Star Trek: Picard couldn’t help but take the easy route out with its season finale

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The CBS All Access drama began the season questioning the hero worship of Jean-Luc Picard. "His optimism, his courage, his ceaseless appetite for exploration, the famed captain had come to embody all that we hold that is good and bright about Star Trek as an entity, not just a single character in a single show," says James Whitbrook. "But what makes Picard leaning back onto this familiar, nostalgic embrace of that mythos is that it had spent a not-insignificant part of its first season questioning if there was a downside to that kind of hero-worship, especially in a version of the galaxy beset by crisis and moral decline." Whitbrook adds: "Picard just couldn’t help but take the easy route out. It decided that anything our lead character had faltered on—especially his personal relationships—didn’t matter in the end. It decided that the Federation turning his back on him could be solved with a snap of its fingers, more than it could an actual reckoning of what even raising those questions in the first place meant for this galactic civilization. All that mattered was that the Jean-Luc we remember of all those years ago, the myth of him, was preserved at all costs, spiritually and literally...In the end, however, Picard decided Jean-Luc’s illusion should simply, suddenly be a reality instead." ALSO: Jonathan Frakes accidentally tweets LeVar Burton's Zoom meeting ID during Star Trek: The Next Generation's virtual birthday reunion for Marina Sirtis.