Star Trek: Picard reached its debut season finale this week, and it proved to be an enormously popular episode with the fans. For one, there wasn’t a dry eye in the house as Jean-Luc succumbed to his terminal illness – and was subsequently reborn as an android – and Data received a final farewell. There were some big punch-the-air moments as well, though, including the return of another classic The Next Generation character to Starfleet. None other than Jonathan Frakes’ Will Riker.
Riker and wife Deanna Troi first returned for episode 7, “Nepenthe,” when Picard and Soji visited their home on the eponymous planet. This outing saw the old friends discuss Riker’s retirement from active service, with Jean-Luc’s former Number One remarking that it would take something truly important to get him back in uniform. Well, that time finally came in the season finale, when Riker travelled to Coppelius to lead a squadron of Starfleet ships.
With the synth/Romulan war about to kick off, Picard bravely led a one-man stand against the whole of the latter’s armada of warbirds. He could only do so much, though, before things started looking dire. But, just in the nick of time, Starfleet arrived. And at the head of the fleet was the Curiosity-class USS Zheng He, a state-of-the-art vessel commanded by Captain Riker himself.
Riker and the might of Starfleet rattled Commodore Oh and the Romulans enough for Picard to find the time to convince Soji to destroy the beacon that contacts the powerful synths from another dimension who’ll wipe out all organic life in the galaxy. With the Romulans now having no back-up, Oh surrenders and the day is saved. Riker then tells Picard afterwards that he requested temporary reassignment when he heard Jean-Luc’s SOS.
Here’s hoping we have more of Riker in Star Trek: Picard season 2.