Star Trek Picard: Ranking All 10 Episodes From Season 1
2. "Remembrance"
It's difficult to separate the promise of "Remembrance", the very first episode of Star Trek: Picard, from what season one ultimately provided.
On one hand, "Remembrance" (and its two sister episodes "Maps and Legends" and "The End is the Beginning") is an outlier, an earthbound show with smaller stakes and Picard, Laris, and Zhaban at its core. Later episodes launched Picard into space, leaving behind Château Picard and (unforgivably) the two Romulans who kept it running, pursuing a larger story of galactic peril. But the roots of the character study and exploration of Jean-Luc Picard are there from the beginning, even if they sometimes got lost amid the giant ship-killing flowers that fly and robotic octopus arms from across the galaxy.
Taken in isolation, "Remembrance" is one of the franchise's very best pilot episodes and very different from anything that came before. "Remembrance" is a quieter, more contemplative, ground-level glimpse at the Star Trek Universe, exploring life on Earth, life outside Starfleet, and life inside the mind of Jean-Luc Picard 20 years after all those heroic adventures we grew up watching.
Star Trek: Picard may have fallen into the trap of telling stories that could easily be told (and basically were told) on Star Trek: Discovery, but "Remembrance" is a wholly unique entry in franchise. The Château may be in the rearview mirror, but the quiet contemplation it represents are the core of Star Trek: Picard and they're worth continuing to explore in season two.