Star Trek Picard: How Season 2 makes fun of your own nostalgia!

• Q (John de Lancie) made a comment on people’s obsession with the past in episode 8 of “Star Trek: Picard” season 2.
• He claims that people are all trapped in the past. It’s sort of like a meta comment.
• If people weren’t totally nostalgic, a series like “Star Trek: Picard” wouldn’t work at all.

The eighth episode of “Star Trek: Picard” season 2 has a clever trick: Q (John de Lancie) gives Guinan (Ito Aghayere) a little tip that helps put FBI agent Wells (Jay Karnes) in a soft mood. “People are all trapped in the past” becomes the sentence of the episode!

Not only does it help Picard (Patrick Stewart) realize that Agent Wells is stuck in the past, the phrase is a direct comment on Star Trek: Picard as a series and fans of the Star Trek universe. If fans weren’t stuck in the past, it’s unlikely that a sequel to an ’80s series would have materialized.

Especially in “Star Trek: Picard” Season 2, the past is on two levels. Jean-Luc Picard must deal with his own childhood to save his future. To do this, he not only has to travel back in time mentally, but also in the literal sense.

On a meta level, Season 2 is also a journey through time. Q is brought back, a villain from bygone “Star Trek” days, and the time travel plot is also very reminiscent of “Star Trek IV: Back to the Present”. In addition, the mega nostalgia bomb has already been announced for “Star Trek: Picard” Season 3: All TNG stars are returning!

So Q’s statement is a biting meta-comment that, to a certain extent, severely criticizes its own series. While many fans may agree, other fans are enjoying the nostalgia of Star Trek: Picard.

Q even refutes his own criticism: “Being trapped is secondary. It’s the escape that counts.” And this is the crux of the matter! The nostalgia, the steps into the past, are a means to an end. You want to deepen the past in order to make the future more exciting.

The best examples of this are the appearances of Q and Whoopi Goldberg as Guinan in “Star Trek: Picard”. Goldberg returns in Episode 1. It’s a warm, nostalgic moment that could be dismissed as fan service. But a few episodes later we meet a young Guinan.

Young Guinan adds many things to the Guinan we know from Star Trek: The Next Generation. It’s not pure fan service, it’s a deepening of the role, new facets are introduced to us, and even more so, the relevance of the young Guinan legitimizes the performance of the older Guinan.

It’s very similar with Q. We already know Q, seen him many times in the 80’s series. But now he’s back and he’s more scathing, angry and unstable. More depth is given to his person and his entire species, because suddenly the actually immortal Q is waiting for the Grim Reaper.

It remains to be seen whether this approach of jumping into the past will satisfy all fans. But Q’s meta-comment is definitely a nice little detail, which is very exciting in the context of the series.

The new episodes of “Star Trek: Picard” are streamed on Amazon Prime Video every Friday. The second season consists of 10 episodes in total. You can find out how things will continue after “Picard” in our overview of the new “Star Trek” releases!