Star Trek: 10 Episodes That Wasted An Incredible Premise

Some of us are, understandably, a bit Borg'd out by now. Seasons one to three of Star Trek: Picard all had the cybernetically-enhanced assimilators as a focus, often the primary. Collective fatigue or no, there is still one Borg (or Borg-adjacent) story from Picard that has been left dangling. It's la vie en rose for everybody else, but Jurati (and never forget Laris!) must have some regrets.

It's often difficult to choose just one episode with serialised television, so we've picked two which encapsulate the matter at hand and the season. The premise that began Picard's second outing in The Star Gazer was, to summarise heavily — 'galaxy-threatening anomaly,' Borg and Queen appear, then there are explosions… and Q!! By the season finale Farewell, Q had died (for a bit), the Borg Queen had been revealed to be a benevolent Jurati spin-off, and the anomaly had become a humungous transwarp conduit (but not the Borg kind). Its creation remained a mystery.

Aside from the odd oblique reference, such as Captain Shaw's "forget about that weird s**t on the Stargazer," these events have never been mentioned again. Of course, this could all be deliberate — there's still more Star Trek to come, after all — but, for now, it feels more like a waste of a great premise. As far as we know, Jurati and her Collective are still waiting "at the gates" for whoever or whatever superpower might come through.