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‘Star Trek: Picard’ launches with a promising premiere
Picard plays like a just-right balance between fan service and staking out new territory. Opening with a dream sequence on Ten-Forward of the Enterprise-D, Picard plays poker with Data. After some familiar chit-chat, Data observes Picard is stalling, who responds by saying he is doing so because "I don’t want the game to end."
The details of the sequence are interesting because they use the familiar visual cues of TNG (Ten-Forward, a game of poker), but twist them with a certain dream logic (Data is anachronistically wearing the Enterprise-E-era uniform he died in, and Ten-Forward, where poker was never played, is lit in a way that makes it feel askew).
At the core of the episode is Picard being haunted by the dreams and memories of his fallen comrade. When I learned of Brent Spiner’s involvement in this series several months back, I feared some sort of retcon that would resurrect him, perhaps through the B-4 escape hatch the writers built into Star Trek: Nemesis. But "Remembrance" does not cheat — and indeed leans heavily into the fact that, yes, Data very much died at the end of Nemesis, which took a very real emotional toll on Picard and now results in strange, mysterious dreams that have Meaningful Reasons.
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