Star Trek Picard: Ranking All 10 Episodes From Season 1
You will not see many more shows LIKE THIS.
Now that Star Trek: Picard's first season is behind us and we're patiently awaiting Star Trek: Discovery season three (to say nothing of Star Trek: Picard season two), it's a good time to ruminate on Trek's newest incarnation.
Recently described by Variety as "divisive", Star Trek: Picard was at the very least ambitious in trying to push the franchise into telling stories that broke from the old Starfleet ship, Starfleet crew, Starfleet stories mold.
Much like Star Trek: Discovery, Star Trek: Picard is a continuous story, more like a ten-hour movie than a ten-episode season of regular television – few if any of these episodes can be watched without seeing the episode before or after. Nevertheless, here's a ranking of the show's ten episodes, leading up to the one episode you have to watch, if (improbably) you only see one episode of Star Trek: Picard season one.
10. "Et In Arcadia Ego, Part 1"
Is "Et In Arcadia Ego, Part 1" bad Star Trek? Not really, but it's a letdown.
After seven episodes tantalizing the audience with just what could be going on with the synths and what secrets their homeworld could be hiding, Picard and the La Sirena crew make it to Coppelius and... it's a bunch of absy, surrong-clad, gold influencer types hanging out playing chess and weird musical instruments. There's no indication these people have a society so much as a commune and individual androids like Saga are played so innocent, they come off as idiots.
The big surprise of the episode is that Bruce Maddox wasn't the only human living among the synths, Brent Spiner as Altan Inigo Soong is here too. Soong describes himself as Data if he'd grown old and gone soft and the idea of a Soong-type android (Lore, anybody?) having grown older and grown to be mostly human is instantly more interesting than yet another shady relative of Noonian Soong showing up.
And then there's Sutra, Soji's golden counterpart on Coppelius, who slinks her way into the episode, chews the scenery, and pushes the synths (and Soji herself) to genocide at the drop of a hat with the thinnest of motivations.
"Et In Arcadia Ego, Part 1" contains one of the best moments in Star Trek: Picard, when the fully powered Borg Artifact comes barreling through transwarp into the middle of the dogfight between the La Sirena and Narek's Snakehead scout ship. But this occurs in the very first act of the episode and, as the giant synth space orchids come and pull the Borg cube into Coppelius' atmosphere, it's all downhill from there.