10 Crazy Star Trek: Picard Season 3 Theories

10. I Fought The Lore

Hologram Professor James Moriarty achieved sentience basically because, in The Next Generation season two episode Elementary, Dear Data, Doctor Pulaski accused Data (Geordi's "artificial friend") of being nothing more than a walking, talking Sir Arthur Conan Doyle encyclopaedia with no imagination or "soul" of his own. Having none of it, La Forge instructed the holodeck computer to,

[I]n the Holmesian style, create a mystery to confound Data with an opponent who has the ability to defeat him. […] Create an adversary capable of defeating Data.

Cue massive power surge that should have been a hint, and a legend is born. The second and last time we saw Moriarty in The Next Generation, he had been condemned to live out his days in a tiny memory cube on Reg Barclay's desk, never knowing of his true fate, after some clever holographic switcheroo on the part of Picard, Data, and Barclay.

It was quite a shock then when Moriarty popped up in the first trailer for Star Trek: Picard season three. Had he escaped his optronic data core ship in a bottle or was he still inside it? Why was he back? How was he back?

In the third trailer for Picard, we see Riker and Worf visiting what, as the wonderful Seán Ferrick pointed out in our breakdown video, has echoes of stellar cartography from Star Trek: Generations, but may well in fact be some sort of holographic data storage centre. This is only moments before Moriarty appears, baring teeth and having a dig at Worf.

Has he been pulled back into the land of the living to fight a certain evil android brother we also know is making an appearance? If Moriarty was supposed to solve a problem like Data, surely he can solve one like Lore? The game's afoot!

…and the Lore won?