Star Trek: Picard Season 3 Features A Small Tribute To A Forgotten Starfleet Captain

This post contains spoilers for the third season premiere of "Star Trek: Picard."

The new season of "Star Trek: Picard" begins with a dramatic event. When the show catches up with returning "Picard" character Raffi (Michelle Hurd), she has been given a special Starfleet assignment to infiltrate the criminal underworld and track down shady weapons dealers who have been stealing from the Federation. A former addict, Raffi has connections with drug dealers and knows how to traverse Trek's criminal fringe. "Picard" introduces a new wrinkle into Trek canon as well. It seems the Federation's scientific research facility, the Daystrom Institute, has a high-security satellite where they store dangerous technologies, secret samples, and other potentially destructive items. It doesn't seem wise to keep all of their evil eggs in one basket, so to speak, but Raffi has been keeping a close eye on that facility. Something, she finds, has been stolen. 

It seems an unknown burglar has stolen what is essentially the central aperture device from the video game "Portal." Its user would be able to create a two-end wormhole at any two points in space. One could create a portal in front of a fleeing starship and force it to exit on the other side right in front of you. Or, as it's used in "Picard," one could create an entrance portal below a building, forcing it to fall through its exit, placed a few miles over and several stories up. The unknown assailant sucks down an enormous building and drops it on its neighbors. 

Many people die in this act of terrorism, as the building in question was Starfleet Recruitment headquarters, and many were gathered there for the unveiling of a new statue honoring the late captain, Rachel Garrett. 

Honoring Captain Garrett with a statue seems a fair and honorable thing to do, given what fans of "Star Trek: The Next Generation" know about her. Garrett, as played by Tricia O'Neil, only appeared in one episode of "Next Generation," but it was one of the more impressive episodes of the series. And, golly, Captain Garrett faced a terrible decision in it. 

In "Yesterday's Enterprise" (February 19, 1990), the Enterprise-D is merrily sailing through space when a rift in spacetime randomly opens in front of them. A damaged starship sails through. In an instant, everything on the Enterprise-D changes. The lights dim, the uniforms change, and the outlay of the bridge alters. Most dramatically, Lt. Tasha Yar (Denise Crosby) is standing at the tactical station. Lt. Yar had died almost 18 months previous. 

The ship that came through the rift was none other than the Enterprise-C, captained by Rachel Garrett. Her ship was being severely buffeted in a vicious battle when a rift opened up and she fled to safety. The rift, however, also brought her and the Enterprise-C 20 years into the future. In disappearing from the above-mentioned vicious battle, the Enterprise-C unwittingly instigated an ongoing war. Thanks to causality, Picard and the Enterprise-D were now fighting in that war, and Starfleet was a much more militant, weapons-forward organization. Only Guinan (Whoopi Goldberg) seems to vaguely recall that something has changed about the timeline.

Picard reveals that Starfleet is most assuredly losing the war, and the only way to win it was to send the Enterprise-C back to its own time ... to be destroyed and captured, thereby preventing the war altogether. Garrett is killed in battle before she can make a decision. 

Her statue can be seen in the above picture. It's red.

Captain Garrett, a resolute character — as all Starfleet captains must be — was faced with several options, all of them bad. She wanted to join the war effort in Picard's present, but her ship was too damaged and too out-of-date to offer any real assistance. She could return to her own time, knowing full well that she and her crew would be killed by a Romulan fleet. She also understood that taking weapons technology back from the future would unduly taint the timeline. It seemed that she could be a burden on the war effort in Picard's time, or dead in her own. The decision was taken out of her hands when a chunk of metal became lodged in her brain. 

"Yesterday's Enterprise" is not only a fun episode in terms of its sci-fi/causality-related story, but also a wonderful tragedy about a no-win scenario. "Star Trek" is so devoted to notions of pacifism and preventing war, that Captain Garrett understands she needs to sacrifice herself and her ship in order to stop it from happening. Captain Garrett, while best known to Trekkies for dying, briefly represented Starfleet ideals to a T. 

In the early years of the 25th century — many years after her death — Starfleet erected a statue of Captain Garrett in front of the organization's recruitment center. Sadly, just as it was revealed, another portal opened up in the vicinity, and the statue was sucked through, giving Garrett another kind of death. Some fates, it seems, cannot be avoided.