Star Trek: Picard - 7 Ups & 5 Downs From Season 1

3. Not Following Through

There have been few lines in Star Trek that sounded quite as exciting as "If your gradient badge starts to blink green… run". Here we are on a mysteriously "deactivated" Borg Cube that, we're told, just randomly shut down one day but still has thousands of drones on board in stasis, and where things could potentially go so catastrophically wrong that everyone needs to walk around wearing an early warning sign.

But the badge never flashed green.

The show routinely tells us that Narek's true feelings are going to put him directly between his sister and Soji, and the latter two never even meet. This Romulan conspiracy to attack Mars feels like it underpins the entire narrative, but nobody besides Raffi seems all that bothered when it's finally proved. There's even a glaring "This facility has gone 5843 days without an assimilation" sign in a show where, somehow, nobody gets assimilated.

While nobody wants a series littered with obvious plot points, routinely teasing big moments and then not making good on them was a real problem with Picard's first season. Hopefully, some of them can be readdressed in Season 2 but, in the here and now it made for frustrating viewing.