The WiC rankings: Every single Star Trek show ranked worst to best

6. Star Trek: Picard, 2020 – 2023

In a perverse way, Star Trek: Picard benefitted from having to film during a global pandemic with a star in his ’80s. Picard had that same old identity crisis that befell Enterprise and Discovery, but because it would’ve been impractical to make more than three seasons, there was no need for the show to find a coherent identity to stick to. Ironically, Picard was like an adolescent trying on different identities; a goth phase one week, a punk phase the next, and so on until it was over.

So Picard was three different shows in its three different seasons. It was the first Star Trek show to focus on a single character; the first season was basically a 10-episode character study of Jean-Luc Picard. I can’t fault the premise, but it was frustratingly slow and they didn’t quite stick the landing. The end was a little anticlimactic.

Season 2 was the absolute opposite in every way. It was too fast-paced to think about character development, or anything at all. Whether you enjoy season 2 of Picard depends on how willing you are to just not think too hard about it. Personally, I loved every minute, but I get the criticisms; it was dumb, and towards the end suffered from speed wobbles. I just get a kick out of the fact that the Borg Queen came up with a plan to assimilate 21st-century Earth and it involved gatecrashing a swanky fundraiser with karaoke Pat Benatar songs and then eating car batteries.

Season 3 was about as perfect as a season of TV will ever be. It reunited Picard with his Star Trek: The Next Generation crew, giving them the farewell fans have wanted since the flop of 2002’s Star Trek: Nemesis. It had everything, and it even fixed some of the mistakes of the past. Dr. Crusher got to fire a phaser rifle and Troi got to helm the ship without crashing it. We also saw Worf give more of his famous awkward dating advice, make chamomile tea, slaughter a bunch of gangsters like a humanoid Cuisinart, inadvertently insult Picard’s wine, and fall asleep in front of the TV (…I mean, viewscreen.)

The chemistry between Picard and Crusher’s son Jack and Geordi’s daughter Sidney was off the charts! They now serve on the Enterprise-G under Captain Seven of Nine, which obviously needs to be a spinoff. Fans have dubbed that hypothetical spinoff Star Trek: Legacy, despite the fact that it hasn’t even been greenlit.