Star Trek: Picard’s Dr. Jurati did the impossible and that deserves to be remembered.

Dr. Jurati’s fate as the new Borg Queen is one Star Trek: Picard season 2 arc that absolutely should’ve been continued in season 3

Of all the fevered speculation regarding how Star Trek: Picard season 3  would end, one thing that didn’t happen, that I was sure we’d see, was the return of Dr. Jurati’s benevolent Borg Queen from season 2.

In brief, for those who don’t remember, in season 2, Dr. Jurati allowed herself to be partially assimilated, to gain access to the Borg Queen’s mind. When the Borg Queen is killed, she lives on in Jurati’s mind, fighting for control, until Jurati agrees to a sort of a merger.

That all happened during a time travel jaunt to the 21st century, so when our heroes returned to the 25th century, the Jurati Borg Queen was now a benevolent entity, who had come to warn Picard of a new transwarp corridor (a sort of artificial wormhole that the Borg use), and offered to monitor it, as a provisional member of the Federation.

Perhaps you needed that refresher because you’re actively trying to forget season 2. To say there are mixed feelings about it would be an understatement.

Personally, I loved every minute of season 2, but I get what the detractors are saying, and I agree with some of it too. I loved the zany madcap dumb fun energy, but zany madcap and dumb fun is the very opposite of what Star Trek should be. On top of that, plot points like the death of Q, or the Borg turning into good guys were so contradictory to the lore we know and love, they were jarring. So it would be understandable if season 3 wanted us to forget about season 2.

And sure enough, there were very few references to season 2 in season 3. On top of that, they undid Q’s death in that after-credits scene.

So perhaps they were just trying to make us forget about season 2.

That would be a shame because Agnes Jurati’s arc was the highlight of season 2.

Her arc was also Trek to the core. Making peace with the Borg is the ultimate challenge posed 35 years ago when the Borg was first introduced. Unlike other villains turned allies, like the Klingons and the Ferengi, the Borg are not rational moral actors who could be negotiated with, that’s what made them so scary.

The Federation’s commitment to peace and diplomacy was meaningless in the face of the Borg. The challenge was implicit when Q flung the Enterprise into the Delta Quadrant, first bringing its crew into contact with the Borg. During that first encounter, when Captain Picard pleaded with a Borg Drone “we mean you no harm”, Q admonished him “You’re nothing to him”. Q’s warning was that there were entities in the galaxy that the Federation, with its commitment to peaceful coexistence, diplomacy, and cooperation, was not ready to face.

Q later summed it up, saying “If you can’t take a little bloody nose, maybe you ought to go back home and crawl under your bed. It’s not safe out here. It’s wondrous, with treasures to satiate desires both subtle and gross. But it’s not for the timid.” Humanity may be able to take on anything the galaxy throws at us, but not with the Federation’s naive ideals of peace and coexistence as its guiding philosophy.

And yet Jurati stepped up to that challenge, making peace with the Borg, and she did it using those vaunted Federation ideals. Her destiny was foreshadowed when she showed sympathy toward the Borg. Early in season 2, when she suggested that the Borg, weakened by the events of the Voyager finale, could be a powerful ally. Her suggestion was dismissed as the hopelessly naive pipedream of someone who relates more to synthetic lifeforms than to real people. But the optimism of the hopelessly naive, and the ability to relate to the unknown are both essential to Star Trek’s utopian vision.

Regarding the Picard season 3 finale, I have no notes. Season 3 achieved the rare feat of being ten perfect hours of television. A lot has already been said about how it served as the perfect denouement to Star Trek: The Next Generation. But Season 2, flawed as it was, had already wrapped up TNG’s most difficult arc.