Star Trek: Picard Recap: Season Two Premiere – Q, Guinan, Borg Queen

Jean-Luc Picard is back in action Star Trek: Picard starts his second journey – and he is accompanied by some familiar faces.

Thursday’s season two premiere begins amid the action scene in which Jean-Luc and his friends face heavy fire aboard a spaceship bridge. The ship is about to collapse and Borg-like tentacles are firing phasers at the crew. Jean-Luc commands the computer to start the self-destruct sequence and a voice calls out his name as the countdown hits one. (Is that the Borg Queen?) Then we flash back two days earlier to Jean-Luc happily picking grapes in his tranquil French wine chateau. He and Laris toast another successful growing season and Zhaban’s keepsake, and she asks him why he chose to be alone all these years… while she leans in for a kiss. However, Jean-Luc retires.

We see memories from his childhood when his mother tried to get him excited about life on the vineyard. But little Jean-Luc only has one question for her and his papa: “Are you going to fight less here?” (Ouch.) She assures him that their problems seem tiny from space, and in the present, Jean-Luc holds one Inaugural address at Starfleet Academy, in which he points to Elron as the Academy’s first fully Romulan cadet and quotes his mother, “Look up, Jean-Luc, and let’s see what’s out there.” We also see Raffi, who is now Captain is in the crowd.

Meanwhile, Seven of Nine has taken command of Rios’ ship and is fending off a gang of thieves trying to plunder their medical supplies. (She gets help from Rios’ virtual assistant.) She’s a loner, just like Picard, but she’s stopped in her tracks when she sees a spooky space anomaly on screen: “What the hell is that?” We’re getting Dahj, too one toasting the lifting of the ban on synthetic products, and Jurati drunkly waving at a guy who hits her. Rios, who now steers Jean-Luc’s old ship, calls them “drunk”. stargazer. He also stumbled upon the space anomaly and needs Jurati’s help to figure out…well what the heck it is. They get a signal from this that Jurati notes has dozens of languages ​​layered on top of each other, all saying the same thing: “Help us, Picard.”

Speaking of Jean-Luc, he pops into a Los Angeles bar to check in with his favorite bartender: Hey, it’s Guinan! They have a warm reunion, but she senses something is wrong. They talk about his loneliness, and he thinks that particular ship has sailed, but she tells him it’s not too late: “The problem isn’t time. It’s you.” She senses something holding him back. (Is it his childhood trauma?) He soon has bigger fish to cook: a Starfleet admiral plays him the message of the anomaly, which was accompanied by a petition to join the Federation “An unknown being that can open and close a hole in space-time,” wants to join the Federation, she says, and wants Jean-Luc’s help.

As he steps aboard, a powerful wave of nostalgia sweeps through him stargazer, the feeling that “my life has closed”. On the bridge, he calls out to the anomaly, and she responds by hissing his name and messing up her systems. An impressive ship appears on the screen…yes, it’s the Borg. Starfleet sends a number of ships as reinforcements, with Raffi in command wood wool. Jean-Luc wonders if the Borg’s petition to join the Federation is genuine, but Seven doesn’t trust them, fearing it could mean “the beginning of the end of the Federation”. The Borg plan to send an emissary, and though Rios refuses, a transport approaches with the Borg Queen aboard. Rios raises shields and warns them to stop, and soon the Borg ship is firing on them stargazer, while the Queen transports straight onto the bridge in a black cloak and full-face mask. “We want peace,” she says, but first they need “power.” Her tentacles shoot out and dig into the controls, and we’re back to square one, with the ship in dire distress and Jean-Luc ordering a self-destruct. As a happy French song plays, the countdown hits zero and the ship explodes. Is this mission over before it even begins?

Well, maybe not: Jean-Luc wakes up again in his castle, staggering to his feet and gazing at a strange portrait of himself on the wall. He calls out for Laris, but is instead greeted by a helpful android named Harvey, whom he doesn’t know. He wonders aloud what’s going on. “An excellent question, Jean-Luc,” replies a familiar voice – it’s Jean-Luc’s old nemesis, Q! The trickster god appears in his junior TNG Form at first, but seeing how Picard has aged snaps his fingers to “catch up,” giving himself gray hair and a goatee. He reminds a bewildered Jean-Luc that he once told him “the process never ends,” adding that they were “at the end of the road they didn’t take.”

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