplus energy” allows the young Romulan to be resurrected aboard the Excelsior.
   
• Rios and Teresa spend their years together helping the helpless through their “Mariposas” organization, revealing the entire season to be a predestination paradox and explaining why we saw Mariposa medical supplies aboard La Sirena in the season premiere.
   
• It also turns out that Teresa’s son, Ricardo, eventually used the Io organism found by Renée Picard to clean the Earth’s oceans and air — so there was no need for Adam Soong’s atmospheric technology to come into widespread use.
   
• Though Agnes Jurati and her Borg will be guarding that galactic gate, they’ll be doing it off-camera — as actor Alison Pill has confirmed that she was not part of Star Trek: Picard’s third season.

The final moments with Picard and Laris are the perfect beat and resolution to conclude the most unique (and perhaps divisive) season of Star Trek we have ever seen — the first to feature a single, heavily-contained adventure with the vast majority of the narrative (seven straight episodes!) taking place on a modern-day Earth.

The time-travel epic featured robust storylines for Q, Guinan and the Borg, and in the end was an incredible season of satisfying self-discovery for more than a dozen characters.

Bring on Season 3.

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.

Star Trek: Picard is currently in post-production on its third and final season — likely to air in 2023 — on Paramount+ the United States, and on CTV Sci Fi Channel and Crave in Canada. Outside of North America, the series is available on Amazon’s Prime Video service in most international locations