By golly, they stuck the landing. It wasn't flawless or groundbreaking or deep or anything crazy like that, but they saw this final adventure through to a satisfactory and satisfying conclusion. The result is certainly the best season of Star Trek in the Alex Kurtzman era, and one that honors the legacy of these characters and sends them off right.
This season of Star Trek: Picard might best be thought of as the final TNG movie that never happened after Nemesis tanked at the box office. It's structured like a movie and has the sensibilities and technical qualities of a movie visual effects, production design, music, sound design β and, yes, the mainstream dramatic concessions of a movie. It also has the length of several movies, which was perhaps the biggest problem with how the season was structured. Yes, in retrospect, we spent far more time than we needed being stalked by Vadic, given the amount of information that was contained in those episodes which is why I think a jaunt to the Founders, to get another perspective on Vadic's faction of shapeshifters, might've been a better way to fill some of this out with a little more current-day- Trek world-building that tied into the plot.
And the nonsense around the portal weapon, M'Talas Prime, and Picard's corpse and the attack used to "cover up" the theft in a way that did exactly the opposite were meaningless time-fillers. But overall, even with the protracted conspiracy plot that was merely the front for the familiar Big Bad in the Borg Queen, these episodes were mostly individually well-paced and entertaining, aside from " Dominion " and the first 20 minutes of " Surrender.
Now we close everything out with "The Last Generation," which is a conventional popcorn sci-fi action extravaganza that wraps up the plot effectively, more or less , and provides us with an extended, nearly minute-long coda that allows us to decompress and say goodbye.
It's the best of both worlds, if you'll forgive the expression. Is it everything it could've been? No, but it is enough. Plot-wise, what's maybe most interesting here is that the Borg threat arises from a weakened collective that's on its last legs, taking an improvised tack of evolution over assimilation, in part because they were so thoroughly devastated in Voyager 's " Endgame. This, she believes, she has in common with Jack.
