In Homer’s Odyssey, nepenthe is described as a potion or drug, given to Helen, to banish grief: quite literally anti-sorrow. In the Star Trek: Picard season one, episode 7, “Nepenthe,” refers to the planet on which Lt. Cmdr and Cmdr Troi live with their child, Kestra—a planet on which the soil has regenerative properties that could have kept their first child, Thad, alive.
For me, just seeing my old friends Riker and Troi on my screen again was enough to regenerate my own desire to see the whole dang cast of TNG brought back together again.
I find it has been impossible to watch Star Trek: Picard without thinking of the TNG series finale, “All Good Things,” and comparing the future Q set out for Jean-Luc then to how the canon is playing out in realtime. Having Picard, Seven of Nine, and Hugh back, by this point, was hardly answering many of the questions put forth by the finale (this is, of course, dispensing with the idea that Data could be a professor since we all watched him go up with the Scimitar in Nemesis).
Instead, they show up to this point and have focused on Picard’s interactions with his new crew on La Sirena, a crew fond of him, but nothing at all like a standard Starfleet crew—and certainly not one that is positively dedicated to him.
Of course, watching “Nepenthe” for the first time when it was released in early March 2020, and watching it today—between the second and third seasons of the series, in June 2022—makes for a different pang. Then, as now, tears leap to my eyes when Picard and Troi share a hug for the first time in years. Then, as now, I am transported to the late 90s when Riker orders his home to alert status.
Then, as of now, I am struck by Hugh’s exit from the franchise. (Side note: I consider Hugh’s death to be a fundamental misstep by the writers of Picard.) And crucially, I will always be crushed by Troi’s retelling of Thad’s sickness and death. But that pang upon leaving the planet for the last time has no lasting sting, knowing as I do now that almost all of the bridge crew of Picard’s Enterprise will be back for the third season.
On initially watching the episode, I’ll be honest, I was a tiny bit annoyed. The jump to visit the Troi family felt like an artificial way to generate sympathy for Soji, utilizing again the core mechanic at work in the show: nostalgia. Deanna’s conversation in the garden with Soji and after with Picard and Riker, about trust and the perception of reality, struggled to find purchase with me initially, as I instinctively rebelled against the show saying to me the same thing Troi was telling Soji: it’s okay to trust us.
Though, seeing how poorly Jean-Luc handled Soji in the immediate aftermath of that conversation did stir in me echoes of TNG’s season five, episode five “Disaster” and Picard’s similarly hamfisted way of handling the children in the turbolift. Sadly, we don’t get an updated rendition of Frère Jacques while climbing a ladder..
But like the entire first season of the show, this episode presents its own platter full of grief and acceptance and invites the watcher to take their fill of both. Though on its face, I think the entire series has been about Picard learning to let go of his own mythos and embracing a smaller role in the universe (you know, all good things must come to an end, and all), the underlying current of the first season trades on the nostalgia of wanting to know what comes next.
And that’s a bittersweet note in the episode that no longer exists (though the opening bars of the TNG theme still tug during the last seconds), because I know there’s a whole season in front of me that will tie up some of those threads that were pushed so far in canon, but without conclusion. The tragedy of Star Trek: Nemesis killing Prime Universe movies, essentially, no longer weighs heavy on our shoulders.
Though I will forever lament that it seems likely much of DS9 will never be given any updates (it seems), and only pieces of Voyager are being meted out via Prodigy, the characters of TNG occupy prime territory in my heart, as they were the ones really got me into Star Trek, to begin with, back in the 80s.
I’d seen the movies up to that point, and enjoyed them profusely, but Kirk and crew didn’t initially resonate with me the way Picard and his team always did. Had TNG ended with “All Good Things,” I don’t think I would be left with this feeling of unexplored potential as I am in a universe that left the crew timeline with Nemesis.
So “Nepenthe” was a balm for a sore heart at its release, giving the Trois a piece of canon closure that they didn’t get from Nemesis. They got their family, though coloured with tragedy; they got their peace. They weren’t simply shipped off aboard the U.S.S. Titan to carry on in exactly the same way as before.
That story doesn’t have to be told, because we’re given the other side of it. It helps to centre the expectations we should have going into the final season of Picard. While I have thoroughly enjoyed the stories presented in the first two seasons, for Jean-Luc himself to have a coda that does not include the bridge crew of the Enterprise is simply insufficient. “Nepenthe” has convinced me of this.
The episode doesn’t move the plot forward very much, but that’s not uncommon for its presentation style of Picard. Like many of the episodes in both seasons thus far, it doesn’t stand particularly well on its own. It doesn’t try to do much for Star Trek: Picard, but it doesn’t seem to intend to.
By twinning Jurati’s and Soji’s pain, the story can spend half as much time on it, resting instead on the soft pillow of nostalgia that seeing Troi and Riker on-screen again hands us. We can luxuriate in the easy camaraderie of Picard and Riker at the pizza oven, and reminisce at Kestra’s Data-lore infodump with Soji, mostly ignoring the reality that otherwise nothing much happens.
What the episode did not do, however, is offer any part of that to any other member of the TNG crew. Though the first season of Picard is suffused with giving a proper end to Data, and Wesley Crusher and Guinan are given a fresh coat of paint at the end of the second season, what of the rest?
Given how criminally underutilized Marina Sirtis and Gates McFadden were in the movies, they both should be given their own shows, but a season will do. When the credits rolled on my recent rewatch of “Nepenthe,” I did not feel sad that I had seen the last frames of some of my favourite characters in all of television, as I did on the first viewing.
I started formulating just what might be next for my favourite generation.
