8 Reasons Reading 'The Last Best Hope' Is Essential To Understand Star Trek Picard
1. Raffi Musiker
More than potentially any other character in Star Trek Picard so far, Raffi Musiker benefits the most from The Last Best Hope. The woman has suffered tremendous loss as part of her role in the relief effort and the betrayal that she feels by Picard is actually understandable when her backstory is examined.
She and her husband Jae had been experiencing marital issues before the mission got underway but were doing what they could for the sake of their son, Gabriel, then only a child. However, as the mission began to drag on for months and then years, she grew farther and farther apart from them, eventually to the point where Jae tells her not to bother coming home. Her family has moved on.
Deeply hurt by this, Raffi then throws everything she has into aiding Picard in his battle to save the Romulans. She had initially predicted it may not come to fruition but her time with him on the USS Verity changes this and she begins to feel hope again. This hope is crushed in the aftermath of the attack on Mars but she immediately gets to work on a contingency plan, putting together ship and personnel inventories that could, in theory, replace that which was lost. However, Picard's rather abrupt resignation from Starfleet leads to her own dismissal.
This is devastating to her already fragile sense of self. She has lost a family to a mission that then died in its cradle. Unable to find a path, she descends into alcoholism and eventual substance abuse. Her road to recovery is shaky because her fall was far.